Why We Are Not Outraged Over the Firing of Government Privacy Officials

​When CNN last week filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for details about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and who has been granted access to sensitive or classified government documents, the news organization says it received an anonymous response from an Office of Personnel Management email account.
 
“Good luck with that,” the reply said, “they just got rid of the entire privacy team.”
 
So how outraged are we as a civil liberties organization that often files FOIA requests over the firing of very people who process our requests?
 
Not very. To be candid, PPSA has a higher level of concern over the change of the New York Yankees’ facial-hair policy, although we are split internally between a pro-beard and anti-beard faction.
 
The reason for our insouciance is that while privacy personnel in government offices scrupulously acknowledge receipt of our filings, the follow-up is always a ramshackle mess usually leading to a dead end. Deadlines mandated in statute are routinely ignored. And when the government does deign to answer us, it comes back with something called a “Glomar response.” This is a judicially created doctrine from the 1970s – created in response to reporting on the CIA’s recovery of a sunken Soviet submarine with nuclear-tipped missiles – that allows agencies to issue a non-response response.
 
Glomar responses, once uncommon, are now the boilerplate answer for most of our FOIAs.
 
This happened most recently when PPSA filed a FOIA request asking the National Security Agency to produce records showing how much money it spent buying Americans’ personal digital data, the size of the dataset purchased, and the sources of the data.
 
In July, NSA gave us a classic Glomar response, that it cannot disclose “the existence or non-existence” of the requested information. The government usually shrugs off our lawful requests for information by issuing a Glomar response.
 
When we sought dollar amounts of NSA spending on purchases of Americans’ personal information, and who is selling it to them, the NSA’s Glomar response also included a statement that it had not performed a records search – as required by the FOIA law. Riddle me this: How did the NSA know that these documents merited the hush-hush, top-secret Glomar response, previously reserved for the recovery of Soviet nuclear tipped missiles, if the agency didn’t even search for them?
 
Another one of our FOIA requests: We asked the government to reveal top-line facts about purchases about surveillance of Members of Congress who served on committees with oversight of the intelligence communities?
 
Glomar response.
 
Another one: Can the government reveal how many times it has “unmasked” – or internally identified – Members of Congress caught up in foreign communications?
 
Glomar response.
 
And then there is this middle-finger response from the Department of Justice to another one of our FOIA requests. They sent us 40 completely redacted pages to a FOIA request, with only one line unredacted: “Hope that’s helpful.”
 
We are sorry people in the privacy offices of the government are losing their jobs. We appreciate that they don’t make policy, just execute it, although that responder at Justice – who didn’t have the guts to sign his or her name – should probably find employment elsewhere, preferably a junkyard. We hope the rest of these government employees will be happier in public or private-sector jobs that actually do something for somebody.

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