New FOIA Requests: CIA, DISA, CBP

I filed a couple of FOIA requests this week: one to the CIA, one to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

CIA. A few weeks ago, a teenager social engineered his way into CIA director John Brennan’s personal email account. A curated collection of Director Brennan’s messages have since appeared on Wikileaks. This led me to make the following request to the CIA:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. subsection 552, I am requesting information or records on:

• CIA policies regarding the use of personal email accounts for work-related purposes.
• CIA policies regarding the use of personal file-sharing accounts for work-related purposes.
• CIA policies regarding the use of personal social media accounts for work-related purposes.

If there are any fees for searching for, reviewing, or copying the records, please notify me before processing if the amount exceeds $25.00.

If you deny all or any part of this request, please cite each specific exemption you think justifies your refusal to release the information and notify me of appeal procedures available under the law.

These kinds of usage policies are very common in the corporate world, and I’m interested to see what the CIA’s policy is.

DISA. The pentagon outsources some of the military’s IT systems development work. In 2011, they learned that two of their contractors farmed work out to programmers in Russia. Oops.

I submitted a FOIA request to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for

• The whistleblower report(s) provided by John C. Kingsley, regarding the use of Russian programmers in the development of a Pentagon communications system.
• Executive summary documents, describing the system in question.

It’s good that the pentagon found out about this, and was able to collect fines from the contractors. This incident reveals a supply-chain vulnerability in the development of our military information systems, and I think it would be in the public interest to see the whistleblower testimony, and to get a basic understanding of the system in question.

CBP. There’s a growing push to equip law enforcement officers with body cameras, and Customs and Border Protection has felt this push as well. Ask YouTube for videos relating to some combination of “Arizona”, “Border Patrol”, and “Civil rights”; after seeing a few, you can judge for yourself whether equipping CBP officers with body cameras would be a good move.

The Associated Press tells us the CBP has been resistant to deploy body cameras. An internal review concludes that body cameras would be “expensive” and “demoralizing”. I’m not sure I buy these arguments. First, the US has a penchant for throwing money, hand over fist, at law enforcement agencies. CBP has been eager to put cameras on drones, so why not border agents? Secondly, what particular aspect of body cameras makes them demoralizing?

I’ve made a FOIA request for the review cited by the Associated Press article. I’d like to see CBP’s reasoning process.