"as if a million alaskan trees cried out in terror...and were suddenly silenced..."

[acroyear]

State of Alaska Prints Out Palin's E-Mails; Online Distribution 'Impractical' - Slashdot:

"Three years after numerous citizens and news organizations requested the release of Sarah Palin's gubernatorial e-mails, the State of Alaska is finally making ready to make them available. In print. In Juneau. News organizations must fly or sail to Juneau and pick up the 24,000 page disclosure in person. The state claims it impractical to release the original electronic versions of the e-mails, so the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Mother Jones, ProPublica and MSNBC each plan to turn some or all of the printouts back into searchable, easily distributed electronic data. Thanks, Alaska."

"Impractical"? So you can't throw 'em up on a FTP site.  Fine.

1) that's what bittorrent was made for, and here's a legitimate use-case.

2) Anybody ever consider sneakernet?  (e.g., bits on plastic?)

No matter how big they are, there's no reason they can't just fit on a couple of dvd-roms or an 8gig flash drive. If she actually has more than 8 gig of email, I'll be stunned.

Comments

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Impractical:= we want to make it as difficult as possible for people to access and search. hence, we print.

This isn't an unusual tactic; some years ago I interviewed with a company where their entire business was taking boxes and boxes and boxes of printed discovery documents and scan/ocr/dbing them so that the requesting law firm could search them with actual effectivity.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

if you noticed, the 'post, the AP, and others are all pitching in to do this in chunks and sharing the results with each other.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

well, yes, but it's still an eff you if nothing else.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

I used to do work like that. In fact, it was one of those jobs where I met lonebear.

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Because e-mails that were created and sent in electronic form are too impractical to keep in electronic form to disseminate. Uh huh. Right.

Methinks the State of Alaska is thinking that they can do to media organizations what they like to do all the time: charge them inflated fees for copying and materials, in order to make a profit off of them. Otherwise, you could put 24,000 e-mails on an old 3.5 floppy disc.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

actually, i think its a CYA: make it difficult and expensive 'cause what's in them isn't exactly flattering to those she left behind.

Some government agencies have been doing the same for FOIA requests - making them paper-only, and huge, and charging thousands for distribution in an attempt to keep the little papers (things like Michigan Messenger) from being about to actually afford to get them. Unless the person's already a celebrity (e.g., Palin), the main media doesn't care enough, so real investigative reporting happens at these small papers and the government thinks they can price them out of their constitutional rights...

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

And, from tonight's news, at least some of the emails have been redacted. It's a lot safer to blank out stuff in paper than electronically, as long as you then destroy the original.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

I don't know, if you pdf something, redact in the PDF then print (not write) to a new PDF (forming a new PDF with the redaction in place) it isn't that expensive and should be fairly secure.

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the Dover, PA creationism/intelligent design case: the argument was that ID was not religion, but a legit scientific POV. This was defeated in part because the critical textbook was shown to be merely a variant of "creation science". This was done by looking at a version of the book's typesetting database, which had a poorly run find&replace. It was clear that the (author?, publisher?) had changed CS to ID in the text.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

ah, the brilliance of the cdesign proponentsists.