A university is an ISP for students and faculty and university email accounts are little different than for-profit ISP email accounts.

Most universities have a privacy policy that protects the contents of the email of students and faculty and only allows viewing of contents for reasons similar to why an ISP would be allowed to view customers' email, like in compliance with a court order. Students, professors, and people who send them email have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

And, in this case, it is irrelevant. If something is subject to the FOIA or the State equivalent, it is going to be subject to disclosure regardless of whether it was sent from a personal or government email account. Likewise, if something is not subject to the FOIA, then it will not be subject regardless of whether it was sent from a personal or government account.

Privileged information is privileged information and public information is public information. The email account used is irrelevant. Most universities hold their faculty and students responsible for policing their own email.

No, national security letters are just used to investigate. In the US, the first amendment protects you if you publish classified information so long as you were not the one with privileged access and you do not impede the investigation into how the information was leaked.

See: Pentagon Papers.

Don't get me wrong, the US is not perfect, but it is one of the few western democracies that does not have hate speech laws or a state secret's act.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

The Ivy League was basically a formal gentleman's agreement (you know, back from the good old days where they banned women and blacks from campus and had strict quotas on Jews) that they would mutually agree to be terrible at sports in order to maintain high academic standards.

Everyone who attends an Ivy League school to play sports is someone who would have been a serious consideration for admission without their athletic ability.

. . . then impersonating a public official is not going to either. The Supreme Court basically ruled that you can outright lie about serving in the military because that is your first amendment right.

Now if someone is trying to lie about being a public official to get into a restricted area or hell, lying about being a veteran to get a free lunch at Denny's on Memorial Day, that might be a crime, but this guy defrauded nobody.

The best case scenario for the mayor is a civil lawsuit for libel, but it is so blatantly obviously a parody account that it would just be a waste of everyone's money. But why use your own money to sue someone when you can send the police to unconstitutionally harass them?

Pretty much ANY research he is doing is proprietary unless the university is funding it or has specific rules about research while on the faculty, in which case, it is proprietary research subject to the rules of the university.

A professor's primary job is to teach. Research is an opportunity he is afforded to pursue as it makes him a better instructor and brings prestige and funding to the university. So, the State equivalent of the FOIA is not going to necessarily apply to faculty research in the first place, only to their job as instructors.

Now, if he is receiving government funding for his research, there may be some FOIA expectation, but the public certainly does not have a right to demand all email. For one, the person making the FOIA needs to be specific about what they want and it has to relate directly and substantially to a specific facet of government funded research. Secondly, it does not cover any communication where the sender or receiver has an expectation of privacy. If he is emailing someone who is not being paid to work on that particular project, such as a graduate student or another person in his field or department, that information is not going to be covered by the FOIA as it violates the expectation of privacy of the person outside the project sending or receiving the email, unless the person is specifically informed that their email may be subject to public disclosure.

Now, does email to other people on the project, to the agency that is funding it, and to others who have no expectation of privacy fall under a FOIA? It is possible, but only if it specifically relates to published data. Anything that is a work in progress is not subject to the FOIA because it is being actively managed by whoever is funding the project.

Most universities have a very specific email privacy policy that guarantees the privacy of employees except in very specific situations.

So if he texts, "I'm sorry I am not going to be in for work today I am receiving medical treatment from my mental health provider," that should be public records?

If he emails, "I am sorry Mrs. Channing, but there is no work you can do in Physics 102 to avoid a failing grade," that should be public record?

Releasing the first email would be a violation of federal law (respecting medical confidentiality) and the second one would likely violate State law or university code on student confidentiality.

The Supreme Court has ruled that American citizens have a reasonable expectation that the contents of their email will be kept private, just like their phone conversations.

The expectation of privacy is a legal concept that exists regardless of any boilerplate click-through agreement.

The courts have generally ruled that there exists no expectation of privacy on certain parts of email, like the routing information (recipient for instance), total traffic volume, and other such information.

On the other hand, they have generally upheld that there exists an expectation of privacy on the actual contents of emails (i.e. message and subject line), the same way that telephone users expect that their conversations, but not their dialing information, be kept private.

See the case of US v. Maxwell.

Does your daughter work an on-campus job? Does she ever use a university email account? Does she use university networks?

These all are public resources, and as a creepy stalker, I demand to be allowed full access to the email and browsing history of all attractive undergraduate students. I want to know who their professors are, which websites they visit using university networks, and any other private information that I can find out.

I demand full access! The government should not be able to hide the information from me. We don't want to be forced to go back to the dark days of rooting through trash and peeking through windows!

So if your daughter works at a student job at the university, can I request access to all of her university email? How about any records of her internet activity, like the websites she visited using university networks? After all, she is a public employee using government resources and as a creepy stalker, I certainly have a right to know what classes she is taking, where she hangs out, what websites she visits, and any other information I might be able to learn through a FOIA request.

So do I have a right to access the university email records of good looking undergraduates at public universities?

People have an expectation of privacy in email. It is as simple as that. In addition, they have some duty to not release certain information to the public, for instance, anything involving students' work or the work of others (who also have an expectation of privacy), anything regarding privileged information (such as medical) or of a purely personal nature.

Does the public have a right to email that directly involves publicly-funded research? Possibly. They certainly do not have a right to ask an individual to turn over all his personal corresponance anymore than they have a right to tap the phone in his office.

. . . the last time I checked, the Economist was not a US publication. Does the BBC World News have a, "US centric perspective," too?

What we know about the universe is a tiny drop in a potentially infinite ocean of ignorance. The fact that scientists, like everyone else, have picked the lowest-hanging fruit bare does not mean that they have made a dent in the boundless orchard of knowledge of the natural world.

Is some genius working in a patent office or holed up in a dormitory at Cambridge, without the aid of even a scientific calculator going to discover anything as fantastic as relativistic mechanics or Newtonian mechanics? Probably not. A lot of big science requires teams of really smart people, trillions of man hour equivalents of supercomputer time, and perhaps, one day, particle accelerators the length of Pluto's orbit. But all that knowledge is still out there for the taking. When we only have a vague idea of what dark matter or dark energy might be, when we really do not understand the brain on a biochemical level, when we really have no understanding about they WHY of quantum physics or how to reconcile it with gravity, there is certainly a lot of big questions left unanswered, and those are just the questions we know to ask.