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?

Comments

It's pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you realize how long that internet tube would have to be to reach Alaska?

Re:It's pretty simple

[WrongSizeGlass]

Do you realize how long that internet tube would have to be to reach Alaska?

If they had some clever programmers they could insert data packets into any air bubbles in the oil pipeline already coming from Alaska.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

They're electronic mail. E-mail. They are in electronic form to begin with. The state is already online or else e-mail wouldn't be in use. WTF is the difficulty here? What's the good, solid, gee-golly-just-no-way-around-it reason for this?

Is this like those Baby Boomer MBA managers who, despite sitting at a decent computer workstation, still insist on having their secretary print out each of their memos and e-mails? For no good reason except they just really hate trees or something?

(Note, any "eyestrain" arguments can be answered with two words: LCD panels. At least if you know anything about how they differ from a CRT. If you don't, why the hell are you commenting about them?)

Re:It's pretty simple

[lxs]

My guess is that either they are scared of faulty pdf redaction or they do it out of spite, like paying a loan back in pennies.

Re:It's pretty simple

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's almost as though somebody knows that they are legally obligated to release certain documents; but also knows that the law nowhere requires that they remove the gigantic stick from their ass before doing so(plus, public 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...)

I'm strongly suspecting that, unless s/he happens to be a kool-aid drinking Palinista, the relevant IT person probably yawned and had the stuff packaged up in 20 minutes(probably in an Outlook 2003 .pst; but electronic and easily internet-transmissible at least). The bitter; but legally obligated, records handling person then presumably took over...

Re:It's pretty simple

[dintech]

It wouldn't surprise me if everything is in various Yahoo accounts and they have no idea how to get them out other than hit the big print button.

Re:It's pretty simple

[nomadic]

More critically, do you know how long it would take to convert e-mails into electronic format?

Re:It's pretty simple

[Adriax]

That would be unidirectional traffic only, and data leakage from the palin emails would contaminate the oil carrier. No one would buy oil that sour.

Re:It's pretty simple

[tibit]

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.

Re:It's pretty simple

[tedgyz]

Maybe we should ask the Russians to grab a copy. They are real close.

Re:It's pretty simple

[elrous0]

I hear all their packet traffic comes in via dogsled.

Re:It's pretty simple

[AJH16]

On the eyestrain thing, do you know the difference? The problem is emitted light vs reflected light. They are inherently different intensities of light and an LCD is still just as much emitted light as a CRT was, possibly worse since non-charged phosphors in CRTs didn't emit light while darkened LCD crystals still permit light through. Until you move to something like an e-ink reflective display, you are going to have the possibility of eye strain. Granted, properly adjusting your contrast ratio and screen brightness will help considerably, but it doesn't change the fact you are spending your day looking directly into a bunch of florescent light bulbs (or LEDs if you have an LED back lit LCD).

Re:It's pretty simple

[shipofgold]

While the TFA didn't mention it, I am guessing that whoever wants the boxes of paper aren't going to get them for free...and the fee probably isn't going to be the sum of paper+ink...

Re:It's pretty simple

[Sfing_ter]

that would be RFC 18700...

Re:It's pretty simple

[oh_my_080980980]

"She and top aides were known to communicate using private email accounts. Perez said Palin gave the state a CD with emails from her Yahoo account, and other employees were asked to review their private accounts for emails related to state business and to send those to their state accounts."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/06/09/national/a162558D34.DTL#ixzz1Ot7usAXc

She gave them a CD! Come on already.

Re:It's pretty simple

[dougmc]

Pretty sure it's the pennies thing -- they know they *have* to do it, but don't have to make it easy for you.

Re:It's pretty simple

[datapharmer]

gotta keep the loggers employed.

Re:It's pretty simple

[DJRumpy]

Well that and it gets armies of folks to swarm on their little Podunk community to get the snail mail copy. Local money is always attractive.

Re:It's pretty simple

[dead_user]

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.

Re:It's pretty simple

[sycodon]

I think they did it because 1) Someone there has a sense of humor and 2) The thought of all the Leftists Heads exploding acorss the U.S. was just too tempting to pass up.

Of courrse there is the increased revenue fro airline ticket taxes and hotel taxes, etc.

Over all, pretty damned funny.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:It's pretty simple

[sycodon]

One doesn't have to try hard to achive that.

Re:It's pretty simple

[sycodon]

And reading over all the posts, heads are exploding and it is funny as hell!

Re:It's pretty simple

[uniquename72]

running around and making fools of the media.

Is that what she's doing? I thought she was making fools of herself, her family, and her followers.

And, of course, as a conservative (NON-Republican), I see this as just another case of Big Government ignoring the spirit of the law and not doing the will of the people. Let me add this little bit of "fuck you, voters!" to the list of reasons why none of these people can be trusted.

And the fact that your buddies Cain, Perry, and Bachman are too terrified to criticize this move speaks volumes for their principles and priorities.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Penguinisto]

If they had some clever programmers they could insert data packets into any air bubbles in the oil pipeline already coming from Alaska.

Bad idea - that would mean the packets would then have to be transported to the lower 48... via ships like the Exxon Valdez.

An oil spill is bad enough... now you want email spills to be a distinct possibility?

Re:It's pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the thing that's most striking with those who support the half-term governor is their often instance that liberals 'fear her'. Ha. Personally I click on every mention of her name, just to keep up her click value. People who legitimately want to be President (like Romney) don't know what to do about her and her unforced gaff ratio is becoming legendary. She's a distraction who may eventually leave the Republican party in a huff and could take 10% of the party with her.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Government abuse of power amuses you. Thanks for this flash of insight into the right-wing mind.

Re:It's pretty simple

[MikePikeFL]

In this case, $24,000 higher. That's per news outlet that wants a copy.

What stops ONE of the companies from getting it, and splitting the cost with the rest?

Re:It's pretty simple

[QRDeNameland]

Pretty sure it's the pennies thing -- they know they *have* to do it, but don't have to make it easy for you.

IOW, they're trying to make it a palin in the ass. ba-dum-pish

Re:It's pretty simple

[SilasMortimer]

Money, sure. But it could also be that they're lonely and desperate for a little company. For just a little while. Edna's making coffee right now!

Re:It's pretty simple

[SilasMortimer]

Be fair. It only amuses them when it's done by the Right.

And if your head exploded on a regular basis, imagining it happening to other people even once, however stupid the reason, is perfectly understandable.

Re:It's pretty simple

[SilasMortimer]

Dude, I think a good portion of people who would never vote for Palin without threat of getting "The Moose Treatment" are one of the big reasons she stays in the news.

Honestly, what's so important about getting her emails? To prove some sort of misconduct no one really doubts? To redundantly make her a joke? Hell no. It's the comedy factor. This will be gold for thousands of established comedians and millions of would-be comedians.

Re:It's pretty simple

[slapout]

The desire to scoop everyone else.

Re:It's pretty simple

[norminator]

And, of course, as a conservative (NON-Republican), I see this as just another case of Big Government ignoring the spirit of the law and not doing the will of the people.

Not to mention, as she complains about government waste and bureaucracy she's going far out of her way to add to it.

Funny that people would think that she's the one making other people look like idiots. I guess that's the Tea Party Reality Distortion field at work.

Re:It's pretty simple

[s73v3r]

They're public records. EVERYONE has business inquiring into this stuff.

Re:It's pretty simple

[currently_awake]

The point is to make this as expensive and inconvenient as possible so nobody else will ask for any politicians email. Just sending the email as a download file wouldn't allow them to charge a dollar a page or require you to visit Alaska.

Re:It's pretty simple

[s73v3r]

Wake me when she somehow does that without making her look like an idiot in the process. And wake me when she makes the media look foolish half as many times as she's made herself look foolish.

Re:It's pretty simple

[shutdown -p now]

I've heard the major problem they were having is that emails crash the spellchecker when opened, before you can click on the "Print" button. ~

Re:It's pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer "Partial Term Aborted Governor."

It's offensive, but not for the reasons that people who find it offensive think it is offensive.
 

Re:It's pretty simple

[Chardansearavitriol]

I think this demonstrates exactly the problem with the modern rightwing. They demand a birth certificate from the president, multiple times and its still not good enough. They then go on to subvert (if not break) the rules so they can intentionally delay, and demand we take thems seriously. If they cant figure out how a birth certificate works, why are they all of a sudden so savvy as to know, for a reason withheld, that this would be impractical to do? Theres a disconnect somewhere in there

Re:It's pretty simple

[Enry]

I don't think it was easy for them to print all 24,000 copies. It cost more money in toner/paper/printer depreciation than it would have to release a CD-ROM. A citizen of the state would have a valid complaint for waste of taxpayer dollars.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Perl-Pusher]

How is she adding waste and bureaucracy? She is no longer the Governor of Alaska and has no power to tell Alaska to release the e-mails in printed or electronic form. So who's reality is distorted here? I'm no Palin fan but it amuses me to no end to watch people lose there minds over her. I also find it funny that people attribute quotes to her that were actually Tina Fey.

Re:It's pretty simple

[mattack2]

I would be considered right wing on most issues, and this is ridiculous. Even if they're vastly "making up" for the work being put into making the copies (makin' copies) by the ridiculous price, it's still a waste of the workers' time, who could be doing something productive to help their local citizens.

Re:It's pretty simple

[PwnzerDragoon]

Unlike CRTs, LCDs have never given me eyestrain. It seems to me a more likely cause is flicker, which LCDs don't have. This is why people would look for higher-frequency monitors if they could; an 85Hz monitor would be easier on the eyes than a 60Hz monitor.

Re:It's pretty simple

[barleypop]

Let's ask Paul Revere to deliver it.

Re:It's pretty simple

[AJH16]

Yeah, it can vary from person to person. The flicker on lower quality CRTs could be a problem for some I suppose, but I know many who the emitted light is the problem. So in the case of those who suffer from fatigue from the flicker, yes, it will make a difference, but those who are sensitive to light, it won't.

Re:It's pretty simple

[hovelander]

"IOW, they're trying to make it a palin in the ass. ba-dum-pish"

This comes quite close to equating her with the squirts if "you have some Palin in your ass".

Hot, itchy, and rank media diarrhea seems apropos. You just want it to go away and it never seems to end quickly enough.

If it's good enough for Santorum, it's good enough for Palin.

Re:It's pretty simple

[SilasMortimer]

As for her looks, I neither have an opinion nor interest. Your claim that she is intelligent is, I suppose, technically true by simple dint of her species (i.e., I'm certain she can press the button to get the cheese at least as well as a rat). For "demonstrated abilities to run a [government]", that is SO cute!

Regarding the Constitution, I've heard her mention it, therefore I suppose she believes that one exists. However, her continuous and hilarious displays of ignorance of its contents implies she either still hasn't read it or she tried to read it and didn't understand it.

The best part of all, though, is how she unites the stupid in one proud bunch standing behind her and shaking their fists at all the intelligent thoughts flying over their heads. There are conservatives with working brains and I'm certain they have to facepalm when someone like you jumps up and spouts off like a character in bad sitcom, but I get SUCH a kick out of it.

Keep up the good work!

Re:It's pretty simple

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Well, those "pixels" as you call them actually glow for a period of time. So what you mean to say is that only a single pixel at a time is ever fully-lit.

Re:It's pretty simple

[blind monkey 3]

Maybe the Alaskan government is concerned that people downloading copies of the emails would chew up their bandwidth.... it could slow down their porn torrents.

Re:It's pretty simple

[An Onerous Coward]

Good looking? Perhaps.

Intelligent? Anything but.

Demonstrated ability to run a government? She ran:

* A state with the population of a mid-sized urban area,
* Where the residents pay no taxes and in fact are paid by the state to live there,
* For less than two years.

Cake, meet walk.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Tetsujin]

Do you realize how long that internet tube would have to be to reach Alaska?

And it's Juneau, too. There's no roads that get you there, let alone any Information Superhighways.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Tetsujin]

Good looking? Perhaps.

Intelligent? Anything but.

Demonstrated ability to run a government? She ran:

* A state with the population of a mid-sized urban area,
* Where the residents pay no taxes and in fact are paid by the state to live there,
* For less than two years.

Cake, meet walk.

Yeah, but with Russia looming over her on one side, and the constant thread of border raids by disgruntled mounties on the other side, every day presented new and difficult challenges, and she received ample opportunity to practice the subtle arts of international diplomacy. Don't think of it as "she ran a state with a small population" - it's more like, "she ran a state with a small population - on the very boundary where the civilized world meets the fearsome wildlands and enemy hordes". In sci-fi terms, it's like she was running Babylon 5. She was just getting to understand the threat posed by the Shadows when she left office.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Bobartig]

The display capabilities, strain, and technology for consumer-grade LCDs still provides for a vastly inferior reading experience than ordinary quality print media. I can read paper faster, annotate faster, and save my eyes strain and effort, and save myself time by simply printing documents out. I read thousands of pages of documents for a grad school, and I will print out anything around 10,000 words, and anything I need for personal research because I'll be reading it 3-5x. I can't imagine why you'd think current LCD technology solves these issues.

Re:It's pretty simple

[vadim_t]

Except that if so, it's going to backfire badly.

There seem to be quite a few interested people, and a non-unsurmountable obstacle like this is only going to get them more interested. This virtually assures a bunch of people are going to go through every email to figure out what is it that they didn't want to get out.

Plus, once people get the idea that there is something to hide, they're going to really dig for every last bit of dirt, and showcase everything that looks suspicious, even if it's in reality just silly and mostly harmless.

Re:It's pretty simple

[uniquename72]

Be a fucking man and admit what you are.

...says the Anonymous Coward.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Jeruvy]

What pipeline?

Answer: There isn't one.

There goes your theory up in the air.

Dear Google

[Neil_Brown]

Any chance you hire out your book scanning equipment? Or does it only work on bound books, rather than stacks of paper?

Re:Dear Google

[grub]

Palin's emails were all in comic-sans. No idea how well Google's OCR would work on that...

Re:Dear Google

[Liquidretro]

An intern in about 2 hours could turn this all into text. A high quality ADF scanner with quality OCR software would chew this up and produce a couple of MB of text files. All I can say is, its 2011 and this is a state government, we should be surprised they are using email at all.

Re:Dear Google

[UnknowingFool]

I think the point everyone is trying to make is that they were electronic in the first place. Along the way, the state turned them into paper versions. Legally, the state knows that they have to release them under freedom of information laws and they can no longer delay. That doesn't mean they will make it easy.

Re:Dear Google

[Nadaka]

Could be worse, could you imagine if they put the font in Wingdings before printing?

Re:Dear Google

[DigitaLunatiC]

...the grammatical and spelling errors could cause a total systems meltdown, let alone the logical fallacies.

FTFY.

Re:Dear Google

[milbournosphere]

They don't even have to do that. Just treat the hard copies like shit, so they won't go in a feeder. It will take FOREVER to scan those in; I know, my first job was at a print shop that offered OCR services to the county. They treated their paperwork like crap, and we usually had to hand place banker box after banker box of originals to be scanned and OCR'd.

Re:Dear Google

[hahn]

I think the point everyone is trying to make is that they were electronic in the first place. Along the way, the state turned them into paper versions. Legally, the state knows that they have to release them under freedom of information laws and they can no longer delay. That doesn't mean they will make it easy.

To what end? Just to be pains in the ass? Oh wait, this is the Republican Party we're talking about...

Re:Dear Google

[norminator]

Sounds like they're trying to slow down everyone who will eventually find mounds of studipidity, incompetence, or corruption in those e-mails. Not that it would stop anyone from finding it...

Re:Dear Google

[Anonymous Coward]

That would actually probably be easier to OCR...

Re:Dear Google

[X0563511]

Shouldn't matter. Hate to spoil the joke, but as long as the OCR system recognizes the typeface, it doesn't matter what the bit means - just so you get the data that was on paper in a document.

Then you just flip the font to something more readable. Unless you're trying to tell me the character -> symbol map of the font is randomized on installation...

Re:Dear Google

[mattack2]

...the grammatical and spelling errors could cause a total systems meltdown, let alone the logical fallacies.

FTFY.

Actually, I made the exact same "correction" recently, and was corrected myself. "Grammar errors" is apparently correct (even though I still argue that it sounds weird), because it is an example of a noun adjunct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_adjunct

Well

[chtit_draco]

There's no need to hack her Yahoo! account anymore...or is there?

WTF?

[RenHoek]

This is total bullshit. Even the most vendor locked email client has export options (I'm looking at you Outlook). Even then, it's trivial to use a print-to-PDF program to keep everything electronic.

This stinks to high heaven and me thinks this means there's something in there people don't want to get out. Reporters are going to have a field day.

Re:WTF?

[Halifax Samuels]

The reporters will have a field day, the poor interns they get to convert this into a digital form and then read over them in their entirety to try to find something interesting are most likely not very excited...

Re:WTF?

[LizardKing]

This certainly does stink, especially when you consider that a large number of emails have been omitted.

Re:WTF?

[webmistressrachel]

What's even more worrying is that there will be no way to prove anything was redacted or censored, or is or isn't the original unedited email. They will just release 25,000 pages of mundane drivel for journalists to pore through for months while she gets elected, but the really bad stuff was simply <SHIFT>> <DELETE> 'd before printing.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is total bullshit. Even the most vendor locked email client has export options (I'm looking at you Outlook).

You obviously have never tried to export email(s) in IncrediMail...

Re:WTF?

[TheGratefulNet]

if you or I tried to pull this shit, we'd wind up in jail for obstruction of justice.

the fact that she gets away with this means our system is broken. yet another red warning light that the revolution needs to happen and happen soon.

Re:WTF?

[Lunix Nutcase]

yet another red warning light that the revolution needs to happen and happen soon.

And yet you will do absolutely nothing to make it happen besides bitching and moaning and possibly posting some tired Thomas Jefferson quotes. You just want to sit back and play armchair general from your parent's basement like a pansy.

Re:WTF?

[PickyH3D]

This is just a slap to the face of the papers that are trying to embarrass Palin. Clearly, whether there's something there or not, being printed is not going to stop the papers from scavenging through it to find whatever they can.

The only possibility of subterfuge is if the state tries to leave out emails that should have been included, but it's not like digital copies prevents anyone from doing that either.

Re:WTF?

[djrogers]

It'd only be obstruction of justice if she were being accused of a crime. Did I miss something?

Re:WTF?

[wykell]

You've obviously never heard of IBM Lotus Notes, if you think Outlook is the most vendor locked email client out there.

Re:WTF?

[PickyH3D]

This was the state playing goalie for her. I do agree that it's ridiculous that the government can do this, but when people do something similar (like pay a $25 fine with pennies) they get another fine.

I do not agree that just because it's printed that the chances of modification is any different. These are emails after all. Not exactly the creme de la creme of tamper resistant files.

Re:WTF?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I resent your assertion that I'm doing nothing. Since I discovered that China has an excellent, and amazingly inexpensive, supply of both patriot blood and(when the public is especially upset about some corruption scandal) tyrant blood, I've had my undocumented groundskeeper, Juan, out watering the tree of liberty every single day! I am the very model of a postmodern, globalized, supply-chain-optimized, revolutionary!

Re:WTF?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Obstruction of justice would not be the correct charge; but most public records laws(while not exactly toothily enforced, and often filled with trivially exploitable loopholes) do make failure to disclose as required an offense of some kind.

Re:WTF?

[LinksAwakener]

It is against Federal law to decline or otherwise punish someone for paying in pennies. Sure, that doesn't stop people from trying to punish you, but if you're an ass to begin with by paying in pennies, they're sure as heck allowed to try and be an ass back. But anyone that knows any facts about currency know that pennies are legal tender for repaying debt, private or public.

Re:WTF?

[xMrFishx]

I'm fairly sure being Sarah Palin is a crime against humanity.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most countries have this thing called transparency level, and to be honest, right now Alaska, and by proxy the entire USA, looks like it's led by some very corrupt politicians.

Nevermind that what they call lobbying, other countries call bribes, but right now, it's all about perception, and Palin sucks at it.

Re:WTF?

[Chris Mattern]

But they have disclosed. I'll bet money that their disclosure obeys Alaska's public records laws. We're just lucky that they forgot the "Beware of the Leopard" sign.

Re:WTF?

[cthlptlk]

yet another red warning light that the revolution needs to happen and happen soon.

The revolution happened. We lost.

Re:WTF?

[stubob]

Your Chinese groundskeeper is named Juan? I think it might be spelled Wan.

Re:WTF?

[Americano]

What did Palin "get away" with here? The state of Alaska is doing this, Sarah Palin doesn't have Bristol and Willow sitting there printing things out on the fucking family inkjet while watching Dancing with the Stars reruns.

From the article:

Once the state reviewed the records, it gave Palin's attorneys an opportunity to see if they had any privacy concerns with what was being released. No emails were withheld or redacted as a result of that, said Linda Perez, the administrative director for Gov. Sean Parnell who has been coordinating the release.

Re:WTF?

[elrous0]

Even the most vendor locked email client has export options

When I used to work in state government (not in Alaska, but in another state), they used some version of Groupwise which had no bulk email export options (you could only export by one message at a time). Nor did they allow you to connect to an POP or IMAP server to download your emails. If Alaska uses something similar, they may well be telling the truth when they say that there is no easy bulk export option for a specific person's emails.

Re:WTF?

[kiwix]

Of course it's just a way to make it harder for people to find information in those mails, and there is no real reason to only give printouts.

The French ISP Free did the same stunt a few months ago. Following the three-strike HADOPI law, they had to identify users of IP addresses suspected of illegally downloading stuff, and they gave it print. Everybody thought it was a smart way to resist that stupid law.

Re:WTF?

[gstoddart]

This stinks to high heaven and me thinks this means there's something in there people don't want to get out.

I see two main options ... the first, as you pointed out, is that they are stonewalling. The second one is that they really are incompetent.

Either way ... this is pretty stupid.

Re:WTF?

[Americano]

Stupid people will listen to her and vote for her in their ignorance, and there is no shortage of stupid, ignorant people.

You just described every politician in the history of mankind.

What makes Sarah Palin so noteworthy in this regard?

Re:WTF?

[Nadaka]

Or, you know, they could create a torrent and publish the magnet link. This is kinda what torrents are designed for.

Re:WTF?

[solkimera]

Why wouldn't NYT be able to get a correspondent in Alaska. Put an add in craig's list and you'd probably have the documents in a couple days. Scanned even... It's silly.

Re:WTF?

[MarkvW]

It is not only total bullshit, it is total bullshit that can very well be challenged in Court. All it takes is for ANOTHER person to make the same request, then file a lawsuit. And ANOTHER. And ANOTHER . . . .. (exponentially). Pretty soon the weight of public disclosure lawsuits will force the State to cave. They don't want to bet millions on a very bad decision.

Re:WTF?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

No, I only import the blood from China, it turns out that letting Juan absorb the risks and costs of importing himself across the southern border was cheaper and legally less risky than importing a groundskeeper myself. I 3 the neoliberal ease with which capital and commodities move past borders, while labor that wishes to do so puts itself in a wonderfully powerless position... So very convenient...

Re:WTF?

[hondo77]

Yes, because printing 25,000 pages is so much more practical than burning them to CD/DVD, right?

Re:WTF?

[Chatterton]

A badly written PDF with text and some graphics is about 5 KB / page. 25000 pages is about 125 MB... Putting that 125 MB file on a website and sending the link or burn it on 20 CD cost far less than this fool playing.

Re:WTF?

[hrimhari]

Would you please clarify if you're implying that Sarah Palin isn't following this release at all and that her subordinates took the, how to say... curious decision to waste 20000+ pages of paper instead of sharing a copy of the originally electronic format all by themselves?

If yes, how is this any less... strange on Sarah Palin for not asking the question herself on why it's being done so?
If not, then what?

Thank you.

Re:WTF?

[mmcuh]

First of all 25,000 pages is one HELL of a pdf file any way you cut it. It would be impractical for email. They'd have to upload it somewhere it could be downloaded (for free where their bandwidth gets tied up.) And it this cash strapped economy, NO ONE in government is giving anything away.

Or they could burn it to a CD-R and make anyone who wanted a copy pay for a blank disc and postage. Less work for everyone.

It's pretty obvious that they are just doing it out of spite. Which would be sort of funny if it wasn't a state government.

Re:WTF?

[hrimhari]

So what you're saying is that nobody, NOBODY, could think of an alternative such as:

- Please come over and copy the file into your preferred USB-based media.
- Please send us your preferred USB-based media by mail, with prepaid return envelope, so we can send you a copy.
- Please give us an external storage connected to the Internet so we can upload it by SFTP.
- ...

Instead, the solution they naturally came up with is:

- Print 24k pages, it's less expensive than uploading the original ELECTRONIC version somewhere. Anyone wishing a copy must come over and COPY them on their expense.

And that out of sheer ignorance or an attempt to profit? No malice at all?

And this somehow should not stain the image of this potential future candidate to president of the USA?

Re:WTF?

[oh_my_080980980]

Hey douche bag, this is the State government not a local government. If Alaska can't handle a simple request like this then they have some serious problems.

FYI 25,000 pages of text is nothing. But you don't need to put them all in one file.

Re:WTF?

[History's Coming To]

Indeed. I own a square foot of a Scottish distillery (it was a marketing gimmick) and they pay me rent in whisky. I have to pick it up in person - partly to save them money, and because I suspect they like getting visitors. I've twice made the 250 mile trip (car->ferry->hike) and they've been delighted to see me.

Either Alaska are trying to make things difficult on purpose, or they're getting a little lonely.

Re:WTF?

[wvmarle]

And when supplied in electronic form you can easily see it's edited? I've always been taught that electronic means it can be altered easily. Usually without a trace.

The fun starts when a recipient of one of those e-mails comes forward and says "hey but this is not what she wrote to me!"

This printing out is just asshattery, that's all. Just to make it harder for journalists. Not by much... just hand it to Google to have it scanned and OCRed, they've got heaps of experience with books.

Re:WTF?

[penguin_dance]

Hey shithead (I just love these terms of endearment)

My city is bigger than their state government.

They have handled the request. You just don't like the way they did it.

Re:WTF?

[PickyH3D]

I do know that, but I was referencing a recent bit of news. Note: I have never visited the above site, but it was the first in the Google News search results.

To me, this is the same approach that Alaska took with the newspapers.

Re:WTF?

[cdrudge]

Please give us an external storage connected to the Internet so we can upload it by SFTP.

Good thing you are using SFTP. You wouldn't want to use something out in the open that could be intercepted unencrypted. Just think of the damage that would happen if the national media got a hold of those emails...

Re:WTF?

[Jason Levine]

Please... Don't mention that name... I swear there's an AI built into that program. The more productive you try to be using Lotus Notes, the more Lotus Notes works against you to sabotage your productivity. *Tries to suppress traumatic memories of using Lotus Notes*

Re:WTF?

[SatanicPuppy]

This is a common tactic to use against news organizations. Chances are, they're going to have to pay copy costs for each page as well...I think federal law caps the cost at $.25 per page. Joy.

Re:WTF?

[Americano]

Somebody in the state government assembled this collection from her records; When given a chance to review the collection, her lawyers asked for no further withholdings or redactions, and signed off on the release of the collection of emails.

"Curious decisions" aren't illegal simply because they're not the same decision you would have made.
"Inconveniently formatted" records aren't illegal simply because they're not easily indexed and searchable.

The GP post opined that she's "getting away" with something by doing this, meaning that she's escaping punishment for some misdeed. Please explain for us exactly what law she's breaking that she's escaping punishment for?

Thank you.

Re:WTF?

[DavidTC]

Please stop making stuff up.

You can repay debt using pennies, or whatever legal tender you want. However, people do not pay for things by having 'debt'. Food and gasoline, sometimes, as you consume those and then pay, but that's about it. (And even they can set terms as long as they make you aware before you consume those things.)

When purchasing something, the seller can require the purchaser pay in whatever format they want, barring various legal exceptions. (For example, it often is illegal to ask for, or offer, payment in sex. As is offering criminal activities.)

Other than those somewhat unique exceptions, they can demand you give them whatever they want in exchange for their goods. And vis versa, of course. They can demand no pennies, they can demand only pennies, they can demand you pay in confederate money.

Re:WTF?

[headkase]

yet another red warning light that the revolution needs to happen and happen soon.

The revolution happened. We lost.

Pissed me off too, I missed it because it wasn't even televised.

Re:WTF?

[ColdWetDog]

I'm fairly sure being Sarah Palin is a crime against humanity.

It's certainly a crime against humility.

Re:WTF?

[L0rdJedi]

This is just a slap to the face of the papers that are trying to embarrass Palin. Clearly, whether there's something there or not, being printed is not going to stop the papers from scavenging through it to find whatever they can.

Or inviting their readers to help them:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/help-analyze-the-palin-emails/2011/06/08/AGZAaHNH_blog.html

It's a witch hunt, plain and simple. They're looking for any type of dirt they can find. And this is why Palin isn't going to run for President. She's far more powerful as a regular person that gives her opinion about what's going on.

If Palin were the idiot that everyone makes her out to be, then why does everyone get their panties in such a bind every time she says anything about anything? You ignore the morons in Hollywood and at work when they do really stupid things (upskirt photos, getting hauled into court yet again for drunk driving, etc), but you freak out when the former Governor of Alaska says something questionable.

Re:WTF?

[LinksAwakener]

Only in the case of private sellers can they demand a specific type of payment since they can decline to serve anyone for any or no reason. Fines, traffic tickets, taxes etc. is different--which is what was mentioned. I made nothing up.

Re:WTF?

[L0rdJedi]

It is not only total bullshit, it is total bullshit that can very well be challenged in Court. All it takes is for ANOTHER person to make the same request, then file a lawsuit. And ANOTHER. And ANOTHER . . . .. (exponentially). Pretty soon the weight of public disclosure lawsuits will force the State to cave. They don't want to bet millions on a very bad decision.

And this is exactly why she resigned. Frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit that the State had no choice but to follow through on, spend money on, and defend. So the State would likely have to defend lawsuits against making printed copies when there's likely a law that forces the State to make copies upon request and then allows them to charge a per page administrative fee for the copy.

As another commenter said, the State has complied with the law. Most of the commenters here just don't like the way they did it. Tough cookies. What Palin did in Alaska doesn't really affect those of us in the lower 48 and most of us don't give a shit what's in the emails.

Re:WTF?

[LinksAwakener]

Erm, let me clarify what I said, since I was using the word "private" in two forms. One cannot be declined paying in pennies when you're paying a private or public debt to the government, but one can be declined by a private seller unaffiliated with the government. I see my statement was rather ambiguous to begin with, I apologize.

Re:WTF?

[ColdWetDog]

Of course it's just a way to make it harder for people to find information in those mails, and there is no real reason to only give printouts.

The French ISP Free did the same stunt a few months ago. Following the three-strike HADOPI law, they had to identify users of IP addresses suspected of illegally downloading stuff, and they gave it print. Everybody thought it was a smart way to resist that stupid law.

The better way to do it would be to put it on a hard drive. Hooked to a BBS (remember those?) whose modem is set for 300 baud. Local number - we'll give you the password and go knock yourself out....

Re:WTF?

[L0rdJedi]

Sounds like he's thinking like the CEO of AT&T. "56k should be enough for anybody".

Re:WTF?

[ColdWetDog]

You guys just have absolutely no sense of humor... Come on, this is hilarious.

Re:WTF?

[Sebastopol]

I think you are projecting. The people reporting on Palin's gaffs [largely] don't have their panties in a bunch (except for the far-left liberal rags who are clueless enough to think she could actually win a major office).

If I may do some projecting of my own, I think for the most part watching Palin speak is liking watching scenes edited out of Idiocracy. If you can stand to hear her heavily sarcastic inflection, her gaffs seem almost scripted by Matt Judge himself. If it weren't for her history and the length of time she has spent raising money for GOP/Tea Party politicians, I would swear she was deliberately invented by the left. (Although that would be giving the left FAR too much credit.)

Re:WTF?

[penguin_dance]

I worked for a large city government (and trust me that government was bigger than their state government.) Heck our city government employment is almost bigger than the population of Juneau (30,796)!

First of all most government offices are at least 10 years behind the times in technology. I know this from working in the tech department although my job was in training. So yeah there may be ignorance or the means to do this electronically. But I'm sure charging a fee has something to do with it.

And that out of sheer ignorance or an attempt to profit? No malice at all?

Secondly, maybe there is malice, but it's likely out of being sick and tired of being bombarded by media requests. This is a SMALL government office even if it is the state government. If there is malice, it is because they are getting overwhelmed with requests from a media who is foaming at the mouth and attempting tear this woman down every way they can. I doubt this is a case of loyalty to a former governor.

I'd like to know how many of you were laughing at the "birthers" when they wanted a copy of the birth certificate of an actual sitting president. But now you're screaming cover-up about a woman who hasn't even declared she's running. I've never seen a non-candidate gone after with such venom. Most of this same media certainly wasn't out there vetting candidate Obama and his associations to known terrorists when he was running. They were getting "thrills" up their leg.

And this somehow should not stain the image of this potential future candidate to president of the USA?

And that's what you care about, right?

Re:WTF?

[aristotle-dude]

You just want to sit back and play armchair general from your parent's basement like a pansy.

why the homophobia?

Are you asking the general public or are you talking to yourself? The meaning of a word is generally influenced by "context". In this case, pansy mean "wimp or coward" since it is in the context of being an armchair "general" in a parent's basement. Your reaction says a lot more about yourself and your feelings. Do you resemble the remark? Do you feel uncomfortable with your sexuality?

Re:WTF?

[cdrguru]

They were on Yahoo to begin with. No, there isn't any export from Yahoo.

The usual way for people to receive things from governments is hard copy. When was the last time an official FOIA request was handled electronically? Never has happened yet, so there is ample precidence for this being done this way.

Sure, they could have dumped the Yahoo email to PDFs rather than hard copy. But then, how would they have distributed it? Printed the PDFs probably.

Re:WTF?

[gstoddart]

You guys just have absolutely no sense of humor... Come on, this is hilarious.

No, it's pathetic.

Either a state government ha a bunch of incompetent fools running their IT, and it's "impracticable" to distribute electronically because they don't know how ... or they're deliberately making it tough for people to actually receive the data they're entitled to ask for.

Saying we'll hand you (in person, at this location, only on Tuesdays between 1:pm and 1:06pm) a bundle of 24,000 (!) pages is foot dragging, or incompetence.

They have a legal responsibility to be able to provide this information ... and if they don't have someone with the technical know how to put the emails into electronic form, they're idiots.

Re:WTF?

[Danse]

Sounds like the fine in that case was for him dumping the pennies on their counter, and creating a mess. Had he just left a big jar of pennies, there likely would have been no problem for him.

Re:WTF?

[ktappe]

They're looking for any type of dirt they can find.

This happens with every candidate of any party. See also Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner.

And this is why Palin isn't going to run for President. She's far more powerful wealthy as a regular person

Fixed that for you.

If Palin were the idiot that everyone makes her out to be, then why does everyone the media get their panties in such a bind every time she says anything about anything?

FTFY again. And I do not know why the media follows here. There is no there there. Please ask them why they do it. If I never saw Palin's name in a "news" story again I would be very happy.

Re:WTF?

[Danse]

And before anyone jumps in and throws out, "but they requested Obama's birth certificate," you should remember that Hillary Clinton actually raised that, and not any paper or Republican.

That's some seriously disingenuous bullshit. You expect anyone to believe a word you say after you throw out some weasely crap like that? This is exactly the kind of shit we don't want our politicians doing. Just because they didn't raise the issue first, doesn't mean they didn't request it vastly more often and more vocally than anyone else and you know damn well that that's true.

I don't really know of any other countries whose politicians I'd expect anything better than this from, nor do I know any other state that might act differently in the face of such a request. After all, the request was quite a targeted witch hunt by the Democrats while Palin was still in office.

Witch hunt? Seems like there was plenty of reason to believe that Palin was doing some shady stuff, and that none of it was being documented by state systems as it should be. Using outside email accounts to conduct state business deprives the constituents of the ability to effectively hold their elected officials accountable. Anyone with a shred of respect for the rights of citizens to hold their representatives accountable should be supporting the release of these emails, and trying to ensure that their representatives conform to the same standards.

Re:WTF?

[Danse]

If Palin were the idiot that everyone makes her out to be, then why does everyone get their panties in such a bind every time she says anything about anything? You ignore the morons in Hollywood and at work when they do really stupid things (upskirt photos, getting hauled into court yet again for drunk driving, etc), but you freak out when the former Governor of Alaska says something questionable.

Because there are a lot of other idiots out there that listen to her. She spouts off about death panels and people fucking believe it! Never mind that she's lying through her teeth. She has real effects on all of us. Nobody gives a shit if some actress wasn't wearing underwear. That isn't going to cause me or my family emotional or financial harm. Her bullshit does!

Re:WTF?

[Shivetya]

Too bad you dmwits see her on the wrong side of it all, what you are watching is a politically orchestrated character assassination and far too many here are quite happy to march along cheering and singing songs for your party.

Re:WTF?

[NEW22]

I do think she is a little dumb in some ways, savvy in others. Sometimes I suspect these people are playing like professional wrestlers. You have some catch phrases and signature moves. Heel or hero, if they're talking about you you're doing a good job. People operating under old assumptions are getting outmaneuvered, or falling for silly things because they believe in taking anything at face value. Really, what used to be material for WWF/WWE wrestling or Jerry Springer/Maury Povich/Geraldo, that stuff isn't just a sleazy sideshow anymore. It is the main course of public debate and news covereage.

Re:WTF?

[orgelspieler]

Seeing as most people who agree with you that "the revolution needs to happen" are actually raving Palinistas, I don't think you would get the result you're hoping for, should the revolution occur.

Re:WTF?

[s73v3r]

If you don't think that she has her hand in this, then you're either an idiot, or have a crush on Palin. But I repeat myself.

Re:WTF?

[qubezz]

- Public debt: debt to a government,

- Private debt: debt to a non-government entity,

- "or": either one of two options (both options also permitted in logic).

If you have a debt, public or private, the pennies are legal tender.

If you eat a meal at a restaurant, and get the bill, you have a debt.

If you get a power bill for electricity you used, you have a debt.

If you copy 50 reams of documents on the Alaska state clerk's photocopiers and take them up to the clerk to pay, you have a debt.

If you are at the Juneau airport and have to pay for three boxes of documents to be checked, you do not have a debt.

Re:WTF?

[FrootLoops]

Palin really is an idiot. She's just a political anomaly. Lemme explain what I mean. When someone tells you 3+4 = 8, you have the urge to correct them. If they're very convinced 3+4 = 8, most people will want to correct them all the more. Palin is the same way. She says stupid things with great conviction. People want to correct her, but they can't, so they do the next best thing: they talk to other people about how wrong she is, or how horrible it is that she might be a serious candidate for the presidency, or whatever is cathartic for them. This generates buzz for her, and is why I read this story and these comments in the first place. This effect is an anomaly--an unintended (to her; maybe not to people who run her or related campaigns) side effect of who she is and how she presents herself to the public. To be honest, I think she's deeply insecure and is simply defensive. Defensive people display the traits she displays: digging her heels in on issues; saying nonsensical things with great conviction; making things personal (her vs. the media). If I didn't fear her gaining office, I'd just feel sorry for her.

She also has a large base of support made up of people who relate to her as a pseudo-middle-class working mom with strong Christian beliefs and morals who's fighting against the decay they see in our society. These people tend to believe her (and, as an overt sterotype, anyone they consider authoritative) without question. These two types of people--roughly, those who want to correct her and those who believe her--bring together the traditional fights of liberal vs. conservative and religious vs. not, which is absolutely fantastic fodder for discussions, news reports, and talk radio.

Palin is an accident. She happened to tap some nerves in our society through how she behaves without her intending to. Sometimes people notice the level of emotion Palin seems to generate. That's backwards. It's actually emotion that generates Palin, politically.

Re:WTF?

[thelexx]

How do you know that for certain? Oh yeah, you don't. You're just being an internet asshole.

Re:WTF?

[nschubach]

I think federal law caps the cost at $.25 per page. Joy.

-- This page intentionally left blank --

Re:WTF?

[s73v3r]

But now you're screaming cover-up

No we're not. We're screaming "This is a waste of resources and time!" Last I checked, /. was still a tech news site, so news of a state government taking a shit ton of documents which were originally in electronic form, and only distributing them by paper just screams retarded and inefficient to us.

Re:WTF?

[X0563511]

... and you would? That's retarded. Someone needs to take leadership, and there needs to be organization. Who the fuck wants to do that? It has to get bad enough to overwhelm this aversion.

The way things are going, we WILL hit that point eventually.

Re:WTF?

[X0563511]

It's IncrediFrustrating!

Re:WTF?

[X0563511]

You don't necessarily use SFTP because it encrypts the data. You mostly use it because it encrypts the credential exchange.

Re:WTF?

[X0563511]

... the lower 48. Who's the 49th? Certainly not Hawaii, that's quite far south...

Re:WTF?

[wintercolby]

I'm guessing the orchestration also involved her making a fool of herself on TLC? She puts her self in the spotlight as much as she can. It seems much more like character seppuku to me.

Re:WTF?

[RightSaidFred99]

Her bullshit does nothing. ~80% of this country are blathering idiots, she is just one of their more outspoken representatives. She never even says anything original, every phrase out of her mouth is a trite talking point.

The problem is that she probably represents ~25% of America's idiots. The rest of them voted in Obama, a junior senator and community organizer, because it made them feel good about themselves. We really are doomed.

Re:WTF?

[Americano]

Please explain what she's "getting away with," for us simple minded folks.

Re:WTF?

[Zancarius]

What's even more worrying is that there will be no way to prove anything was redacted or censored, or is or isn't the original unedited email.

To be fair, this would be trivial to do with a distributed electronic version as well since I doubt they'd be sending an entire mbox file/maildir/whatever (also trivial to edit) to the press or granting the press access to an account hosted by someone else.

It's not like e-mail itself is so magical that it can't be edited without printing it out. Well, except maybe to the state of Alaska.

Re:WTF?

[Lunix Nutcase]

How do you know that for certain?

Because he is part of a long string of Slashdotters that threaten rebellion and post Thomas Jefferson quotes about the "Tree of Liberty" and yet nothing EVER comes of it. Why should I assume that he is any different? I'm more than willing to be shown wrong that this time around the armchair general does something other than bitch.

Re:WTF?

[Lunix Nutcase]

If I truly believed in the cause, yes. It's just fucking hilarious to watch people like him who make empty threats of rebellion within their comfy lives while actual courageous people in Libya, Egypt, etc actually do something to improve things.

Re:WTF?

[Zancarius]

I think the biggest problem here is that the Left is, in general, doing everything they can to destroy her (or at least giving that impression)--even though she's already been politically undermined. Remember the Tina Fey incident of "I can see Russia from my back porch?" That's a good example.

If it were true that people like yourself really did feel Palin is a total idiot, the best solution is to ignore her. By dragging her back out into the discussion, the press is doing nothing more than validating her as a political force and in many ways, providing a great deal of confirmation to her followers that there is a concerted effort to destroy her.

Of course, neither of us have control over the press. In some regards, their activities could be viewed in two ways: 1) by the political Right as a means of destroying her and otherwise active malice or 2) by the political Left as a means of validating her beliefs to her followers and thus making them more rabid. While the intent may be to portray what they feel as a total lunacy the net effect it has is far greater.

So really: The best option is to ignore her.

Disclosure: I consider myself right wing. I don't particularly like Palin because she's politically toxic and hypocritical (her daughter had a kid out of wedlock while Palin strongly espouses her religious beliefs), and I think she would be far better off keeping to herself and her family due to the activities of the press. Moreover, I see a bit of irony with the negative attention she's been gathering for herself never mind that she welcomed TLC into her home to film what I can only surmise to have been an obnoxious reality show. That alone is an embarrassment to my political beliefs (and I agree with most of her political stances!), and is an absolute disgrace that aspiring political leaders would bring such attention onto themselves. Political leaders should have some dignity and decency, and I can't help but feel that her activities in the last year or two have indicated otherwise.

Re:WTF?

[markass530]

you do realize she's not the governor of Alaska anymore, and she has no hand in any of this right? apparently not...

Re:WTF?

[Darinbob]

Unfortunately, Palin appears to want to lead the revolution.

Re:WTF?

[Darinbob]

Did you check youtube?

Re:WTF?

[microbee]

But she is hot.

Re:WTF?

[Danse]

The problem is that she probably represents ~25% of America's idiots. The rest of them voted in Obama, a junior senator and community organizer, because it made them feel good about themselves. We really are doomed.

To be fair, a lot of people voted for him because the alternative scared the shit of them. Better someone who is at least sane, than a guy crazy or irresponsible enough to pick Palin as a running mate, and old enough to possibly die in office, leaving her in charge.

Re:WTF?

[BlueStrat]

Please explain for us exactly what law she's breaking that she's escaping punishment for?

It's not a "law", but a Liberal/Progressive "Commandment";

"Thou Shalt Not Ruin By Example The Left's Misogynistic Stereotypes of Conservative Women."

Strat

Re:WTF?

[penguin_dance]

Making claims that about redaction or (possible) missing emails is not talking about resources and time. It's a premeditated attack that potential evidence of wrongdoing has been removed. So if nothing incriminating is found...well they must have removed it is the excuse rather than there was nothing incriminating to begin with!

But the Guardian has the emails online and humorously is using the PUBLIC to let them know if there's anything scandalous! They can't even be bothered to put an intern on it?

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find it funny at all. Indeed unless you're some kind of asshole, you wouldn't either.

Re:WTF?

[Hatta]

far too many here are quite happy to march along cheering and singing songs for your party.

Not to mention ringing them bells and firing warning shots.

Re:WTF?

[Hatta]

Palin really is an idiot. She's just a political anomaly

Uh, did you sleep through 8 years of Bush II?

Re:WTF?

[ergean]

What do you mean? Sarah Palin is not a character played by Tina Fey in a SNL sketch?

Re:WTF?

[thoromyr]

"If it were true that people like yourself really did feel Palin is a total idiot, the best solution is to ignore her."

That reads like you think you are correcting GP, when in fact there is nothing you say that contradicts what GP said. GP observed that people feel compelled to correct her erroneous statements, not just because they are wrong, but because they are said with such conviction. Of course its better to ignore her, it just isn't easy. Kind of like watching a train wreck, terrible but you can't look away.

Re:WTF?

[SnarfQuest]

What makes Sarah Palin so noteworthy in this regard?

As a typical white person, she can't name all the 58 states?

I always get stuck on the 58th state, Alaska and Hawaii.

Re:WTF?

[Relic of the Future]

If you'd looked at them, you'd notice the huge redacted sections. The first example is on the second page of the scans provided by the New York Times.

Yes, lots of stuff was redacted. But anyone can easily see where those parts are, in context.

Re:WTF?

[Relic of the Future]

...which would mater if "this shit" was something they were trying "to pull".

Nothing was deleted. Lots of stuff was redacted, but all the context for the redacted parts is viewable.

Re:WTF?

[PickyH3D]

Like saying she needs to visit all 60 states ("one left to go," plus Alaska and Hawaii)? Or maybe signing her signature and dating it three years in the past?

Put under a spotlight, and speaking or writing away from a script, you are bound to be caught saying something stupid. Of course, that goes doubly if you are stupid.

Re:WTF?

[PickyH3D]

There is a vast difference between requesting emails of a public official, while they are still in office, and uncovering three people who have questionable ethics.

Gary Hart was dumb enough to be having an affair while running for President.

Bill Clinton had an affair while President.

Anthony Weiner put himself into public view by taking pictures of his family name, and sending them to women.

Yet, I have still not seen requests for all of their emails (Gary Hart excluded, as that predated most email) even as Anthony Weiner refuses to resign. And considering that there is suspicion that he talked to as many people as Tiger Woods did--and one of them might be a minor--I just do not see the comparison.

Re:WTF?

[RightSaidFred99]

It was a combination. Dubya had turned people off so much that really anyone else might have won, too. But if you listen to people breathlessly ascribe all these ridiculous qualities to Obama, to this day, it's clear there is also some kind of doltish ego gratification going on. It makes people feel really good about themselves to tell everyone else how post racial they are by ascribing all these wonderful traits to Obama. They also enjoy attributing any kind of attack on him as "racism", because, well, other people are racist, not them by golly! Nevermind the fact that Dubya got the same treatment from his enemies, Clinton sure took a lot of shit from Republicans, etc...

Re:WTF?

[Danse]

But if you listen to people breathlessly ascribe all these ridiculous qualities to Obama, to this day, it's clear there is also some kind of doltish ego gratification going on. It makes people feel really good about themselves to tell everyone else how post racial they are by ascribing all these wonderful traits to Obama.

Who, exactly, are you listening to? Where do you find these people? I suppose you could find equally ignorant folks supporting just about anyone. There are absolute morons on all sides, supporting the side for reasons that they are generally incapable of articulating, or that just don't make any sense.

It makes people feel really good about themselves to tell everyone else how post racial they are by ascribing all these wonderful traits to Obama. They also enjoy attributing any kind of attack on him as "racism", because, well, other people are racist, not them by golly! Nevermind the fact that Dubya got the same treatment from his enemies, Clinton sure took a lot of shit from Republicans, etc...

While I don't doubt that some people might attribute attacks on him to racism, the "they" that you're referring to are still a rather small fringe of the far left. Most people look at the arguments, and a lot of us, especially those of us that don't support either party, have problems with things that he's done since taking office. Talking about the "left" as a monolithic block is just as retarded as talking about the "right" that way. If we attributed the craziest actions of the right to every republican or right-leaning independent, it would be stupid. Just as it is the other way around.

I kind of like the description of the political spectrum as being like a circle, with the moderates at the bottom and the crazies at the top. If you go too far to the left or right, you end up in crazy land.

Re:WTF?

[FrootLoops]

Hah! Good point, and thank you for the laugh.

Re:WTF?

[FrootLoops]

I don't think it's fair to call Palin a hypocrite based on the apparent disconnect between her daughter's actions and Palin's own beliefs. She is also a human being with bills and a kid with Down Syndrome. I can understand her desire to make money through her reality show. I also agree with you that the loss of dignity would be saddening in a serious presidential candidate.

I waffle back and forth on the best way to deal with Palin. Sometimes I think that there's no way she could ever win head-to-head with Obama, in which case I'm fine with her getting continued buzz, since it should make it easier for him to win (and I want Obama to be reelected). Sometimes I think that there's a small chance she might somehow win, in which case I wish everyone would simultaneously agree to stop talking about her. Other times it seems like very little more will come from discussing her, so continued discussion is innocuous enough to just be interesting, like a solar flare or a dog dancing on YouTube is interesting to discuss. Still other times she seems to rile up everyone enough that she should really be ignored. I just don't know.... The first option seems most likely, which is what I usually act according to.

Re:WTF?

[Zancarius]

That reads like you think you are correcting GP...

Some of us are a little touchy aren't we?

When the OP started off with "Palin really is an idiot," it seems to me that the best option for someone who feels that way about another individual (regardless of whether it is or is not true) is to simply ignore that person. The intent wasn't to correct but to provide a solution.

I think what came out was my frustration with most Slashdotters in general: They're repeating much of the same rubbish that is common on other sites like Reddit, and it's really quite annoying. Perhaps I hold the readership here to a higher standard, which is part of the reason why I feel it is better to offer a solution.

My apologies that you saw it as a correction. Had you read my entire post, you would have seen that I have mixed feelings about Palin, too. In fact, you later admit immediately after suggesting that I was correcting the OP by qualifying it with:

when in fact there is nothing you say that contradicts what GP said

How can I be correcting the OP and agreeing with him (or her--more or less)? Again, the objective was to offer a solution! Ignore Palin. It's not difficult.

I'm really somewhat appalled that you would make such an assumption. Perhaps I didn't make my frustration all that clear, because frankly, what's the use of continually whining about a political figure who may or may not have any chance in hell of ever running for anything again?

After all, the reason she's received so much press is precisely because no one will ignore her. That, fundamentally, was the crux of my entire point. Sorry you missed it.

Re:WTF?

[Zancarius]

I don't normally reply to ACs unless they state something really stupid, even if it is a vague attempt at trolling. In this case, I think you've succeeded.

First, refer to my response to someone else with a similar sentiment. Then you can understand my intent since I believe you missed it.

'Left' and 'Right'. These are not organized, monolithic groups that can be so easily categorized. These terms almost always indicate lazy thinking and lazy writing.

For the sake of concise arguments, it's often better to boil things down to a more easily understood and digested premise rather than enumerating through every single little group that's out there. The US political system is predominantly driven by left- and right-leaning forces. Yes, there are many in between, but the significant power base rests (unfortunately?) along one of those two sides.

Though, your nitpicking suggests I struck a nerve. That makes me happy.

"hypocritical ... daughter had kid ... espouses her religious beliefs. Really? Did Palin ever say she approved of her daughter's choices? How do her daughter's actions make her a hypocrite?

I'll give you that--to an extent. It was a mostly tongue in cheek comment. However, I do find it rather hypocritical that some individuals will carry on about others' lifestyles when their own are... questionable. Glass houses and all that rot.

That same SNL sketch had some very funny, nonseniscal bits that were verbatim Palin quotes.

I don't rot my brain watching SNL skits, and I might suggest you avoid doing the same.

But, whatever. More reasonable individuals would have been able to pick apart the intent of my post rather than collecting a laundry list of points they don't like.

To other readers: I have mixed feelings about Palin, and this article from the AP doesn't help. On the one hand, it seems that she's fair with her staff, but the Palin that is presented to the rest of us is different, either because of how the media presents her or because of how she presents herself. I wanted to offer some insight into how I see her, in spite of being right-wing myself, and indicate reasons why I don't really care for her in addition to the proposed solutions I offered of just ignore her.

Unfortunately, it appears that some Slashdotters dislike the woman so severely (take our AC friend who replied to me, for instance) that they almost immediately lose their marbles when it looks like someone else is vaguely coming to her defense. Sad world.

Re:WTF?

[Zancarius]

Interestingly, you're the only one of three replies made to my post that makes any sense, and it's quite clear that you're far more fair than the others in your distinction. I would like to thank you for that.

I don't think it's fair to call Palin a hypocrite based on the apparent disconnect between her daughter's actions and Palin's own beliefs. She is also a human being with bills and a kid with Down Syndrome. I can understand her desire to make money through her reality show. I also agree with you that the loss of dignity would be saddening in a serious presidential candidate.

That's also true. I suppose I was being unfair by pointing out that particular part. Allow me to explain my reasoning:

Palin, and for that matter, a significant part of the right wing (and yes, I am a part of it as I mentioned) tends to overtly criticize the lifestyle choices of others while overlooking their own issues close to home. To that extent, I see it as something hypocritical. That's probably unfair of me, because I can't really recall any instances where Palin herself outwardly criticized someone else's family and/or children. However, the portion of our political spectrum she represents is pretty vocal along those lines, so while I'd like to suggest if fair to attach her to them in kind, maybe it's not. Thoughts?

Sometimes I think that there's a small chance she might somehow win, in which case I wish everyone would simultaneously agree to stop talking about her. Other times it seems like very little more will come from discussing her, so continued discussion is innocuous enough to just be interesting, like a solar flare or a dog dancing on YouTube is interesting to discuss. Still other times she seems to rile up everyone enough that she should really be ignored. I just don't know.... The first option seems most likely, which is what I usually act according to.

I don't want Obama to win, so that's probably one of the points we would disagree on. However, I don't particularly want Palin to run, either. She's too vitriolic and has far too much political baggage at this point. On the other hand, I do think it's likewise very sad that the two strongest female personalities in recent political history (think Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton) have essentially been demonized for their entire careers, and it probably suggests a great deal about a certain level of sexism that exists in our political system. I don't know.

Regardless, I do wish to thank you for being extremely fair in your response to me, and it's clear that you read through and followed my points (agreement or not being moot). It's just a shame that 2/3rds of the replies I received were inflammatory and inane. Thanks again for being fair and even handed.

Re:WTF?

[Zancarius]

Sorry to reply to your post twice, but I missed something: I hadn't noticed that you were the OP I responded to.

Isn't it rather humorous that you provided a far more fair response than others in spite of the fact that you were the one I was responding to (even though my verbiage was decidedly unfair)? That says a lot about the others...

Friended.

Re:WTF?

[FrootLoops]

However, the portion of our political spectrum she represents is pretty vocal along those lines, so while I'd like to suggest if fair to attach her to them in kind, maybe it's not. Thoughts?

I don't know. My analysis of Palin is based on what the major media outlets say and bits of interviews and speeches. To answer that question I would need to have at least read one of her books or listened to a larger number of her speeches. My original analysis pretty much exclusively used observations of Palin as the person she presents to cameras, and it didn't need this type of deeper data. Studying people is a hobby of mine, and it doesn't take that much for me to read them. For instance, your original reply was mostly just trying to be honest. It was infected with a bit of invective which skewed the reasoning, but that was most likely an accident or a force of habit, or both. An honest reply deserved an honest reply, which is what I gave.

On the other hand, I do think it's likewise very sad that the two strongest female personalities in recent political history (think Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton) have essentially been demonized for their entire careers, and it probably suggests a great deal about a certain level of sexism that exists in our political system. I don't know.

Interesting point. It's hard to draw conclusions with only two samples. Maybe Palin and Clinton just have personalities or run campaigns that attract detractors. But in any case, possible sexism in national politics is something I'll pay a little more attention to.

Striesand Effect

[ozmanjusri]

The state claims it impractical to release the original electronic versions of the e-mails

That's pretty good evidence of malfeasance all of it's own.

At least the journos now know there'll be a reason to collect and analyse all of those US Letter pages...

Re:Striesand Effect

[Talderas]

There's some reasonableness to their statement. The article points out that Juneau has limited bandwidth. If they make a digital release available for download from the Internet they're going to impede their IT services that Alaskan citizens may or may not use.

On the other hand, there's no reason why they have to distribute the emails in paper. They could have written the emails to CD or DVD and mailed that to anyone that requested it.

Re:Striesand Effect

[h4rr4r]

Have they perhaps heard of the Cloud?
This is one of those times it makes sense. Just toss it up on Amazon e3 and let them at it.

Re:Striesand Effect

[arisvega]

all of those US Letter pages...

Except, of course, the ones that will get misplaced.

Re:Striesand Effect

[petes_PoV]

But it's so much easier to "lose" pages, or mix up the order, or assign additional pages to the wrong email. Just out on interest, does her printer have a special "smudge" button, like Nixon's tape recorder sometimes forgot to record?

Re:Striesand Effect

[isopropanol]

Or set up a torrent and take the seed offline as soon as there's a full copy (or two) in the wild.

Re:Striesand Effect

[eepok]

LOL -- Limited bandwidth. All they would have to do is save the emails to SOME sort of digital format and send it, one time, to another non-Juneau server and let distribution be done from there.

Or, if that's entirely too complicated, put the files on some thumb drives and overnight the big news agencies and ask THEM to host it.

Limited bandwidth...

Re:Striesand Effect

[Denogh]

There's also no reason why they have to host them in Alaska. Why not dish out a bit of cash and have some other state with more bandwidth take the beating?

Re:Striesand Effect

[Talderas]

I said it was a "reasonable argument" for why they weren't hosting it. It's not a reasonable argument to justify only distributing the emails in a paper copy.

27,000 pages. Even assuming an extremely favorable half cent per page cost you could still make about 500 DVDs with the emails on it for the same cost of printing just one copy. And even going at DVD printing shops which may charge you $3 per copy, that's still a LOT better than printing the damn thing.

Re:Striesand Effect

[snarkh]

US Postal service and Fedex have pretty amazing bandwidth. A few petabytes of data can be easily transferred within a day or so.

Re:Striesand Effect

[quickgold192]

We're trying to get these documents to upstanding Americans, not freedom-hating pirates.

Re:Striesand Effect

[GameboyRMH]

Troll? You dun goofed, enjoy metamod damnation >:)

Re:Striesand Effect

[Patch86]

They could make it available electronically, offline. That is, stick it on a CD and put a copy in the post (or tell people to come and collect it). That way the mail would still be searchable- and would be easy for any interested party to host (such as a news company's website).

To tell people that literally the only possible format you're going to provide it to them in is ink-on-wood-pulp format is obstruction pure and simple. Considering the size of the document, it's no better than offering it in audio-book format recorded on 8-track.

Re:Striesand Effect

[MozeeToby]

A hardcover book page of text averages 2500 bytes, making 25000 pages of text a whopping 60 megabytes. If 10,000 people download the documents over the course of a few weeks, their servers would need to average 340 kBps, I find their argument hard to believe. Of course, there's going to be pictures, attachments (which I doubt are included in this print out anyway), etc. on some of the emails, but I'm guessing based on their description of the 'process' used that every email is getting at least one page, that means that a single word response is going to get a whole page to itself. I suspect the average will work out to something quite a bit less than 2500 bytes average per page.

Word is that they're charging $400+ to receive a copy of the documents, which by my understanding is supposed to cover incremental costs only. A 1GB SD card can be had for $5, which should cover the emails with ease even if they include attached attached files. They may be following the letter of the law, but they are certainly not in line with the purpose which was to make government data available to the people who it belongs to. After all, the law just says that the information needs to be available at cost, it never says you have to reduce the costs as much as possible, now does it?

Re:Striesand Effect

[L0rdJedi]

Or, if that's entirely too complicated, put the files on some thumb drives and overnight the big news agencies and ask THEM to host it.

Yes, and I'm sure the big news agencies, who are doing the witch hunt, will gladly host the document. Of course, they'll put it behind a pay wall so anyone else that wants it will have to pay for it.

Re:Striesand Effect

[ColdWetDog]

Well, everyone has "limited" bandwidth. Juneau has pretty good connectivity with the rest of the world, all things considering. We even have Netflix! There are a couple of reasons why they didn't do this (instringence, sloth and I suspect a perverse sense of humor), but connectivity isn't an issue.

Even if the offices had maxed out T1's from the last century, somebody could have taken the stuff home and stuffed it through the 1 MB/sec up / 10 down cablemodem they have sitting in their living room.

Re:Striesand Effect

[michael_cain]

I pulled up the Alaska open records statute. IANAL, but have previously held a position in state government that required me to render opinions as to the meaning of particular laws. Here's the first paragraph, which lays out the basic requirements:

Unless specifically provided otherwise, the public records of all public agencies are open to inspection by the public under reasonable rules during regular office hours. The public officer having the custody of public records shall give on request and payment of the fee established under this section or AS 40.25.115 a certified copy of the public record.

"Inspection" is almost always interpreted to mean "You can look at a paper copy." The agency is not required (or allowed) to provide you with access to their computers, microfiche readers, etc. "During regular office hours" is almost always interpreted to mean the person making the request has to come to the state agency to perform that inspection or pick up their copies. But the real kicker is the phrase "shall give... a certified copy". To quote from Wikipedia, a certified copy "has on it an endorsement or certificate that it is a true copy of the primary document." No choice for the agency — they have to certify any copies they provide.

A downloaded copy is certainly not certified, so agencies are simply not allowed to do it that way. A write-once CD might be certifiable, so long as the courts have interpreted the law to mean that a single certification can be applied to a large collection of documents. If the individual documents (ie, each e-mail message) must be individually certified, paper is the only practical way to do it.

Re:Striesand Effect

[hitmark]

Set up a torrent then ;)

Re:Striesand Effect

[cratermoon]

The emails are probably all stored in an Exchage server somewhere. Any experts on that system want to chime in on the actual difficulty of extracting tens of thousands of individual messages, what format they'll end up in, how big the resulting dump would be?

I know as slashdotter we all keep our email in plain text format and can easily bzip -9 the whole thing down to a few hundred K, but you know Palin's email probably contains a bunch of PP presentations and other huge files.

Re:Striesand Effect

[cdrguru]

The problem with that idea is it would not be possible for the state to control distribution - or even to effectively support distribution. This could be viewed by a court as not fulfilling their responsibility to distribute the data.

Re:Striesand Effect

[cdrguru]

Because it is the responsibility of the State of Alaska to distribute it. If they passed it off somewhere else they would not be fulfilling their responsibilities and could be subject to some kind of court sanctions because of it.

Say they paid Montana to do it and Montana lost the files. In the court's view of it the responsibility would still rest with Alaska. No, there isn't any easy way out of this and if they do not fulfill their responsibilities themselves they are responsible for anyone else's screwups. Which could get very, very expensive in the end.

Re:Striesand Effect

[X0563511]

DVDs? That's some wasteful text format. That should all fit on a CD with room to spare...

Re:Striesand Effect

[Denogh]

I'm sorry, perhaps I was unclear. There are hosting companies in other states that they could pay to host the site. These hosting companies, due to their location, lack the bandwidth constraints mentioned in TFA.

What if they lose the files? Well, they just ftp them from Alaska again. We are talking about emails here. They're sitting on a tape somewhere in Juneau. Even if the hosting company's servers explode, those files still exist somewhere.

Re:Striesand Effect

[Solandri]

That's pretty good evidence of malfeasance all of it's own.

At least the journos now know there'll be a reason to collect and analyse all of those US Letter pages...

But malfeasance on the part of whom? You're assuming it's Palin while she was governor. It very well could be. But it could just as easily be some admin who's ticked off that s/he has a lot of other stuff to do, but s/he first has to comply with this huge FOIA request regarding a person who no longer holds political office and should no longer be politically relevant were it not for the press' seeming fascination with her as she makes the talk show circuit.

Re:Striesand Effect

[thoromyr]

it is 100% trivial to pull out the email from an exchange server into a PST and how we do it when complying with similar requests. It is, in fact, necessary to retrieve them in some fashion before printing. That digital intermediate could then trivially have been distributed, limited bandwidth or not.

Re:Striesand Effect

[Danse]

I said it was a "reasonable argument" for why they weren't hosting it. It's not a reasonable argument to justify only distributing the emails in a paper copy.

No, you said their statement was reasonable, but that statement only said it was impractical to release the electronic documents, not host them. It's not remotely impractical to release the electronic documents. People with far fewer resources manage to share much larger amounts of data every day. It's trivial to accomplish in any number of ways if they had any inclination to do so.

Well, of course.

[Ieshan]

As we learned during the last Presidential campaign, Alaska is close enough to Soviet Russia that instead of sending emails to Alaska, email sends you to Alaska.

Re:Well, of course.

[jmottram08]

you mean as you learned from SNL?

All printed in

[assemblerex]

Wingdings or Comicsans I imagine.

Re:All printed in

[sorak]

Wingdings or Comicsans I imagine.

Printed by wingdings, in comic sans.

Simply WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how often they had to fix their dot matrix printer paper so that they could print?

My thoughts on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull Shit!!!!

Follow up: Really!!!! Do you really think this is going to keep news agencies from showing up to get a copy. Someone will end up digitize it and it will get distributed widely. They are purposefully making it harder to search the emails by doing it this way. Plus, its just easier to loose a piece of paper with what Palin don't want out and say, "Whoops", than it is to say that something was mistakenly left out of the digital copy.

Paper was their second choice

[Schlopper]

It seems that a shortage in stone tablets and required etchers resulted in them having to painstakingly print out all the emails.

Re:Paper was their second choice

[syntheticmemory]

Nah, they had to wait until spring for the clay to thaw.

Alaskan Trees thank you

[samsonov]

Wow, what a waste of paper!! Seriously, printing out the emails? How about just putting them on line? impractical for whom?

Re:Alaskan Trees thank you

[Mashiki]

Shouldn't you be happy that they're using paper? It supports the forestry industry, and in turn creates jobs. You do know that here in North America we grow forests simply to use them for pulp, and base lumber products.

Sharpest tool?

[dccase]

Maybe she actually IS the sharpest tool in that drawer.

Re:Sharpest tool?

[rjmx]

Maybe she actually IS the sharpest tool in that drawer.

Sigh. Where are mod points when you need them?

Re:Sharpest tool?

[syntheticmemory]

That being a sap?

How do we handle government lies like this?

[erroneus]

I think just about EVERY person on Slashdot will disagree with the idea that print is easier than electronic. This is simply a lie from the state government. Which citizen's group do I send money to for the purpose of pushing legislation that requires the government is honest to the people. Lies like this should be actionable.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[webbiedave]

Attn: C.E.F. (Citizens for Exercises in Futility)
999 Dream World Lane
Fantasy Land, USA 00000

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[Qubit]

Which citizen's group do I send money to for the purpose of pushing legislation that requires the government is honest to the people. Lies like this should be actionable.

Find Dick Cheyney and tell him that there are some quail loose in the state government building... :-)

But you do have a good point -- who's the right person to call this office out and get them to fix the problem? I mean if I lived in Alaska near the state's offices, I'd be tempted to grab a handful of usb thumbdrives, cables, hard drive enclosure, and my laptop, and go down there and offer my technical help in transferring the digital documents off of whatever babbage machine of a computer they have there and onto the Internets.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[Monchanger]

How do we handle government lies like this?

Simple. You sue the state in court, just as if they had declined the FOIA requests outright. That's what the judicial branch is for- limiting the ability of the state to abuse its power.

Unless the judges there are completely corrupt, they would force at least a reasonable argument about why the state made the decisions to go with paper and in-person delivery (because they'd be ruled against with this idiotic claim), if not force the governor to release everything digitally.

Between the major newspapers and cable news outlets, the cost and effort would be minimal. All we need is competent journalism, which includes knowing the difference between things that really matter and the bullcrap which comprises most Palin-related "news".

...Which citizen's group do I send money to for the purpose of pushing legislation that requires the government is honest to the people. Lies like this should be actionable.

The legislation is already there. FOIA and related disclosure laws are thankfully in-place, though perhaps not as tough as we citizens would like. Trying to get better versions of the legislation is IMO a waste of time. Rather, I'd check out various campaign-reform groups, such as Lawrence Lessig's, and perhaps third-party/independent candidates.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[future assassin]

You use the money to buy a gun and stand up against your governenment. But its been shown since 911 no one want to do anuthing about it.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[rwv]

I understand that they redacted certain personal parts from the e-mails. It is easier to print e-mails and draw a black line through text and then make a photocopy to eliminate the previously printed part than to eliminate it electronically. In the past, government has been laughed at for trying to electronically delete information from electronic files and having those deleted passages available through various "change tracking" mechanisms. Alas, the printed copies are truly the easier to deal with option until electronic means to purge individual bits of information reliably is created. And though this is not going to be a popular opinion, kudos to the Alaskan government for offering the printed versions of the (presumably redacted) e-mails to private industry so that taxpayers don't have to pay for the digitization of 24,000 pages in communication from the former governor.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[erroneus]

On the surface, that might make sense, but everything in these official email exchanges are supposed to be public record. So if personal things are mentioned in there, they just contributed to the public record. And I'm 99.9% sure that the users of the email services are aware of this.

In any case, since you are making presumptions, shouldn't your kudos also be presumed?

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[rwv]

I can imagine a circumstance that redacting the information would be appropriate. Imagine Sarah signs up for some service that is important for her job. The company she signs up with will create a username for her. Imagine she forgets her password and they send her Xdfsi432A%3 as her new password. Now, any self-respecting service would require that she change this password as soon as she attempts to login. Any self-respecting person reviewing these documents who strike out the password, though, even though it is very unlikely to be useable. It is hard to make an argument that this temporary password wasn't a private piece of information that only Sarah should ever be given access to use.

And just for the record... I *do* want to generally state that I think Sarah is an idiot who shouldn't be trusted more than we can throw her. I'm not entirely convinced that printing the e-mails is easier than putting them on a DVD. I just want to provide a voice to defend the action of the government since every other aspect of this discussion seems to be outraged that the government is behaving so stupidly. It's not stupid. Sarah has the right to some minimal level of privacy while she was acting as the governor. It is *good* that gaining access to electronic records is limited to records which affect state business.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[ArundelCastle]

It's not a government lie.
It's the tourism lobby.
Get your conspiracies straight. You're embarrassing us.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[Monchanger]

Not necessarily. Just because many once-competent news organizations followed Fox News to the dark side doesn't mean it's not possible to maintain standards. It's when "for profit" turns to "profit at any cost" that you cease to be a journalist (or any other noble profession- e.g. doctors who perform unnecessary procedures, corrupt policemen, and... well, pretty much all lawyers). I think NPR is a good example of where non-for-profit makes it easier to maintain journalistic integrity, but even they suffer from catering to the demand for tabloid news.

A more intelligent news consumer would help, just as a smarter voting public is necessary for campaign finance reform.

Re:How do we handle government lies like this?

[Lotharus]

Great idea, so when the cops shoot you dead, you'll at least die with the satisfaction of having stood up for your beliefs.

They should do both

[Random2]

Print and electronic release. A print copy would be a nice verification that the electronic version hasn't been altered after release; but only allowing the print is far too cumbersome.

It does have merit to do this, but only in conjunction with an electronic copy.

Ted Stevens

[tekrat]

The great senator from Alaska said it best: "The internet isn't just a truck you can dump stuff on, it's a series of tubes..."

Obviously, dumping Palin's email into the internets would cause them all to clog up, taking weeks for people to download their internets.

Actually overheard once at Best Buy: "Does this computer come with the latest version of the internet?"

Re:Ted Stevens

[GameboyRMH]

If it gets clogged just clear it out by shooting a poker chip through it.

Redacted?

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize it is just a state government but there can still be sensitive information that needs to be redacted. Electronically doing this is not an option.

Although redacting the 25000 pages and then converting back to pdf would be reasonable.

But I also don't think requiring the data to be picked up in person, with a valid picture ID, is that out of the ordinary. As a citizen (i.e. not a journalist), that's the way you would have to get many documents.

Re:Redacted?

[GameboyRMH]

I realize it is just a state government but there can still be sensitive information that needs to be redacted. Electronically doing this is not an option.

LOLWUT? Care to explain that one?

Re:Redacted?

[michael_cain]

Electronically doing this is not an option.

Nonsense. Historical redaction fiascos involving soft copies of documents occurred because people were too stupid to realize that simply adding a black rectangle to the document didn't remove the obscured text. Adobe Acrobat includes a set of redaction tools that replaces the redacted content with a placeholder such as the traditional black rectangle. Microsoft offers a free redaction add-in for Word that removes the redacted text from the document so that it can't be recovered. Redact-It sells a product that reliably redacts text from documents of various formats, including Outlook messages.

I see their point - It *IS* impractical

[mikeabbott420]

to hide things in a machine searchable file.

This halfway makes sense

[locallyunscene]

While the "impracticality" of putting it online is a bald-faced lie, I can see why they don't want to. If Cardinal Richelieu can find a reason to hang a (wo)man is three sentences the mainstream media will have no problem finding lots of political hay in 24,000 emails. Especially with someone as controversial and, ah, differently spoken as Mrs. Palin.

Is it ethical? You could make an argument that only Alaskans should really be concerned with how Governor Palin acted in an official capacity. She's a public figure, but unless she actually runs for president I'd say that these emails serve more as a distraction than as newsworthy.

Re:This halfway makes sense

[Nethemas the Great]

Evidently I offended such a partisan...

Where's WikiLeaks North?

[countertrolling]

Like most of us, wikileaks just doesn't consider her to be relevant.. Besides, the ticket fare is tied up in lawyer fees...

They're all saved in her Yahoo account

[Sectoid_Dev]

Maybe the Alaskan state government should ask Yahoo to export the emails for them. I bet that's where the bulk of them are stored, in a personal account.

If you're not much of a nature person...

[__aasehi2499]

then Alaska's primary tourism draw wont work for you, but be glad, now they have a great reason to go to Alaska, Sarah Palin's e-mails.

Obligatory HHGTTG

[Nidi62]

It's probably also being stored in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.

Who wants to fly to Alaska to file a lawsuit

[stating_the_obvious]

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).

Re:Who wants to fly to Alaska to file a lawsuit

[Denogh]

(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.

Encouraged != Required From a technological standpoint, it's silly not to publish the stuff electronically, but I don't see the legal problem here.

Re:Who wants to fly to Alaska to file a lawsuit

[Chris Mattern]

"*May* provide". "Is *encouraged*". In other words, they don't hafta. And they ain't gonna.

You can argue (and argue successfully, IMHO), that they haven't used electronic formats to the greatest extent feasible. But they're not obligated to do so. They're only "encouraged".

Re:Who wants to fly to Alaska to file a lawsuit

[Nethemas the Great]

You're missing the "is encouraged to" part. It does not say "shall". No law was broken, the payment in individually wrapped pennies may continue unfettered.

rsync -var --partial

[buglista]

will eventually get you everthing, even if you're on damn dial-up. I used to keep a debian box up to date on UNSTABLE with a 33k modem.

What they're basically saying is, we think there's something to hide. Go go gadget OCR!

Palin is a Genius to her Fans

[Anonymous Coward]

What Palin does and says (and writes) may seem completely stupid to most people, but to her followers she is a genius. She could very well be the next president of the United States. It's a good thing for her that Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't born in America.

Re:Palin is a Genius to her Fans

[Lunix Nutcase]

She could very well be the next president of the United States.

As if the US doesn't already have enough problems. What we need is an even more idiotic person running the show than the last couple of idiots.

Re:Palin is a Genius to her Fans

[Nethemas the Great]

it's easy to seem like a genius in a movement full of complete RETARDS. Most of her followers are intellectually overmatched by their household pets...

whose numbers depressingly account to some 50% of the American population.

Anyone in alaska hear of cutepdf???

[voss]

Its free, it does not require the emails to be any particular format because its installed as a virtual printer.

Hilarious

[orn]

That's like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Or maybe something Woody Allen or Mel Brooks would come up with.

Re:Hilarious

[ColdWetDog]

That's like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Or maybe something Woody Allen or Mel Brooks would come up with.

Reality has been waging a very effective war on satire for some time now.

The REAL Reason

[wintercolby]

Palin's email dirtied the systems up so bad with viruses and trojans, that they had to print them out for record keeping but deleted the entire account. She reminds me of the kind of user that says "I only ever get emails with paper clips from friends, why wouldn't I trust them?"

Poor Alaska Governor's office IT department wasted 2 years just to clean up the mail server.

Re:nice environmentally-concious idea

[i kan reed]

I was with you until the pointless misogyny at the end of your post.

you're FIRED!

[Thud457]

take your pick:
- incompetence
or
- malfeasance


"Oh yeah? Well I'm not fired, I QUIT!"


BTW /., what do <ul>/</ul>, <li>/</li> and &nbsp; supposed to do?!!! Goddamn you're a bunch of idiots.

You don't understand that Richelieu quote

[Moraelin]

You don't understand that Richelieu quote, grasshopper.

Ya see, what Richelieu was saying there was basically just flaunting his abuse of power. That's it. It has nothing to do with the usual idiotic interpretations like too many laws, or everyone is guilty of something, or anything.

What Richelieu actually did was employ forgers to write whole contracts with the devil in the handwriting of his opponents. Then have them waterboarded until they confess, and then execute them.

You think I'm kidding? Check out for example Urbain Grandier for a documented case of such a victim of Richelieu.

THAT is what he needed six lines in the handwriting of someone for: as a writing sample for the forgers Richelieu employed.

And while in that quote he's clever enough to not directly say that, it's a very thinly veiled reminder of why it's not wise to cross him. If you can write and ever wrote anything, he can "find" something else in your handwriting to hang you for, even though you don't remember ever writing that.

I hardly think that Palin's emails are in any similar danger. And releasing them as paper is hardly a solution. If they're worried about forgeries in her name, then the sane way would be to release them as a file with a public secure hash value. That way if anyone says they found a damning email in there, you can see if their file actually matches the hash value. If it doesn't, it's been tampered with, and you can ignore the accusation.

Re:You don't understand that Richelieu quote

[imric]

Nah - they're fakes. Richelieu made a deal with the devil to get the samples.

Re:You don't understand that Richelieu quote

[Dachannien]

Actually, I think the use of that quote is slightly more apt than you're giving the earlier poster credit for. The media is really good at sifting through quotes, pulling something out of context, spinning it, and then propping it up to achieve some political end aside from neutral journalism. Sure, that's not the same as creating documents from whole cloth based on a sample of the person's handwriting. But they do create meaning or intent where no such meaning or intent previously existed, usually by eliminating the nuances associated with the context that was present at the time, and that's at least analogous to what Richelieu was doing.

Common legal trick

[caseih]

In a recent lawsuit my organization was involved in, the plaintiffs demanded any and all emails from certain individuals related to the case. So our lawyers had us send them all the e-mails in raw electronic form, which they then simply printed out for the plaintiffs. And of course the plaintiffs did the same thing for our side. Kind of a dirty way of complying with the court order if you think about it. I'm sure that neither side printed off the complete e-mail headers, so we're left with just the visible from, to, subject, and date fields, and the message body.

Anyway, when you're on the receiving end of a demand, printing out the e-mails is definitely a common thing in the legal world. So I'm not surprised Alaska would do this. Plus it fits with Palin's policies and platforms. I mean we have all these resources in alaska going to waste, so all these printouts means trees are being put to good use, and the ink used will put all that oil to use as well. Drill baby drill.

Re:Common legal trick

[stating_the_obvious]

It's definitely true that in legal cases the standard is paper format, but there is a substantial difference between a FOIA response and a subpoena ducas tecam. Additionally, the Alaska Legislature has mandated that FOIA requests be filled electronically when reasonably possible. As many have pointed out, print to PDF would have been easier and less expensive.

Re:Common legal trick

[Denogh]

It's definitely true that in legal cases the standard is paper format, but there is a substantial difference between a FOIA response and a subpoena ducas tecam. Additionally, the Alaska Legislature has encouraged that FOIA requests be filled electronically when reasonably possible. As many have pointed out, print to PDF would have been easier and less expensive.

FTFY.

(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.

Re:Common legal trick

[Americano]

Additionally, the Alaska Legislature has mandated that FOIA requests be filled electronically when reasonably possible.

If you're basing this off the law you quoted above, then no, they haven't "mandated" that these requests be fulfilled electronically. They've "encouraged" the agencies to make the records available electronically "to the greatest extent feasible."

I'm pretty sure I could drive a dump truck through a loophole that large. "We did an analysis, and discovered we simply don't have the in-house expertise to convert this data to electronic formats. It simply wasn't feasible, so we printed them instead." When asked, all of the clerks simply profess complete ignorance of "print to PDF," or any other way of converting emails to a dumped electronic format.

You may find it hard to swallow, and you may not LIKE that they've chosen to do this, but the wording of the law you quoted above is very clear - there is no mandate from the legislature requiring release of electronic records "whenever it is possible to do so." It's simply a suggestion, which "encourages" them to release electronically "to the greatest possible extent."

Re:Common legal trick

[stating_the_obvious]

Mandate is an imprecise word and was a poor choice on my part -- while it is often synonymous with 'order' or 'command', it can also by synonymous with 'guidance', as when an elected official who wins the popular vote claims a mandate to promote a specific political agenda. I intended the latter. I hope this can end the semantic part of the debate.

It is my opinion that the existence of PDF files, PDF reader software, or PDF creation software on the machines within the office of the Governor would allow someone with standing (any of the news organizations forced to incur great expense, or even a local citizen with a bad back) to credibly claim that the Governor's office engaged in behavior which did not respect the Legislature's intent, and economic loss resulted. The objective would be to make this a pissing match between the Legislature and the Office of the Governor, not to make it between the claimant and the office of the Governor. For this reason, a local citizen making a stink is better than the NYTimes filing a suit.

I have no idea if someone could prevail. But it would be an interesting next move in what appears to be politically motivated behavior. Publicly embarrassing bad behavior is one way citizens get elected officials to behave appropriately.

Re:Common legal trick

[jafac]

Another common trick, is when electronic format is demanded, they will provide it in the form of a PDF file, but the pages are encapsulated jpg images of scans, so there is no searchable text. You must be extremely explicit with these lawyer weasels.

Re:Common legal trick

[osgeek]

Well, lawyers commonly charge their clients per printed page, faxes sent, etc. They make lots of money off doing things archaically.

Re:Common legal trick

[esocid]

That's like saying you exported all the emails to binary. All the information is there, but making it harder for someone to access is just being a dick, and in some cases illegal. This appears to be one of those cases, as someone pointed out with the FOIA laws.

Not that unreasonable

[kgwilliam]

The slashdot crowd of course is going to lambast this decision. But if you take time to think about it rather than reply with a knee-jerk reaction, it really isn't that unreasonable.

What is required to host thousands of emails online?
  - A web server. Presumably they have one of these, but is it just a simple website at some hosting company and not very easy to configure or mass-upload to, and perhaps with a limited storage quota? Is it their same server they had in the late 90's that might choke on 24,000 files in one directory?
  - How do you convert the emails to individual files which can be hosted? Convert to PDF perhaps? File -> Save As? Either way, it is going to be very labor intensive. Perhaps the email system is old enough that it is even more difficult and time consuming?
  - How long do you have to store the online files? Every day they store the files on the server costs them extra $. And every person who downloads the files costs them extra $.
  - What type of technical knowledge is required to put all of the pieces together? To a slashdotter it might seem trivial, but a town of 30,000 reachable only by water and air is not the type of place who will employ public servants with the technical expertise of a slashdotter. Their IT staff might consist of a guy who knows how to replace a monitor and reformat Windows XP. They may outsource all of the rest of their IT functions at an hourly cost to the state. All of these email requests are probably going to some poor secretary who has a hard time opening her own email.
  - Who should have access? IANAL, but this is a foia request so I presume anybody in America, but is Alaska required to make government documents readily available to the governments of North Korea and Iran? If not, who is going to setup the security to prevent unauthorized access?

Remember, this is a foia request which Alaska has to respond to, but they have no incentive to make it easy at their own taxpayer's expense. It is far cheaper and easier for a small town government office to tell people to come and get the information than it is for them to make it easily accessible over the internet.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[Nethemas the Great]

You sir ought to be ashamed of yourself. You demonstrate an intellect equal to her partisans.

If they have the resources necessary to "print to paper" then they have the resources to "print to file" or "print to PDF". The US postal service makes regular runs from the town of 30,000 reachable only by water and air. There is absolutely no reason these documents could not be mailed on disc. As allowed by the FOIA any reasonable expenses may be recovered from the recipients. This is simply a case of paying in individually wrapped pennies.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[Monchanger]

You're overthinking the problem and absolving Alaska's government of their responsibility to comply with their own law. They don't have to build the equivalent of the Library of Congress' high-tech and user-friendly website (that would have been useful back then, or for implementing for future email, but nobody is expecting that here). They just need to provide a data dump to several groups who have raised concerns about this information. This isn't even strange or obscure information on which they'd have to spend months pulling hundreds of boxes out of storage- it's electronic email of official correspondence by their chief executive, who served (well, sorta-kinda, ya know) less than a decade ago. Short of pulling a Bush, there is no excuse to being unable to put the information together at reasonable cost to their tax-payers who are the prime beneficiaries (that's assuming this isn't being done for tabloid or political reasons, of course), not just the bill-footers.

All those "problems" can be solved by today's smart 14 year-old:
Data Export - write a ten-line script. You don't have to hand-format the text- just pull it out of Outlook (VBA) or wherever. The value in digital is being searchable, not in looking pretty.
Limit access- burn CD, FedEx only to the newspapers. Those who make FOIA requests are under no obligation to keep that stuff secret. Not even from those evil North Koreans, who are just itching to... invade Alaska? Redaction concerns are irrelevant to distribution. If North Korea mustn't know, neither should the public.
Storage & distribution - Bittorrent, or wikileaks will host it for you for free. Govt doesn't have to limit its response to only the parties who made the request- it's in the public domain.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[kgwilliam]

And you sir demonstrate the critical thinking abilities of a junior developer straight out of school. You think problem A leads directly to solution B without thinking of any of the other ramifications or what-if scenarios.

Is it trivial to think about a modern email server with easy-to-use capabilities such as print to file? Of course, which is exactly what you and the majority of slashdotters immediately do. Unfortunately the thought process too often stops there and people immediately villify everybody who doesn't come to the same conclusion, regardless of the lack of supporting knowledge of the system.

If you put a little more critical thought into the scenario are you able to imagine an antiquated email system (you know, like the kind which might be in use in a government office of a town of 30,000) which might have a more antiquated print to file system (perhaps one which requires user input to enter a unique file name for each file, or even just click OK on each file)? If you put a little more critical thought into the scenario you might also imagine that the office manager and secretary who are trying to fulfill this foia request have never even heard of "Print to PDF" (my mom has never heard of the feature, and she was a non-technical government employee). You might even make the stretch that the in-house IT staff of this office doesn't have the technical skills to implement the end-to-end scenario. And do you think that the manager who's ass is on the line to meet all of the legal requirements of a foia request is going to risk giving it to some junior IT person?

The key thing to remember is that they are not under any legal obligation to provide the foia information in an easily consumable way at their own expense. Yes, foia law allows them to collect reasonable expenses, but that probably doesn't include the cost of hiring an outside IT consulting firm to help put the information online.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[Sebastopol]

I understand your attempt to think of the possible reasons behind their decisions, but remember something: it has been three years since the request was made, and lawyers were allowed to comb through all 26k+ mails and even withhold and redact them. Seems to me the Alaska gov't had no trouble accommodating the needs of the lawyers (who were in fact loyalists to Palin), but for some reason want to drag their feat for a few media outlets. I would be interested how you reconcile these facts with your theory.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[kgwilliam]

You make a good point. I dislike Palin as much as anyone and I am definitely not trying to defend her, and it is quite possible (likely even) that the state of Alaska really is playing games to purposely make it harder. I am just trying to point out that the typical slashdot response of "ZOMG Print to PDF and bittorrent solves all their problems so therefore it must be a conspiracy!" is a bit naive and not very well thought out.

To your point about the lawyers having access, they may very well have been sitting at a desktop in the state office using the same email server. Just because the lawyers have looked at the emails doesn't mean that Alaska has secretly been passing them around electronically and is just now deciding to make it difficult by printing to paper.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[he-sk]

All of your objections are naught once you realize that the government has to be accountable to the electorate and therefore an easy-to-use mechanism for disclosing public information in a timely matter is part of the government's job.

IOW, they should be able to piggy-back on the infrastructure that is already in place to disseminate that information.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[r_jensen11]

The slashdot crowd of course is going to lambast this decision. But if you take time to think about it rather than reply with a knee-jerk reaction, it really isn't that unreasonable.

Really? Let's break it down:

What is required to host thousands of emails online?

  - A web server. Presumably they have one of these, but is it just a simple website at some hosting company and not very easy to configure or mass-upload to, and perhaps with a limited storage quota? Is it their same server they had in the late 90's that might choke on 24,000 files in one directory?

Sort the files by date, file type, &c. instead of one folder. Even the most basic web servers can list a thousand rows of text in a single web page.

- How do you convert the emails to individual files which can be hosted? Convert to PDF perhaps? File -> Save As? Either way, it is going to be very labor intensive. Perhaps the email system is old enough that it is even more difficult and time consuming?

Run a script to convert to PDF or postscript. Less labor-intensive than having somebody man the printers

- How long do you have to store the online files? Every day they store the files on the server costs them extra $. And every person who downloads the files costs them extra $.

Paper costs money to store. It also costs less to send 24k files over the internet than to print them out. If $ is an issue, charge the person $5 to access the archive.

- What type of technical knowledge is required to put all of the pieces together? To a slashdotter it might seem trivial, but a town of 30,000 reachable only by water and air is not the type of place who will employ public servants with the technical expertise of a slashdotter. Their IT staff might consist of a guy who knows how to replace a monitor and reformat Windows XP. They may outsource all of the rest of their IT functions at an hourly cost to the state. All of these email requests are probably going to some poor secretary who has a hard time opening her own email.

Hire a contractor. They're a government, they know how to get hold of contractors. The amount of time they pay the contractor for will still cost less than having somebody man the printers for each press agency.

- Who should have access? IANAL, but this is a foia request so I presume anybody in America, but is Alaska required to make government documents readily available to the governments of North Korea and Iran? If not, who is going to setup the security to prevent unauthorized access?

Remember, this is a foia request which Alaska has to respond to, but they have no incentive to make it easy at their own taxpayer's expense. It is far cheaper and easier for a small town government office to tell people to come and get the information than it is for them to make it easily accessible over the internet.

The same people who have access to federal documents released under the FOIA

Re:Not that unreasonable

[kgwilliam]

This response just shows that you are not thinking outside of the technical box where every problem can be solved with a script. Your statements about sorting files into multiple folders and running scripts to convert to PDFs are very technology focused without any concept of the bigger picture. You do realize that my examples which you are attempting to argue are merely examples of some of the challenges they could potentially face and not the exhaustive list? But you attack those specific examples with the typical approach of a purely technical person who thinks that solving one or two of the technical issues solves the entire problem.

Let me try again with another example, but this time try to extract the context of the big picture without trying to solve the technical question...
Who is going to write the script to covert the emails to PDFs? And remember that the script has to filter out the legally redacted emails and the emails where only a portion of it is redacted. I am sure you are a very smart person who could do it in 15 minutes, but a government office in a town of 30,000 may very well not have an in-house IT person capable of doing this since they outsource the bulk of their IT work. Should they pay a consultant to come in and write that script? What incentive do they have to spend their taxpayers' dollars in order to make it easier for CNN to consume the information? Alaska can and is charging CNN the actual cost to create the paper version ("man the printers" as you say) so it is free to them. It is quite likely they would not be able to pass on the cost of an IT consultant to CNN.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[kgwilliam]

You are right, the government does have a responsibility to disclose public information in an easy to use mechanism. But there is a balance between ease of access and cost. Extreme ease of access means that your city would host all public hearings streamed live over the web with integrated polling functionality and a live twitter feed. But the cost of doing this is unjustifiable to the taxpayers for all but the most progressive cities.

Try this... Call your local government office and make a foia request for something. If that information isn't already online, do you think they are going to put it online just for you, or do you think they are going to tell you that you are welcome to come on down to the office during business hours and they are happy to print it out for you?

To your point, yes it is very likely that they could have and should have used their existing infrastructure. But my point was that nobody on slashdot knows anything about their existing infrastructure or any other legal, technical, manpower, or fiscal challenges they may face in putting this information online. Yet most of the posts here are crying about conspiracies and incompetence because they limit their perspective to a 10 line perl script and a bittorrent feed which should solve the whole problem.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[schlachter]

what are you talking about??

Grab the email archive file.
Generate a bit torrent.
Share the torrent.

Or

Grab the email archive file.
Put it up on the Google cloud.
Enable public access.

Either option should take your average teen 5 minutes.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[kgwilliam]

Yes, you are right, that does sound like the solution that your average teen would come up with in 5 minutes.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[vadim_t]

Who is going to write the script to covert the emails to PDFs?

If they don't have an in-house programmer, a consultant

And remember that the script has to filter out the legally redacted emails and the emails where only a portion of it is redacted. I am sure you are a very smart person who could do it in 15 minutes, but a government office in a town of 30,000 may very well not have an in-house IT person capable of doing this since they outsource the bulk of their IT work. Should they pay a consultant to come in and write that script?

Yes

What incentive do they have to spend their taxpayers' dollars in order to make it easier for CNN to consume the information?

That they are mandated by law to do so. The FOIA exists, and they're supposed to be able to comply with it. If they can't, that's their problem. If they don't have the means to comply with it when requested, it's their problem to figure it out and pay for what's required out of their budget.

Does this ultimately come out of the taxpayer's pocket? Sure. But so do all government services.

Alaska can and is charging CNN the actual cost to create the paper version ("man the printers" as you say) so it is free to them. It is quite likely they would not be able to pass on the cost of an IT consultant to CNN.

So what's getting printed? Just burn that to a CD and hand it out.

Re:Not that unreasonable

[thomasdn]

The slashdot crowd of course is going to lambast this decision. But if you take time to think about it rather than reply with a knee-jerk reaction, it really isn't that unreasonable.

Yes, it really is unreasonable.

What is required to host thousands of emails online? - A web server. Presumably they have one of these, but is it just a simple website at some hosting company and not very easy to configure or mass-upload to, and perhaps with a limited storage quota? Is it their same server they had in the late 90's that might choke on 24,000 files in one directory?

Put it in a zip-file or tarball. As for bandwidth, you make it available via bittorrent.

- How do you convert the emails to individual files which can be hosted? Convert to PDF perhaps? File -> Save As? Either way, it is going to be very labor intensive. Perhaps the email system is old enough that it is even more difficult and time consuming?

How do you print them? You automate the process. If you can print the to a printer, you can print them to a PDF printer. Same amount of work.

- How long do you have to store the online files? Every day they store the files on the server costs them extra $. And every person who downloads the files costs them extra $.

How long do you store the paper versions? As for bandwidth, se above.

- What type of technical knowledge is required to put all of the pieces together? To a slashdotter it might seem trivial, but a town of 30,000 reachable only by water and air is not the type of place who will employ public servants with the technical expertise of a slashdotter. Their IT staff might consist of a guy who knows how to replace a monitor and reformat Windows XP. They may outsource all of the rest of their IT functions at an hourly cost to the state. All of these email requests are probably going to some poor secretary who has a hard time opening her own email.

I would assume the IT guy is capcabable of taking backups. What would he do, if an user comes to him and says she need him to recover all her e-mails from backup. He would extract the e-mail (in maildir format or some other storage format) from the backup archives. Now, he should just do the same. Instead of putting the backup back on the server, he should just tar or zip it and put in online via torrent.

- Who should have access? IANAL, but this is a foia request so I presume anybody in America, but is Alaska required to make government documents readily available to the governments of North Korea and Iran? If not, who is going to setup the security to prevent unauthorized access?

If everyone in USA has access to the docs, then there is not much difference if the rest of the world has access. If every US citizen has a copy, it would be trivial for any foreign person to obtain a copy as well.

Remember, this is a foia request which Alaska has to respond to, but they have no incentive to make it easy at their own taxpayer's expense. It is far cheaper and easier for a small town government office to tell people to come and get the information than it is for them to make it easily accessible over the internet.

Yes, and as I has explained above, the chosen method of printing the e-mails is hardly cheaper or easier. It is a blatant attempt to make it more difficult to obtain a copy.

They're right

[Charliemopps]

Everyones spouting off how easy it would be... You're not thinking it through. You can either "select all > Print" or... Export them all... ok... and put them where? Ok, we need a website, we'll need to get bids, we're the government after all. How much traffic should we estimate? Lets see, the private emails from one of the most divisive politicians in the country... and news agencies are likely to link directly to the source... Or we could just print them out and let the news agencies host them... It's really a no-brainer.

Re:They're right

[Tsunayoshi]

These are not private emails, these are the emails from her official account from when she was Governor...if she was stupid enough to conduct personal correspondence using that account, well sucks to be her...

Re:They're right

[minderaser]

You're not thinking it through. Export them all... ok... and put them where?

Uh ... on a cd?

It's really a no-brainer.

Yea, it really is.

Re:They're right

[MirthScout]

Uh.... no. It is easy. Certainly easier than the 2 years it as taken them to print. Export to a file and/or directory (for some systems you might be able to skip this step). For each requester, copy to physical electronic media (DVD, thumb drive, external USB drive; whatever works). Collect payment and hand over. Requester can convert formats and host if they want.

No hosting required.

Printing them out was pure mean spirited obstruction.

Re:They're right

[Nethemas the Great]

Something(one) is certainly a no-brainer. Have you considered those remarkable, little shiny discs that can house vast quantities of binary data? Then we have those great mechanical birds stamped "US Mail" on their side with hollow insides capable of holding tens of thousands of these shiny discs. Surely we could use them, but how dammit? How?

Re:They're right

[Jason Levine]

How much does it cost to print out all 24,000 pages (manpower, printer ink costs, paper costs)? Is all of that recovered in the fee? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it is. Well, obviously, you can charge whatever you need to recover costs. Now let's examine the electronic version. Electronic doesn't need to mean online. You could burn the files (or one big PDF file) to a CD and mail it to the requesting person/organization.

Any cost incurred would be much less than printing 24K pages. First of all, supplies would cost less. A quick search of Staples' website shows paper costing $49 for 5,000 sheets. This means you'd need to spend over $235 for the paper to print out all of this. Ink or toner would, of course, add much more to the cost. Meanwhile, a 100 pack of CD-R's costs $13 so burning one copy of the Palin E-mails would cost 13 cents. Staff time would be much reduced also. Time required to burn a CD: 3 minutes, maybe 5 tops. Time required to print out 24K pages? Well, a quick search turned up a laser printer that does 25ppm. If we take that to be an average performance, the Palin E-mails would be printed in 16 hours. How much extra pay does 16 hours vs 5 minutes work out to?

Even if you add in costs for mailing a CD, the electronic form is clearly the easier and more cost-effective route. The only possible reason that they are demanding these documents be printed out and presented in person is to raise the barrier for obtaining them.

Re:Giant Print Button

[TaoPhoenix]

Except they couldn't pay a 17 year old kid ten dollars to make an Adobe PDF printer default and write a script to batch-print all of them ... so when they hit they hit print once they wind up with ... pdfs!
Then you pay the kid ten more dollars to "combine all the pdfs with Adobe" into a big hash and produce 25 USB-stick copies of the archive and a server copy with backup. Throw in $5 for Pizza Overhead for the kid.

Seriously. It's like they're trying to make themselves known forever to be obtuse.

Government waste...

[mevets]

Clever indeed, using a strategy that 5 year olds get scolded for. Are the people of Alaska - who this government is directly accountable to - so beaten and downtrodden to permit this kind of bullying by the people that work for them?

What is the GoA afraid of? Is Palin possibly done something more embarrassing in email than she does in front of TV cameras? Makes my head spin...

I never thought of Alaskans as meek or timid, but learn something new every day.

OCR time!

[Limburgher]

This sounds like a job for Project Gutenberg, since this stuff is public domain. http://gutenberg.org/

I don't even WORK for them...

[Qubit]

...but I'll bet you $100 that I could get archive.org or one of the dozens of other repositories of information to host these files within the week.

Someone is just trying to make things difficult for the press.

Duh

[Bogtha]

Do you have any idea how long it would take to print those emails out, scan them in and embed the scan into a Word document for online distribution? After all, that's the standard way of distributing data from people in the public sector isn't it?

Re:Duh

[ginbot462]

You need to work some flash in there (with random public comments on, of course) and you'll be set.

Just have Google send someone to pick them up.

[DdJ]

They have some small experience with scanning in paper documents, storing them on the web, and making them indexable and searchable.

Impractical? As opposed to?

[SeeSp0tRun]

I could see if they had to physically scan 24,000 pages... but even then they would be doing so for every copy picked up.
Which is more practical... ftps://user:pass@readpalinsemail.com or a scope and grope, flying 3000+ mi (for me), and spending $xxxx.xx?

So what are the rules against someone getting the 24,000 physical pages and scanning/uploading them themselves?

More information on the process...

[RockClimbingFool]

I can't tell if this is being spearheaded by MSNBC or not, but their story has a lot of information about it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43281157/ns/politics-more_politics/

Re:More information on the process...

[AlamedaStone]

I can't tell if this is being spearheaded by MSNBC or not, but their story has a lot of information about it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43281157/ns/politics-more_politics/

Not entirely on-topic, but one of the reasons I dislike the online presence of all "major" news outlets is embodied in that link. Noscript shows *9* different domains trying to ply me (no googles, surprisingly - but facebook is one) with god knows what, and will only serve a blurb without activating some arcane combination thereof (msn.com alone doesn't do it).

What a trivial thing to get annoyed at, but it vexes me. Will 'Do Not Track actually work? Because I can't imagine it will.

It's the Lumber Cartel (TinLC)

[BenSchuarmer]

When the Alaska state government uses paper the Lumber Cartel (TinLC) makes money.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

talk about cognitive dissonance!

[Thud457]

Didn't the persecute (yes, word choice intentional)> David Kernell for doing just that?!!!
So it is entirely possible. By an amateur.
Stupid fucking bureaucrats think you're all as stupid as they are. And they're half right. Palin can get 50% of the vote, she just needs to win over some 1% special interest and the stupids are in charge again.

Re:talk about cognitive dissonance!

[Greystripe]

Last time I checked Republicans/Democrats are currently in charge and have been for quite some time.

Re:talk about cognitive dissonance!

[RightSaidFred99]

and the stupids are in charge again.

Lol. "Again". Like they're not in charge now. The stupids have been in charge since Clinton left office, frankly. Clinton was an asshole in some ways and I never vote Democrat, but at least he wasn't stupid.

Is there a legal reason for "Certified Documents?"

[WimBo]

I've been trying to come up with a real reason that paper might be required, and I was wondering if it was because of some long standing law related to "original" documents that doesn't really make sense with electronic document creation?

This sounds like a troll for the Streisand Effect, which it's obvious plenty of people still don't understand.

The number of pages sounded to me like close to a standard box of copier paper. While scanning and OCRing the documents would be frustrating for an individual, it seems like an obvious step for an organization trying to find out what the state is hiding.

Will email from Palins personal account be included, since at least some state business was reported to have been dealt with from there?

Alaska was considering

[h1q]

a public oral recitation in Inuit from Braille faxed copies of a iPhoned'ed JPGs of ASR-33 Teletypes output of BINHEXED screenshots of the emails, sorted by their number of vowels.

But they couldn't find a blind Inuit with a strong enough Ebonics/Scottish accent.

Re:Alaska was considering

[GameboyRMH]

LOL, you win this thread XD

Psych Anal - Palin & Friends

[ginbot462]

So the mom/dad finally forced the obnoxious kid to give you the lollipop that was legally yours to begin with. Printing is them licking (or worse) that lollipop before handing it over.

Re:Is there a legal reason for "Certified Document

[MetalliQaZ]

My gut-assumption is that they did this:

1. FOIA request?? Oh crap!
2. Make false claim: "We can't export our emails electronically because we lack the technical savvy."
3. Print out all emails. Take damning emails out by hand and burn them.
4. Do absolute minimum to give the rest of the paper to news organizations, knowing that they could never reconstruct the original data set.
5. ???
6. Profit!

-d

You are being obtuse

[GameboyRMH]

What is required to host thousands of emails online?
    - A web server. Presumably they have one of these, but is it just a simple website at some hosting company and not very easy to configure or mass-upload to, and perhaps with a limited storage quota? Is it their same server they had in the late 90's that might choke on 24,000 files in one directory?

If it were plaintext and compressed they could send it in an email. They could use any free hosting service. Use the FTP server one of their offices probably already has. Again if they're using some old Pentium 1 server that will choke on a large number of files, put it in a ZIP file.

How do you convert the emails to individual files which can be hosted? Convert to PDF perhaps? File -> Save As? Either way, it is going to be very labor intensive. Perhaps the email system is old enough that it is even more difficult and time consuming?

What kind of email system has no export function whatsoever?

- What type of technical knowledge is required to put all of the pieces together? To a slashdotter it might seem trivial, but a town of 30,000 reachable only by water and air is not the type of place who will employ public servants with the technical expertise of a slashdotter. Their IT staff might consist of a guy who knows how to replace a monitor and reformat Windows XP. They may outsource all of the rest of their IT functions at an hourly cost to the state. All of these email requests are probably going to some poor secretary who has a hard time opening her own email.

Anyone with slightly-above-average IT knowledge could do it. Are you saying they have nobody there who's even half-way decent with computers? Anyone working in any IT department should be able to do it, or should not be working in IT. Do they not have an IT department?

I think any of the secretaries at my office could figure it out if asked.

- Who should have access? IANAL, but this is a foia request so I presume anybody in America, but is Alaska required to make government documents readily available to the governments of North Korea and Iran? If not, who is going to setup the security to prevent unauthorized access?

Oh fucking please, if you make it available to the American public, it is trivially fucking easy for anyone in the world to get it. But I'll play your game, if you want some feelgood security, again is there not a single IT person in their dumb little town who can configure an Apache .htaccess to only allow US IPs?

Re:You are being obtuse

[cdrguru]

The emails in question were on Yahoo which has no export function. I don't think there is a way other than forwarding them to get them off that service onto anything else. Except by printing them out. It obviously could have been printed to a PDF, that is the only export available.

Re:You are being obtuse

[GameboyRMH]

Connect via POP/IMAP and download using your client of choice?

No...

[d3ac0n]

It's known as "Abiding by the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law". "Skirting" a law involves finding a way to not have to obey it at all without strictly breaking it.

In this case, "skirting" would likely involve claiming some kind of executive privacy privilege that exempts them from having to release the emails. Much like Clinton did back in the '90's during the various scandals he went through.

Alaska's government has obeyed the letter of the law by releasing the emails. Nowhere in the law does it say that they have to release them in an easy to distribute format.

Besides that, it IS customary to release FOIA documents in hard copy form, so this isn't surprising.

Re:No...

[oh_my_080980980]

Except it is surprising to make people come and get the copies! FOIA requests are sent to the individuals who make them.

Moron

Re:No...

[tibit]

Alaska's government has obeyed the letter of the law by releasing the emails. Nowhere in the law does it say that they have to release them in an easy to distribute format.

While true, what you're saying is that they can be jerks simply because there's no law about that. This is what irks me real bad. What about simply being a good person to others and also not fucking away a ton of paper simply because "there's no law against it".

Besides that, it IS customary to release FOIA documents in hard copy form, so this isn't surprising.

Yeah, it's customary for those who do the releases to be jerks because it's legal for them to be so. I mean, how effed up has one to be to have to go through all the trouble on both ends. Do all government jobs turn people into uncaring jerks with excuses for every stupid thing?

Re:No...

[d3ac0n]

It's surprising to make people come and get a stack of paper 24,000 pages long? What, are they supposed to just drop that in the mail?

Don't be an idiot. They may be required to print it all out for FOIA, but that doesn't mean they have to waste even more money on shipping costs. Let the people requesting it bear that burden.

Re:No...

[cbiltcliffe]

Do all government jobs turn people into uncaring jerks with excuses for every stupid thing?

No. Uncaring jerks with excuses for every stupid thing are most qualified to work for government, and in most cases, are probably the only ones to apply for the job.

I can hear the conversation right now

[monoqlith]

Alaska official: Hey IT guy, we have 24,000 of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's archived e-mails. That's too many to be stored in electronic form, though, right?

IT guy: Uhm, why, no, not at all. I'm not sure if you know this, but e-mail is short for "electronic mail," and the Internet is also electronic. In fact, e-mail comes from the Internet. So the e-mails you are talking about are already electronic.

Alaska official: Right, but converting all of these would be impossible. There are waaaaay too many, right?

IT guy: No, actually. I could convert them to HTML or PDF format right now if you'd like, and we can post them to the state of Alaska web site immediately.

Alaska official: What I'm hearing from you is that it is possible but very, very, difficult.

IT guy: No, it's quite simple, really. I actually did it while you were saying that sentence.

Alaska official: You're fired.

Re:I can hear the conversation right now

[Wovel]

I imagine that is pretty close to what happened.

Re:I can hear the conversation right now

[alphatel]

Alaska official: You're fired.

IT guy: You can't fire me, I am Donald Trump, Palin's Pizza friend!

Re:The state claims?

[Americano]

Sorry, I'm never sure who to hate when posters don't use enough idiotic neologisms to express their outrage. It's hard to understand what you mean when you don't alter common words to make yourself sound clever or funny.

Could you restate your point and include references to "teabagging," "republicunts," "core-pirate greed," "the MAFIAA," "Micro$oft" and "Dubya" as well?

It does actually make sense

[nedlohs]

Sure, making life difficult for those asking is one motivation, but it's not as ridiculous as it seems.

The lawyers had to review it all. They will have done so by having it all printed out and then going over the resulting documents.

You can't now just use the original electronic versions since you risk adding back things the lawyers removed, and converting those pages back into electronic format would cost more money and time for the state. So use copies the paper documents that the lawyers spat out and call it done.

Sounds more like payment

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Someone has a friend in the printing business and awarded a contract as a political payment. Electronic files can't be used as payment to anyone.

Oh come on...

[AngryDeuce]

OBVIOUSLY they could easily put the emails out there electronically, they just chose not to because it makes it more difficult to go through the data.

Lawyers do this crap all the time, the other side submits a records request, the court orders it, all of a sudden 75 legal-sized boxes of records show up.

So what's the fuss?

[goffster]

The government of Alaska knows it will only add a day or so until world-wide circulation.
Now they can charge *per page* for the emails with
copyright restrictions perhaps?

Re:Giant Print Button

[MonsterTrimble]

Throw in $5 for Pizza Overhead for the kid.

'Pizza Overhead' is now on the list of Engineering costing extras. Much like Scotty's Rule of 4.

Slash dot posters are tools...

[inthealpine]

Like Palin or not you have to admit that the media goes way out of the way to try and destroy her. The media has been caught pushing many lies about her as though they are facts. The media does not give other politicians the same kind of scrutiny, not even close

This is Alaska's way of pissing the media off, making them jump through a few hoops before they start to unfairly and unevenly try to target her on the emails. The media are being asses, AK are being asses right back. Who cares.

Re:Slash dot posters are tools...

[onkelonkel]

Not being from your fine country I'm not really up on the minutia of Ms Palin vs the Media, but I remember her comment about "blood libel". It revealed a level of cluelessness of almost Zen-like purity. The media doesn't need to make stuff up if she keeps spouting stuff like that.

Re:Slash dot posters are tools...

[inthealpine]

Many other quotes from other politicians have used "blood libel" in the same context as Palin and there was not a blink. Scrutiny against Palin is 100 times more than any other politician. Having different standards and then a bias against her political party makes the whole situation look more like a witch hunt than news or the political process.

Really?!?

[Teufelsmuhle]

The most shocking part of this story is that Juneau, a state capital, is inaccessible by road or rail. Really? There's a state capital that can only be reached by air or water (other than Honolulu of course, but that's on an island)? Who knew?

Re:Really?!?

[Elder Entropist]

Juneau is also on an island.

Re:She's dumber than her voters

[Jason Levine]

You know those alignment systems with Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, etc? I've always pictured Bush as being Chaotic Neutral (or perhaps True Neutral) by himself. The problem was the people he surrounded himself with (*cough*Cheney*cough*) pushed his policies and actions towards Evil alignment. Palin, on the other hand, is Chaotic Evil from the get-go. You just know that any "President Palin" is not going to surround herself with advisors and staff members that temper her alignment. If anything, she'll surround herself with people that enhance her Chaotic Evil-ness.

And now that I've earned my geek reference points for the day...

Palin? Seriously.

[dugn]

Seems we'd have answers to a lot more questions if we could get a printed history of President Obama and his past.

Wonderful delayed Streisand effect

[cheros]

All the State of Alaska (no doubt in collaboration with Palin) will achieve is that there is now a solid determination to mine the data for any mud..

A load of BS to...

[TavisJohn]

Try to limit the distribution of the e-mails. It would require fewer resources to release the originals, but then everyone in the world could have full access to them in 24 hours or less.

So instead they print them out in the hopes that:
A) It will slow down the flow of Palin BS hitting the news.
B) That it will go unnoticed if a few e-mails are missing.

Illumination

[dcollins]

Now I see where Sarah Palin gets her sneering, snarky attitude from.

What they didnt say was...

[SuperCharlie]

Its only one letter per page..

Precedent...

[Alrescha]

"THE POLICE HAVE REQUESTED ALL FILES UNDER DIRECTORY TITLE RAND.
  'Dump it for them at 300 baud.'"

Niven and Pournelle, Oath of Fealty, 1982.

A.

Re:Obama's E-mails

[dkleinsc]

All presidential records will become public no more than 12 years after the president in question leaves office, according to the Presidential Records Act. So whether "the media" ever looks at Obama's emails, you'll be able to to your heart's content.

"Impractical" ...citation needed

[thwack328]

Where did the state say this? The word "impractical" appears nowhere in TFA. What they're doing is still absurd, but that's no reason to misquote them.

Re:"Impractical" ...citation needed

[Elder Entropist]

The state said it was not practical to provide electronic versions of the emails.

Unless you're being a complete tool, the phrases "not practical" and "impractical" can be considered the same thing.

Re:"Impractical" ...citation needed

[thwack328]

Wow... Not a tool, just incompetent at searching. Thanks for being informative and not too harsh. :)

Re:She's dumber than her voters

[DavidTC]

Bush wasn't dumb. He can't speak very well, and he is extremely incurious and let Cheney lead him around by the nose. But he's not stupid. He's probably above average, in fact.

That doesn't mean that he was smart enough to be president, which requires an incredibly intelligent person. In fact, he's exactly the wrong sort of person to manage anything, the sort of manager who will be lead around by his subordinates because he just doesn't care about what's going on. Which, on top of his speaking problem, makes him a rather...odd...person to have as president. But not 'stupid', per se.

With regard to Palin...she's a moron. Really stupid. I mean, those notes on her hand pretty much prove it.

Not because she had notes on her hand, I can see someone smart doing that...with actual notes. If she had the tax rate and unemployment in 1980 vs those in 1987 written there, if she had some obscure fact to pull out, it would be be a 'ha ha, she's pretending to remember obscure facts' moment. We'd laugh and discuss the ethics of 'cheating' on your 'prepared speech' time allocation by using your 'extemporaneous speech' time.

But because she couldn't remember basic Republican talking points. "Energy", "Budget^WTax Cuts" and "Lift American Spirits"?

Seriously? She couldn't remember to talk about energy? It's not like that's some obscure political concept.

She couldn't remember that she's in favor of budget^Wtax cuts? (Who here thinks crossing out 'budget' was hilariously meaningful WRT how Republicans behave? They say budget cuts, they mean tax cuts.)

And, finally, she couldn't remember the country she was in? Actually, that last line might be forgivable, if it was intended as a slogan she was supposed to get in. But, grammatically, it's a rather strange slogan. Logically, a slogan would be something like 'Lifting America's Spirits', or at least 'Lift American's Spirits'. There's not really such a thing as 'American Spirits', unless we're haunted or something.

The only reason to write a slogan down is to get it exactly right. I'm not going to complain about grammar on personal notes to oneself, that sentence is (grammatically) fine as a casual note, but it doesn't appear to have been a slogan.

Which means that, if it's just a note...she for some reason thought it important to write down 'American', like she might forget who she was talking to. Perhaps she was used to saying 'Alaskan'?

Seriously, Palin is a total idiot. I don't mean idiot in the 'I disagree with her' sense. I do, but that's not the issue. I disagree with a lot of the Republicans on pretty much everything, I think their beliefs and politics are stupid...but not them.

Palin is the only one I honestly think is just outright dumb. And strangely unprepared to be in the public eye, and she doesn't seem to be able to learn how to be in the public eye, which is why she refuses to actually give interviews.

Re:Palin? Seriously.

[geek2k5]

Apply it to all Presidents and Vice Presidents. Exclude issues of national security. This would be fair to all parties. If you wanted a greater degree of fairness, extend it to all state and federal officials.

Gotta Love The Alaskan Economy

[Zamphatta]

So the real news here is that the cost of paper, printer ink, & workers to reformat the data, add up to less than the cost of copy-n-pasting files or even attaching the files to an email.

For the Gander

[ThatsNotPudding]

And yet, if you try to pay a bill in with US legal tender in the form of pennies...

Re:For the Gander

[nospam007]

Try to post your tax-form as a binary printout of zeroes and ones, because "it's more practical".

probably redacted the paper copies

[Khashishi]

They figured it would be easier to print them out and go through them with a black marker than edit the text files.

Why now?

[slapout]

Why weren't all these new organizations clamoring to read the health care bill?

Poor Alaska

[lexsird]

I feel sorry for them, because these must be some whopper emails that will embarrass the entire State, and probably the entire country for making such a fuss about her. I imagine its going to be an epic wikileaks dump of some very funny stuff. It will be a hoot at first, then it will become sad, and at long last just fade into some mythic joke.

I am kind of sad this came out, I was hoping to see Sara and Hilary have a debate. Caribou Barbie vs Darth Hilary. /popcorn

How much are they hiding?

[Radtastic]

Paper format also makes it easier to hide anything that has been 'lost' in the printing-to-paper process.

paper for proper redacting?

[beanyk]

I thought the point of printing them out was to allow for effective redacting of sensitive information? I read recently that the Alaskan officials didn't think they could properly redact in the original electronic documents.

Of course, they could print out, redact with Sharpie, then rescan the page image to PDF (making it much larger than it should be, of course), but that last step is time-consuming.

(No, I haven't yet RTFA)

Re:paper for proper redacting?

[makubesu]

Don't be silly. It's ridiculously easy to redact electronically. Just highlight the sensitive text, and turn on strikethrough. If it's really sensitive, use a double strikethrough.

Wikileaks strikes back

[gnasher719]

Latest news: Anonymous activists broke into Alaska government offices, turned on a photo copier, and copied 24,000 pages of e-mails. They escaped using a fleet of 20 dogsleds.

Re:She's dumber than her voters

[s73v3r]

There's not really such a thing as 'American Spirits'

They're a brand of cigarettes which claim to be 'natural' and have no additional additives/ingredients other than tobacco.

Re:Obama's E-mails

[AkkarAnadyr]

Yeah, because the Palin-bots are so clever with the 'look-over-there-instead' gambit. No college perfesser type can withstand its subtle twist on the false equivalence fallacy. And it hasn't even been tried in other Internet forums than this one.

Now come back and say "Well, I'm no Sarah fan, but ...". That'll really suck 'em in.

Forgeries, you say?

[wfstanle]

While your comments about the Richelieu quote are basically correct there is a totally different issue at the heart of the matter.

A forgery in an electronic media can be easily detected. Even if there are not ways to prevent a forgery it can easily be detected by taking the alleged forgery and doing an electronic search through the 24,000 pages of the original disclosure to see if it can be found in it. If it can't be found, it probably is a forgery.

Now take the paper version of the original documents that they released. These are printed copies and probably use a generic print font. As such, a forgery using the same font can be produced. Yes, it will eventually be found to be a forgery, but by the time that mountain of printed documents is entirely read it will b e too late. The forgery will have time to take on a life of its own. That is the issue, it will take much more time to detect a forgery on paper than in an electronic document.

Re:Forgeries, you say?

[Moraelin]

Well, that's what I was saying too by the end of the message you reply to: make them available online and digitally signed, so it's easy to see that it's not been tampered with, and you can dismiss forgeries a lot easier. So we can really agree very quickly, what with both saying the same thing and all.

I could understand bandwidth.. but paper???

[Maxo-Texas]

Seriously- put them on a usb drive.
Give them to a news organization with bandwidth to distribute them.

Politics is local and tourism dollars

[northland5]

I live in Alaska and have on and off since 1983. Juneau became the capital back when Alaska was a territory and received 90% of its goods and services from Seattle via the sea. Hence the capital being close to Seattle and on the water. All that made since back on 1900 but ever since we became a state and our population began to grow the more centrally located Southcentral and the Interior parts of the state have eclipsed Juneau and its environs. Begin 50 years ago through today the pressure been mounting to move the capital to Anchorage or Fairbanks where the majority of people live and work. Palin escalated the conflict by refusing to move to the govenor's mansion in Juneau and deciding instead to live in Wasilla. This made Juneau even more paranoid about its future prospects as the capital. Juneau's future is in doubt as the polical and cultural center of the state and they know it. This is a purely calculated move to get dollars and attention funnelled to Juneau. Everyone who want's the Palin email archive needs to buy an airline ticket, stay in a hotel, eat at local restaurants, maybe see the sites (it's a beautiful place) and buy their own printed and bound copy of "the book". It's not a conspiracy to defraud justice (they don't much like her for the above mentioned mansion stunt) but a cold calculated move on cash. It's that simple.

Think about it this way, though

[Moraelin]

Think about it this way, though: wouldn't the best defense against that be to actually just comply and make those emails public, and cryptographically signed by a 3'rd party? I mean, if soneone is going to spin things out of context, they're just going to find something to spin out of context. It seems to me like being able to point at the context and have everyone able to check for themselves, is the best way to kill most people's belief in conspiracy theories.

the missing 2,000

[thetoadwarrior]

The 2,000 witheld ones are the ones actually written by Palin. The 24,000 were written by an aide why she played Deer Hunter all day.

Not very green, is it?

[torgis]

In this age of eco-awareness, someone needs to call them out on the fact that this is about the most environmentally unfriendly way to go about dealing with this issue.

Granted, I realize there's a lot of spite here and a desire to really thumb their noses at everyone who wants to get a look at these emails. But seriously? 24,000 pages of digital emails, printed to hard copy and packaged up, which then need to be picked up in person. That means that someone needs to fly to this place in the middle of nowhere, then (according to the article) either catch another plane or a friggin' boat to actually pick this stuff up. Then 24,000 pages of emails need to be transported back to whatever news organization bought them and, again wasting fuel and resources.

And that's per request. What's the carbon footprint of this idiocy?

Re:Obama's E-mails

[Required Snark]

The 5 million, or is it 22 million. missing Bush emails. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controversy

The Bush White House e-mail controversy surfaced in 2007, during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an e-mail server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act. Over 5 million e-mails may have been lost or deleted. Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove lost emails, leading to damaging allegations. In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been deleted.

So your are trying to defend Palin by attacking Obama for something that hasn't happened yet, given the 12 year release cycle (see the other previous reply). Meanwhile, in the real world, the previous administration blatantly broke the law to avoid political embarrassment and likely criminal proceedings. If you wanted an example of non-compliance, the Bush example has actual relevance: Palin complied, Bush didn't. This makes Palin look OK, so you would have made you nominal point, while being factual. However, if you used this example you would be explicitly criticizing someone on your political side of the fence, which you would never do.

Instead you used this as an excuse to attack the media and the Obama administration. I expect partisan politics on Slashdot, and that is fine as long as things make sense. Your post is ignorant and contra-factual. The only thing you have acomplished is showing that your political opinions are stupid.

The Trees

[Zomalaja]

Too many goddamn trees in Alaska, this will at least get rid of a few.

Insane in the Membrane...

[DarthVain]

Yes but reading those emails is like looking directly at the sun... with your brain.

Its a public service really keeping them from the light of day...

Exactly

[publiclurker]

Two faced hypocrisy is almost as much of a given from a teabagger as bigotry and willful ignorance.

Re:I certainly am glad to be Canadian

[Overzeetop]

Hey, don't look at us - you live right next door to those kooks in Alaska, we don't.

Re:The real bullshit should be

[Danse]

the unbelievable extent of which the press and many in media in general go to such extremes to get one person. They have spent more energy examining a failed candidate for Vice President than any other politician in history that I can recall. Reading across various blogs and so many hate filled people are nearly orgasmic over this release of documents.

What is it that gives people the feeling that there are no limits in character assassination? Where is the in depth research in the guy that got elected? You can't jack shit about him without being declared a racist yet you can attack a woman with impunity.

Seriously dude, get some perspective. More energy on her than any other? I'd love to hear your evidence for that. There's been tons of research into Obama. They just didn't find much of anything interesting to report, so the right mostly just makes things up (secret Muslim, friend to terrorists, not a US citizen, hates white people, radical socialist, etc.). Meanwhile he's been the most right-leaning Democrat any Republican could ever hope for. Their claims are ridiculous, but they scream about how he's trying to destroy America because it's what gets their base all fired up.

People lament all the time, if there were only a choice, if only we didn't have to vote for X or Y. Yet we get a group out there and candidates; and no I would never vote for her either; and all that seems to happen here is vilification to the nth degree.

and you wonder why we are stuck with the D and R on our ballots. Your being told to go ballistic and forgo any sense of human decency and your enjoying it. Keep up the goosestep.

She invites every bit of it. She takes actions to avoid accountability, like using outside email addresses. She goes public in every way she can figure out how to with all sorts of attacks on anything that isn't ultra-right-wing-conservative. She has few original thoughts, and no good ones, but manages to regurgitate talking points and say things that are either moronic or simply outright lies. I don't see any problem with vilifying that.

Re:Your tears are delicious

[Tetsujin]

Wahhhh my witch hunt isnt being made easy for me!

If the witch weren't on your team you'd probably accuse her (or her cronies) of obstructing justice...

Media doesn't know truth about Paul Revere's ride

[MillionthMonkey]

Ah, he, who warned the .uk suffix types that they weren't gonna be takin' away our headers, uh, by sendin' those packets and, um, makin' sure as he's sendin' his stateful ensembles through tubes, to send those warnin' packets each containin' a message body sayin' that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free!

Where's WikiLeaks North?

[reboot246]

Better yet, where's Obama's college records?

WikiLeaks won't touch that one I bet.