This does seem excessive. I don’t know their justifications or rationale, but I question how valuable these images have turned out to be. There should at least be some mechanism in place for determining if the images have value and, if not, deleting them immediately.

And, as you could probably figure out, many of them are of an….intimate nature, and those were apparently being viewed by many people at the agency who didn’t need to view them. For things such as that between consenting adults, no one needs to view them other than the sender and recipient; I can’t imagine any of them are related to national security.

I’ll wait to hear their explanation as to the probative value of these captured images, but I suspect it is going to be difficult to explain away.