Customs and Border Protection has a pretty unreasonably definition of “reasonably described”

By Curtis Waltman, MuckRock, August 7, 2017

On two recent CBP FOIA requests of mine, the agency crossed the line from frustration into absurdity. One of the requests was for CBP contracts with the Israeli forensic tech company Cellebrite, the other was for a contract with SNAP Inc., the maker of Snapchat, who recently sold a biometric identification system to CBP.

I located these respective contracts on the Federal Procurement Data System - an extremely useful tool if you need to locate information on a federal contract. Keenly aware of CBP’s reputation, I was careful to provide CBP with as much information as possible - these requests featured everything from contract ID numbers, to DUNS numbers, to dates and IDV numbers. Pretty much everything a federal agency could want to be able to locate a contract.

Or so I thought.

Almost five months later, CBP wrote to me “After careful review of your FOIA request … we have determined that your request is too broad in scope or did not specifically identify the records which you are seeking.”

Read more here.