this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
405 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
58133 readers
5189 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is true that they could resurrect the tapes if they had a compelling reason to do so. Denying the request indicates that they don't believe the reason to be sufficiently compelling to warrant the extra expenditure of resources. That is subtley different from "we don't want to", which implies a level of capriciousness.
Government departments get FOI requests all the time and they take resources to fulfill. FOI is not intended as a way to have taxpayers fund people's pet projects. That's why FOI law doesn't require your government to spend (even more) money to acquire technology they don't have or need for anything other than the FOI request itself. Rather, something that requires that kind of extra effort and expenditure should be submitted as a research request, normally with its own funding.
The NSA mission is to spy on people and help American corporations create a worldwide hegemony, they ain't got no time to be wasting on pet projects for total losers.
"Jesus H. Christ, how is this gonna help us against the Russkies, Larry? I ain't spendin' one red cent on this ancient history nerd bullshit. We got commies to catch! Or, uh, whatever the Russkies are nowadays. Throw that FOI shit in the fuckit bucket, goddammit."
Makes sense, thanks!