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: "Death by a Thousand FOIAs", WSJ 2009 column on Sarah Palin

With the release of Sarah Palin's electronic mail from her tenure as governor of Alaska nearing, it's worth rereading this 2009 piece by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal on "Why Palin Quit". Emphasis added, which frames intense interest in the workings of public office as abusive political targeting:

This situation developed because Alaska's transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin's use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

Note that the "bureaucratic quagmire" is not triggered by the actions of an individual requester who is doing anything out of the ordinary in requesting public records, but rather from a mass action in which numerous individuals and organizations all ask for something slightly different but perfectly reasonable at about the same time. Bureaucratic budgets that work at the speed of government are ill-equipped in general to respond to a sudden burst of need, especially when that need is internally focused.

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.