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| Could the released e-mails look like this? |
The state is about to release more than 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails from her time as governor. But officials are also going to withhold another 2,415 pages the state deems privileged, personal or otherwise exempt from Alaska's disclosure laws.
Each of those who requested the documents will be required to pay $725.97 in copying fees. They'll also have to pay hundreds of dollars more for the state to ship them what's expected to be about five boxes of copied emails, the boxes weighing about 55 pounds apiece.
The state says it is providing printed copies because it doesn't have the software to electronically redact information from emails.
I suppose they've never heard of scanners and don't know how to make a pdf. Instead of copying the whole lot for each entity that requested the e-mails, they could have scanned them once, put them on pdfs and hey, presto!
But then they couldn't have charged over $700 from each of these nosy people...
Am I being naive? Was providing five heavy boxes of hard copies the only way to comply with the requests?
No wonder it took nearly three years to produce these e-mails. The copying and collating is done almost automatically (if they have modern machines, that is), then they had to put them in boxes, label them, take them to the post office, etc. But I suspect most of the looong time involved had something to do with running to the shops to buy more sharpies.
