Email Privacy Update

Harvard Magazine has an excellent summary of where things stand. Among the unanswered questions the Magazine mentions are these:

What was the impetus for the second and third e-mail investigations? How were they initiated without the FAS dean’s assent? What was learned about the handling of Ad Board materials from those further queries? What transpired in the March 12 meeting that prompted Smith to pursue further queries? When did he and Faust learn about the additional investigations?

There is also an oddity that the Crimson noted:

In her [April 2] remarks, Hammonds also said she had authorized that second search with the approval of the Office of the General Counsel. [Harvard spokesman Jeff] Neal declined to comment Monday night why the General Counsel did not correct the original statement. 

The same Crimson story details some disputed points, for example whether the resident dean who forwarded the email had actually made a mistake by doing so, and whether that dean had in fact not been sanctioned as stated in the March 11 Faculty meeting. As the Magazine quotes several professors as suggesting, the mistrust emanating from this affair is infecting the way faculty think about other matters where the administration may be withholding information from the faculty. (Cf. also my earlier post, We Operate on Trust.) So it is good news that the outside counsel's report on the email searches will, apparently, be made public. According to the Crimson, Harvard Fellow William Lee stated,

At the request of a Corporation committee, Mr. Keating’s review is focusing on the facts bearing on any searches of email or email metadata done in connection with the Administrative Board proceedings relating to a take-home exam in a spring 2012 undergraduate course.

 I expect the report to be definitive, truthful, and extremely narrow. I expect it to leave unanswered most of the important outstanding questions. It may, in fact, be very brief: "Yes, the searches described on March 11 and April 2 are the only ones that occurred in connection with this particular incident." In addition to the questions mentioned above, there would then remain the core questions: Were these searches really undertaken out of fear that student records might be leaked to the Crimson, or was the fear, as the Globe editorial board speculated, simply that Harvard's reputation-shaping and control bulwark was being breached, however harmlessly? And how often, and for what kinds of reasons, have searches like this taken place in the past? A separate story in the same issue of the Crimson reports that the Undergraduate Council has asked for clarification and strengthening of Harvard's policies with respect to searching student email. Here are the relevant paragraphs of the Handbook for Students:

Privacy of Information

Information stored on a computer system or sent electronically over a network is the property of the individual who created it. Examination, collection, or dissemination of that information without authorization from the owner is a violation of the owner’s rights to control his or her own property. Systems administrators, however, may gain access to users’ data or programs when it is necessary to maintain or prevent damage to systems or to ensure compliance with other University rules.

Computer systems and networks provide mechanisms for the protection of private information from examination. These mechanisms are necessarily imperfect and any attempt to circumvent them or to gain unauthorized access to private information (including both stored computer files and messages transmitted over a network) will be treated as a violation of privacy and will be cause for disciplinary action.

In general, information that the owner would reasonably regard as private must be treated as private by other users. Examples include the contents of electronic mail boxes, the private file storage areas of individual users, and information stored in other areas that are not public. That measures have not been taken to protect such information does not make it permis