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An agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tasked with ensuring that electronic messages on the devices of its workforce comply with public records laws admitted last week that it has stopped using software to do so.
Instead, ever since April, workers have been told to take screenshots on their own devices in order to abide by the law — a shift in policy that has a high potential for misuse and abuse, and which makes it much more difficult to track messages when requested in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries.
The Federal Records Act requires all agencies within the government to document their employees’ communications, with some exceptions ostensibly granted for national security concerns. Since 2023, DHS has relied on a software archival tool called TeleMessage for that purpose.
In testimony before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia he gave last week, Michael Weissman, executive director of the Chief Data Officer Directorate within the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), said that TeleMessage had “cybersecurity failures” that meant DHS had to stop using it. However, it was not replaced with new software — instead, DHS employees were “obligated to manually archive their messages,” via screenshots taken by themselves, “in accordance with existing” department policies.
The testimony from Weissman stems from a lawsuit brought against the agency by American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog organization, which had sought communications from DHS staffers regarding the National Guard’s deployment in Los Angeles as well as records relating to the prison camp in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Following a FOIA request earlier this summer, OIC had told the group that it didn’t have any of the texts it sought on file. American Oversight made additional requests in the following months, only to be told the same answer. The group sued in October, when DHS officials said those responses from OIC were made by mistake — text messages were indeed preserved, but because of their being kept intact via device screenshot, they weren’t readily searchable, requiring a manual search instead.
The revelation of the changes to how DHS is keeping track of its own communications — including its willingness to dismiss FOIA requests on account of its own inability to do so — has many open records advocates deeply concerned.
“80 Years of US Federal Records Management Theory, Training, Regulation, and gosh darn it, patriotic democratic aspiration. Down the Tubes,” wrote James Cassedy on social media, a former National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archivist.
Others noted that the new system could easily be manipulated, and perhaps already has been.
“If you are an immigration official or an agent and believe that the public might later criticize you, or that your records could help you be held accountable, would you go out of the way to preserve those records that might expose wrongdoing?” questioned Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Lauren Harper.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, blasted OIC for providing “inaccurate information” about whether or not the text messages the organization had sought were preserved.
“We’re talking about messages exchanged amid major national controversies — from the deployment of military forces on American streets to inhumane immigration crackdowns and deportations carried out in defiance of court orders. The public deserves to know whether these records still exist, and whether officials destroyed evidence of how those decisions were made,” Chukwu said.
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