Americans Find Swift Stonewall On Whether NSA Vacuumed Their Data

WASHINGTON — Since last year’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s massive communications data dragnets, the spy agency has been inundated with requests from Americans and others wanting to know if it has files on them. All of them are being turned down .

The denials illustrate the bind in which the disclosures have trapped the Obama administration. While it has pledged to provide greater transparency about the NSA’s communications collections, the NSA says it cannot respond to individuals’ requests without tipping off terrorists and other targets.

As a result, Americans whose email and telephone data may have been improperly vacuumed up have no way of finding that out by filing open records requests with the agency. Six McClatchy reporters who filed requests seeking any information kept by the NSA on them all received the same response.

“Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries’ compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” the NSA wrote last month in response to a McClatchy national security reporter who requested his own records. “Therefore, your request is denied because the fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter.”

In an apparent reaction to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s data collections, the number of open records requests filed with the agency more than tripled – from 1,065 to 4,060 – between 2010 and 2013, according to data supplied by the NSA. The denial rate during the same period skyrocketed from an estimated 33 percent to 82 percent because of the higher number of people seeking their own intelligence records. The NSA does approve other types of records requests, such as academics asking for historic records and former workers seeking their employment records.

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