A highly suspicious email subject
Are you a public employee of any kind—from a day care worker to a college professor? You could be vulnerable to broad open records requests from rightwing groups, as labor studies faculty at three Michigan campuses are
finding out:
A free enterprise think tank in Michigan -- backed by some of the biggest names in national conservative donor circles -- has made a broad public records request to at least three in-state universities with departments that specialize in the study of labor relations, seeking all their emails regarding the union battle in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, TPM has learned.
So, yes, the Koch brothers and the Waltons are paying to try to get any emails a bunch of college professors sent that mention Rachel Maddow or Scott Walker. As Chris Bowers wrote when the Wisconsin GOP went after Professor William Cronon's emails:
It's hard to conceptualize this as anything but an attempt by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to discredit all of their critics by looking for a couple of questionable emails in the personal files of one of their critics. Further, the request cuts against the spirit of transparency laws, which are intended to help relatively powerless individuals learn about the activities of very powerful organizations.
Hopefully, the universities, departments, and professors will fight this. But meanwhile, if I was a professor at a public university? I'd be doing two things: switching to Gmail so that if, after a prolonged legal battle, the Koch brothers got their hands on my university email account, they'd be getting a big load of nothing. And preparing my own open records requests, because it sure would be interesting to know what state legislators have been saying about the Mackinac Institute, the Koch brothers, and other corporate donors.