Derp derp, NSA claims it can't search its own email

According to the NSA, they cannot search their own emails. The ultra-secretive organization, which represents the cutting edge of surveillance technology, cannot perform a simple email search within its own archives.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - It's almost certainly a whopper of fantastic proportions, but the NSA insists it cannot search its own emails. Specifically, the agency denies that it can search the email records of its 30,000 employees and fish out emails based on keywords.

What's happening?

As Justin Elliott explained in ProPublica, he filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for emails exchanged between employees of the NSA and the National Geographic Channel exchanged over a specific period of time.

According to Elliott, the channel had recently done a friendly documentary on the NSA and he wanted "to better understand the agency's public-relations efforts."

The NSA responded to his request by saying, ""There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately." That from NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker.

Elliot then said Blacker followed up asking him to narrow his request because the NSA can only search employee emails "person y person."

The response from the NSA is certainly a lie. Large corporations readily have the ability to tease out individual emails based on keyword searches or other criteria and they do so routinely. Legal and internal investigations are the most common reason for this, according to Elliot.

So here is an organization, charged with aggregating the world's communications and filtering it to discern patterns that could be helpful stopping terrorists before they strike, and with the power to tap even the President's telephone in the Oval Office, and yet they cannot do a search of their employee email.

It strains credibility beyond the breaking point.

In other words, the people who work at the NSA are liars, professional ones at that, paid to lie while engaging in practices that would make our Founding Fathers cringe.

It's a nice thought, isn't it?

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