They Want To Take A Michigander

Now a conservative think tank in the mitten wants to read professors' mail, to find out if they helped organize labor demonstrations in Wisconsin. I wonder what all these nosy parkers would do if public employees started using their personal e-mail accounts and computers.

The Conscience Of An Archivist

Historian Maarja Krusten, who stopped working at the National Archives in 1990, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for materials about a fateful 1989 meeting she attended to discuss Richard Nixon's White House records. The file contained a memo describing an interview that an agent of the agency's inspector general's office had conducted with a top NARA official to learn more about the meeting. NARA's FOIA team had blacked out the official's name. But Krusten noticed an error:

[T]hey overlooked the initials of the interviewee on the last page. I redacted it myself and informed NARA of the oversight. I’m probably one of the few, perhaps the only, recipient of FOIA released material who went in and further redacted the item.