FOIA Coordinator by Edward Vielmetti

Reading's Sarah Palin's email - follow #sarahpalin

If ever there was an argument for using a no email strategy for conducting your political life, this is it.

Several media organizations are live-blogging Sarah Palin's inbox.  I have been reading through The Guardian's coverage of this FOIA request and its 20,000 plus responsive documents, many with considerable redaction. The Los Angeles Times Data Desk is handling their coverage and working on a searchable archive. The MSNBC site's mail archive presents a search box. The New York Times has an email browser.

Follow the tag #sarahpalin on Twitter; there's sure to be something interesting unearthed, and certain to be insights into the process of redaction and unredaction along the way. Also follow @gdnpalin which is chronicling The Guardian's 25 page per minute digitization project which will take most of a day out of some poor soul's life.

 

Alaska: Gov. Palin emails to be released, with redactions

Electronic mail is perhaps the worst possible record to redact, because it's so likely to have information in it that is subject to exemptions but where you might have to examine each record in detail to determine what's there.

In Alaska, the state is preparing to release 24,000 pages of Gov. Sarah Palin's electronic mail - heavily redacted, of course: From the story from the Anchorage Daily News:

Perez said emails were redacted and withheld based on the right to privacy afforded by the state constitution as well as legal justifications established in court cases over Alaska public records law. That includes attorney-client privilege and the state's right to withhold records considered "deliberative process," meaning internal discussions of policy that happen before a decision is made.

Perez said the state will provide a "privilege log" that describes the reason each of the records was withheld or redacted....

The state says it is providing printed copies because it doesn't have the software to electronically redact information from emails.

The pattern here is straightforward. The request is for a lot of email; it takes a long time to compile a response; the copies are bulky and on paper, with lots of Sharpie applied for redaction; and any metadata in the files and all of the digital originals are turned into paper as the response.

Pennsylvania: Can you ask for the governor's calendar?

In Scolforo v Corbett, a reporter sued and won the right to access the official calendar of the sitting Governor of Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett.

In response, lawyers for the governor are advising staff to regularly purge their calendars of personal information.

Laws vary state by state, but in many circumstances there are routine FOIA exemptions for "items of a personal nature" (Michigan (1)(a)); that should result in any request for a calendar being redactable after the fact. You might always wonder whether someone purging items from their calendar after the meetings have happened would get a bit overzealous in the effort.

Michigan supreme court won't hear Howell teacher email case

The AP story on the Howell schools email case, via NECN:

HOWELL, Mich. (AP) — The Michigan Supreme Court won't take an appeal in a dispute over whether e-mail is public if written on a school computer.

The state appeals court has ruled that e-mail written on Howell computers by members of the teachers' union is not public. The Supreme Court refused to take the case in a 4-3 decision released Thursday. Conservative justices wanted to hear it.

 The Mackinac Center weighs in

“A Supreme Court hearing in this case is vital,” Wright observed. “Just consider what the Court of Appeals’ ruling condoned. It effectively said that a school employee can sign onto a school district computer system provided at public expense, read a warning that clearly states that anything on the system can be monitored and copied, and then go to court to prevent e-mails written and sent on that system from being reviewed by citizens who are concerned that the employee used the e-mails to break the law. This is awful. Illegal activity by public officials using public resources is precisely what the Freedom of Information Act was meant to expose. The ruling will severely hinder reporters and citizen activists in their role as government watchdogs.”

More from the Lansing State Journal, noting the court's direction to the legislature:

In 2008, a Circuit Court judge favored releasing the e-mails, but the appeals court overturned that decision, concluding that "personal e-mails were not rendered public records solely because they were captured in a public body's e-mail system's digital memory."

In addition, the appeals court said the issue in the case is "one that must be resolved by the Legislature, and we call upon the Legislature to address it."

FOIA access to teacher email was also a key point in a case in Wisconsin, with a similar ruling.