Ride the Lightning

Quirky Effort to Get Phone Records from NSA is Tossed By Court

January 21, 2015

A Washington Times article offered a bit of a giggle last week. Hey, if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hiding text messages, why not go to the agency whose motto is "Collect it All"?

The Competitive Enterprises Institute (CEI), a conservative think tank, has been trying for years to get access to text messages sent by senior EPA officials. The EPA, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, turned over thousands of text messages but declined to turn over others, saying it doesn’t believe it has them and that it doesn’t think it has a duty to preserve text messages.

Undeterred, the CEI filed a FOIA request with the NSA which (surprise) refused to confirm or deny whether it had the Verizon records – though it has acknowledged previously that it has collected Verizon metadata records. CEI went to court to enforce the request, but a D.C. federal judge kyboshed the effort, dismissing the suit and saying that forcing the NSA to tip its hand would compromise national security.

Judge Boasberg wrote “In essence, were the agency required to confirm or deny the existence of records for specific individuals, it would begin to sketch the contours of the program, including, for example, which providers turn over data and whether the data for those providers is complete.”

I give the CEI points for an inventive gambit, albeit one doomed to failure.

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