Free Motion to Stay - District Court of Federal Claims - federal

Case 1:05-cv-14210-NBF

Document 64-2

Filed 06/18/2007

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IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF FEDERAL CLAIMS THOMAS C. PORTA, et al., and ANDREW D. BARTH, et al., Plaintiffs, v. THE UNITED STATES, Defendant. ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )

No. 05-14210C & No. 05-759C CONSOLIDATED (Judge Firestone)

DECLARATION OF ISH DACIO I, Ish Dacio, state the following: 1. I am the Chief, Data Center Operations, Enterprise Data Management &

Engineering Division (EDME), of the Office of Information and Technology ("OIT") for U.S. Customs and Border Protection ("CBP"). 2. This declaration relates to a request for a search of emails either to or

from Ronelle Rotterman, Alethea Smalls, or Wayne Coleman for approximately a 3½ year period, and covering 7 search terms in the subject line. 3. A recent search related to this case concerned the same 3 individuals,

was limited to 3 search terms, but covered a period of approximately 5½ years. 4. The prior search took approximately 40 hours and produced almost 900

emails, many of which were unrelated to these cases. 5. Actual searches of email systems maintained by U.S. Customs and

Border Protection are conducted by the Enterprise Networks and Technology Support 1

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Division of OIT. The Technical Integration Lead of Enterprise Networks and Technology Support Division of OIT is Bobbi Walker. 6. In preparing this response, I have been fully briefed by Ms. Walker and is

primarily based on information I have received from her. 7. CBP does not maintain emails on hard drives indefinitely but backs up its

email systems every night by the use of tapes. The tapes are stored and maintained at an off-site location. 8. When CBP receives a request to search emails that are not currently on

the hard drives, it must first determine what tapes may contain the relevant emails. To do this, CBP uses an index which contains information (criteria) related to: Sender (From) Recipient (To, CC, & BCC) Subject (Specific) Starting Date Ending Date 9. A second restriction is that we are able to pull a maximum of 250

messages meeting the search criteria (hits) at a time. Therefore, any search must be performed by reviewing a maximum of 250 emails at one time. 10. This is just to determine what emails listed in the index meet the search

criteria, it does not actually retrieve the emails. 11. In order to retrieve the actual emails, the technician uses a tool to find the

appropriate tape, load it, and retrieve the relevant data (email) from that one tape. 12. This is the longest part of the process because the data is spread across

several tapes and can take quite a few minutes to retrieve even a single message. In addition, messages may not be retrievable due to missing tapes, corrupt backups, or 2

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tapes being impounded for security reasons. 13. Retrieving messages from a large timeframe (such as years) will take a

significant amount of time since the search could produce large numbers of responses and many tapes may need to be accessed. 14. For example, when we received the original search request, we searched

the index for emails to or from Ronelle Rotterman, Alethea Smalls, and/or Wayne Coleman for the time period January 1, 2002 until May 8, 2007 (the date of the search) where the email contained one or more of the search terms, "FLETC," "overtime," or "Glynco." This resulted in 18 separate searches. 16. A search request for seven terms (7) to three individuals and from (2)

three (3) individuals will result in at least 42 individual searches. (7x2x3 = 42). 17. In light of the similarity of the current request to the prior search, we would

anticipate that many of the email results contained in the prior search may be retrieved by the current requested search. Accordingly, OIT personnel will have to review each email to determine whether or not it has already been retrieved by the original search request, and eliminate it from the results. 18. The Office of Information and Technology is currently managing three

email systems and over the next year we are migrating to one. This means that the OIT resources used for email searches are particularly limited at this time. 19. Furthermore, OIT does not have dedicated staff to perform email

searches. These types of searches are only done by senior contractor personnel, therefore, operational priorities override and can delay the estimated time of completion.

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Filed 06/18/2007

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