Alaska Must Release Palin E-mails By May

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from msnbc.com: "The state of Alaska has until May 31 to release about 25,000 pages of e-mails from former Gov. Sarah Palin and senior members of her administration, the state attorney general declared Wednesday. ... the delays in dealing with public records from the Palin administration will have stretched out longer than the Palin administration itself. She was governor for 966 days. By May 31, the request from msnbc.com for the official records will be 986 days old. State regulations usually require records to be made available within 10 days, but state officials said they were overwhelmed by the volume of the e-mails."

Comments

Slashdot:

[Anonymous Coward]

News for nerds, stuff that matters.

I'll save everyone the trouble

[neoevans]

It's all lolcats and forwarded emails from people who swore they received checks from Microsoft, sprinkled with the occasional note to the president (at the time) somewhere along the lines of,

"Do you like me? Check one:

-Yes
-No
-Maybe"

Alt Source

[NEDHead]

Can't they just get them from Wikileaks?

Overwhelmed?

[wiredlogic]

Overwhelmed? They really must try to come up with better BS than that. Even princess half-term can spout off more believable nonsense.

more interesting

[MikeMacK]

Just add a colon and it becomes a more interesting story..."Alaska Must Release Palin: E-mails by May"

Re:Oh, no!

[MoonBuggy]

I don't really see what can be taking this long other than censoring them; just locating the relevant files and dropping the few gigs of data on a flash drive would take a few days, at most. If it's taking years, it means that something is being done with the actual content. According to TFA there are rules allowing certain messages to remain private, so some of the censorship will be legal, but I imagine that they'll just stamp a big red "privileged" restriction on anything that's too embarrassing to Palin.

Irony

[cosm]

So the kid who guesses her security questions with answers that were guessable based on her Wikipedia profile gets hard time for posting her private emails online (not to mention that she used her private account for some work emails as well allegedly), all the while Palin Inc. LTD LLC is taking its sweet time releasing the actual campaign emails because I'm guessing (this is pure speculation) that there is content in there that the GOP is afraid the Palinites won't cherish dearly.

I hope she runs for office, and is put to shame at the ballot box. I am so sick of hearing about this washed up nobody anti-intellectual and her following of people who have been fleeced by her PR handlers into thinking she actually has the mental cahones of more than a donut.

Re:As we don't like republicans.

[Red Flayer]

Well, we don't like Democrats either, by-and-large. If it was a prominent Democrat whose office had been spending years scrubbing emails subject to a state equivalent of FOIA, it would be news also.

Your attempt to derail the conversation with "B-b-b-ut this is biased against Republicans" has nothing to do with the FACT that this is about Sarah Palin's governance of Alaska, and potential misuse of government communications channels. It has nothing to do with whether people on slashdot lean right or left. So drop your silly persecution complex, it adds nothing to the conversation other than the idea that conservatives have no possibly valid points other than how much they are discriminated against.

And FWIW, I see conservative viewpoints, when expressed clearly, modded up all the time here on slashdot. I see the same of liberal viewpoints. What cracks me up is how often conservative viewpoints are modded up right alongside a post complaining of slashdot bias against conservatives.

Let's face it... Palin is a divisive subject, but given her power as a public figure, she's worthy of discussion -- for what she has to say, for what she has done, and for what impact she has on the American political scene. I believe she's a greedy, selfish, uneducated, calculating, egotistical nightmare... but I don't let that get in the way of my recognition of her importance as a topic of discussion in general.

Really?

[TiggertheMad]

I know that /. is full of cynical and borderline paranoids, but really. Think about this for a second...

There there is probably one state IT guy that this got dumped on. Being that he is a state employee in IT, he probably has plenty of other shit to do, and picking through 25k email is a huge time sink. It will need to be evaluated, because a Governor could be, in theory, privy to sensitive material. So, he will probably catch hell if a missed sensitive e-mail goes out, especially in light of the whole wiki leaks thing.

In addition, there is probably a clause that says personal mail doesn't have to be released, and so he has to pick through this idiot woman's mad rambling about pointless shit that shouldn't be on a state mail server anyway. I don't envy the people who have to pick through all the e-mail that is out there when information requests come in.

But in general /., don't be so quick to see a conspiracy, when idiocy and ineptitude are so much more likely.

Re:Really?

[kenrblan]

I doubt some poor IT guy is sifting through these emails checking for sensitive information. Having worked in public higher education, I had to respond to these types of requests, either for subpoenas or freedom of information act requests. Our procedure was to produce an archive file for the legal staff to handle. The legal staff was aware of what could or could not be released in order to comply with the release. If there is one thing state governments have, it is lawyers. Of course, we are talking about Alaska and judging by the debatable competence of the governor in question, one could speculate about the abilities at all levels of the state government.

Re:Really?

[PopeRatzo]

We see how well that worked for Wikileaks.

It seems like it's worked out really well. I still haven't heard of anyone being killed because of anything wikileaks has published. But it's possible something happened that I didn't hear about, but with the frenzy over wikileaks, you'd think it would have hit the news if something like that had happened.

Re:As we don't like republicans.

[Red Flayer]

Perhaps people despise her because they feel that her brand of political discourse is damaging to the country. Perhaps they feel it is unfair that someone like her can become a millionaire, a governor, a candidate for vice president, and a well paid political consultant without having any of the skills or qualities usually required by those jobs. She is just one more piece of evidence that we do not live in anything even resembling a meritocracy, and that galls some people.

What galls me is that people are stupid and mentally lazy. Stupid and lazy enough to fall for her schtick. I know it shouldn't bother me that a lot of people are idiots; for some reason it just irritates the crap out of me.

It's not that I think conservatives are idiots because of their political views. Surely it must be possible to have conservative views without being an idiot. It just seems that the willfully ignorant followers of demagogues are just too legion for this nation to withstand.

Another reason I get irritated by Palin and her ilk is because I believe I have the ability to do EXACTLY what they do. And that I could be very successful at it. But I can't do it, because I believe it is immoral. So I guess the real reason I despise Palin et al is because I think they made an immoral personal choice to exploit others, and are therefore, to a certain extent, evil. And deep down, I'd like to believe that the good should win. Yeah, it's an idealistic hope... which is why I've turned into a cynic. I hate Palin, Bush, Reagan's puppetmasters, et al for turning me into one.

And that, my friend, is the end of the navel-gazing I'll do tonight.

Re:As we don't like republicans.

[Red Flayer]

Whenever I ask a liberal, who at the mention of the name starts foaming at the mouth and screaming something like "greedy, selfish, uneducated, calculating, egotistical nightmare" why exactly they hate her so much, I never get a satisfying answer.

Because I believe she's not qualified to be a good leader of people. Because she's a demagogue out to serve her own ends.

She is very conservative but there are plenty of male politicians who are more conservative than her and are not hated so much.

It has nothing to do with how conservative she is. It has to do with her immorality. Please see my post below (in response to a post by Spun) for a little more info on why I feel the way I do about her.

The fact that so many people fawn over her is why people who don't like her need to react strongly. She is an abhorrence on the idea of a well-qualified statesman serving their country for what is best for that country.

Re:Oh, no!

[davester666]

Hopefully, they are busy converting all the emails to PDF, then drawing black boxes over all the redacted content.

Re:As we don't like republicans.

[bmo]

"The reason, it appears, is that Bachmann delivered her speech to TeaPartyHD's camera"

That's straight from the article itself. Instead of an "address the nation" speech, it was "address my base" speech. Like I already said. It's not up to the networks to use the candidate's personal camera. That's how it's done. She should have been looking into the network cameras *like everybody else does.*

Her M.O. is not to be inclusive. Her M.O. is appeal to the gullible to extract as much cash as she can out of her "base." And her base is pretty stupid if they bought into a single word she said. The amount of stupidity that came out of her mouth is astounding for such a public figure. I live here in the Northeast where History is in my back yard. The insult to my intelligence that she perpetrated deserves all the scorn and ridicule I can dish up. Because she is that misinformed.

And don't even get me started on how the Tea Baggers and Far Right say that this is a "Christian" country, when the fucking Touro Synagogue is 20 miles from me. No. The far right and the Tea Baggers are FUCKING STUPID at best.

Burning Karma because I am mad at what these idiots have done to my country.

--
BMO

Palin

[DarkIye]

...state officials said they were overwhelmed by the volume of the e-mails.

Make sure to give all Republican party members one of those ChromeOS laptops without the capslock key in future.