Supplemental declaration of Kirit Amin
I, Kirit Amin, pursuant to 28 USC § 1746, do hereby declare the following under penalty of perjury:
1. My name is Kirit Amin. I executed a Declaraion in this action on July 6, 2011 (ECF No 7-1).
2. I submit this Supplemental Declaration to address questions raised by the Court during its July 12, 2011 hearing concerning the 2012 DV Lottery and to provide additional information about the State Department's efforts to comply with the procedures mandated by 22 CFR 42.33(c).
3. As a preliminary step in the DV Lottery the State Department created a website to which aliens seeking diversity visa could submit their petitions during a submission period. The submission period for this year's DV Lottery began on October 5, 2010 and ended on November 3, 2010.
4. As DV Lottery applicants submitted their petitions, a database program captured and recorded the petitions onto a series of hard drives. The database program stored each petition in a physical location on the hard drive, for the most part in the order in which they were received. However due to the database program and the "storage optimization algorithms" there are some exceptions to the order by which database stored petitions, as I discussed in my July 6 Declaration.
5. Because DV Lottery participants submitted petitions at such a high volume, the database program was not always able to store an incoming petition at the physical location on the hard drive immediately adjacent to the location where it had recorded the immediately preceding petitions. When that happened, to keep up with such high volumes and to perform optimally, the database program would record the petitions in a distant location on the hard drives and leave, temporarily, an empty spot or gap on the hard drives adjacent to where it had recorded the immediately preceding petition.
6. This temporary, fleeting inability of the database program to access a particular physical location on the hard drives and store petitions in sequence explains why some entries submitted on October 5 and 6, 2010, were not stored in a physical location on the hard drives alongside the other entries submitted on October 5 and 6. This temporary inability to store records in a particular physical spot on the hard drives also resulted in gaps on the hard drives in the location where the database program recorded nearly all - but not all - of the petitions submitted on October 5 and 6. As the Submission period progressed, the database program filled these gaps in the hard drives with petitions submitted later in time. This backfill process - which I referred to in my July 6 declaration as "internal storage optimization algorithms" (Decl. § 5) - explains how and why the database program recorded the two percent of the petitions submitted after October 5 and 6, 2010, in the sections of the hard drives containing nearly all the petitions submitted on October 5 and 6 2010. The database program was designed to minimize the number of these gaps on the hard drives so it could later access the data more quickly and efficiently.
7. After the database program recorded each petition submitted over the Submission period, the database program rank-ordered each petition in the order they were located on the physical hard drives which, as I noted earlier, generally (but not exclusively) corresponded to the date on which they were submitted. Also, as required by the DV Lottery program, the database program applied region and country limitations to the selection to ensure no single region or country dominated the selection. These limitations, along with the manner in which the database program stored the petitions on the hard drives, account for the fact that some petitions entered on October 5 and 6 were not selected: there were enough petitions with a lower physical location in the database to satisfy the region and country limitations.
8. At the conclusion of this data storage process (step one), the State Department must initiate a second process in which it rand-orders the petitions again, but this time at random, using computer software designed for this purpose (the "Randomizer program").
9. Next, the State Department must initiate a third process in which it selects petitions from each world region in their rank order as determined by the Randomizer program as winners of the DV Lottery.
10. This year, the State Department used a new computer program intended to server as the Randomizer program.
11. The programmer who wrote the Randomizer program, however, made an error that rendered the Randomizer program ineffective. Instead of instructing the computer to select DV Lottery winners based on the rank ordering of the Randomizer Program in step two, the computer program simply selected entries in the order in which the database program stored petitions on the hard drives in step one. Thus, the Randomizer program, which was designed to make the selection random, failed entirely to achieve that goal.
12. I understand the Court has inquired about the State Department's interpretation and definition of "random" that appears in relevant DV Lottery statutes and regulations, including 22 CFR §42.33(c), which requires that the DV Lottery petitions be "... rank ordered at random by a computer using computer software for that purpose." In computer software, a "random" sequence is one in which the numbers in the sequence are generated as if they were independent draws from a well-mixed vessel where each number is represented once in the vessel. This random process embodies qualities of unpredictability and equal probability. In other words, the "random" rank-ordering of a list is a term of art that requires specialized software that generates numbers that are mathematically proven to be without any definite aim, direction, rule or method.
13. The first step required by 22 CFR §42.33(c) - the process executed by the database program - is not designed to produce random results when the database program recorded each petition in a physical location on the hard drives, it did so with a definite aim: the aim to fill the hard drives in consecutive order to the greatest extent possible while also optimizing data storage and retrieval and minimizing the number of empty spaces on the drives that were interspersed with portions containing data. The database program also recorded each petition with direction: it started recording petitions in the first available physical location on the hard drives and recorded each additional petitions, to the greatest extent possible, in a location on the hard drives physically adjacent to the space where it recorded the preceding petition. Finally, the database program recorded the petitions with a rule or method designed to optimize data storage and retrieval and to minimize the empty portions of the drives that were interspersed with portions containing data.
I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoind is true and correct.
/s/ Amin.
