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How Private is your Wayne State Email?

This week’s blog is ‘ripped from the headlines’ (well, last week’s headlines, anyway). Most of you must have heard about recent FOIA requests from conservative/libertarian organizations to the University of Wisconsin, and, more recently, Wayne State. The requests were for email messages sent and/or received by faculty members at this university.
The Mackinac Center explained that

we thought a FOIA investigating professors’ emails on these subjects might demonstrate whether state officials should ask questions about this use of tax dollars for public universities. In the worst-case scenario, we knew these emails might suggest that the faculty had acted illegally, because certain political uses of university resources are prohibited by Michigan law.  http://www.mackinac.org/14863

Whatever one might feel about the motivations of the Mackinac Center, you may have been surprised to learn that your email is subject to FOIA requests. But, in fact, according to Michigan law, if you work at Wayne State, you are:

A state officer, employee, agency, department, division, bureau, board, commission, council, authority, or other body in the executive branch of the state government
Freedom Of Information Act, Act 442 of 1976, Section 2(d)(i)

Your email messages are a ‘public record’:

“Public record” means a writing prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by a public body in the performance of an official function, from the time it is created. Section 2(e)

And consequently

a person has a right to inspect, copy, or receive copies of the requested public record of the public body.  Section 3(1)

Now, those of us who have been using email for a long time (I have some email records saved in files going back to the late nineteen eighties) have long said that emails are not private. In fact, there used to be a an aphorism that you shouldn’t put anything in an email you didn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times. Or that you wouldn’t put on a postcard. The recent events simply illustrate this fact. Email is not secure, and it’s not private. If you want to communicate with someone privately, don’t use email.The technology is not secure, and, if you work for Wayne State, and use a Wayne State email account, you are not legally entitled to keep the messages private. (I should add that there are, in the FOIA law, exemptions for things that actually are private, such as personal communications, communications with your doctor and so on.)
Interestingly, in the case that started this debate, at the University of Wisconsin, the General Counsel of UW argued that political discussion with peers by faculty constituted privileged communications:

http://www.news.wisc.edu/19196
For an insightful discussion of all the issues, you can read my friend Tracy Mitrano’s blog on Inside Higher Ed:

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law_policy_and_it/the_cronon_case_part_i_law_policy_and_email

and

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law_policy_and_it/the_cronon_case_part_ii

Because it is quite irrelevant, I have not commented on any of the political issues touched on in this blog (for obvious reasons), but the facts are quite clear–your email belongs to the world.

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More cool ways to use Wayne Connect

My last post about Wayne Connect dealt with ways to use the powerful search engine capabilities to find anything anyone has ever sent you (or that you have ever sent to anyone else). This week’s post will deal with how to do things quickly.
There’s a variety of ways that people interact with their computers. Some are more mousy, others are more fingery. I tend to do a lot with the keyboard, reaching for the mouse only occasionally. Consequently, I really like keyboard shortcuts to do stuff. And Connect has lots of these, and they’re mostly very fast.
The keyboard shortcut I use the most is for moving messages to mailboxes. I keep a lot of my mail in mailboxes (it’s an old habit–in some senses you don’t need to do this if you are good at thinking of clever ways to search for things). For example, I set up a mailbox for every course I’m teaching, and put all correspondence with students about that course in there. Similarly, I subscribe to several linguistics listservs, and put any messages I want to keep in the relevant mailbox.
When the message is open on the screen you can go to the ‘Move’ icon:

Click it, then click on the relevant mailbox in the little box that pops up. If you have lots of mailboxes you’ll have to scroll down, which, of course, means lots of mousework. However, you can also type ‘m’, then the first letter or two of the relevant mailbox, which will probably highlight the one you want (if not, you’ll have to type more letters or move the cursor either with the mouse or with the arrows). For example, if I type m, ph, I get this:

Once the relevant mailbox is highlighted you can hit enter and it will move the message to the relevant place.

Other keyboard shortcuts that I use include ‘f’ for ‘forward’, ‘n’ to bring up a new message and one that I never remember, but would otherwise be pretty handy–switch between mail, calendar and address book with ‘g’ followed by ‘m’ for mail, ‘a’ for address book (contacts) and ‘c’ for calendar.

All of these shortcuts are listed on the ‘Preferences’ page. Click ‘preferences’, then ‘shortcuts’ on the menu on the left side.

My next blog on this topic will deal with filters and personas.