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?

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.

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.