To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request the
following records:

records concerning the CRITIC (Critical Intelligence Communication)
messages of 11 September 2001, designated by NSA as DIRNSA CRITIC
1-2001, as described below.

BACKGROUND

On the morning of 11 September 2001, the North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORAD) originated a CRITIC with date-time group (DTG)
111349ZSEP01 (9:49 a.m. EDT). NSA's National Security Operations
Center (NSOC) retransmitted it as a "LATERAL CRITIC" at 111352ZSEP01,
then issued "FOLLOW-UP-1" at 111414ZSEP01 and "FOLLOW-UP-2 AND FINAL"
at 111448ZSEP01 to DIRNSA CRITIC 1-2001. On 13 September 2001 NSA
issued a "CRITIC SUMMARY FOR DIRNSA CRITIC 1-2001," DTG 131303ZSEP01.
NSA has previously processed and released these and related records
(including a NOIWON record sheet and NSOC e-mail traffic) under FOIA
in heavily redacted form, withholding the NORAD-originated substance
as "OGA" information on the stated ground that NORAD, as a bi-national
command, is not subject to FOIA. The prior release, with the DTGs
above, is described in Miles Kara, "Chaos Theory: 9-11; CRITICS, a
snapshot of the national awareness," 9-11 Revisited
(oredigger61.org/?p=895)

RECORDS REQUESTED

All records, in whatever form they are maintained, that were created,
received, transmitted, relayed, or logged by NSA/CSS, including NSOC,
and that fall within any of the following categories:

(a) The CRITIC originated by NORAD, DTG 111349ZSEP01, as received or
held by NSA in any form, including every copy in message-handling
systems, NSOC files, and CRITIC logs.

(b) NSA's LATERAL CRITIC, DTG 111352ZSEP01, retransmitting item (a).

(c) FOLLOW-UP-1, DTG 111414ZSEP01, and FOLLOW-UP-2 AND FINAL, DTG
111448ZSEP01, to DIRNSA CRITIC 1-2001.

(d) The CRITIC SUMMARY FOR DIRNSA CRITIC 1-2001, DTG 131303ZSEP01,
together with any drafts, amendments, corrections, or cancellations of
it.

(e) Any other CRITIC, LATERAL CRITIC, CRITIC follow-up, amendment,
cancellation, or CRITIC summary issued, received, relayed, or logged
by NSA between 0000Z 11 September 2001 and 2359Z 14 September 2001,
regardless of originator.

(f) For each message in items (a) through (e), the complete message as
transmitted, including all header and trailer information: precedence
and handling markings, originator, DTG, message identifiers or serial
numbers, TO and INFO addressees, routing indicators, classification
and dissemination-control markings, and all transmission, delivery,
receipt, and acknowledgment logs or time-stamps; and any distribution
or notification records showing when, and to whom, each message was
delivered (including the White House Situation Room, the National
Military Command Center, the National Military Intelligence Center,
and other NOIWON participants).

(g) NSOC records for 11 September 2001 that document the receipt,
evaluation, and dissemination of the CRITIC: Senior Operations Officer
(SOO) logs, watch and desk logs, CRITIC logs or checklists, NOIWON
record sheets and conference notes or summaries, and NSOC e-mail
traffic concerning the CRITIC, including the e-mail identified in
NSA's prior release as originating from the "TRAN" desk.

(h) Any NSA after-action report, lessons-learned review, chronology,
or internal history (including Center for Cryptologic History products
and Cryptologic Quarterly or Cryptolog articles, whether or not
published) that discusses the issuance, handling, content, or accuracy
of the 11 September 2001 CRITIC and its follow-ups.

(i) The FOIA case file for NSA's prior release of records concerning
this CRITIC: a copy of the records as previously released, the final
response letter, and any declassification review worksheets and
consultation or coordination correspondence with NORAD, USNORTHCOM, or
any other agency about those records. I do not request internal drafts
of the response letter.

Where some items can be completed sooner than others, please release
records on a rolling basis rather than holding the entire response for
the slowest item.

SEARCH GUIDANCE

Responsive records are likely to be found in NSOC (including "go
critic" on NSAnet, SOO, CRITIC, and desk files and logs), NSA
message-handling and CRITICOMM/DSSCS archives, NSA/CSS Records
Management holdings for 2001, the Center for Cryptologic History, and
the FOIA/PA Office's own case files for the prior release. Useful
search terms: "CRITIC," "LATERAL CRITIC," "DIRNSA CRITIC 1-2001,"
"CRITIC 1-2001," "CRITIC SUMMARY," "FOLLOW-UP," "NOIWON," the DTGs
111349ZSEP01, 111352ZSEP01, 111414ZSEP01, 111448ZSEP01, and
131303ZSEP01, and the date range 11 through 14 September 2001. Because
NSA has already located and processed the core records once, the
search burden should be modest.

FORMAT OF PRODUCTION

Under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(B), please provide the records
electronically, in the form in which they are maintained, with
metadata intact. For records that exist in electronic form (message
text, e-mail, logs, database entries), provide native-format files or
an exact export (for example .txt, .eml, .msg, or .csv) preserving
headers, time-stamps, addressee lists, and system metadata; please do
not print electronic records and rescan them. For records that exist
only on paper or as images, provide searchable PDF with an OCR text
layer at not less than 300 dpi, preserving all markings, stamps, and
handwritten annotations. Where any portion is withheld, please mark
each deletion at the place it occurs with the specific exemption
claimed and indicate the amount of information withheld, as 5 U.S.C. §
552(a)(6)(F) and § 552(b) require.

NORAD-ORIGINATED CONTENT, FORESEEABLE HARM, AND DECLASSIFICATION

I ask NSA to reconsider its prior position that NORAD-originated
content in these records is outside FOIA. A record is an "agency
record" if it was created or obtained by the agency and is under the
agency's control at the time of the request (U.S. Department of
Justice v. Tax Analysts, 492 U.S. 136, 144-45 (1989)); the origin of
the information does not remove a record in NSA's own files from
FOIA's reach. NORAD's status may justify consultation with or referral
to NORAD/USNORTHCOM under 32 C.F.R. § 286.7(d), but it is not itself
an exemption. If NSA believes any portion is exempt, please identify
the specific statutory exemption for each withholding and release all
reasonably segregable non-exempt portions (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)). I am
filing a parallel request with the NORAD and USNORTHCOM FOIA Requester
Service Center and have no objection to NSA coordinating with that
office.

Under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(8)(A), NSA may withhold information only if it
reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected
by an exemption, and must consider partial disclosure. The substance
of this CRITIC, NORAD's real-time report of the hijackings, is not
signals intelligence and does not describe NSA sources or methods. Its
essential content has been public for more than two decades through
the 9/11 Commission Report, the Commission's Staff Statement No. 17,
NORAD's published timeline of 18 September 2001, and NORAD's release
of Northeast Air Defense Sector audio recordings, and the CRITIC
system itself is officially acknowledged in NSA's own historical
publications (e.g., Sharon A. Maneki, "Did Anyone Tell the President?
Establishing the CRITICOMM System," NSA Center for Cryptologic
History). There is little foreseeable harm in releasing the precise
text, times, and addressees of a 25-year-old alert whose substance is
already known.

To the extent any portion remains classified, please review it for
declassification under Executive Order 13526. The records are more
than 25 years old and reach their automatic-declassification date of
31 December 2026 under § 3.3(a); § 3.1(d) directs declassification
where the public interest in disclosure outweighs the need for
protection; § 1.7(a) prohibits classification to conceal error or
prevent embarrassment; and Executive Order 14040 (2021) states, as to
the 9/11 attacks, that "information should not remain classified when
the public interest in disclosure outweighs any damage to the national
security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure." If NSA
declines to declassify any portion in the course of this request,
please say so expressly so that I may pursue mandatory
declassification review of the specific documents under § 3.5 of the
Order.

ADMINISTRATIVE MATTERS

Please acknowledge this request with an individualized tracking number
(5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(7)(A)). If unusual circumstances apply, please
notify me in writing and give me the opportunity to discuss the scope
of the request; I am willing to confer to make the search more
efficient. If any part of this request is denied, please identify the
exemption claimed for each withholding, advise me of my appeal rights,
and inform me of the availability of the NSA FOIA Public Liaison and
the Office of Government Information Services. I certify that the
foregoing is true and correct to the best of my knowledge and that
this request is not made for any commercial purpose.

REQUEST FOR PUBLIC-INTEREST FEE WAIVER

I request a full waiver of fees under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii) and
32 C.F.R. § 286.12(l). Disclosure is in the public interest because it
is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the
operations or activities of the government and is not primarily in my
commercial interest. Each factor in § 286.12(l)(2) is met:

(1) Operations or activities of the government. A CRITIC is, by
definition, the government's mechanism for placing information of the
highest urgency before the President and the national command
structure. These records are the government's own contemporaneous
account of how the U.S. air-defense and intelligence apparatus
recognized the 9/11 attacks; what it told the President, the National
Military Command Center, the White House Situation Room, and the
interagency watch community; when it did so; and how that information
was corrected over the following hours and days. They shed direct
light on NORAD's warning function, NSA's NSOC, the NOIWON conference,
and the CRITIC alert architecture established under NSCID No. 7.

(2) Meaningfully informative and significant. NSA's prior release
established the existence and timing of the CRITIC and its follow-ups
but withheld their substance. The public still does not know precisely
what national leadership was told at 9:52, 10:14, and 10:48 a.m. on 11
September 2001; how far that information diverged from events (the
redacted release already reveals a report of a "Boeing 767 aircraft
originating from JFK" heading for Washington, a flight that did not
exist, and confusion over the location of American Airlines Flight
77); to whom the messages were addressed and when they were received;
and how the errors were corrected in the 13 September summary. No
public source reproduces the text of these messages: not the 9/11
Commission Report, the Joint Inquiry report, NORAD's timeline, nor
NSA's historical publications. Release would add new primary-source
information and allow the CRITIC's timing and content to be compared
minute by minute against the FAA, NORAD/NEADS, NMCC, and White House
timelines assembled by the 9/11 Commission. The fidelity of the
information delivered to the President through the nation's
highest-priority warning channel during the most serious attack on
U.S. soil in the modern era is a central and still-unanswered question
about the government's performance that day, and the records cannot be
reconstructed from other material.

(3) Reasonably broad audience. I am an independent researcher and
former Marine Corps intelligence analyst with knowledge of the CRITIC
and its contents. This request is filed through MuckRock, a nonprofit
news organization; every record released in response will be published
automatically and permanently on muckrock.com, where it is freely
accessible to the public, journalists, and researchers, and I will
publish the records in full with an analysis placing them within the
established 9/11 timeline at http://critic.markciubal.com/, deposit
copies with public repositories such as the Internet Archive, and
provide them without charge to historians, journalists, and other
researchers of the attacks. [Add: prior publications, readership or
follower figures, any editor or outlet that has expressed interest.] A
requester need not show an established audience or multiple
distribution channels; a stated plan to publish suffices (Cause of
Action v. FTC, 799 F.3d 1108 (D.C. Cir. 2015)), and the fee-waiver
provision is to be "liberally construed in favor of waivers for
noncommercial requesters" (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Rossotti, 326 F.3d
1309, 1310 (D.C. Cir. 2003)). The 9/11 attacks remain a subject of
enduring public, scholarly, and journalistic interest, as the
Executive Branch itself recognized in E.O. 14040, and the 25th
anniversary of the attacks and the approaching
automatic-declassification date for records of 2001 make this a moment
of particular public attention to exactly this kind of record.

(4) No commercial interest. I have no commercial interest in these
records. I am not requesting them for any business or client, I will
not sell them or charge for access to them, and my research and
writing on this subject are [not conducted for profit / unpaid]. Any
incidental benefit to me as a writer is not a commercial interest and
would in any event be far outweighed by the public interest in
disclosure.

The request is narrowly drawn to a handful of specifically identified
messages, each pinpointed by DTG, and the immediately related logs and
correspondence, and NSA has already located and processed the core
records once, so processing costs should be modest. For fee purposes I
am an "other" (non-commercial) requester under 32 C.F.R. § 286.12.
[Optional, if you have a publication record: I also ask to be treated
as a representative of the news media under 5 U.S.C. §
552(a)(4)(A)(ii)(II), because I gather information of potential
interest to a segment of the public, use my editorial skills to turn
raw materials into distinct works, and distribute those works to an
audience through [publication / website].] If a full waiver is denied,
please grant a partial waiver for those records that satisfy the
standard (§ 286.12(l)(3)), apply the two hours of search time and 100
pages of duplication provided without charge under § 286.12(e), and
notify me before incurring fees above $50, which amount I authorize
now so that processing is not delayed pending the fee determination.
Under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(viii) and 32 C.F.R. § 286.12(e)(2),
search fees may not be charged if the statutory time limits are not
met.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public,
and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would
inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I
would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment
if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.
I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 20
business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Mark Daniel Ciubal