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:
36 CFR § 1236.20 is the Ten Commandments of Federal electronic records management. If an agency doesn’t comply with 36 CFR § 1236.20, it does not comply with any Federal records management laws.
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
So, situation normal.
For a state that’s supposed to work as a state, lack of accountability on this scale could warrant no mere audits, but thorough investigations treating the entire agency in question as a crime scene.
For a sprawling anarcho-tyranny which exists to serve an antinomian sect, it’s business as usual.
Ya – anybody know where the video tapes of the lunar landing are? Just askin’ …for a friend
or the flight records – amazing the most significant aerospace event in the history of mankind yet all the
flight records were “destroyed” – right
Maybe it was 4 days of astronauts filmed picking their noses and scratching their bottoms. The achievement is fantastic, the execution might have looked like a bus ride in the city.
So is it just the climate capers cabal in NASA who are rogue public servants, or are the space exploration folks enemies of the state as well?
I believe the space exploration folks were were the genuine article, just for the record.
The smartest Americans of the 60s (not really but roll with it) were developing rockets for space and bombs.
The smartest Americans of the 80s (not really but roll with it) were trading stocks.
The smartest Americans of the 90s (not really but roll with it) were developing Internet.
The smartest Americans of the 2020s are developing …
That’s the box nobody since Clinton has been checking for me. What _is_ the big goal? DJT has put his real person into what had been left a personality and platform vacuum, but nothing is capturing my imagination like “One small step for man” or Endicott Steel,
Mission to mars, AI and defeat the Russians part 2 (return of the Russians) feel too worn out. I must have aged out of the target demographic while I was absorbed in a Netflix series.
“One small step for a man”
Fixed.
Never assign to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity and incompetence.
That applies to an individual. When it is a massive agency, it warrants a different slogan.
«Well, it’s only good advice when there is no malice afoot.»
“So is it just the climate capers cabal in NASA who are rogue public servants”
I would say that is the case for the most part.
Sean Duffy, the new NASA Administrator should be made aware of this failure to carry out the law.
…,and also his wife. NASA might have been too busy back during the space exploration hay-day, but it is time somebody got ’em straightened out.
This is why I don’t want the government involved in so many things. The lack of accountability and transparency is scandalous. If an individual or business/manufacturer treated the government like this they would be in jail.
I think the same kind of thing every day – “Amazon.com went public in 1997 and that company can deliver any physical item I can think of to my front door within a few days, but (describe any inefficient government transactions here).”
“deliver any physical item I can think of to my front door within a few days”
Really? I can think of quite a few things they couldn’t even begin to deliver.
If NASA retains no records of lunar landings, that means all we have are media records. Why are they any more reliable for Apollo missions than they are for Climate Change?
Without saying I’ve concluded either way, the belief in Apollo missions has just taken a large step toward being a product of mass delusion, by the records vacuum enlightened by this article.
All the pictures of the equipment left as well as the buggy tracks that were taken by later orbiters were all just faked?
The experiment where they bounce a laser off the moon to measure the distance to the moon, were all just faked?
The moon rocks that were returned and have been analyzed by scientists from all over the world were just faked?
The Soviets, who had the equipment to track the mission and who would have gained a huge propaganda victory by exposing the fakery, but kept quiet, were they in on the scam as well.
The fact that thousands of employees, both inside and outside NASA would have had to be in on the fakery, and not a single one of them has talked in the almost 60 years since the landing.
It takes a really gullible person to believe that it was even possible to fake the moon landing.
I don’t know, honestly–and I speak as one who has held a moon rock in my hand at one time, as I was in grad studies at the time and my thesis advisor–one of those scientists from all over the world–had been sent one. I couldn’t tell it from a terrestrial rock, there was nothing special about it; it looked like many gabbros I’ve seen on this planet. But then why should it be different?
Does a laser reflector require placement by a human?
Have you seen the tire tracks with a telescope?–or just photos of them? And can you access those photos at NASA? Has Hubble seen them?
As I said, I don’t conclude either way and I don’t demand that anyone else do either. I just don’t find the probability that it was faked as zero-point-zero, that’s all. Everyone is free to draw their own conclusions, and not possessing personality traits of Michael Mann, David Suzuki or John Kerry I don’t call anyone else ignorant. I have however earned my credentials as a scientist, and all things should be questioned.
Moon rocks are different from Earth rocks at the isotopic level, and that has been shown by labs from all over the planet.
So you believe NASA secretly launched a voyage to the moon that nobody noticed?
As to automated landing on the moon, the technology didn’t exist at the time.
The moon is too close for Hubble to focus on. Pictures of the landing sites have been taken by orbiters from at least 3 different countries, several of whom are not freiendly towards the US. Are they all in on the scam.
I heard the U.S. government gave a moon rock sample to the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Later analysis showed that the rock was petrified wood … go figure.
Grok:
“The 1969 Apollo 11 goodwill gifts involved small lunar samples (about 0.05 grams each) embedded in acrylic plaques, presented by U.S. ambassadors to 135 countries, the 50 U.S. states, and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant on behalf of President Nixon. These originated from the 21.6 kg of material collected by astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin.
For the Netherlands, the plaque was handed to Prime Minister Piet de Jong (successor to Willem Drees) during a September 1969 ceremony in The Hague. It featured four rice-grain-sized fragments and a Dutch flag that had flown to the Moon. The item later passed to private hands before museum donation, where the 2009 mix-up occurred with a separate petrified wood piece once owned by Drees.
Similar verified plaques exist in Dutch collections, including at Space Expo in Noordwijk. All official samples remain U.S. government property under loan agreements.”
Got a source for that? Or is just something you heard from a friend of a firedn?
How did reflectors get there if not placed by humans? I’ve never seen an explanation for soft landing them on the moon so would be interested in a scenario of a mission to do it.
I question your credentials as a “scientist” if you don’t know enough basic physics to understand why Hubble can not see them. Furthermore, you bring up Hubble images while ignoring other images that exist. Why would you trust one but not the other? Logic seems to fail you also. But, you did succeed in sidetracking the conversation from NASA lies to a whack conspiracy theory so maybe politician is your real job.
Mr. Werner: As Mr. hoffer says below, the article is an ongoing scandal at US gov’t “science” agency, and your “just askin’ questions” is a distraction. You can recover by saying something about the article, and I invite you to do so.
https://vt.co/entertainment/music/moment-buzz-aldrin-punched-a-conspiracy-theorist-who-repeatedly-accused-him-of-faking-the-moon-landing
Not only that, but hundreds (at least) amateur astronomers world wide watched the lunar lander in real time.
The Japanese satellite orbiting the Moon just took a photograph of the Apollo 11 landing site last week clearly showing man-made objects on the Moon.
And there are pictures of all the other Lunar landing sites, too.
I suppose it is probable that the conspiracy believers will think the Japanese are in on the conspiracy. That is usually the way their confused minds work.
“It takes a really gullible person”
This coming from the guy who fell for a claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t apply to EM radiation? Can you tell us what the Second Law actually says, Professor?
And in defense of the gullible are the willfully ignorant.
The 2nd law is actually several pages of fairly dense math. The quote that most people echo is just a short piece of verbiage that describes it. Those words are not the second law, just a summation.
A photon (or packet of energy if you will) is emitted by one object and absorbed by another. There is no mechanism by which a photon knows the temperature of the object it came from, and there is no mechanism by which that photon can avoid objects that are warmer. Neither is there a mechanism by which a potential absorbing object can determine the temperature of the emitting object and reject all photons from cooler objects.
“Those words are not the second law”
Who told you that?
“just a summation”
Please tell us the “summation”, if you can. In English. I’ve given you first-grade-level instructions on how to find it online, since you’ve been unable to produce it from memory. Please do that now.
The math told me that. Perhaps if you learned some, and perhaps took a beginners course in physics, you would be at the threshold of understanding. But since you are unprepared to believe you could ever be wrong, I guess that won’t happen.
“The math told me that.”
No it didn’t. Neither theory nor experiment will back up this claim. It is false. It is a lie.
Now, I will ask you again: please define the Second Law of Thermodynamics for us. In English. No physicist has any trouble doing this. Nor does any physics textbook. Nor does Google. What is preventing you?
Actually experiments do support the fact that radiation from a cold object will strike and impart energy to a warmer object.
You haven’t answered my question. Please stop prevaricating and obfuscating, and just tell us the definition of the Second Law. There are no “several pages of dense math”. That is a lie. It is a straightforward principle that is easily expressed in a single English sentence. Can you tell us what it is? If you don’t know, and can’t find it online, just say “I don’t know”.
Not going to bother to defend your words, Professor? Even Willis the fisherman knows that a man ought to be able to do that. (He can’t either, of course, but at least he knows that it is incumbent upon him to try.)
Having completely failed, indeed outright refused, to defend your original claim – the one you insulted me over, remember – you have now made a new claim. Presumably this is a futile attempt to deflect everyone’s attention from your aforementioned shortcomings. Well, it turns out that the truth of this one depends entirely on what you want the word “impart” to mean. It is not really a physics term, and in colloquial English it generally means to communicate something intangible, usually knowledge. That act, of course, does not require the “imparter” to lose anything, while the “impartee” nevertheless gains something. But energy in physics doesn’t work like that. The Second Law (you know, the one you can’t define to save your life) says so. For now, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn’t mendaciously choose a non-physics term solely to confuse your audience, or indeed yourself. So did you actually mean “transfer”, i.e. “do work upon”? Because in that case, your new claim is false, i.e. a lie – just like your previous one.
What did your Engineering Ethics professor teach you about lying? Or insulting your teachers? Do you remember? What grade did you get in that class, if I may ask?
EM radiation and thermal energy are two different forms of energy.
Simple. EM radiation can transit a vacuum. Thermal energy requires kinetic interactions of molecules, which are not present in a vacuum.
And now let’s haul those goalposts back to the other end of the field.
Surely there is sufficient documentation (that can be reasonably proven as not made up decades after the fact) which shows all those missions not only went over there, but actually were doing what they are claimed to do, with the results they are claimed to have? Oh, good. There was no reason for that massive strawman campaign on internet supported by legacy press, then. It must have spontaneously happened.
There are literally mountains of evidence that moon landings did happen.
There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that they did not.
All we have are paranoid delusions generated by those with no understanding of even basic science.
Every single piece of supposed evidence that the landings did not take place have been refuted by people who understand the science and the technology.
Some guy just ripped the lid off of one of, if not THE, biggest instances of government malfeasance with major implications for the climate debate, and an argument breaks out over the moon landings being faked. FFS.
The Smithsonian Institute has all the images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. Yeah I know, someone will argue that those are faked too. And NASA purposely screwed up Apollo 13 and almost killed the crew just to make it all seem so much more real. Tens of thousands of employees all part of the same cover up and not one said anything even on their death beds, its been over half a century.
The real story here is that NASA is not compliant with records retention law and it will take a herculean effort to comb through those records to categorize and cross reference them. Cross referencing them is vital because it is one of the keys to identifying lost, deleted or altered records.
Thank you.
Yes the real issue here us of course how all the “climate” malfeasance can be swept into the memory hole to keep it from seeing the light of day to protect the GISS propagandists from FOIA requests.
Whatever it takes, as long as topic is diverted from the can of worms into some swamp of NO U nonsense. Like you didn’t see that kind of thing before, including on WUWT.
The Smithsonian Institute is MiniTru, m8. Keepers of the One True History of the day.
I have seen local government folks in US go to both extremes. Some decided long ago to comply with open record laws, setting up systems that quickly produce all docs requested. Others learned how to frustrate the system. Fine example was in recent headline, VA school board demands $120,000 or so to produce emails requested by parents. I expected emails in EPA system from early days of Obama Admin (spring ’09) would show how they pushed through the “CO2 dangerous” finding, but this article tells me EPA destroyed them long ago or managed to not retain them. I love this article, it’s rare that the requesting party knows more than the bureaucrat re: record retention.
I doubt thisdisgrace is exclusive to NASA. I’ve been dealing with the Veterans Adminstration about several issues since 2022. Lots of correspondence. Still waiting for a letter from an accountable human being. EVERYTHING signed by “District Director”, “Regional…”, “Legislative Liaison” or such.
Currently waiting for them to act on something they approved six months ago. I am told it’s being reviewed. No explanation why. Can’t/won’t say who’s desk it’s on. I think someone spilled coffee on it a long time ago. NO WAY, says VA: everything is working as it should. Scary, if true.
The dog ate my homework?
Looks like bureaucratic delay is another method they have learned to avoid FOIA requests :<)
Per earlier comment… If Amazon.com produced experiences like that …
Every public institution develops an immune system to defend from things it doesn’t want to know. Laws like the ones being spoken of here are supposed to prevent organizations from doing exactly that. There are three problems with this:
Spring ’09 is 16 years ago. The bosses in places like EPA tend to be older. Let the retired bosses golf in peace while the next generation fixes it. Let their putting skill be their own punishment.
Symptom of a different problem, where pre-lunar-landing USA expected lifetime government jobs and post-lunar-landing USA (and the physics of space travel) decided it didn’t want to pay for landing Americans anywhere else in space. Too far. Too Expensive. So what do thousands of class-topping STEM experts do when their mission disappears just when their children are expecting to go to good private colleges? The whole job transitions from getting men onto the moon to finding a justification for the paycheck that buys good private college tuition.
That is one part of it, yes.