they are on a format that NSA no longer has the ability to view or digitize,” the NSA FOIA office said in a follow-up. “Without being able to view the tapes, NSA has no way to verify their responsiveness. NSA is not required to find or obtain new technology (outdated or current) in order to process a request.”
In short, “we don’t want to”.
Which also gives them another idea on how to deny FOIA request?
The hard drive with the information is on a very high shelf and you cannot force us to buy a ladder.
Also, it is a proprietary ladder that match our shelving system, and they don’t make it anymore.
In that case cant we request the raw data in another format? I dont care about the end result if i can make em run trough hoops to comply
Tapes
Raw data
How, without the right kind of reader
“Your failure to plan does not constitute my emergency”.
Sounds to me like they’re just choosing not to comply with FOIA, a federal law.
This is a bullshit ruling and everyone involved with it knows it. They have my information, I require a copy of my information, end of story. Not providing it is noncompliance.
But of course nothing will happen because the American federal government is broken.
What if I didn’t turn on my office lights, so now I can’t read any written materials. I decline the use of technology like lights to help me with this. Now we don’t have to fill requests for written materials.
I threw away all speakers and headphones. Any audio cannot be processed because we lack the technology and we do not have to get more.
See how stupid this is???
I never specified correctly read data.
I don’t care weather they read it by microwave the tape and provide me a transcript of chef and dinner quest first reactions to it. Or if that ends up actually useful. But its interesting to know wether or not specific data is at all requestable.
When it comes to things that are deemed public, all the information around it should be too, regardless of intend or use.
In essence, everything is information, it would be a mistake to discriminate on perceived value because we never know what future science can accomplish or what specific aspiration someone may follow.
Practical Example: While its reasonable that most people assume The text of the Declaration of Independence is what is important. That is not the case if you happen to do a historical study of hemp genetics and want to learn what strain of the plant was used for the declaration.
An officia office should to my opinion put as much effort into being helpful against requests of both kind.
The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.
The president can’t lie to us if he doesn’t know who he is
Ah no, they can’t give it out because they aren’t able to ensure that there’s no sensible data on it.
Btw, how about donating them a tape-to-usb converter? Can they refuse it? With some “we can’t ensure integrity and security of the device” mumbo jumbo?
They haven’t forgotten about “The Thing”. Anyone donating hardware might have an ulterior motive for wanting hardware inside an NSA building.
If the information that is the tape cant come to us maybe we can visit the tape and measure it ourselves.
you could donate one and at the same time claim (somewhere really anonymously in the internet) that you want to destroy that tape with that player for protection. They then might actually ‘want’ to investigate
- the tape
- the player
(3. possibly also you)
after doing 1 and 2 they then actually have the technology AND the hardware to play that stupid tape.
if they do 3. and ask you who you want to protect, you can truthfully say “law fulfillment”
always think outside the box AND around the corner ;-)
hope that helps
It is true that they could resurrect the tapes if they had a compelling reason to do so. Denying the request indicates that they don’t believe the reason to be sufficiently compelling to warrant the extra expenditure of resources. That is subtley different from “we don’t want to”, which implies a level of capriciousness.
Government departments get FOI requests all the time and they take resources to fulfill. FOI is not intended as a way to have taxpayers fund people’s pet projects. That’s why FOI law doesn’t require your government to spend (even more) money to acquire technology they don’t have or need for anything other than the FOI request itself. Rather, something that requires that kind of extra effort and expenditure should be submitted as a research request, normally with its own funding.
The NSA mission is to spy on people and help American corporations create a worldwide hegemony, they ain’t got no time to be wasting on pet projects for total losers.
“Jesus H. Christ, how is this gonna help us against the Russkies, Larry? I ain’t spendin’ one red cent on this ancient history nerd bullshit. We got commies to catch! Or, uh, whatever the Russkies are nowadays. Throw that FOI shit in the fuckit bucket, goddammit.”
Makes sense, thanks!
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Betacam?
Wait, so the NSA could put everything on an external HD with a proprietary cable that destroys itself after being used.
Then, they have a way to produce it as needed, but because they are not required to obtain it they can now refuse it.
… like a prophet that has genuinely seen inevitable future !!
Insane. This is a violation of our rights.
The Ampex 1" type C video tape recorder needed is rare, but it’s not impossible to find one. The NSA could certainly watch the video if they wanted to. The just don’t want to go through the effort for a FOIA request.
The article seemed to suggest you could buy them easily on eBay lol
Yes, they do show up on ebay, but usually not in working condition. Then you have to find someone that can do a restoration. Keep in mind that there may only be one chance to play the tape before it falls apart, so the player needs to be working perfectly.
Which means they need a player AND a way to digitize it from that player, so if it does die, it will still be recorded.
Digitizing is the easy part. Even though it’s an ancient format, it’s still just NTSC composite video and analog audio. You digitize it just like you would a VHS tape.
The zero-effort method of pointing a camera and mic at the screen as it’s being played back should be sufficient if they can’t do it another way. Given the tape’s age, the resolution is unlikely to be high enough to lose significant details that way.
I know two VCR repair men who would be up to the job 🤔 somebody call Lighting Fast VCR!!
Those guys are a couple of hackfrauds
Techmoan can get them sorted.
I guess Foone could also have something.
I know several youtubers that could be trusted with solving that issue. Why can’t they find someone with the skills?
Edit: Thanks for the replies I see now it’s not a technical knowledge problem, but a security+law+regulation problem.
Why can’t they find someone with the skills?
Because it’s a bad excuse to avoid their legal duties because they’ve probably broken some laws while thinking there would never be any consequences.
Ofc they could digitise it, easily, they’re the fucking NSA, not a tech-illiterate grandparent.
I’m not super-well read on the federal FOIA, but am responsible for public information requests at my city, which follow state regs.
At least at my level, the big one is that the government does not have to create documents to satisfy a request. If the data is not in a readable format, we essentially don’t have responsive data and are not required to go through the conversion process because that would be creating data.
We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.
My example of when we used it was a request for every copy of a specific formthat had been rejected in building applications. It would have required manually scrubbing tens of thousands of building permits to look for specific forms that were not always turned in using the same name and looking for versions that were rejected (which may have been part of accepted applications if the applicant corrected the form later).
It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them “no.”
Who determines whats reasonable?
What if i claim i can read a sound and a video recording of the tape rolling in HD
In the quest for preservation of information can you do to much?
Who determines whats reasonable?
The government decides that, and then if the requestor doesn’t like it, they can kick it to a court for review.
So its the citizen that has to go to court over it, shame.
I still propose that in cases like the above tape we should try and request any information about it as possible.
What are its exact dimensions?
From what materials is the tape build? Can we get a description of its smell?
Any text of markings on it or the box/closet it is stored in?
What facility is the tape housed?
Is there a record of who has previously seen or borrowed it?
At some point someone may actually get something useful they can start tracking with.
So its the citizen that has to go to court over it, shame.
That’s the system. Congress created a way to encourage government agencies to make their records public, and a mechanism to get the courts involved to oversee it. Before that, there was no public entitlement to the records in the first place, and no way to get the courts to order the agency to do anything about it.
I still propose that in cases like the above tape we should try and request any information about it as possible.
I’m pretty sure that’s already required. That’s why we know what we know about this case:
The NSA’s excuse? It didn’t have anything to play the tapes back, couldn’t listen to them, and therefore couldn’t clear them for release. “When the search was conducted, our office reached out to the organization that would have the tape you requested if it still exists. We were informed that although there are some older video tapes that are potentially responsive, they are on a format that NSA no longer has the ability to view or digitize,” the NSA FOIA office said in a follow-up. “Without being able to view the tapes, NSA has no way to verify their responsiveness. NSA is not required to find or obtain new technology (outdated or current) in order to process a request.”
Ravnitzky asked the NSA for pictures of the tapes and they complied. The pictures revealed the tapes were recorded on an AMPEX 1-inch Video Tape Recorder. There were three different standardized types of AMPEX machines, but it wouldn’t be impossible to find a device that could play back the tapes. A cursory search on eBay revealed dozens of machines that might fit the bill.
If they end up finding a mutually agreeable solution, great. But it doesn’t even sound like they’re done negotiating, before filing a lawsuit. If it gets to that point, then I’m sure the court will want to know all the details and make a judgment call on whether the request is reasonable.
Cool, heres hoping for future updates on this.
It’s actually not a shame you can go to court over that. That’s actually excellent we still have that right intact.
This sounds sideways, as FOIA processing is a part of city services, and state services, and federal services.
Treating it otherwise has always seemed to invite abuse.
We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.
How is that a legal workaround against FOIA? Literally every response to FOIA causes a ‘disruption’ to city services in that context. This sounds like a strategy from management that is incompetent or intentionally unethical trying to avoid processing FOIA requests. “Undue disruption” reads as a convenient scapegoat to hide things from the public, a public that the government is there to serve in the first place.
It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them “no.”
~165 hours for ever 10k documents to review at 1 min avg per doc. 45k documents = 750 hours = 25 work weeks @ 30hrs.
That’s $11,250 @ $15/hr wages. Call it $16,000 for FTE total costs as a govt employer. You can engage 10 local contracted temp workers to process the data in a under 3 weeks.Once you have done the review, the dataset to that point has been compiled and can be used for other such requests without additional expenditures towards recompiling data up to that date.
I’m sure budgets are carefully crafted to avoid including FOIA processing.
A building permit can involve hundreds of documents, some of which are hundreds of pages long. All of which need to be reviewed to see if that form was included in the packet. We came up with the time requirement by processing 100 permits and averaging the time it took to review each permit case. The fucking database won’t load a permit in a minute.
And after that we have to redact information, which in this particular example basically makes the request worthless anyway.
And it’s not some City Manager excuse. It’s literally written into the Public Information Act. We can’t stop providing city services to everyone elae because one jackass asks an overly-specific question that will require months of work.
And we can’t use contractors because of the requirement to redact certain information before contractors can see it.
Can the requestor offer to either do it themselves or pay to have someone do it?
The issue there is redaction. A form may have sensitive information that we’re not legally allowed to release, so we have to redact information. I’m not talking about classified info, but things like driver’s license numbers or or medical information.
It’s often stuff we tell people not to give us, but when they do it still requires redaction from a PIR. It’s one of the primary reasons they’re such a pain in the ass - we have to manually review every page for 30 different kinds of protected info.
We can’t let a third-party just sift through that data, because we don’t have the right to share that information with them.
Can I bitch about that redaction for a bit? Someone hit our car while it was parked on federal property. There were cameras, and the security people figured out who did it (and called them, and they denied it). When we finally got the police report, all of the information for identifying the guilty party had been redacted, along with the officer’s name and any other useful information. For a literal fender bender. Shitty driver got away with it. The police report was completely useless. I can only imagine my insurance company was like, “We waited 3 weeks for THIS?” They might as well have sent over a blank page.
I get the idea behind redacting stuff in general, but that one just pissed me off.
It’s frustrating for me too, but state law requires us to redact certain things on a PIR even when we think it’s stupid.
I have to redact homeowner information even though it’s available through the appraisal district. That means I have to manually check for homeowner names on every page of every document, even though another agency has it labeled on the map. It adds hours and accomplishes nothing.
But it’s state law, so I have to follow it.
Right, so what about the second option, paying for someone to handle the data?
With a total staff of 11 I’m guessing there’s not a huge budget for outside contractors to do the work.
If it came down to it the remedy is to challenge it in court. An impartial judge should be able to look at the argument from the local government and determine if their argument is legitimate or not.
I’m not talking about the city budget, I’m saying the person requesting documents could pay for the labor needed to get the documents.
A third party can’t view the un-redacted documents because the city can’t share them.
That’s how it works in NZ, you can request anything, but the govt can also charge you the costs of collating that data beyond a certain point
Legit reason: Chain of evidence. They can’t bring in an outside expert that hasn’t been vetted, and they especially can’t use equipment that has been outside their control and hasn’t been verified intact. Damn near zero youtubers would pass NSA vetting, which clearly rules out their equipment as well. The fact this is such an outdated tech means there’s no verified-trustworthy experts within or contracted with the government that can work with it, so they really are stuck not being able to do anything with this tech in house. Digital obsolescence is a very serious problem, especially in government (why do you think they pay so much for COBOL developers?) and this truly is a nontrivial issue to overcome.
… Which is the bureaucratic legitimacy behind this claim. Obviously they could fix this, I mean duh. But it’s an actual hassle, and they see no benefit to going through it to reveal something they don’t see a point to revealing. So they just hide behind the legit issues, shrug, and know we can’t do anything about it.
They’ve probably secretly listened to someone unknowingly telling them how to fix it.
Christ just tell Biden to make them give them to the national archives with an executive order. They’ll figure it out.
I’ll lend them my VCR
Well, Ampex player, not VCR.
But still, it’s available in droves on eBay.
God damn! Somebody buy the government a VCR!
/s
Whoopsie! History just slips through your fingers like sand sometimes, huh?
Complete incompetence that it wasn’t digitized already.
That tape is old and degrading. If it’s not digitized soon, it will be lost.
I don’t think tapes degrade that fast. Yes, the quality will get slightly worse but it can be played until it becomes too brittle.
Video tape isn’t really that durable over time. Most of the info I can find comes from digitization services, but they are fairly consistent in saying that, for tapes that are stored in “normal” conditions, you can expect 10-25% degradation in 20 years. These tapes are 40 years old. They have likely degraded significantly already and may fall apart when played.
These bad boys have been screaming for preservation since the 90’s tbh. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be public domain. Its our history, its computer history.
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I’m gonna call bullshit based on the story by Snowden in his biography about his Boomer co-worker who was in charge of maintaining a tape drive that recorded all incoming communications from field agents as a backup
I mean, there’s a difference between a reel of AMPEX film that the NSA is dragging their feet on digitizing, and the modern 45TB 8gbps tape cartridges that absolutely could be used to store thousands of hours of video per day.
If I remember correctly, he said it was definitely not a modern tape drive, which is why an older man was maintaining it
It’s more modern than what’s being talked about in the article. Snowden knew his stuff, that doesn’t mean he knew what the old guy with the tape was doing tech wise.
Whatever you say man lmao clearly you didn’t read the book and are just making generalizations
Yeah, I’m not going to be reading that any time soon.
did they try adjusting the tracking? that does it for me
Just hit it a couple of times
the downside of spaceballs instant video cassette revolution.
Smart people do dumb things sometimes.
Bureaucrats aren’t known for their out-of-the-box thinking. Probably half the staff at the NSA could figure out how to get the data off the tapes, but the person in charge of this isn’t that cleaver and might think that there could be something classified on them. Either in plain sight or as in the form of some sort of Steganography. They can’t leave the building with the tapes and they can’t use someone else’s player as it might be bugged. “The Thing” probably still spokes the hell out of them.
They should call TechMoan or CathodeRayDude! One of them probably has the right player just sort of… lying around!
NSA don’t know things, they know people.
