Just imagine that everything you posted on Facebook were evaluated on the standard of a public official. Can you post pictures of your kids, talk to your old school friends, upload Led Zeppelin videos, without having these judged by some political correctness standard, left or right-wing? In the blurring age of social media, email is already outdated for its clunky administrative functionality. The difficulty separating nostalgic photos from politics are only going to get more difficult as communication technology pervades our lives.
So now turn to the ongoing discussion of William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin History professor, who criticized conservative lobbies and is now subject to the Republican Party's request to have his emails scanned for political content unbecoming of a public employee, Milwaukee conservative columnist, Patrick McIlheran, protests that it is wrong for liberals to object to such Freedom of Information Act requests. Conservatives are merely holding liberals to the same standards they deploy, so runs his argument, and indeed that is fair enough.
So now turn to the ongoing discussion of William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin History professor, who criticized conservative lobbies and is now subject to the Republican Party's request to have his emails scanned for political content unbecoming of a public employee, Milwaukee conservative columnist, Patrick McIlheran, protests that it is wrong for liberals to object to such Freedom of Information Act requests. Conservatives are merely holding liberals to the same standards they deploy, so runs his argument, and indeed that is fair enough.
The Freedom of Information Act serves to allow citizens insight into the operation of government officials and agencies.
The question remains was the request intended to intimidate Cronon into silence? For there is a huge difference between requesting that a secretive, powerful government agency reveal information, and combing through one person's emails. A similar problem arises when prosecutors try to use RICO statutes, originally intended to investigate secretive organizations like the mob, on other organizations, such as businesses. Corporations can act like mobsters, but the question remains whether it is fair and appropriate to use mob surveillance on businesses.
As my buddy Matt Grant (link at the sidebar) has argued, the lines dividing legitimate and illegitimate political activity become very unclear when you focus on an individual's opinion expressed in email versus fund-raising by a state legislator. The boundaries between scholarship, administrative planning and budgeting, conversation between friends, and public statements are often interlocking steps in the formulation of an argument. The tone of a statement to a friend may sound overtly political but that does not make it illegal under Wisconsin state law. You don't even have to reach for the sixties motto, "The personal is political," to understand that a single person can express many different meanings in a single email. When is his statement political, when is an expression of administrative worry, when is it an act of friendship between colleagues? In a government agency, these boundaries have to be respected, in the everyday life of a person they are not separated into administrative functions.
Thanks for starting this conversation--it's just the beginning; we'll have to keep continuing to think about this issue. With so many of us using social network sites to connect and exchange ideas and information, the 60s slogan will have to be revisited many times. Nice post.
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