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I had a buddy a couple years ago who was a low level FOIA officer in the U.S. military. He was telling me that shortly after the Clinton email scandal there was
by cheschire 6y ago
I had a buddy a couple years ago who was a low level FOIA officer in the U.S. military. He was telling me that shortly after the Clinton email scandal there was a policy pushed on all his branch's computers that forced encryption to be turned on for all users.
What that resulted in was basically a complete shutdown of email discovery for fulfilling FOIA requests. You go into Outlook, do a search, and if it's not in the subject line of the email then it's simply not found.
He told the story as if it was a conspiracy against FOIA, but based on my experience of dealing with bureaucracies, it was more likely just coincidence.
Never attribute to malice what could be explained with incompetence.
- clort 6y agoIncompetence is what leads to doing nothing and scandals continuing to happen because people have access to information that exposes hypocrisy and wrongdoing that offends them. As this was a reaction to a scandal I'm going to say your buddy was on track, it was done intentionally in order to frustrate future discovery. (Not solely a conspiracy against FOIA particularly but that is one method used to reveal information)
- cheschire 6y agoIt was done near a scandal, but not necessarily in reaction to one. Correlation is not causation.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoDoes anything, anything happen in politics that isn't in reaction to a causation?
- cheschire 6y agoNewton's third law confirms that yes, everything in politics occurs in reaction to some other causation. However correlating two items together based on timestamp alone is not enough to validate causation.