Well, I would say that the response we had when Ms. Gretchen Hamel (Administrator!) emailed Letter arrived could be described amongst us “Techi Groksters” was a “really, you expect us to believe that this is difficult?”. After all, amongst us, we have a handful of degrees and upwards of 75 years of technical experience and several of us are the corporate experts in our areas for our respective companies. So, we’re asking the main technical guy of the State of NH – is this really that difficult?
Good evening, Commissioner,
Upon reading the rather sparse Letter from Ms. Hamel (April 27) concerning our Right To Know request concerning the website traffic Summarizations, we became technically puzzled. It is our hope that you would be able to address our concern and lack of understanding of the difficulty implied by Ms. Hamel’s Letter.
Our response to that is below, as well attached to this Letter in both WORD and OpenOffice formats.
Regard
– Skip
Skip Murphy for Steve Mac Donald and Ed Naile.
*****
April 30, 2012
To:
Stanley “Bill” Rogers, Commissioner, Department of Information Technology / CIO, State of New Hampshire
Re: April 30, 2012 Request for Records Pursuant to RSA 91-A – delay of response.
Dear Commissioner Rogers,
We are in receipt of the letter by Ms. Gretchen Hamel, Administrator of April 27, informing us that it was impossible to transfer the Internet URL Summarization records that we, as citizens of the State of New Hampshire, believe that we should have access to, especially under the aegis of RSA 91-A (the State’s Right To Know (“RTK”) law). From a technical standpoint, we are extremely puzzled over two issues:
- First, we included DES Commissioner Burack as a courtesy on this RTK simply as our first RTK dealt specifically with one of his employees abusing the Internet access afforded by your network and we requested those Summarization records specifically in that case. We accept the fact that in a case pertaining a single employee, we understand that these could be labeled as “responsive but exempt”.
- Secondly, our latest RTK concerned these Summarization records are in toto, thus not tied to any given employee or subgroup of employees and therefore, would fall into that category of “responsive but non-exempt”.
But more to point of fact, we are puzzled as to the “additional time is needed” in delivering records that taxpayer monies have already paid for and whose existence has already been confirmed by the State.. As a technical person (although we do recognize that you are, by dint of your title, a Political Appointee, and thus mired in politics which most engineers tolerate but abhor), you must realize that we understand how such records are obtainable in short order.
As primary examples:
- A simple flat file / text file is used as a log file by either your gateway router or your “web sensing” filter software. In this instance, all that is needed to copy this primary file to a secondary storage area (e.g., FTP site or a USB storage device (i.e., “thumb drive”). A relatively easy task to accomplish for your IT staff
- This might be complicated a bit in having your gateway router storing these records internally in conjunction with your filter software which would mean that a technical staff person would have to trigger those records out to an external storage device.
- We also recognize that instead of simple flat files, these Summarization records may be going to a SQL database of some type (e.g., MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle) or even a NoSQL database (e.g., Hadoop). In that case, one of these solutions (or a slight variation thereof) may be the technically correct course of action to follow:
- Doing a BACKUP up that database and sending it to us for subsequent RESTORE and analysis
- Issuing a SQL query to unload that data to a flat text file / data file.
- And of course, there is always the Windows standby of sending that data to a syslog / syslog server which extraction is a relatively easy process to accomplish.
Thus, given the very limited time needed to accomplish any of the above, we continue to be technically puzzled as to the delay related by Ms. Hamel. Given that the technical part of the request is of the “trivial” category of technical problems, that only leaves the other part of your position, which can be very convoluted and complex to puzzle out. We await your explanation.
We hope that the technical side will override the mere political side.
Kindest regards,
Skip Murphy
Gilford, NH
(For myself, Steve Mac Donald, and Ed Naile)
