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An agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tasked with ensuring that electronic messages on the devices of its workforce comply with public records laws admitted last week that it has stopped using software to do so.

Instead, ever since April, workers have been told to take screenshots on their own devices in order to abide by the law — a shift in policy that has a high potential for misuse and abuse, and which makes it much more difficult to track messages when requested in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries.

The Federal Records Act requires all agencies within the government to document their employees’ communications, with some exceptions ostensibly granted for national security concerns. Since 2023, DHS has relied on a software archival tool called TeleMessage for that purpose.

In testimony before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia he gave last week, Michael Weissman, executive director of the Chief Data Officer Directorate within the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO),

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