Isn't this kinda like extortion?

Perhaps if Sarah Palin doesn't want to be regarded as greedy trash and as a corrupt Republican hack, she should stop acting like it:

Sarah Palin's office has discovered a renewable resource to bring millions of dollars into Alaska's economy: the governor's e-mails.

The office of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has quoted prices as high as $15 million for copies of state e-mails requested by news organizations and citizens. No matter what the price, most of the e-mails of Palin, her senior staff and other state employees won't be made public until at least several weeks after the Nov. 4 presidential election, her office told msnbc.com on Thursday.

How did the cost reach $15 million? Let's look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor's husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer's time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for "security" checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that's $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.

First of all, why do they need a "programmer" to assemble e-mail? An Outlook or Lotus Notes administrator, maybe. And if we're talking about Palin's Yahoo mail account, there's really nothing that anyone they could hire could do about deleted mail on Yahoo's servers.

This is nothing other than a cynical attempt to use people's ignorance about technology as an excuse to extort money from the press for the Palins' personal coffers.

Of course if the State of Alaska uses AT&T as its internet provider, it should be easy to just ask the NSA for the records, since AT&T did their dirty work in sweeping up all its customers internet activity.