Slashdot Mirror
State of Alaska Prints Out Palin's E-Mails; Online Distribution 'Impractical'
ZipK writes "Three years after numerous citizens and news organizations requested the release of Sarah Palin's gubernatorial e-mails, the State of Alaska is finally making ready to make them available. In print. In Juneau. News organizations must fly or sail to Juneau and pick up the 24,000 page disclosure in person. The state claims it impractical to release the original electronic versions of the e-mails, so the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Mother Jones, ProPublica and MSNBC each plan to turn some or all of the printouts back into searchable, easily distributed electronic data. Thanks, Alaska." Where's WikiLeaks North?
from the statutes and regulations related to FOIA requests of the Great State of Alaska:
Sec. 40.25.115. Electronic services and products.
(a) Notwithstanding AS 40.25.110 (b) - (d) to the contrary, upon request and payment of a fee established under (b) of this section, a public agency may provide electronic services and products involving public records to members of the public. A public agency is encouraged to make information available in usable electronic formats to the greatest extent feasible . The activities authorized under this section may not take priority over the primary responsibilities of a public agency.
I would guess that you could credibly argue that the authorities overseeing the FOIA request did not make into available in electronic form to the greatest extent possible (e.g., provided on CD-ROM).
The difficulty is nothing. This is done on purpose to make it as hard as possible to get at the materials without doing something illegal. It's otherwise known as skirting the law.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I lived in Alaska, Fairbanks to be exact. Which was even further from civilization.
This was around eight years ago. Yes they have plenty of internet there, and plenty enough to email a 25k page document to the journalists.
At the time I had DSL and had 128k up. I'm sure they have improved upon that by now. The government may not be able to handle actually hosting it themselves, but thats due probably more to inadequate webservers then inadequate bandwidth.
http://www.internet-alaska.com/#hosting
This company has multiple T-3 connections.
http://www.alaskacommunications.com/
This company offers high speed internet in Alaska
With Dedicated Internet Access from Alaska Communications, you get a private connection to the Internet with speeds up to 1,000 megabits per second and symmetrical upload/download speeds.
There is PLENTY of bandwidth. The state government is acting this way because Palin has alot of friends still in the government. I guarantee there will be nothing spectacular found in any of those emails. I wouldn't be surprised to one day find out that Palin's lawyers were allowed to review and redact the documents themselves. The government in Alaska is run by a few families.
Another reason would be that a government typically charges $1 per page for Public Records Requests. So not only does it make it harder to scan through data, it makes the barrier to entry much higher. In this case, $24,000 higher. That's per news outlet that wants a copy. When I worked for a local municipality we would constantly get requests for vendor lists and taxpayer lists. They cost about $3500 to $7000 each, depending on the list. 99% would say never mind. Now, to be fair, these were people looking to build mailing lists for new businesses in the area.
records laws often allow some sort of cost recovery fee, so printing them all out will allow you to stick it to those uppity 'journalists' and their 'transparency' to a much greater extent.
Nope. Originally (a couple of years ago) they were quoting $15 million for the entire undertaking.
But now it's just $725 for one complete paper copy.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.