What started out as a simple attempt to learn more about how the State Department processes FOIA requests has turned into a sanity-shredding saga that threatens to stretch into infinity.

Curious about what criteria the CIA have for determining if they “can neither confirm nor deny” something? So did Jason Smathers, who back in 2010 filed one of MuckRock’s earliest requests for exactly that. Six years later, he still doesn’t know.

America’s favorite bureaucratic behemoth, the Central Intelligence Agency, is notoriously one of the most difficult agencies from which to get a straight answer. And as their recently released FOIA guide shows, that’s exactly what their officers were trained to do.