No, this is not at all how FOIA works. You cannot request copyrighted, classified, sensitive, or otherwise protected information. You cannot FOIA something that doesn’t exist and you also can’t force the government to do research on your behalf.
If you consider this reasonable then I don’t think it’s a super big jump to say FOIA requests should not force the government to source expensive or hard to acquire equipment.
>classified, sensitive, or otherwise protected information
Do you think this footage falls under any of these categories?
What is to stop the agency from just saying every request is "sensitive"?
Without any accountability, what is the point of the law in the first place?
This behavior does not seem to be in the spirit of the FOIA act itself. This agency is _extremely_ well funded, they can afford to accommodate this request.
> Do you think this footage falls under any of these categories?
Without knowing the details surrounding the talk, it's hard to say, but given that the NSA (not the Library of Congress, or the National Archives, or DEC, or some university) owns the tape, it's quite possible. What the NSA said is that they would have to listen to it to decide whether it falls under any of those categories. I think they do that (listen, read,...) to everything they release under FOIA, precisely because they deal with classified information.
Guys, the talk is unclassified if you care to read the article. It's about the resources. They won't digitize everything for obscure FOIA requests on old tapes unless some billionaire spends it for them.
> What is to stop the agency from just saying every request is "sensitive"?
The courts. It's not that unusual to have to litigate a FOIA request and get a judge to decide that no, the agency's excuse does not exempt it from the request.
Unfortunately this means that the eponymous "freedom" in the FOIA can become quite expensive.
