It's rare that you see two news stories so perfectly juxtaposed as these two.
On one side you have a revealing vignette into the mind of the NSA's chief: the "Information Dominance Center"
It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.
"'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."
Yea, that sounds like a good use of money.
So while the NSA has lots of money to build the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, they have a shortage of money for things like, oh, constitutional requests for information.
Starting two weeks ago, requests faxed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) started coming back as undeliverable. After several subsequent attempts and troubleshooting on our end, MuckRock reached out to the OSD. Sure enough, their fax machine is down... possibly until November.
Now, in 2013, you wouldn't think this would be an issue. But when an agency accepts FOIA requests by a) fax, b) mail or c) a clunky online request portal that doesn't play nice with other systems, suddenly that fax machine becomes a technical linchpin.
It bears repeating: The office that oversees the most powerful military in history (not to mention the best-funded) is unable to project when its single fax machine will once again be operational.
The OSD's FOIA section chief confirmed the grim news yesterday, responding that his office "will likely need to procure (purchase) a new fax machine. However, that purchase will not occur until the start of the new fiscal year (at the earliest)."
The NSA has a $31.8 Billion budget to build real-life Star Trek sets, but they can't spend $100 for a fax machine to respond to FOI requests.
It's a question of priorities.
And court-ordered constitutional protections simply aren't priorities to the NSA.
(Reuters) - The National Security Agency routinely violated court-ordered privacy protections between 2006 and 2009 by examining phone numbers without sufficient intelligence tying them to associates of suspected terrorists, according to U.S. officials and documents that were declassified on Tuesday.
BTW, Obama's new NSA surveillance review panel met the other day, but it seems
changes in the NSA spying program weren't even discussed.
"My fear is it's a simulacrum of meaningful reform," said Sascha Meinrath, a vice president of the New America Foundation, an influential Washington think tank, and the director of the Open Technology Institute, who also attended. "Its function is to bleed off pressure, without getting to the meaningful reform."