I was involved in network security during the u201cpioneering periodu201d so my information could be a bit out of date, however:Without special authorization, hacking by federal employees is illegal. It is also improbable that a man-in-the-middle would be very effective in stopping or blocking FOIA requests. In the proof of concept days this hack was tricky to setup but became somewhat automated by the time my job changed. Why not poison the FOIA requesteru2019s DNS sending them to a bogus site to collect the information.So the answer is, hacking by anyone, is illegal. The exceptions are special authorization or a u201cget our of jail free card.u201d