NSA Says they Can't Bulk Search Their Own Employee Email: Um, They Can but They Just Don't Want To

This has to be laughable if it was true.

But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' e-mail? The agency says it doesn't have the technology.

"There's no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is "a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

I filed a request last week for e-mails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency's public-relations efforts.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they want some reporter getting their hands on emails that go from the NSA to the National Geographic Channel in regards to a PR softball story. So the NSA has a poky old email system from the 1998 or something which makes them look incompetent. Sounds like a good way to dodge FOIA requests from nosy reporters and make them look like harmless and backward.