NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' e-mail? The agency says it doesn't have the technology. "There's no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," said NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker. The system is "a little antiquated and archaic," she added.