NSA sued for EPA records

A group of conservative and environmental organizations is suing the National Security Agency (NSA) in order to obtain records about top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, top EPA staffers have repeatedly flouted federal recordkeeping laws by using their personal phones and email accounts for work business. The group has tried to obtain those communications under a Freedom of Information Act request, but was told that, for instance, thousands of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s text messages had been deleted and could not be retrieved. However, along with the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, the conservative group claims that the NSA also has that data and has not been handing it over despite repeated requests. “Here there have been clear public admissions that the NSA has collected telephone and text message metadata, the very records requesters have sought,” the groups said in a lawsuit filed on Monday. The three organization first asked the NSA for information about calls and text messages to or from McCarthy and former EPA chief Lisa Jackson last year. In return, they got a message from the NSA saying that the spy agency “cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such information,” since it is classified...more