duplicado
Only those who believe everything printed in the NYT and WaPo would be taken by surprise at that.
Glurge doesn’t mail itself
I don’t read anything in the NYT or WaPo, so I can’t comment as to its believability. I did watch the debate, though.
I guess the kid who ‘hacked’ her yahoo account was doing it for the ducets, the guy’s a millionare now!
Well, I came in here to post something along these lines, and was I pleasantly surprised to see this post. I agree with the basics but not the outcome. I think that $15 million is excessive for the volume we’re talking about, particularly given that the approach the government appears to be suggesting is the functional equivalent of leeches to cure cancer. But this is certainly a doable project, and frankly while it’s big, it’s not unmanageable.
In a volume this size, you certainly wouldn’t do it on paper; as ed suggests, you’d keep the documents in an e format, and have your team of lawyers review them on computer, marking them electronically. The responsive documents can then be tiffed, with redactions or without, for production.
If it’s too much to simply produce everything, you can target certain employees who are more likely to have responsive documents, and cut the list of employees down. (I presume the 16,000 employees includes everyone from the proverbial janitor on up; you don’t need all of them.) You can also run targeted searches through the entire database. Plus, once you’ve pulled down the data and indexed it, you don’t incur those costs again. You only incur the costs for review and redaction of documents, and once you’ve had a lawyer go through a particular document for privilege, you don’t need to review it for privilege again (it’s not like it’s going to all of a sudden become privileged.) So then it’s merely a responsiveness review and, again, you likely can do that easily through targeted searches. Or – and here’s a novel concept – since they’re all public documents, make them available to the public once they’ve been scrubbed of privilege.
So the $15 million is quite high as an estimate, like at Christmas when the store offers “free” gift wrapping, but then they tell you that they’re backed up so there’s a three hour wait in an attempt to dissuade you from availing yourself of the gift wrapping service. But that’s why god invented bars and movie theaters, people.
Bottom line, it’s bull and they ought to be called on it. Those are public documents and they shouldn’t be permitted to hide them from the public.
It’s Alaska though. You’d have to buy a lot of tubes to get the data from there to civilization.
I think Campion is on to something with the “free gift wrap” analogy. Take the $15M figure. According to the article in the OP:
They’re claiming that it will take their code monkey 96,000 hours to find all the email sent to Todd Palin. Then it will take a further 112,000 hours of sifting in order to make sure nothing “sensitive” gets sent to the press. (Nevermind the question of why state employees would be emailing the husband of the governor “sensitive” information in the first place.) That’s nearly 24 years worth of labor going into satisfying just one request. Of course, if you want it done anytime soon you’ll have to pay somebody overtime.
Kroll Ontrack has a whole division that does just this - and the price tag for a terabyte wouldn’t be anywhere near $15m. They can do it off of backup tapes.
I get the impression that what’s happening is that there is a good-faith estimate by a legitimate electronic discovery vendor lurking in here somewhere (the 960 bucks for a single account sounds pretty normal), and I wonder if Todd just ran with it by multiplying that amount by 16,000 accounts to make it sound bad.
Of course some companies specialize in processing large amounts of data, and while it would be considerably more than 960 bucks to do everything involved in this job, I can’t imagine it being anywhere near the 15 million amount.
As an aside - one way to deal with the cost of processing multiple access to info requests for public info such as this is to just publish it. The Canadian government saved a significant amount of resources spent on responding to constant requests from journalists and others for travel and other expense claims paid to government ministers by simply deciding to publish the info regularly on the Internet.
When it is all done, Palin will be a rich woman.
That’s about what it sounds like to me, too. I get the feeling they really don’t want people to know what they were sending, and this is just one more way of discouraging people from finding out. They’re allowed to charge a “reasonable” fee for processing; they’re basically saying “well, $15M is a reasonable fee. That’s what it costs.” and then hoping that the requestors decide that it’s not worth that and just give up without fighting the estimate. Honestly, finding all email sent to a single account should be easy. You have to sift through the data, but it shouldn’t take even 6 hours to find all messages sent to Mr. Palin. And even if it does take that long, it’s not 6 hours of your IT guy furiously writing code and running scripts, it’s 20 minutes of work followed by 6 hours of waiting for the data to transfer. And nothing in this process involves 4000 man hours.
They’re trying to get paid for this.
AP should geta rate quote from a few other states that have open records policies, and publish and compare the price estimates.
From what? The $15 million goes to the state, not to Palin.
Right, which is dumb, because the media is on a witch hunt for McCain/Palin tidbits right now.
Note that the $15 million is only for searching the emails, not for attorney review or production. So following the state’s methodology (which, as I said before, is about as antiquated as you can get), the actual cost for producing those emails would likely be about double.
Yes, it’s all a ruse, and not even a very clever one.
As I mentioned earlier, I work in IS for a small county government. I am not a Sys Admin and never have to work with backups and such. The closest I get to a server is when I have to reboot one or replace one.
We had such a request a few years ago. It was a pain and I think took about 2 weeks of work for one guy. I am not sure how far back the request went, but I will guess a few years. Say 2 grand of work, while his other work does not get done. Double it then.
IMHO, the 15 million is bullshit because they should just give the data to whomever has requested it.
Ya want to look for a needle in the haystack? Here ya go. Sort through it and find out that Palin has emailed her husband 50 times.
Ooooooo here is an unauthorized grocery list!
Done on the ‘peoples’ time!
I don’t like witch hunts.
I will be voting for Obama by the way, but I am very tired of this bullshit.
The government actually already does this sometimes, especially when they’re trying to hide something. “Records? We’ll give you records! Hahahahahahaha!” and then a geyser of tangentially related information opens up underneath the person and lifts them several hundred feet in the air and the PTB hope that no one will see the scrap of real dirt in the slew of trivia. For bonus points, release it on a Friday so the reporters won’t have time to read it and get a story in before the Sunday edition and you’ve just buried the story.
With electronic release it’s a bit easier to search through everything, but the real innovation is to distribute the search to interested parties. Then instead of one person slogging through 50,000 pages of dross you can have 100 people actually reading 50 pages. Or 1000 people poring over 5 pages.
The fact is that they’re not looking for grocery lists. Take the AP request for all email sent to Todd Palin. The man has no standing in the government. He doesn’t hold an office and he isn’t employed by the state. But he was apparently working, off the books and outside of oversight, for the state anyway. Alaskan law says that those emails are public, and the public has a right to see them if they want. It’s part of the price you pay for open government–well, openish government.
I don’t think for one minute “The Dude” was working for the state of Alaska. I believe he was working solely for Sarah Palin using the resources of the state of Alaska. I think this should be investigated.