The following is a recreation of an X (formally Twitter) article from Don Lueders
https://twitter.com/DonLueders/status/1983578009396256971
[This is the first in a series of posts exposing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s weaponization of agency information through their records management program.]
Since it was first passed in 1967, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been the American public’s sole mechanism for delivering government transparency and accountability. FOIA requests are entirely downstream from an agency’s records management program. They are, after all, a request for agency records.
At NASA where I worked as an electronic records management consultant for over five years, no one at the agency has complied with any Federal records management laws or regulations for nearly 20 years. This fact doesn’t just mean NASA’s responses to FOIA requests are inaccurate. It means the agency can alter, hide, or destroy any incriminating record relevant to a FOIA request that they don’t want the American public to see.
And this is what @NASA has consistently done for a very long time. Here’s just one example.
As a leading authority in Federal agency records management, I have unique insight into how to write the most effective, airtight FOIA requests. Over the years, I have volunteered to write FOIA requests for a number of organizations I support. In March of last year, one of those organizations asked me to draft a FOIA request for NASA.
(To be clear, this request came well after I filed my first complaint to NASA’s Office of Inspector General detailing NASA’s records management crimes – and the OIG did nothing to correct the problem – so I didn’t believe participating in this FOIA request was in any way unethical.)
The following images are sections of the original FOIA request (black italics) and NASA’s initial response (in red). After each section, I provide my analysis of NASA’s response:
Critically, the regulation includes the following requirement: “Recordkeeping functionality may be built into the electronic information system or records can be transferred to an electronic recordkeeping repository, such as a DoD-5015.2 STD-certified product.”
NASA’s response to this section is accurate. The agency has never deployed a DoD 5015.2 certified records management repository
. By default, this means that NASA must build records management functionality into every electronic information system the agency deploys, or they are not in compliance with Federal records management laws.
This is possibly NASA’s most egregious records management lie. The agency does not use Microsoft 365 to manage any electronic records.
I was hired in April 2020 to support NASA’s implementation of records management functionality into their agencywide deployment of M365. I was at the agency for less than a year before I realized they had no real intention of implementing compliant functionality into the platform. The reason I was hired was to give the illusion of compliant electronic records management at the agency so they could make false FOIA statements like this one and lie about their compliance in response to NARA’s Annual Agency Records Management Self-Assessment.
NASA has hundreds – possibly thousands – of unique information systems across the agency. None of these systems were ever built from scratch or modified to include compliant records management functionality. None of them.
This fact, combined with the agency’s lies about M365 as a records management solution, and NASA’s admission that the agency doesn’t leverage DoD 5015.2 records repositories is enough to prove that all NASA FOIA responses are objectively unreliable. As a result, any party submitting FOIA requests to NASA should assume that some portion of relevant records were either destroyed or hidden and some of the records that were provided in the response have been altered.
Nonetheless, I will continue with my analysis.
There’s a lot to unpack on this one. Firstly, the three annual reports NASA provided are available to the public. There is no reason to include them in their response. There were thousands of records created supporting the creation of these reports. Many of those records were indeed destroyed, as I have personally witnessed. None were destroyed in compliance with a NARA-approved retention schedule.
The NASA records management program has never created a single Certificate of Destruction for an electronic record. They do not have the technology to do it. This is why they ignored the request for them.
NASA claims they use the Capstone methodology for managing agency email records. They do not. They have implemented some limited M365 Exchange technology that gives the appearance of a functioning Capstone process, but no one at the agency has ever actually executed it.
The following is a Teams chat message I received from a NASA Exchange administrator as part of a discussion about the status of the agency’s Capstone email records management solution. In it, he explains that he told the Agency Records Officer that the solution was not properly configured to manage agency email records in compliance with the law. He also explained to her that her previous response to NARA’s annual records management self-assessment of email records management was inaccurate. (Note that ‘liked’ is a typo. The intended word was ‘lie’.)
The Capstone deficiencies the administrator describes here have never been corrected.
These chat messages exist. Here is one of many:
Locating these responsive chat messages is a simple online Exchange query. It shouldn’t take a qualified administrator more than a few minutes. There is no need for NASA to have an ongoing process to find them.
But perhaps more importantly, given NASA’s records management failures, it is impossible to prove the authenticity and integrity of any relevant chat records the agency provides in their response.
There is no way NASA can make this claim. The agency has no text message records management solution in direct defiance of ten-year-old NARA guidance.
This is another impossible claim to make. NASA has an extensive social media presence. Much larger than most other Federal agencies. But, as with text message records, NASA has no social media records management solution. This is also a violation of long-standing NARA guidance first issued in 2013 .
It should be understood that every statement I make above can be proven with documentation I currently possess.
The fact is, NASA does not care about providing truthful FOIA responses. Instead, the agency has corrupted a law intended to provide transparency and accountability and turned it into the exact opposite: a tool to weaponize agency information against NASA’s perceived enemies in politics and among the American public. This is a direct assault on our democratic process.
Coming up in Part 2 of this series, I will provide further proof of NASA’s records management crimes, including recorded admissions from some of the bureaucrats who commit them.
https://twitter.com/DonLueders/status/1983578009396256971
H/T Willis Eschenbach
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