Kevin McAleenan Emails

Good afternoon,
Attached is our acknowledgment of your DHS FOIA request.  If you need to contact this office again concerning your request, please provide the DHS reference number. This will enable us to quickly retrieve the information you are seeking and reduce our response time. This office can be reached at 866-431-0486.
Regards,
DHS Privacy Office
Disclosure & FOIA Program
STOP 0655
Department of Homeland Security
245 Murray Drive, SW
Washington, DC 20528-0655
Telephone:  1-866-431-0486 or 202-343-1743
Fax:  202-343-4011
Visit our FOIA website (http://www.dhs.gov/foia)

Dear Taylor Amarel,

Thank you for your message. We apologize that we are not able to give you a more precise estimate of when you can expect to receive our response. At this time, our general expectation is that, we will be able to send you a final response in the next three to four months.

Please understand that our office handles a very large volume of requests – in one month we respond to more requests on average than most Departments receive in a year. In addition to handling a large volume of requests, we are also responsible for processing a variety of particularly sensitive types of records. We have a responsibility to ensure that we carefully review all of the records we process to ensure that we provide maximum transparency while withholding any exempt material that could foreseeably cause harm to a protected interest. This is a labor intensive task that involves working with offices to ensure that any potentially responsive materials are provided to us and then conducting a page-by-page and line-by-line review of all responsive records.

OCIO has provided us with potentially responsive records and your request has been added to our processing queue. It is very difficult to provide an accurate estimated date of completion until our FOIA analyst reviews these records for responsiveness and we have a better sense of the number of pages and the sensitivity of the material. The Privacy Office is also coordinating the Department’s response to requests related to COVID-19; many of these requesters asked and qualified for expedited processing, meaning that they are required to be placed at the front of the queue. Again, our general expectation is that we will be able to send you a final response within three to four months. Please know that this estimate may change dramatically based on the volume of work associated with our expedited COVID-19 requests and on the types of records that OCIO has provided us for your request. Regardless of the specificity of your request, we cannot accurately estimate the amount of time it will take to process the record until we understand both the volume and sensitivity of the record.

While we make every effort to be responsive to requesters and hope to be able to respond to you sooner, there may be additional delays.

I hope that this response provides additional insight into why we are not able to give you a more precise estimated date of completion, and why we expect it will take three to four months for us to respond to your request. Please let us know if you have any other questions about our processes.

Respectfully,

DHS Privacy Office
Disclosure and FOIA Program
STOP 0655
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
2707 Martin Luther King Jr. AVE SE
Washington, DC 20032
Telephone: 1-866-431-0486 or 202-343-1743
Fax: 202-343-4011
foia@hq.dhs.gov<mailto:foia@hq.dhs.gov%0d>
Visit our FOIA website<https://www.dhs.gov/privacy-office>

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Good morning Mr. Amarel,

Back in 2019, we received the attached FOIA request from you seeking emails sent to, from, or copied to Kevin McAleenan, from January 1, 2019 containing any of the following non-case-sensitive key-strings "big data", "automated intelligence", or "machine learning" (Date Range for Record Search: From 1/1/2019 To 9/10/2019)

Please let us know if you are still interested in this request.

If so, please let us know if you would like to discuss your request so we can determine some conjunctive keywords to conduct a targeted search.

Thanks in advance.

Maura Busch,
Senior Program Specialist
Privacy Office
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Main: 1.866.431.0486
Direct: (202) 570-2018
Fax: (202) 343-4011
Visit our FOIA website