Request for email metadata (Office of the Governor - California)

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the California Public Records Act, I hereby request the following records:

For all non-personal emails accounts in use by the governor and its staff, please provide me the following information for all emails sent and received between March 5 2018 and March 9, 2018.

1. From address
2. To address
3. bcc addresses
4. cc addresses
5. Time
6. Date

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 10 calendar days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Matt Chapman

Hi -

While I understand why this request is considered to be overly broad, I would like to ask for reconsideration, as there are many steps that can be taken to reduce the burden - particularly because this request is not a request for email contents - only each email's metadata. The review process should be treated as such.

The information that I am requesting can easily be thrown into an excel spreadsheet (or MSAccess, or SQL), which can be used to find unique email addresses for review and/or redaction. If needed, I can provide you with an excel spreadsheet that does exactly that, which includes functionality to redact sensitive email addresses. By removing duplicate email addresses during review, and through similar methods, the review time should take significantly less time.

Anecdotally, the City of Seattle made a similar claim sometime last year, where they claimed that a similar request would cost >30 million dollars and 300 years of effort. After some recommendations and persistence, they eventually agreed that the cost was less than $50.00.

Please let me know if you would also like any technical documentation for this request - there are many sources of information that provide simple forensic analysis methods to acquire this information. I believe that those methods would still fall under use of California's Public Records laws.

I'm still uncertain why a spreadsheet could not be used to segregate the requested information. In a separate communication, I sent an example of a spreadsheet that can be used (or as a reference of possibility) in the review process to segregate the information. There is no need for a custom software application to be written. As such, the level of burden that you suggest should be revisited.

Has this request been sent to your IT department? They should be able to review my request and confirm that what I am requesting is not only possible, but significantly less burdensome than what your office is currently assuming.