Getting NASA To Comply With Simple FOIA Requests Is a Nightmare (vice.com)

From a report on Motherboard: Freedom of Information Act requests are used by journalists, private citizens, and government watchdogs to acquire public documents from government agencies. FOIAing NASA, however, can be an exercise in futility. In one recent case, Motherboard requested all emails from a specific NASA email address with a specific subject line. Other government agencies have completed similar requests with no problems. NASA, however, said it was "unclear what specific NASA records you are requesting." Possibly the only way to be more specific is to knock on NASA's door and show them a printout of what an email is. JPat Brown, executive editor of public records platform MuckRock, explained similarly frustrating experiences with NASA. "Even in cases where we've requested specific contracts by name and number, NASA has claimed that our request was too broad, and added insult to injury with a form letter rejection that includes the sentence 'we are not required to hunt for needles in bureaucratic haystacks,'" Brown told Motherboard in an email. Brown added that NASA has refused to process records unless presented with a requester's home address, something that is not included in the relevant code; and makes it more difficult for requests to obtain 'media' status.

Comments

Re:Probably Not All That Easy

[gurps_npc]

The thing is, this kind of thing is not just a government request. There is this thing called "Discovery" that law firms do all the time.

I used do this job also. But instead of working for the government, I worked for a law firm.

We routinely had to gather all emails from/to a specified email account. We would do it both for our own emails and for clients.

We routinely did it in WEEKS, not years. We had similar issues of privacy, and routinely restricted the searches to certain dates, as well as even doing very complex searches. For example, if it was a sexual harassment law suit, we would search the emails for a whole bunch of dirty words, all the while excluding any email that was sent to, cc'd, or bcc'd to us - as that counted as 'privilege communication with your attorney'.

Private industry does this kind of thing all the time, and we do it on time, for relatively small amounts of money.

The government however has decided that since there are no effective punishments, they can ignore the law.