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

In violation of the law?

[Frosty Piss]

NASA, like many federal agencies, is in violation of the law, Not just the intent of the law, but the law itself. As I posted in a previous "article" here today, where if the EFF?

Re:In violation of the law?

[El Cubano]

NASA, like many federal agencies, is in violation of the law, Not just the intent of the law, but the law itself. As I posted in a previous "article" here today, where if the EFF?

It is actually not that surprising. These sorts of things happen for the same reason that you occasionally find caches of undelivered junk mail, permit applications sometimes take too long or get "lost," and someone occasionally gets a ticket for going just one mile over the speed limit: government employees, at all levels, are regular people who hate their jobs as much as anybody else and who sometimes have bad days and take out on the public they are there to serve. It sucks, and it is wrong, but some government jobs suck more than others.

FOIA requests are particularly sucky because most federal agencies have rather poor records retention. All the problems that people talk about related to big data are the same sorts of problems that exist with FOIA. In addition to that, agencies who wish to undertake certain activities and ensure that those activities escape official notice by the public can engage in strategies that result in records being misclassified, improperly destroyed, or even never kept in the first place (Hillary Clinton's home email server was a good example of this). So, if you are the person tasked with going around to a bunch of people and departments who think they are too busy to keep proper records (because none of these records are stored in a central, properly indexed, easy to access repository) then the suck factor will make your every day rather miserable.

That said, nobody forces people to work for the government and if they don't like the job they should quit and let someone else do the job who takes the responsibility seriously enough to it properly. The proper application of lawsuits by the EFF and other watchdogs is sadly a necessary component to ensure that the government remains compliant with the law.

Re:In violation of the law?

[ShanghaiBill]

NASA, like many federal agencies, is in violation of the law,

That means nothing if there are no penalties for violation. There are some sanctions for violating FOIA, but I am unaware of them every being applied, and I don't think any bureaucrat has ever been fired for denying or ignoring a FOIA request. So why should they care?

Re:In violation of the law?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes, NASA isn't a priority, because um, they don't have enough to deal with due to the incessant demands from the denialist brigade trying to make them prove the moon landing wasn't faked.

Re:In violation of the law?

[tlhIngan]

FOIA requests are particularly sucky because most federal agencies have rather poor records retention. All the problems that people talk about related to big data are the same sorts of problems that exist with FOIA. In addition to that, agencies who wish to undertake certain activities and ensure that those activities escape official notice by the public can engage in strategies that result in records being misclassified, improperly destroyed, or even never kept in the first place (Hillary Clinton's home email server was a good example of this). So, if you are the person tasked with going around to a bunch of people and departments who think they are too busy to keep proper records (because none of these records are stored in a central, properly indexed, easy to access repository) then the suck factor will make your every day rather miserable.

That said, nobody forces people to work for the government and if they don't like the job they should quit and let someone else do the job who takes the responsibility seriously enough to it properly. The proper application of lawsuits by the EFF and other watchdogs is sadly a necessary component to ensure that the government remains compliant with the law.

They suck even worse for large departments like NASA, because if you want a specific contract, then it may involve searching all of NASA's campuses for a copy of it. Either that FOIA employee gets a huge expanse account to fly to various NASA campuses to search, or you have to farm out the search to many people. And as anyone who's been bounced around between companies for a support issue knows, it turns what is supposed to be a relatively easy search into a tedious one involving the coordination of easily 10 or more people. Add to that NASA issues tons of contracts all the time, and it's likely the one you want is in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door marked "Beware of the Leopard". in the cellar where the lights have gone as had the stairs.

Add to it that NASA is full of geeks and all that who probably don't really give a hoot about filing or other bureaucratic issues so that contract you fine may be missing pages because they were used to wipe up spilled ketchup.

Consider that the next time you balk at documenting something.

Re:In violation of the law?

[Teancum]

As one of the first agencies to move to electronic documents in the federal government and even having one of the first e-mail systems, it is sort of a joke that NASA can't find documents. While the formats and nature of the documents have changed considerably over the years (that sort of happens with pioneers in technology) it isn't all that hard.

> Add to it that NASA is full of geeks and all that who probably don't really give a hoot about filing or other bureaucratic issues

That isn't the NASA I'm familiar with. They take bureaucratic paperwork very seriously and document everything. For much of their engineering work (I'm personally familiar with the STS software development team but it applies to other areas of engineering and contracting work) they are literally the gold standard of documentation. When software engineers are considered prolific because they wrote 4k lines of software in a full year and others did less, you start to see just how much paperwork really happens.

Add to that NASA issues tons of contracts all the time, and it's likely the one you want is in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door marked "Beware of the Leopard". in the cellar where the lights have gone as had the stairs.

Nice reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

That may be perception of the worst aspects of a bureaucracy, but the reality is that everything in terms of contracts and even many of the reports is likely sitting on a server at the NASA HQ in DC. Anything needing appropriations will go through the HQ anyway and not be approved at individual centers unless it is such a small project as to be funded with purely discretionary funding. That is like office supplies and stuff under about $10k, not any major contract at all and thresholds might even be lower for all but center chiefs.

It is far more likely that people getting these FOIA requests are simply lazy and don't want to be bothered.... with their immediate bosses encouraging them to not bother with responding either.

Re:In violation of the law?

[Bartles]

It doesn't matter. Those are our documents and NASA nor any other agency has a right, legally or otherwise, to keep them from us when requested. There are specific instances where they can deny a request, but in all other situations they should be offering requested documents forthwith.

Re:In violation of the law?

[stealth_finger]

Everything they claim we need independent 3rd parties to validate

Everything everyone claims needs independent 3rd parties to validate otherwise you end up with a religion.

Re: In violation of the law?

[Teancum]

Take the metric-vs-imperial error that took down the Mars Climate Orbiter as a case study in how well knowledge management is accomplished across teams of rocket scientists.

That doesn't get to the level of a major NASA contract simply getting lost or the final report getting buried like is being done with several FOIA requests from NASA.

What you are describing is making sure everybody understands the data they are receiving and that they are working on the same problem. Essentially it is dealing with an API (to use a software analogy) or interface specification between parts that got screwed up there. Of course I've seen extremely poor documentations on APIs, so such problems are hardly unique to just NASA. I'll bet you a good sized pizza that the unit types were very clearly marked and documented on that Mars Climate Orbiter and it was mostly a lack of paying attention to details which got everybody in trouble including a clash of cultures where multiple groups assumed things that simply weren't true.

Moon landings, 1st!

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, they're not going to show you proof that the moon landings were "staged."

CAP === 'category'

Re:Moon landings, 1st!

[ShanghaiBill]

Listen, they're not going to show you proof that the moon landings were "staged."

Private investigators have already found proof. The evidence, including film reels of deleted scenes and "extra takes", and affidavits from "astronauts" (really actors), was held in a storage room on the 57th floor of the World Trade Center. This is why GWB had the towers destroyed, using his ties to the Bin Laden family.

Also, if you look at the film of the landing, you can clearly see the flag flutter and cast a shadow. That is where they screwed up, because as any idiot can tell you, shadows don't form in a vacuum.

What other proof do you need?

Re:Moon landings, 1st!

[networkBoy]

indeed, AC was right. With just how bad that hurt me to read...

Re:Moon landings, 1st!

[TheReaperD]

The scary part is there a groups of people who actually believe shit like this, just as much as we believe that water is wet and that most lawyers and politicians should be drowned in a vat of urine.

Re: Moon landings, 1st!

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of this... the design artwork:
http://www.metafilter.com/157037/NASAs-Visions-of-the-Future-Calendar-Images
If Motherboard or whoever the jerk was who was making a FOIA stink over this had just waited until Feb. 16, 2016, then it all would have been publicly available. Something that the self-serving article fails to mention.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/tif/jupiter.tif
There you go, a _216MB_ TIFF of Balloons over Jupiter. Well, the requestor wanted the highest possible resolutions...
FWIW, JPL is a Contractor managed by Cal Tech, and not an Agency of the Executive Branch of the US Government; the employees don't work for NASA. They get their paychecks from Cal Tech. There is an oversight office there that is staffed by NASA.
The FOIA doesn't even apply here.

Reimbursement

[Tablizer]

Some local govt's require the requester to pay for the cost of searching. This reduces frivolous requests, but also favors wealthy requesters.

Re:Reimbursement

[spire3661]

All government records should be in searchable and in easily accessed formats. Hiding behind 'it costs too much too look' needs to die, now. Things like traffic cams shouldnt even allowed to be installed until a pathway for the public to access its records at any time is made available. All government agencies should be required to submit ALL their records to an open repository, unless otherwise marked as sensitive or classified. FOIA should be the unfettered access to any record not marked classified. EVERY citizen should be able to access this data, en masse.

We are deep into an Information Age, its time to remind the government pervasive surveillance goes both ways.

Re:Reimbursement

[Anonymous Coward]

All government agencies should be required to submit ALL their records to an open repository, unless otherwise marked as sensitive or classified.

As a taxpayer, I strongly object to this. I certainly don't want to pay the kind of money that would require.

Re:Reimbursement

[Tablizer]

Plus, a lot of time would be wasted explaining & investigating things that "look suspicious". We learned that already from the DNC leak fiasco: people with agendas add some creative context to ordinary work lingo, requiring investigation and/or formal explaining and other time-consuming endeavors.

Re:Reimbursement

[ShanghaiBill]

Some local govt's require the requester to pay for the cost of searching.

This is why government records should be public by default, and available on-line. Then private citizens can do their own searches. Government records should only be withheld from the public if there is a court order requiring them to be sealed, and even then only till a specific date.

Re: Reimbursement

[Anonymous Coward]

Drivers' licenses, birth certificates, tax information, and passport info, are all government records.
They are also pretty much all you need to steal someone's identity.

Re:Reimbursement

[rtb61]

Not an investigation, a cover up, a pretend investigation. Yep, the pretend ones often take much longer that, ohh look top secrets on a server in your bathroom, well, that's a slam dunk, off to jail you go. The bullshit version takes months and months with the backing of main stream media and a flood of bullshit to drown out the reality. Politics for sale, perverting democracy, criminal negligence with state secrets, even more perverted stuff, and instead basically hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Russia hacking the elections bullshit.

All government exposed, all of the time and real actual fucking prosecutions, confiscation of the proceed of crime with penalties and custodial sentence (if people died as a result, well, even more serious punishments).

Re:Reimbursement

[Tablizer]

The laws are vague and the verification systems fucked up. Hillary is only partly to blame.

Re:Reimbursement

[Anonymous Coward]

All government agencies should be required to submit ALL their records to an open repository, unless otherwise marked as sensitive or classified.

As a taxpayer, I strongly object to this. I certainly don't want to pay the kind of money that would require.

As a taxpayer I strongly support this. I'm happy to pay the kind of money that would require.


Now what?

Re:Reimbursement

[apoc.famine]

More concerning than this is when such frivolous FOIAs are common, everyone resorts to not putting things in writing, or running everything past legal first. If you feel that government bureaucracy is bad now, if everyone was in CYA mode 100% of the time, it would be 10x worse.
 
I had one middle-manager who selectively put things in writing so as to not leave a paper trail for other things. It was pretty obvious, but it took extra time when we knew it was CYA time, as we'd need to sit down, summarize what he told us verbally, and send it to him in an email. At which point he'd reply with a "you misunderstood me", and spend more time spinning that into something totally different, which wouldn't come back to bite him in the ass later. While we waited on his "clarification". I don't want to see that sort of thing pervasive in government. Nor do I want to see a reversion back to verbal-only things, as that just leads to misunderstandings and wasted time.

Re:Reimbursement

[spire3661]

As a citizen, i dont give a shit about your tax payments, they certainly dont entitle you to anything. It has no bearing on your citizenship or political view. Why do you use the term taxpayer? Its a meaningless status.

Re:Reimbursement

[OhPlz]

Leaders should own up to their mistakes. Hillary is not a leader.

Re:Reimbursement

[OhPlz]

Because they pay for it.

Re:Reimbursement

[Dunavant]

At least in my area, this is available. http://chart.maryland.gov/map/ Allows you look at all the traffic cameras live. I do not agree however, that all data should be public. For example, the government has access to people's fingerprints. Allowing public access to that data would make it quite easy to frame whoever you wanted for a crime.

Re:Reimbursement

[Shotgun]

Really? Where I work, the company owns the email system and can look at anything anytime they like.

If I spend company dollars, I better have a receipt.

If I sign a contract with a third party to do work for the company, they want a copy and I better damn well run it past legal.

Why would we have government employees needing to run everything past legal? Do they not know their jobs? If if something is extraordinary, like a third party contract, why aren't they ALREADY running it past legal.

You had the option of always communicating with the middle manager via email. We should not have government workers running their own email servers out of their basement in order to avoid oversight from their employers.
 

Re:Reimbursement

[apoc.famine]

Because your company isn't open to public scrutiny, and subject to political asshattery and abuse, that's why. And because your CEO or CIO can most likely approve that, without any additional oversight from other agencies or companies.
 
In the state I live in, several years back someone had an ax to grind with one of the government departments, and did an FOIA for all travel by all employees within that department, for the last three years. This FOIA included all their expenses. That person then totaled up the amounts, came up with crazy tales of waste and abuse, and sold that to the news.
 
The problem is that pulling together this information took weeks of time, because all PII had to be stripped from it, because reimbursement is tied to paychecks. So bunches of department employees had to consolidate all this, sanitize it, double-check that, and finally get it to the asshat in the format he requested. And once the asshat had sold his crazy tale, they had no way to really respond to the claims, because that would require even more time, because nobody has the job title, "PR To Counter Crazy Shit". For example, some of his complaints were that people were using all $40 of their per-diem meal expenses. Well, yeah. When you're flying somewhere, airport food eats into that really, really quickly. To think that $40 for three meals while traveling is wasteful you have to be someone who has never traveled.
 
All the department had the time to respond with was that all those expenses had been pre-approved, had receipts, and were signed off by 2-3 layers of management. That's already a crazy amount of bureaucracy. The fact that any random yahoo can add even more to it is really a problem.
 
How profitable could your company be if I could request the logs of every website visited in the last 2 years? How much staff time could I waste if I could just send an email asking for copies of all emails with "Thursday" in the subject? How much staff time if all your competitors could do it, as much as they wanted? And now imagine if they were able to ask for large chunks of information, and could use it in a PR campaign against you.
 
I'm not arguing for government obscurity, just sensible limits so that anyone with an ax to grind or a crazy conspiracy theory can't cost us piles more money and further increase the wasteful bureaucracy. We don't need random people micro-managing government employees. Anyone who has ever been micro-managed should understand this. There are sensible limits to government transparency which balance the need to understand what's going on with the ability for government employees to do their jobs.

Re:Reimbursement

[Tablizer]

She admitted she made poor decisions with regard to email. What more do you want?

Re:Reimbursement

[OhPlz]

"What difference does it make now anyway?"

Considering the epic lengths her and her cronies went to lie about it, there needs to be punitive action.

Really?

[DontBeAMoran]

Last time I checked, FOIA requests were not exactly rocket science.

Re:Really?

[Tablizer]

Last time I checked, FOIA requests were not exactly rocket science.

It's more like brain surgery: the patient keeps squirming.

They don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

Like most any other government agency, they don't want anybody digging up any dirt so they find any reason to reject any request.
Any questions?

Your FOIA Response Enclosed

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is fake. Earth is flat.

There, no FOIA necessary.

Don't underestimate the amount of work involved

[Virtucon]

"Simple FOIA Request?" There's no such thing.

I've worked with a few Federal agencies and watched how much time is spent on FOIA requests. It takes a lot of effort to get some of the data together and along with the approval process, i.e., "Will this compromise any ongoing operations? Does it need redaction based on PII and other rules? Where is the data?" Then there's the approval of the response which always has to be reviewed by Lawyers, discussed in triplicate and then dispatched to the requester. Some agencies have huge departments just dedicated to handling FOIA requests and even with that I've seen them impact day to day operations where front line management has to deal with data collection and validation as well.

To a point, FOIA is a great law and I think it's definitely opened up the inner workings of gov't. A lot of this would go away if the gov't was more transparent to begin with especially in matters not dealing in PII/4th amendment issues (Tax Returns for individuals) or national security. I do think some FOIA requests are fishing expeditions and in all cases the costs should be paid for by the requester. It's also not applied uniformly across all agencies and while the National Park Service may respond quickly, the DoD or DOJ may take years or in the case of the IRS or State Department might get derailed altogether.

Re:Don't underestimate the amount of work involved

[jediborg]

If they set up arbitrary procedures, review boards etc. to handle FOIA requests, thats not our fault. Its the fault of the agencies. The fact is most of this information is NOT readily available to the public because these agencies all have something to hide. PII is to often used as an excuse to redact information that makes a bureaucrat look bad personally. Heck, even if it does violate 4th admendment, they should release the information. That will make people wake up and realize just how much info the government is collecting on us and then maybe there would be more backlash against this trend. If the FBI has any personally identifiable information about me I want to know! And I want everyone else to know that they know!

Re:Don't underestimate the amount of work involved

[Virtucon]

I'm not sure I agree with all you've indicated. If I'm an employee for a Federal Agency, doing my job and not at a senate confirmation level then my information should be redacted in FOIA. If there's criminal issues, the DOJ and Judicial process has ways of extracting that. The current Judicial Watch lawsuits are showing how that works. Are agencies deliberately blocking FOIA? I think in a lot of cases, yes especially when it deals with some high profile political issues, IRS, State Dept. but that's why we have a process and courts. As far as information the gov't is collecting on us, there is a political process to address that. It's called an election.
If people in this country don't like how things are being run they have the ballot box and SCOTUS has affirmed in numerous cases that certain decisions are political and that requires the people to elect representatives who do what the people want. Does that work? Not in practice when almost 80% of congress is re-elected every election. That's where the corruption comes in, the obstruction, the pay to play, the runaway spending, legislation getting passed w/o reading it. FOIA wasn't meant to be a cure all for people sitting on their asses and not voting and holding elected officials accountable.

As for the FBI, shit who cares? The DHS has my fingerprints & my background and that's so I can fly on an airplane. Does it violate 4th amendment? I'd say yes but SCOTUS has said "we're good with it" the laws haven't changed and until then we're all getting tracked one way or another because "terrorists"
 

I think

[shentino]

I think NASA is just... ...spacing out.

Re:I think

[Tablizer]

I think NASA is just... ...spacing out.

It's a bur-rocket-cy of galactic proportions.

Face meet brick

[meerling]

I've dealt with several offices in NASA before, and to be honest, in my opinion, they tend to cooperate with each other like male beta fighting fish in the same glass of water. Often I would attribute failure to comply with something like a FoIA request to such issues, but after reading the article, it really looks like somebody is being stonewalled.
Note, it might not just be the writer, it may be a global stonewall everyone thing going on.

Because Aliens.

[cutefatbird]

We can all say this is *Crazy* but it also most certainly true that if NASA has observed or had contact with ET's (or unknown technology) then Nasa must record and safeguard this data. In this way the National security apparatus is directly at odds with laws like FOA.

Probably Not All That Easy

[painandgreed]

Having been the IT guy assigned to help people fulfill these roles. First off, I would assume the request got mangled and by time it reached the person that needed to do the work, it is probably confused if not unintelligible. See, they talk to their lawyers, their lawyers talk to NASA's lawyers who talk to the administration who send the request down to lower administration who send it to who they think need to do the work who eventually talks to somebody who knows what email is. All the way, there is a big game of telephone as each group redefines the request in their particular language while concealing what they think needs to be concealed for legal and privacy reasons. Take the summary for example. "all emails from a specific NASA email address" Is that sent from or received from? By time the instructions gets to the person that is supposed to do the work, no telling what they are actually asking for. Even if you're the admin over the person that uses that email, sent emails can reside on on the local machine only and possibly not any server depending on how things are set up. How much due dilligence needs to be taken? What about that one computer that crashed and they lost all their sent mail? What if multiple people use that email? Hell, even if it's a simple request and makes it to somebody, they might not know how to do the search. Perhaps they sent nice instructions for searching on Outlook on a PC with instructions stating "use these instructions exactly" but the person in question uses Mail App on a Mac? That has happened too.

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.

Re:Probably Not All That Easy

[spaceman375]

This is some actual reality here. Wish I had 'em: mod parent up!

Re:Probably Not All That Easy

[GNious]

Heh

Last employer had a simple solution: Don't keep emails for more than a few weeks, to avoid them being subjected to a Discovery.
(yup, that was an official email that went out to everyone)

Re:Probably Not All That Easy

[gurps_npc]

We had several clients that tried this. Note the word tried.

Emails are like cockroaches. They hide in places you don't expect. Back up files, CCers, BCCers, senders, receivers. One of our major jobs was de-duplication - and we only considered something a duplicate if it was an exact duplicate.

One person ccing someone outside the company and you get screwed so darn fast.

If you do not want a judge to ever see something, do NOT put it in an email.

Translating the FOIA requests

[brennz]

tldr; Motherboard made several poorly worded FOIA requests, did not actually request records, or was not requesting it from an IG

Record Definition:
"Records include all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine-readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them (44 U.S.C. 3301)". from https://www.archives.gov/recor...

Asking for someone's email, the budget for a simple calendar or graphic, or trying to fish for information doesn't meet that criteria.

Re:Translating the FOIA requests

[DRJlaw]

Asking for someone's email, the budget for a simple calendar or graphic, or trying to fish for information doesn't meet that criteria.

Whew. For a second I thought that people could simply request thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails while serving as Sec. of State in an attempt to fish for information prior to an election. Good to know that they don't meet 3301s criteria.

Oh wait, they did, and a Federal judge even ordered the State Department to supply thousands of emails concerning disparate subjects in response to a single request. And again for John Holdren's emails.

You're simply wrong. "machine-readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics" includes emails and budgets. "appropriate for preservation by that agency" includes emails and budgets (but possibly not slack channel contents, since they would be difficult to automatically archive). "other activities of the Government" extends to any government business.

Motherboard needs to appeal the denial within the agency. Obtain a final agency decision. File a FOIA suit with a judge. Watch agency lose if the requests are at all specific -- i.e., keyword searchable or associated with particlar identifiers such as an email address. It's been done before and it can be done again.

Re:Translating the FOIA requests

[brennz]

Point missed completely...

There is a vast chasm of difference between a Secretary of State's emails, and those of a consulting graphics artist, a few lower level budget analysts, or even some engineers.

The assumption for a Senior Executive directing an organization of > 60,000 personnel, with a > $40,000,000,000 budget is that much, or most of that email are records because it contains "organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them". Lower level flunkies at the working level lack direct reports, do not supervise anything, control nothing, and have little impact. They don't have the decision material, don't control resources, and don't dictate policy, and therefore would have little to no federal records.

This also explains why pretty much all of a President's official correspondence is considered federal records, captured, then released in time, subject to classification release schedules.

Re:Translating the FOIA requests

[Whibla]

Point missed completely...

Lower level flunkies at the working level lack direct reports, do not supervise anything, control nothing, and have little impact. They don't have the decision material, don't control resources, and don't dictate policy, and therefore would have little to no federal records.

Not missing the point, just disagreeing with it.

Any e-mail to or from a governmental e-mail address is government 'property'. As such they are also a record. When presented with a FOIA request, whether the government agency, in this case NASA, thinks it's a useful record or not is irrelevant.

In the specific case given in the summary where "Motherboard requested all emails from a specific NASA email address with a specific subject line" responding with "There were no emails found matching this search criteria" might have been a valid response, as might "We regret to inform you that the information you have requested has been classified Top Secret...", but responding that it was "unclear what specific NASA records you are requesting" is clearly taking the piss, and in violation of both letter and spirit of the FOIA.

Now, reading between the lines, in this particular instance (above), it sounds like someone was aggrieved at not getting through the tender process, and went, via Motherboard, to get to the bottom of the process. Someone involved in that process at NASA stymied that search. So a small favour to a friendly regular supplier (albeit one that violates acquisition protocols) has the potential to snowball into a nightmare case of misuse of funds etc. No wonder they'd want to delay, stall, cover it up and hope it all eventually just goes away...

Previous paragraph is, for the record, probably just my overactive imagination, and not in any way representative of the situation!

Re:Translating the FOIA requests

[DRJlaw]

There is a vast chasm of difference between a Secretary of State's emails, and those of a consulting graphics artist, a few lower level budget analysts, or even some engineers.

That's why I included Holdren. No answer to that one, eh?

Where is the EFF?

[mi]

where if the EFF?

Together with ACLU, EFF are busy #RESIST(ing) the imaginary "Nazism"...

It's to cover up all the LIES

[Trogre]

What did you expect from the department of LIES? As we all know, Nasa is Hebrew for "to deceive".

Clearly they have so many SECRETS and LIES that they can't risk getting out to the general public.

Now excuse me while I go and finish my thesis on the impenetrable deadly Van Halen belt.

It's really annoying

[stealth_finger]

when people start comments in the subject box.

Re:FOIA

[stealth_finger]

No need to be a twat. It's very common in the journalist crowds.

They have it covered then.

Re:Then pony up cash to do that.

[stealth_finger]

Are you willing to pay? For the system to be designed, implemented, staffed and maintained, including the cost of bandwidth and hosting?

Like it matters? You're going to pay the same in tax regardless. The government is going to spend whatever and borrow any difference and even that doesn't matter because all the money is made up anyway.

Re:Then pony up cash to do that.

[Shotgun]

How much do you think it takes to put a web interface on the front of a database? The cost is more than made up by relieving citizens from occasionally having to drive into the center of town, and then having a person to search through archives to retrieve a record.

Re:requests

[SharpFang]

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

Reagan and Bush Sr. scaled the budget near 26bln. Clinton scaled it back down to about 21bln. G.W.Bush kept it at 22-23bln. Obama scaled it down to below 20bln, with 2013 seeing it at about 18bln, lowest since Kennedy. Trump's first year has it higher than Obama's average.