The point does not stand. The 15 minute comment wasn’t even hyperbole, it was sheer ignorance. The point is further fatally flawed by your sneering celebration of the aforementioned ignorance. As I said, you’re probably looking at at least an hour of work, for each person in the office. Plus the time of whoever is going to compile, sort, and double-check. Every email over the space of 4 days.

As I recall, there were about 50 employees in the GO when I was supporting them. 1200/50 = $24/hr. For the first hour alone. That’s not counting the lawyer you’ll have doing the sorting. You start adding that up, and $1200 isn’t by any means “making a profit”. Even if there are a few less, an average pay of $24/hr (remember, that’s the average compensation – do you think that sounds reasonable for an average wage across that office?) When I was there, well more than 1/2 the office would be making a lot more than that. Ok. Presume that the lowest paid admin assistants (who are probably at least at $20/hr) do it. That leaves you what for the lawers?

It might be slightly high, or low, but my first eyeball and estimation would label that as reasonable. (Actually, as I said, low.) Your “hyperbole” demonstrates that you do not have a handle on what the request would take. Sneering further at me hardly demonstrates any better judgement.

As to the technology between then and now, no, there hasn’t been a lot of *substantiative* difference. I don’t remember when we upgraded their post office, but they were running a centralized database-backended , secure email system. At some point, we upgraded them off of the main Pentium – with the floating point error, no less! – running Novell 3.12 to the NetFRAME running 4.10. And now to Pentium 4 servers (so I hear). MCA to PCI-X. We were running IPX for the Novell server, now it would all be wrapped in IP. Wait, IP is older than NetBIOS, for the Windows servers they’re using now… Newer! .. Right? (We could have encapsulated IPX with IP back then. But it was a lot of trouble.)

But the *technology* is hardly changed. Not from a gross perspective. Still client-server, still centralized email, stored in a database format. They’ve since degraded it to the industry-leading (in headaches) email backend. That too was around in 97 and 98. Sure, minor upgrades. But nothing like the quantum leap you’d be hypothesising. *Web* technology *has* progressed greatly in some ways. But we’re talking *e-mail*. The email in the office then is different only in cosmetic appearance.

I’d say trust me on this, but if personal experience, demonstrated fact, basic math and Econ 101 hasn’t made that point, I’d say it’s a forlorn hope.

Al Gore had barely invented the Internet tubes in 1997 and absolutely nothing about the Web then is reflected in today’s technology. Especially not with e-mail. As a “Unix Jedi” or e-mail guru or whatever you are, you of all people should know that.

Obviously the 15 minute remark was hyperbole, but the point still stands. The governor’s office cannot legally try to make a profit from FOIA requests. And they certainly cannot jack the price in an attempt to deter people.

The point of the request might well be for that. But the comment that it’s a 15 minute job is ludicrous.

Nor is it easy to set up a system to do that – when I specced it, probably in 97 or 98, we were looking at – at least – $15M. For the setup. And $3-5M per year. And my estimate on the growth was low. (as I can state definitively now). Even after you had that set up, the access controls are hardly trivial. (And that presumes that my solution would have worked as well as I think it would have, but more importantly, the size of that project would have taken it into bidding territory, and I’ve never seen one of those projects work. Check out child support enforcement and that boondoggle if you need to know more.)

Most records requests are cheap, they’re just subsidized, and most people don’t see the true cost. Knowing the amount of time it would take to undertake something like this lets you see that $1200 isn’t that high of an estimate. I too worry about the problem with making it expensive to examine records (but “all email?”), but the solution cannot ignore the total *real* cost.

I think the point of this request is to highlight the fact that despite the claim that all public records are accessible, the systems in place actually place records out of reach of all but the deepest pockets. There is an internal storage/processing problem if records are only ‘open’ at such a high cost in time, labor and dollars.

My .02

I am sure the nesxt Governor of SC will be a Democrat and more responsive to the people.

And a red state(SC) is getting ready to turn black and blue because Obama is the next POTUS.

State Senator Brad Hutto says he is filing legislation that calls for an investigation of Governor Mark Sanford’s involvement in the sale of a port land near Beaufort.

Hutto told the Senate on Wednesday that an investigation is the only way to get answers to questions about Sanford’s involvement in selling the valuable waterfront Port Royal property.

Sanford’s office has said it would welcome an impartial investigation.

http://www.wtoc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7934261

Speaking as someone who a few years back was in charge of that same mail system – that’s *not* a simple operation.

It’s certainly not 15 minutes of my time – and I’m a damn good tech.

Nor would it be a complete response when I was done – the nature of email is such that there’s no mechanism for preserving it like other records. Trust me. I went around with Archives about this for quite some time as to what it would require to “trap” all email and make it searchable.

It wasn’t chump change, and it was more than every IT budget in S.C. State Government at that time.

$1200 is a bargain.

Not only would every email have to be vetted (quite a few would not fall within FOIA guidelines), you’d have to have a method of actually pulling them, vetting them – and trust me – The Governor’s Office isn’t going to let some tech read through all their mail. This would require a tech to (somehow) (I could tell you how I’d have done it, and it wouldn’t have been simple, easy, or cheap, but they’ve since changed email systems (making this even harder)) pull the mail, someone to vet the mail and then save it somewhere for archiving.

The more practical matter would be to issue a directive to everyone in the Governor’s office to read the mail from those days, and to forward anything not excluded from FOIA to a common mailbox, and then pass it along. 4 days of mail, everybody in the office.

(I’m not trying to defend Sanford here – don’t know him. But that’s not a reasonable request, and if you didn’t charge for that time, I’d guess easily an hour each – presuming the email you’d be looking for would be still available and not deleted or purged – then you could utterly shut down the Governor’s office with similar requests. Which has its own set of benefits, but be honest about your motives.