As readers know, last week CEI scored a final court victory on the FOI request for GMU’s emails in the RICO20 case. In the final days, while GMU was prepared to release the emails under court order, the ringleader, Edward Maibach went off on his own and threw a volley of mud against the courtroom wall to see if anything would stick that would prevent the release. He failed miserably, and after just a couple of minutes hearing CEI’s counter-motion, directed that the emails be released “forthwith”.
The release consisted of boxes of paper that has the printed emails on them. This is a delaying tactic, one designed to make the petitioner jump through hoops to make former electronic documents electronic again so that they may be searchable. CEI had them scanned and has released them to me.
The result is one large PDF file of over 100 megabytes. There is a lot of information here, and thus it will benefit from a crowd sourced effort of examination, much as we did with the Climategate emails.
So here they are:
GMU-emails-20160527200127 (PDF 109 MB)
Note: if you can’t open/view this PDF, it probably has to do with your own computer not having enough memory, an updated PDF reader, etc.
UPDATE:
GOOD NEWS! Commenter “cbone” made a searchable version of the PDF using a text scanner.
searchable-gmu-emails-20160527200127 (PDF 65MB)
Those that read these are welcome to post comments/excerpts below.
UPDATE:
Tom Nelson finds this gem:
I’m surprised Trenberth didn’t go with 97%.
Here is another:
This one makes me laugh.
As someone who deal with e-discovery professionally (and this is what this document dump is — a dump of electronic documents reformatted on a paper), I can say with confidence, CEI should go back and ask for the documents in native format. That means the original EML or MSG files. At the VERY least the should have been produced in print-to-PDF if not native EML or MSG.
Why?
1) The law is on their side and the courts have slapped down those who try these stunts, but most are not aware of it. See:
Rule 34. Producing Documents, Electronically Stored Information, and Tangible Things, or Entering onto Land, for Inspection and Other Purposes
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_34
Rule 34.b.2.E:
(E) Producing the Documents or Electronically Stored Information. Unless otherwise stipulated or ordered by the court, these procedures apply to producing documents or electronically stored information:
(i) A party must produce documents as they are kept in the usual course of business or must organize and label them to correspond to the categories in the request;
(ii) If a request does not specify a form for producing electronically stored information, a party must produce it in a form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form or forms; and
(iii) A party need not produce the same electronically stored information in more than one form.
BACK TO BASICS: COURT ORDERS COMPLIANCE WITH RULE 34
http://www.ediscoverylaw.com/2014/10/back-to-basics-court-orders-compliance-with-rule-34/
‘Beginning its analysis, the Court explained that Rule 34 includes “two specific and separate requirements” aimed at preventing the problems associated with a “document dump”: First, “[a] party must produce documents as they are kept in the ordinary course of business or must organize and label them to correspond to the categories in the request.” Second, “[i]f a request does not specify a form for producing electronically stored information, a party must produce it in a form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form or forms. A party need not produce the same electronically stored information in more than one form.” ‘
2) If you get them in native format or print-to-pdf (both are satisfactory), the documents can be threaded to reconstruct conversations and near-dupe processed to reduce the amount of reading (repeated history, etc.). That is because all the meta data (sender, recipients, CCs, subjects, dates, etc.) can all be extracted and process reliably without OCR errors. Similarly all attachments will come over in native format and can also processed for near-dupes and de-dupes. This is impossible to do well from OCR of paper.
Google near-duplicate, email-threading and Equivio for more info, but here’s a start (and no I don’t work for equivio):
Near-Duplicates
http://www.equivio.com/technology.php?ID=36
Email Threads — Eliminate redundancy in email review.
http://www.equivio.com/technology.php?ID=37
Perhaps CEI’s lawyers weren’t aware of the finer points of e-discovery, but that’s not acceptable in 2015 when 90% of all documents in any litigation are electronic. So I suggest CEI double check with their lawyers and get an expert on e-discovery as co-counsel or advisor.
Going forward I think given the litigation going on this arena — with CEI and others, all should be more aware of this so their documents they get are far more useful. Google e-discovery to learn more.