On June 9, 2014, a complaint was filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) against the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for failing to fulfill two Freedom of Information Act requests for records pertaining to the conduct of the EPA.

The case was filed after the NSA issued a Glomar response, in which it declined to provide the requested information, and instead refused to confirm or deny that it possessed the request records.

According to the complaint, this lawsuit stems from repeated incidents of the EPA circumventing federal recordkeeping laws by using personal devices, including email accounts and text messages, to conduct work-related correspondence and otherwise federal business. As revealed by its Inspect General, NSA is known to have a program to collect metadata from telephone, text message and email records from certain telephony carriers including Verizon. CEI requested the copies of all text message data, and particularly all metadata of text messaging activity using Verizon voice and/or data accounts in NSA’s possession.

On September 5, 2014, defendant filed for summary judgment.

In response, the plaintiffs argued that NSA has waived its right to issue such a response by its previous official acknowledgment that it has the records they seek. The judge found that despite their FOIA requests for email and text records, the plaintiffs failed to identify any evidence showing that the NSA actually collects this information on a widespread basis.

On January 13, 2015, the court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant. The court stated that plaintiffs failed to point to concrete evidence showing that the NSA has actually admitted this fact.

The court entered a judgment for the defendant on the same day. The case is closed.

Ginny Lee - 02/10/2017


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