NSA Says It Can't Search Through Its Own Emails

The National Security Agency, which recently came under fire for a widespread surveillance program of millions of people all over the world, is apparently not as up-to-date with its email system as it is with its spying programs.

Justin Elliott of ProPublica requested documents unrelated to the surveillance program last week, but was told the agency doesn't have the technology to do a simple search of its own employees' email.

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told Elliott.

She also added that the system is a little antiquated and archaic."

The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with computers so powerful that their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second, which helps with the task of sorting through large amounts of data in its surveillance programs. It's fairly common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees' emails for legal discovery or internal investigations.

The NSA has over 30,000 employees, but the office can only apparently search emails "person by person" rather than in bulk.

Its just baffling, says Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. This is an agency thats charged with monitoring millions of communications globally and they cant even track their own internal communications in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. If anybody is going to have the money to engage in evaluation of digital information, its the NSA for heavens sake.