Using the Open Records Law To Intimidate Critics 369
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."
Better to keep work life and home life separate (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:motivations (Score:4, Interesting)
> Alas, the most corrupt will communicate off the record anyway.
I'm afraid this is not a reliable assumption. I've seen such correspondence working with business partners, cleaning up after other departing partners. People are quite careless about where they keep their illicit documents, fiscal data, passwords, insider trading communications with people outside the company, and correspondence about job candidate evaluations that violate gender and racial and age bias regulations, etc. I was once asked to help retrieve email messages about an employee seeking an internal transfer, where the manager of the other department actually wrote that they did not want to get stuck with the employee's pension bills when they retired, and couldn't the employee be eased out before then. (After retrieving the email, I brought this to the corporate legal counsel: we cooperated to help educate the HR department that this was going on, that this was illegal, and to explain the costs of throwing out your most experienced people by surprise and leaving them _angry_ at you. The manager got released due to this and other issues, the manager's upset about my "unauthorized access" let the employee know what had happened despite my discretion, we wound up acknowledged by the rank and file of our partner's employees as being on _their_ side, and that transfer worked out very well for our partners and for us working with them.)
But people engaged in such casual corruption are notoriously careless about their record keeping, and their social correspondence can very much provide links to their activities. It can also lead to that nest of political troublemakers who are engaging in unwelcome but legal activity, such as starting a union, planning a skunkworks project, or are being approached by corporate recruiters. People often don't _plan_ to do illegal things. They do them as part of their ordinary lives, and forget (over time) that this is not acceptable behavior, or come to think of it as "how things are done". That's where an outside partner can be very handy, to help remind both partners of how they _should_ be done for reasons of safety, ethics, and profit.
Thank Scientology (Score:4, Interesting)
Email Privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the common mistakes at the heart of the matter:
"they do involve academic work that typically assumes a significant degree of privacy and confidentiality."
It strikes me nearly as tragedy that so many people see email as private and confidential. SMTP is unencrypted, most cloud services (gmail, hotmail, etc) are automatically reading every email that hits them, and I suspect the federal government either already has or soon will kick email out of the ever narrower sphere of "reasonable expectation of privacy" -- leaving it unprotected by the term "unreasonable" in The Fourth.
We (geeks, hackers, etc) did not make it easy enough for the plebs to encrypt their email, and did not make it common practice to do so. Now everybody uses postcards, even for their most intimate communications, and powerful entities get to read whatever they want.
Scarier: Give it a few more years, and I'd wager using encrypted communications will become reasonable cause for search and seizure, or used like removing the battery in a cell phone has been in court cases -- as evidence of foul intent. They won't have taken the freedoms of speech and association, we will have given them away.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not just Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
Its public info, frankly I'm glad that people are boycotting their businesses because they are bigots. I dont want to support any business which feels it has a right to say what I do when it affects only myself.
Thanks for the boycott list though, Ill doubly make sure I don't buy from any of those businesses.
Re:Nothing New Here... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Republicans have yet to figure out how to reach the younger demographic of net users
That's a symptom of the main problem, which is this distressing anti intellectual, anti science attitude that the Republican Party has embraced.
They won't inquire into the facts of matters. They won't listen to anyone who has, preferring instead to make accusations of bias, ulterior motives, corruption, and lack of patriotism when they can't simply ignore the pesky researchers. They shape policy in deliberate ignorance. They act as if science is a big hoax, a diabolically clever machine for manufacturing rationales and manipulating the public. They set up their own institutes to manufacture rationales they like, and think that is science, that they're just doing the same thing that the other guys do. The manipulators among them think Big Tobacco's "Doubt is our product" campaign against the dangers of smoking is a great model to follow, and the idiots are only too happy to embrace the conclusions uncritically. Scary.
In case you think that does not matter, that it all works out, consider the biggest blunder in recent times. I refer to the accusation that Iraq had WMDs. That was the excuse for the Iraq War, and it turned out to be wrong. The costs are more than money, which is itself extremely large, estimated to be at a minimum a staggering $3 trillion. The West lost a lot of credibility, strained a lot of friendships. All that isn't enough to bring us down, nowhere close, but we can't keep making mistakes like that. The Republicans are supposed to be the party of fiscal prudence, but when they were in power, they couldn't abandon fiscal sanity fast enough. This sudden new concern the Republicans have for the budget, after that financial disaster (note that it's far more than the bailout), looks like empty posturing, deserving of the most cynical view possible. Do the Republicans have any principles left, or have they sunk to the party of Greed and Ignorance?
The Democrats, despite their many faults (such as supporting ACTA), have seldom interfered with scientists.