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Using the Open Records Law To Intimidate Critics
Layzej writes "On March 15, Professor Bill Cronon posted his first blog. The subject was the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council in influencing recent legislation in Wisconsin and across the country. Less than two days later, his university received a communication formally requesting under the state's Open Records Law copies of all emails he sent or received pertaining to matters raised in the blog. Remarkably, the request was sent to the university's legal office by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, with no effort to obscure the political motivations behind it. In a recent editorial, the New York Times notes that demanding copies of e-mails and other documents is the latest technique used politically to silence critics."
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons. Otherwise you end up with the inevitable, "It's only OK to request records for a cause advantaging the sufficiently powerful." It's the listener flip side to declaring freedom of speech then listing a million forms of speech which don't really count as speech.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant. Everyone should be able to engage in all these things, and life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
This means that any open records law must be limited in application to specific people in specific roles which affect the public: legislative, executive or judicial. In particular, those representatives directly elected or those appointed by such representatives should expect to have all their correspondence scrutinised.
Exceptions may only exist when the exception is required to protect the well-being of a private citizen, and they must exist for only as long as that protection is required. For example, correspondence relating to a police investigation would not be appropriate to reveal until the investigation and any judicial wheel-turning is complete, but should be available for perusal after that unless certain private witnesses need protecting. If the witness-protection justification is used, it must be well documented so that, after the natural death of the witness (or as appropriate), records can be revealed and our descendants can study our performance and learn from it.
Remember also that, while today we think that we have an impossible mound of bureauratic record-keeping, in 100 years time computer systems may be able to intelligently search and analyse more text than we have ever created.
Alas, the most corrupt will communicate off the record anyway.
The FOI is perfectly legal,
Except the cases in which is illegal.
TFA:
Let me offer just a few concrete examples.
A number of the emails caught in the net of Mr. Thompson’s open records request are messages between myself and my students. All thus fall within the purview of the Family Educational Right to Privacy Act (FERPA, sometimes known as the “Buckley Amendment,” named for its author Senator James Buckley—the brother of conservative intellectual William F. Buckley). The Buckley Amendment makes it illegal for colleges or universities to release student records without the permission of those students, [...]
Many more of the emails that would be released under this open records request are communications with colleagues of mine at other institutions about various matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with Wisconsin politics or the official business of the University of Wisconsin-Madison—but they do involve academic work that typically assumes a significant degree of privacy and confidentiality. [...]The emails include, for instance, conversations with authors and editors about book manuscripts, and also the deliberations of two professional boards on which I sit, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the American Historical Association (AHA), the latter of which I now serve as President-Elect. Online email exchanges among members of these boards are expected to be confidential, so that all of us are admonished not to share each other’s emails lest doing so discourage colleagues from being candid in sharing their views.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
He is NOT a public employee; he is an employee of a university which (more often than not depending on the state) is a separate legal entity.
Just because an organization receives government funding does not make them a government agency.
Also, if what you say were true, then every book written by a professor would be in the public domain.
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Er... The media is supposed to be liberal, isn't it? So the fairness doctrine, rather than silencing conservatives, should ensure they have a voice in the public debate, despite the media's liberal bias.
I remember the post-Vietnam era when "conservative" was a dirty word. Broadcasters, whatever their political position, didn't want to present unpopular positions associated with Vietnam and Watergate, so the only place you heard conservatives was on fairness doctrine mandated segments. I remember a number of local conservative radio personalities that I first heard giving their opinions in one of those times set aside for crackpots under the fairness doctrine. These segments were pretty amateurish affairs; the stations didn't have to help these guys with production values, but these guys learned. The fairness launched some conservative media careers that later proved to be influential.
Having to present opposing opinions doesn't mean you are silenced, unless your position is so weak that merely hearing an opposing viewpoint will obliterate it in your audience's mind. In the old days in which conservatives had to scrape fairness doctrine time to be heard, they didn't get anything like parity in time; they just got a few minutes now and then preceded by a disclaimer that the station had nothing to do with this nut. The fairness doctrine didn't sweep away the editorial power of the stations. It did keep opposition to the public's prevailing political mood alive.
Conservatives have done very well by the fairness doctrine, but now that the shoe is on the other foot they've discovered a whole new set of libertarian principles they didn't have when they needed the fairness doctrine to keep their viewpoint from being silenced.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think the proper comparison is to the letters that the police and fire fighters' unions sent to business that contributed to Governor Walker's campaign in last year's election that contained veiled threats if those businesses failed to publicly express opposition to the budget bill that Wisconsin just passed. There is also the cases of Democratic Party affiliated groups using the open records laws to gather the information of people who signed petitions for referendum they opposed and then protesting at those individual's businesses and/or place of employment.
I find it interesting that until the Republican Party starts to use Open Records laws in this way, no one expresses much concern over Democratic Party affiliated groups doing the same thing.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Apparently the new 'in' thing for fascists is to use the freedom of information act to obtain emails sent by their critics about them. Apparently, academic freedom seems to be dissolving. I don't understand how the freedom of information act can be used to invade the private transactions of professors, but it has happened several times over the last year or so, and has been entirely perpetrated by the increasingly more rabid conservative undertow in this nation, not all conservatives, but a specific group of highly politically (as opposed to socially or morally) motivated people. I had the displeasure of hearing what conservative talk radio sounds like these days while I was driving through the highly conservative '3-corners' region of Missouri (i.e. Limbaugh's homeland), and it is astoundingly racial charged and disturbingly desperate and angry. These people are truly scary, and we really should keep our eyes peeled (as intelligent and reasonable people) for the horrible emerging attitudes in this country. If you asked an average German citizen about their attitudes on putting Jewish people in ovens in 1938, it is likely they would think you were crazy. And if you asked them what National Socialism meant, they would say it had something to do with purity and sexual abstinence, the words like 'Jew' or 'camp' likely would have never come up. No to compare these people to Nazi's, but it illustrates how quickly the most infamous act of hatred in human history can emerge from the consent of a naive population. I guess, ultimately, I am trying to say, that it is our job as being vigilant and morally informed people to see things like McCarthyism and National Socialism before it becomes a problem.
The only people I've ever heard talk about reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine are Republicans and their shills. It's especially been a talk radio talking point, and used repeatedly as a scaremongering tactic. I listen to Neal Boortz now and then, and I've heard him constantly harping on how Democrats want to shut down talk radio. The only problem is, I never hear any Democrats actually try to shut down talk radio. It's just a fabrication, another conservative scaremongering tactic just like all the others.
It's simply not true. I'm about as liberal as they come, and I have exactly zero interest in shutting down or changing talk radio. I mean, sure, some liberal out there has probably mentioned the Fairness Doctrine at some point, but I'm pretty liberal myself and I have exactly zero interest in pushing any kind of law to change or shut down talk radio and I don't know of anyone who does. This clatter all probably rose because someone made an offhand comment, and conservatives saw a chance to jump in and try to scare the bejesus out of everyone, thinking that the big, bad liberals are trying to take away the First Amendment or some crap.
I normally don't post "Mod parent UP!" posts, but damn, what a day not to have mod points of my own. :( I'd also mod the OP down. "Insightful?" Politics sometimes being sleazy isn't particularly insightful, and the claim that Democrats tried to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine is an outright lie.
Professor Cronon did just that. It's not his personal correspondence that's at stake here.
His problem with the request is twofold:
1. It was clearly done in retaliation for his writing about the American Legislative Exchange Council, since what the request is looking for is information that could be taken out of context to portray him as a left-wing nutcase on the payroll of the unions that are opposing Scott Walker. He's not at all keen on attempts to create a chilling effect on free speech.
2. Much of his professional correspondence is expected to be confidential, such as conversations with students, working with colleagues on peer reviews of not-yet-published material, or work on the boards of professional organizations he belongs to. If he were working for a private company, he'd have confidentiality and trade secret laws to help protect that stuff.
I am officially gone from