 Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel, details in The Washington Examiner how the National Security Agency is stonewalling our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records showing how much money that agency spent to acquire Americans’ digital data, the size of the datasets purchased, and the sources of this data. PPSA is now suing because the NSA issued a Glomar response, a rule that allows the government to refuse to disclose “the existence or non-existence of the requested information.” Schaerr writes: “This is a judicially created doctrine first issued when a Los Angeles Times reporter broke a story in the mid-1970s that the CIA had retrieved chunks of a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine using a bespoke crane ship, the Glomar Explorer … our filing doesn’t concern a secret CIA program to recover a Soviet submarine with cryptographic machines and nuclear-tipped torpedoes. We seek topline facts the American people and Congress should know – how much is NSA spending on collecting Americans personal information, and who is selling it to them?” Americans deserve to know the basics of the government’s collection and warrantless inspection of our most personal and intimate data. PPSA urges the 119th Congress to hold hearings to examine how the unrestrained use of the judge-created Glomar doctrine is killing a law, the Freedom of Information Act, meant to shed light on government operations. Comments are closed.
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