NSA: Please Stop Mailing Us FOIA Requests Posted on June 21th, 2013

by Jonathan Corbett

I received the following e-mail today, which was somewhat unexpected since I never gave the NSA my e-mail address:





I authenticated the sender by looking up the IP address from which it came, which was registered to MD Procurement Office, Ft. Meade, MD. Sounds about right.



It seems that the NSA does not quite get that this is a protest, in addition to a request for information. :) I'll leave it up to you guys: if you'd like to indulge the NSA, submit your requests online. If you enjoy the protest, please continue to use (and share!) the site and I'll continue to deliver your paperwork.



Full Text of the E-mail Mr. Corbett, The NSA FOIA Office received a box of FOIA requests from you today. I appreciate what you are trying to do by providing a service to individuals to submit requests to us; however, it is not a very efficient way to do this. NSA has an on-line form for submitting requests directly to the NSA FOIA Office. Requests submitted via the on-line form are received immediately (or the next day if submitted after hours). It took a week for your box to arrive to our office. The form also has fields for the required information. Many of the requests that you forwarded to this office do not contain a complete mailing address. Therefore, we cannot respond to those requests, and the individuals will not know why. We do answer each and every request that we receive. If you would like to continue to provide the service of enabling individuals to submit FOIA requests to NSA, might I suggest that rather than mailing us hard copies of letters, that you provide a link to our web page at http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/foia/submit_foia_request/index.shtml and provide the instruction that requesters click on the hyperlink in the middle of the page that says By On-Line Form. This will allow them to submit requests directly to this Agency in a timely manner and will provide more assurance that the information is complete. Thank you. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly. Respectfully, Pamela Pamela N. Phillips Chief FOIA Public Liaison Officer National Security Agency (301) 688-6527