Want Palin's e-mails? That'll be $15 million

State employees overwhelmed
Since Palin was chosen by McCain, state employees have been overwhelmed by hundreds of public records requests sent to the governor's office and other agencies, said Kevin Brooks, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Administration. There's been no attempt to delay release of public records about the governor until after the election, he said. Many records requests have been fulfilled, forming the basis of news stories and online archives such as the one growing at governmentattic.org.

But e-mails have been much slower to emerge through the tight window of nine weeks from Palin's selection until the election.

"I've had my information technology folks working nights and weekends. These people are not doing their regular jobs anymore," Brooks said. "We used to get several records requests for e-mail in a week, or a month. Now it's literally hundreds and hundreds. It's gone exponentially off the charts."

After msnbc.com challenged apparent double billing, Brooks said he was going to try a new approach: assembling the e-mail files a single time, without charging requestors for that time. But that still leaves the search and copying costs.

"Hindsight is 20-20," Brooks said. "If we could do it over again, we would have loaded it all up and done these requests." Still today, he said he was not considering taking a more active approach, posting online for the public all of the governor's e-mails.

Brooks said he was also rethinking that rate of $73.87 an hour. That cost is not the actual salary of any particular employee. At that rate, an employee would be making about $144,000 a year. Instead, the state has been charging the public and news organizations the same rate that the state Enterprise Technology Services group charges other state departments, as a cost-shifting mechanism on state budget forms.

Alaska law does allow the state to charge for an employee's time for recovery of records. Brooks said he thought the actual cost would be between $50 and $60 an hour, including benefits and a share of the department's overhead costs.

As for the estimate of up to five hours to search e-mail for a single word or phrase, Brooks said he was just passing along the estimate from the technical staff.

‘A heckuva lot’ of data
"Why five hours? I've asked repeatedly, and that's what they say it will take," Brooks said. "We're talking about 5 terabytes of compressed data. I don't know what a terabyte is. I just know it's a heckuva lot."

Brooks said the state has Outlook on the desktop computers of employees, and that a search of those e-mails would take only a few seconds. But he said most e-mails are on journal servers, which hold e-mail for many employees, and that older or deleted messages might be on archival servers. "The point is we have three sources. We pull from those three and download to a storage device we can search. The process is not simple."

The courts have given the Palin administration a nudge toward open records. A state judge ruled this week that the state must retrieve public e-mails sent between state accounts and the private e-mail accounts used by the governor and other state employees.

Having a private e-mail account, by itself, is not unusual or unethical, because state employees are forbidden to carry out political activities on government accounts. That's the reason given for Palin's habit of punching away on two separate Blackberry devices. But a citizen request earlier this year yielded hundreds of heavily redacted e-mails from the governor's office, which suggested that Palin and her staff had chosen to move most of their government conversations off the radar, to their Yahoo accounts. News reports then led to public curiosity and the hacking of one of Palin's Yahoo accounts, for which a college student in Tennessee, the son of a Democratic legislator, has been indicted.

Brooks said the state doesn't know yet how much e-mail it can recover from Yahoo, in cases where one state employee on a personal account e-mailed another on a personal account.

But the state probably can recover e-mails sent between government and personal e-mail accounts, he said. At least 18 public records requests have been filed for some or all of those e-mails. The requestors include Mother Jones magazine, the AP, NBC, the Anchorage Daily News, the Juneau Empire, msnbc.com, CNN, the Alaska Democratic Party, and several citizens, including Andree McLeod, whose request for the Yahoo e-mails was upheld by the court. Msnbc.com, for example, sought all e-mails sent or received by the governor and a dozen top aides between their state accounts and the personal e-mail accounts of themselves and others. The request included e-mail sent to Palin's husband, Todd, who has been active in policy and political discussions. The state quoted a price of $11,000 for all the e-mails sought by msnbc.com, which apparently won't be available until after the election.

To respond to those requests, the state is pulling together all the e-mails sent or received by  51 employees, including Palin, her senior staff, members of the Cabinet, the governor's assistants and schedulers, and key staff involved with the pipeline proposed to bring natural gas from Alaska's North Slope, the governor's office said Thursday. It sought the attorney general's approval to delay the search of the e-mails until mid-November. Later Thursday, the attorney general, Talis J. Colberg, sent the requestors a letter offering them a chance to be heard before he rules on that request.

'The hottest thing right now'
Many states have had battles with news organizations and citizens over the fees charged for access to the public's records, particularly for electronic records such as e-mails.

News organizations have often claimed that the fees are used as a tollbooth to discourage requests, and that requests are delayed until interest in a public issue or candidate has long passed.

Federal law is more favorable. The federal Freedom of Information Act will change in January to penalize agencies for delay. After January, if an agency takes more than 20 days to respond to a request, it can't charge any search fees to individual requestors.

Nationally, access to e-mails of government employees "is the hottest thing right now in open government," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that helps journalists obtain public records. "Most judges are interpreting the laws that if you use your private e-mail for state business, that's a public record.

"Many public officials thought e-mail was more like a phone call, but it's more like a letter. You type those words, those are like documents. It doesn't matter if you used a piece of paper from your home or stationery from your office. The form doesn't matter."

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