$15 million for Palin’s e-mails: Freedom of Information now anything but free
October 17, 2008 by William K. Wolfrum
Remember, if two consenting women marry, it’s a slippery slope until some guy marries a dung beetle. Having the Secret Service keep the media from reporting or charging $15 million for finding out what your leadership is doing? No threat there.
From MSNBC:
Want Palin’s e-mails? That’ll be $15 million
Sarah Palin’s office has discovered a renewable resource to bring millions of dollars into Alaska’s economy: the governor’s e-mails.
The office of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has quoted prices as high as $15 million for copies of state e-mails requested by news organizations and citizens. No matter what the price, most of the e-mails of Palin, her senior staff and other state employees won’t be made public until at least several weeks after the Nov. 4 presidential election, her office told msnbc.com on Thursday.
How did the cost reach $15 million? Let’s look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer’s time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for “security” checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that’s $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.
This brings us to another slippery slope: soon we’ll be referring to computer hackers as “Great American Patriots.”
–WKW
That’s total bullshit. A programmer is not even necessary.
A run of the mill incredibly average Network Admin should be able to pull that information off whatever email server is being used (probably MS Exchange) and copy it to a disk in under an hour.
If the request is for all email sent by the Governor of Alaska to a particular email address? That should be no problem at all.