Neither Confirm Nor Deny

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**Latif Nasser** (1:04)
Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser and I happen to be allergic to peanuts, like even tiny traces of them. And when you have an allergy like this, you just go around every day paranoid that there are peanuts in everything. So you always check the ingredients. And at a certain point during my childhood, there started to be written on the back of basically everything in the grocery store, this phrase, may contain peanuts.
And that phrase drives me up the wall because it's like, yeah, duh, it may contain peanuts. That's why I'm looking at the ingredient list in the first place. You are not giving me any more information than I had before I read this. And it is your job to give me that information.
The story we have for you today is about an equally meaningless phrase that arguably has even higher stakes for democracy as a whole. We made this episode over 10 years ago, but the phrase that it's about continues to flourish and be used at the highest levels of the American government, including for cases like Jeffrey Epstein and the war in Iran.
I can neither confirm nor deny that you will enjoy it.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:19)
Wait, you're listening? Okay.
All right.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:28)
Radiolab, from WNYC.

**Jad Abumrad** (2:38)
Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad, and I'm Robert Krulwich, and today on the podcast, we have a Cloak and Dagger maritime adventure in secrecy and truth from reporter Julia Barton.

**Julia Barton** (2:49)
So Jeff, maybe first you could start off just by introducing yourself. Yeah, so the story for me begins with this guy.

**Jeff Larson** (2:53)
Yeah, my name is Jeff Larson. I'm the data editor at ProPublica.

**Julia Barton** (2:58)
ProPublica is this investigative journalism outfit, and Jeff does a lot of their-

**Jeff Larson** (3:01)
Data-based reporting.

**Julia Barton** (3:03)
So in any case, it was summer of 2013 That big story about how the NSA had just been monitoring millions of Verizon customers, that just came out. Jeff's watching the story like all of us are, and then the thought occurred to him, jeez, they're monitoring all of these people.

**Jeff Larson** (3:18)
Hey, does that include me?

**Julia Barton** (3:22)
So he goes over to the NSA's website.

**Jeff Larson** (3:25)
He was surprised to find that right there, on the site, you could file a Privacy Act request for your metadata.

**Julia Barton** (3:32)
They have a little online form right there.

**Jeff Larson** (3:34)
It's a service that they offer to everybody. And so I went ahead and did that.

**Robert Krulwich** (3:38)
And this is yourself you're requesting? You're saying, what do you know about who I called and who I heard from?

**Jeff Larson** (3:44)
Yes, exactly.

**Robert Krulwich** (3:46)
What were you expecting?

**Jeff Larson** (3:47)
The best case scenario would be just a page of all of the communications actually to my wife. My wife's a Verizon customer and I'm an AT&T customer, so all my phone calls to my wife, I guess. I didn't think that I would ever get any response back.

**Julia Barton** (4:06)
So we hit submit, expecting nothing to happen.

**Jeff Larson** (4:08)
But it was actually really, really quick. I think it was on the order of 10 or 12 days. You know, it came to my home address, sort of a manila envelope. You know, my wife called me immediately when she picked up the mail and said, hey, you know, you got a letter from the National Security Agency and there was complete panic in her voice.