Back in April, I sent the FBI some FOIA requests concerning the FBI‘s public stance on encryption — which is kind of a big deal right now, given that the FBI is giving mixed messages on encryption. Director James Comey is out there pushing the panic button over people encrypting their mobile phones, while older FBI recommendations suggested that encrypting your mobile phone could protect your information from those with malicious intent. So it seemed quite reasonable to find out what kinds of talking points the FBI had put together on encryption, as it seemed rather important to the very timely debate about whether or not tech companies should be forced to backdoor encryption.

I submitted the FOIA requests on March 27th. On September 10th — which is 167 days later — the FBI finally responded, telling me that it expected to get to my request about 300 days later, or approximately 475 days from when it was first submitted. It was addressed (typo-wise) to „God morning.“