Kafka-esque and somewhat Ionescu...

Kind of funny, since I've already seen yours.

Pretty boring, actually.

I'm not a lawyer, but to me this reads like all requests are denied as a matter of standard procedure, and you have to appeal to make the case that they have no exemption based on executive order or statute. Which may be a difficult thing to prove absent any knowledge of the intelligence that they may or may not have about you.

But to invoke an executive order claiming that even admitting to the existence of surveillance on an average U.S. citizen "could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security"?

That's an extraordinary claim.

"(c) intelligence activities (including covert action), intelligence sources or methods, or cryptology;"

So, it seems to me that they're blocking your request due to the fact that you are requesting to gather intelligence. Quite the Catch 22.

If they didn't have a file on you, I bet they do now.

Reminds me of when Senator Ron Wyden said "As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee we have been provided with the executive branch's classified interpretation of those provisions and can tell you that we believe there is a significant discrepancy between what most people - including many Members of Congress - think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and what government officials secretly believe the Patriot Act allows them to do."

To accurately and completely respond to your request would probably be to admit that the NSA listens in on all major telecommunication trunk lines (a la Room 641a in the AT&T facility in San Francisco, the subject of two EFF lawsuits).

It is therefore probably technically accurate for them to say, "If we were honest about the extent to which we have compromised everyone's security and privacy, we believe significant barriers to our spying would be raised."

@5--Brendan, you're being far too generous. It's completely fucking insane.

What @7 said.

Catch-22.

@ 7 and 10. That's okay. These days, U.S. citizens live in an open-source world, from how you can be tracked on the internet to the broad, broad interpretations of accepted domestic surveillance after 9/11.

I figure it's better to live in the open and try to get all the information I can (surveil the surveillers—or "counter-veillance") than keeping mum and hoping for the best. The latter course skirts dangerously close to abdicating one's civil rights.

@8 is correct. As is @7.

They're already back extrapolating information on you from anything anyone in the world posts on Twitter or Facebook anyway.

The funny thing is that this information is virtually useless in actually catching real terrorists, of course. Well, except for the massive unconsititutional invasion of privacy and massive budget cost and massive economic cost of it, that is - that part's not funny.

Also worth noting is the actually vulnerability they're worried about. Privacy-enhancing technologies (encryption, decentralized networks) have a cumulative effect that is greater than their individual effect. That is, even if someone could break any encrypted communication, or tap any decentralized network, it would be impossible to do so to ALL encrypted communications or networks if there were enough of them. As a security researcher in a recent Ars Technica article concluded, "When Google turned on SSL [encryption] by default, in January 2010, in one day that company did more to protect the privacy of activists than the rest of us have done since."

He wasn't suggesting that Google is un-surveillable (As a US company, it is probably participating in surveillance constantly). He was saying that such an increase in the total amount of encrypted traffic a) makes the fact that a given communication is encrypted less suspicious and b) makes deep-packet inspection and data mining of all traffic infeasible. It is entirely possible that anything that frightened enough people people into adopting strong security measures (such as not adding their own data to centralized services like google and facebook) would really disrupt any surveillance programs currently in operation.

Bottom line is still that they're not lying or even being particularly disingeuous. It's just that what they're doing is immoral in the extreme.

That's because these fuckers are data mining pretty much every electronic interaction that they can survey.

And thanks to Bush/Cheney, the only people they are legally obligated to inform are a few senators on a committee and/or a judge in a secret court.

Walter Mitty alert @3.

The translation from legalese is: "Go fuck yourself."

Brendan, if you found out they had records of all your emails and telephone calls made within the last ~5 years (which there's decent reasons to think they do for all of us now) yeah, as a journalist you could proly cause plenty of damage to their intelligence gathering if that was confirmed.

"And does this apply to all U.S. citizens? Or am I a special case?"

If they confirm or deny that, they might as well confirm or deny you've got a file.

@8 wyden should enter that secret data into the congressional public record. They could not stop him, if he did. Pentagon Papers, etc

Technically, if you were a sooper s33kr3t spy, you could do stuff that you think might cause a file to be created for a particular identity, then try and find out if that actually happened, and thereby potentially find out how the NSA is gathering intelligence and/or gaps in their methods of gathering intelligence. Personally I think that this ought to be trumped by the civil rights of individuals, but obviously neither party is really interested in anybody's civil rights these days.