Wikileaks Internet Everywhere

This April 13, 2016, file photo shows the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Here's a joke: How long does it take the CIA to respond to a public records request?

Amy Johnson, an anthropologist and MIT PHD candidate, studies how government agencies use social media - and particularly, the rare cases when agencies abandon the stilted tenor of formal communication in favor of the jokes and casual tone typical of Twitter and Facebook posts.

So when the CIA created an official Twitter account in 2014 and began making jokes about Tupac and shouting out Ellen DeGeneres, Johnson was intrigued. She filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details on the intelligence agency's social media policies.

But when they responded, Johnson didn't like the punchline.

"The basic experience of it was a lot of delays," she said in an interview. "I was asking for something I think should have been really simple and rather small. It was baffling what was going on."

It has been two and a half years since Johnson made her legal request for CIA records. And with the agency continually delaying its response, and refusing to hear any appeals, she has filed a lawsuit in federal court in an effort to force disclosure.

The suit, filed with the help of the Boston University School of Law Technology and Cyberlaw Clinic, demands that the CIA provide Johnson with emails between the agency and Twitter discussing the @CIA Twitter account, any social media training documents and a list of applications used by the account.

Andy Sellars, the BU School of Law attorney assisting Johnson with the lawsuit, said Johnson's records request had been delayed nearly nine times the average response time for the agency. The CIA's professional discretion bled over into its handling of the request, Sellars said; the public records officer he spoke to at first would not even give his name.

"I had probably four conversations with him before I learned his name is Anthony," Sellars said. "You call for a status, they say it's in progress, you ask if they can elaborate, they say no."

The CIA did not immediatley return a request for comment.



The records, if the lawsuit is successful, would fill the final gap in Johnson's dissertation, which she is scheduled to complete for her graduation from MIT this June.

Johnson first began studying humor on social media during the Arab Spring, when she noticed parody accounts on Twitter beginning to comment on the upheaval in the Arab world. When she began her graduate studies on MIT, she began to focus on how governments were adapting to the loose, conversational humor of the internet.

NASA's accounts for its rovers, which are lighthearted and written in the first person, drew her attention - as did the CIA's unexpectedly sassy entry to Twitter in 2014.

The nation's foreign intelligence service launched its Twitter presence with a self-referential nod to the agency's secrecy about its activities.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet. — CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

A month later, the @CIA account tweeted answers to five of the "top questions" received by the agency from the public. Those answers included a reference to Tupac, the legendary rapper whose death in a 1996 drive-by shooting has been the subject of two decades of speculation and conspiracy theories:

No, we don’t know where Tupac is. #twitterversary — CIA (@CIA) July 7, 2014

An appeal for a selfie to talk show host Ellen DeGeneres:

Sorry for not following you back @TheEllenShow. But if you visit us maybe we can take a selfie? #twitterversary — CIA (@CIA) July 7, 2014

And a joking reminder that the CIA cannot unlock your electronic devices for you:

No, we don’t know your password, so we can’t send it to you. #sorrynotsorry #twitterversary — CIA (@CIA) July 7, 2014

"It was very weird," Johnson said. "There were these five questions that appeared on this page that were clearly very snarky, funny and well geared to social media. But strange in coming from the CIA."

The CIA's Twitter outburst drew international media attention - some of it appreciative, and some thoroughly unamused. Slate dubbed the posts "too glib," and Australia's Sydney Morning Herald asked if someone was drunk-tweeting from the agency's account. PR Week reported that the posts were the work of small digital team overseen by a single officer in the CIA's office of public affairs.

"The vast majority of our posts are educational - both in tone and content - but we're attempting to do this in a manner consistent with the culture of these various social media platforms, which includes the occasional light-hearted or humorous posting," CIA spokeswoman Kali Caldwell said in a statement to PR Week.

The CIA'a Twitter experiments fit neatly within Johnson's research into how government agencies communicate with the public. So on Dec. 19, 2014, Johnson filed a FOIA request, asking the CIA for details on its social media policies and correspondence with Twitter.

"It is rare for a federal agency - especially an agency whose duties are so serious - to employ a humorous tone when communicating with the public. This makes the CIA's decision to do so a matter of both public and academic interest, especially for scholars in the humanities," her lawsuit says. "The decision to use humor as a communicative technique has also been the subject of public criticism, as it can be seen to reaffirm a common fear that the agency is too cavalier and reckless in its activities."

The CIA acknowledged receiving the request on Jan. 30, 2015, but Johnson did not receive any further response until March 23, according to her legal complaint. The CIA estimated that it would complete the request by Sept. 10. On Sept. 21, after not hearing anything from the agency, Johnson asked about the status of her request - and was told it would not be ready until Feb. 9, 2016.

She still received no reply and filed an administrative appeal with the agency in May of last year, according to the complaint. But the agency argued that she could not file an appeal because her request was still pending and had not been formally denied.

Johnson's frustrations with the agency were compounded by what the lawsuit alleges is evidence of unusual delays, based on FOIA statistics released in the agency's annual report. Those figures showed that 5,389 requests had been processed between Sept. 1, 2015 and Oct. 31, 2016, the complaint says.

"Based on Ms. Johnson's estimated place in the queue, this would mean that approximately 4,000 requests that had been received after Ms. Johnson's request had been processed, in violation of the CIA's first-in, first-out policy," the lawsuit says.

Sellars, Johnson's attorney in the case, said the agency told them FOIA requests are routed into different departments, but then refused to provide more details.

"We don't know which department she's in, we don't know if her request is being held up longer in the department," Sellars said. "She's been held up almost nine times past the average response time."

After requests for explanations of the delays went unanswered, Johnson filed her lawsuit on May 4. She hopes the legal action might pressure the CIA into giving her the documents, two and a half years after her initial request - and less than two months before she graduates from MIT.

"It would be great if the US Attorney's office said to the CIA, why don't you just give them the documents?" Johnson said. "That would be the great ideal."