So You Want Records?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just released 1,400 pages of emails and other internal records concerning the agency’s role in advising the Department of Justice and Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on changes made to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) guidelines used to collect and retain data about potential terrorist threats.

[...]

The documents are so heavily redacted it’s impossible to determine what the talking points said and what advice DHS had offered DOJ and ODNI in drafting the new guidelines.

[...]

Last March, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a joint statement announcing that they were updating NCTC’s [National Counterterrorism Center] November 2008 guidelines “that governed NCTC’s access, retention, use, and dissemination of “terrorism information” contained within federal datasets that are identified as also including non-terrorism information and information pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism.”

The most controversial aspect of NCTC’s updated guidelines was that the agency now had the ability to retain data on U.S. persons for five years—even if the individual is not suspected of being involved in terrorist activities—instead of 180 days under the November 2008 guidelines.

In a July 6, 2011 email written by DHS Associate General Counsel Matthew Kronisch that he sent to DHS General Counsel Ivan Fong and DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis Caryn says, “I have inserted two new bullets at the top of the paper to clarify why the new guidelines are needed.”

But the “paper” included in the batch of records released by DHS is completely redacted.

  Freedom of the Press Foundation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.