The Purge: A Teaser and A Look Back
I should do my part in drumming up anticipation for Governor Perry's soon-to-be-released emails, since a blog journey of mine inadvertently motivated a Wisconsin-based open government crusader to "mess with Texas" last November.
One week's worth of Governor Rick Perry's office emails have been received by John Washburn in electronic format, just as requested. Of course, it cost him $611, which generous donors opened up their pockets to pay for, but soon, we'll all see what the Governor's office was sending, replying and forwarding during the first week of November, 2007. I'll let Washburn explain the files himself:
There were 1993 files occupying 233 MB. My first question is where are the other 3,000 to 6,000 emails the $568 dollars was supposedly paying for? The Governor's office estimated the emails for Friday November 2, 2007 to Monday, November 5, 2007 numbered between 5,000 and 8,000. Either the estimating process faulty or the Governor's office sent 3-6 thousand emails to the Office of the Attorney General for review as per this letter.This all started when Washburn caught the first entry of The Purge, a blog series in which I thought we could journey together to discover what our state's various offices do with the emails on their public computers. The Purge began by examining the Governor's office policy of deleting emails every seven days, because Missouri Governor Matt Blunt was taking heat for it from his Democratic challenger, Missouri AG Jay Nixon.I am currently sorting through the files to see if they are responsive and, if not, why not.
My initial impression is that the set is not very responsive because email attachments were stripped even though attachments were part of the PIR. Also this was considered an email and responsive. Yes, you saw correctly. A screen shot of various .MSG icons was considered the same as providing the emails contained in those .MSG files.
The most charitable description I can give is that these files (most are PDF versions of email text cut and pasted into an MS Word doc) is that the organization is chaotic.
BTW, just today, Blunt suddenly dropped out of the gubernatorial race against Nixon.
Washburn then took matters into his own hands; he blasted Perry's office with TPIA request after TPIA request twice a week, requesting all inter-office emails between Governor's office staff. Washburn became a cult hero to sunshine advocates around the country, thanks to reporting of his quest by Jay Root at the Star-Telegram, detailed coverage by Cody Garrett at The Texas Observer, radio stories by Ben Philpott at KUT, and eventually picked up as a national piece by the AP and "All Things Considered" on NPR.
Washburn doesn't have the money to pay for all the emails he requested, and he's still in a fight over the fact they cost so much in the first place. Washburn, a software developer, even created the code for a program for the Governor's office which would sort out office emails within the server so it wouldn't cost so much staff time to fulfill these sort of requests in the future.
See them soon.
