
NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails - ams1
http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-says-it-cant-search-own-emails
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jtbigwoo
This is a pretty common strategy. Many companies have poor record retention
and backup policies because it's in their best interest to "forget" the things
they do. I know of large companies that limit email boxes to 50 MB partially
because it forces deletion of old, possibly incriminating email. Government
agencies are generally supposed to be better about this due to stuff like the
Freedom of Information Act. I wonder if there's any teeth in the act for non-
compliance like this?

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mullingitover
> I know of large companies that limit email boxes to 50 MB partially because
> it forces deletion of old, possibly incriminating email.

Fortunately it doesn't stop me from archiving locally. I've got emails from
2006 on my desktop machine. It is damn frustrating that my free gmail account
is drastically less trouble to manage and search than my (probably expensive)
corporate Exchange account.

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MWil
Archiving my work email by forwarding to a personal email literally won me a
decision against a former employer. When they can cut off your credentials in
anticipation of firing you and they think it means you don't have access to
those emails anymore, it's really satisfying to show up at the next hearing
with clear proof that they've come down with a terminal case of foot-mouth
syndrome.

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rhizome
Who ever thought there could ( _could_ ) be a class war fought over privacy?
Since this means _some_ Americans _do_ get official privacy protections (many
also get to walk through TSA checkpoints unmolested), we now know there is now
a two-tiered society in the US that has been engineered from the top down to
create this state of affairs based on the 4th Amendment.

~~~
pstuart
There's only one class war: the haves vs. the have nots. Everything else is a
diversion.

~~~
rhizome
I think there's something to be said for "have," historically referrering to
tangible assets.

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brianlweiner
Administration officials have also been caught using email addresses
corresponding to non-persons in order to avoid exactly this sort of FOIA
request.

[http://washingtonexaminer.com/watchdog-epa-grants-ethics-
cyb...](http://washingtonexaminer.com/watchdog-epa-grants-ethics-cyber-
security-certificates-to-fake-employee-richard-windsor/article/2530993)

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a3n
The obvious solution is for the NSA to spy on themselves, and then get a court
order to "collect" the emails so they can read their own email. Legally.

~~~
ephoz
Or switch to Gmail.

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baddox
> thousands of trillions

If only there was a word for this.

~~~
korethr
There is. The word is 'quadrillion'.

~~~
stephengillie
or thousand billion, if you use the Long scale

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales)

~~~
sneak
Don't do that.

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DanBC
I'm not quite sure I get what the article's point is.

"Government agency lousy at complying with FOI request"? Well, it's poor but
it's nothing new.

"Government agency does not use secret spy programme to search petabytes of
communications traffic when responding to FOI requests"?

"Government agency responsible for many secrets successfully keeps its own
email secret, even in response to FOI requests"?

Or is it really just the lousy click-bait of "They spy on everyone but can't
give us a couple of emails?" (Wouldn't any journalist have gone to both the
NSA (who have secrets and who will be difficult to get information out of) and
the National Geographic Channel (who don't have secrets and who might be happy
to pass on some email addresses or at least names)?)

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MWil
I think the word "can't" is the operative term and here it's being used to
describe technical infeasibility, not legal interpretations or anything else.

I can't explain it any better than that. (see how it works, I could if I
actually strived to do better)

~~~
rhizome
But is it legal for the NSA not to be able to search their own email?

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MWil
That's not a conversation that I think can be concisely argued, nor is it the
point of the article.

~~~
rhizome
It is a question that is begged, if not a buried lede.

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bitwize
"Are you kidding me? Our systems are rigged to search _everyone else 's_
emails, we never thought about our own!"

~~~
ryanmcbride
I assure you, they were thinking about their data the whole time.

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treerex
Don't forget that the NSA is, when all is said and done, a Government
organization with all the multitudinous layers of bureaucracy. I have no doubt
that their electronic mail systems are under the control of an IT staff that
is just as competent as any many of us deal with in the corporate world. But
they have the added restrictions that secrecy entails: it would not surprise
me if the server software is a decade old because that was the version they
vetted way back when and it has never been updated.

The groups that work in the basement do not have such restrictions: or at
least have very different restrictions. This dichotomy is not a surprise to
anyone who thinks about it for any length of time.

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jbattle
I'm having a hard time believing that the NSA trusts it's own people so much
that they tie their own hands here. Unless it's a strategy to limit the amount
of internal information any one person can access (?)

~~~
rhizome
One might even reflect upon their statements about knowing every little step
that Edward Snowden took, and exactly which documents he took with him, when
the news of his leaks first broke.

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ISL
If you want to maintain security over classified work, segmenting it and
making it impossible to search the entire outfit in one shot makes sense.

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mdakin
I guess they don't eat their own dog food.

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MichaelGG
I know it's probably not for this reason, but certainly it'd be far more
secure that way. If each mailbox is encrypted with a user-provider key, that'd
provide the same end result.

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cypherpunks01
Anyone have a mirror? All I get is:

A Database Error Occurred Error Number: 1317

Query execution was interrupted

DELETE FROM exp_freeform_params WHERE entry_date < 1374619759

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LekkoscPiwa
"NSA Says" \-- ma answer to that -- and who believes in what NSA says?

~~~
ferdo
"When in doubt, lie."

-Motto of every bureaucrat in history.

