Thread by @kohenari

Today’s the day when a university IT professional searches my hard drives to capture any documents that respond to five search terms demanded by a local lawyer under Nebraska’s Public Records Act.

I’m going to live tweet it now. Enjoy.

The first three search terms—a student’s name—turned up nothing on one of my computers. This is not surprising. The remaining two search terms, for Turning Point USA, also turned up nothing on that first computer.

She is now using a forensic tool called MacQuisition to capture my web browser history.

We’re now in the phase where they start taking stuff off my machine, like my user profile and information about the operating system. Then comes the browser history and then, apparently, pictures for some reason. Pictures were never mentioned in any of the conversations I’ve had.

Why do they want the photos of my kids that are in the “Pictures” folder on my desktop? Apparently because pictures are searchable. Like, in case I kept lots of pictures of this student?!?! This is remarkable overreach.

The best part, when we started looking through my pictures, was that I was asked to please identify three pictures that were scans and not photos of my family.
“Oh, those are copies of transit cards from when the Nazis moved my grandfather from one slave labor camp to another.”

So, that part was super awkward. It’s not clear that they’re actually going to remove photos that are very clearly pictures of my children. There’s no conceivable way they constitute a public record and there’s like 2 gigs of them.

Now MacQuisition isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. There’s some setting that isn’t allowing access to my user directories so access to browser history isn’t just an option that can be chosen from this beautiful menu.

Now this poor IT professional has to search for browser history data folder by folder. There’s virtually no browser history on this machine. As a matter of good internet hygiene, all of my browsers automatically delete history and cache weekly. Been doing that for a *long* time.

We just took a photo of my browser history in Safari. It includes a whopping 22 items. Most of those are from news websites and the rest seem to be Google searches from the last time I caught a student plagiarizing.

Now we’re starting on my second computer. I anticipate a similarly ridiculous process. We’re starting with the search terms again. The student’s Twitter handle somehow turned up a copy of my 2017 tax return. So we’re definitely starting over with that search.

One other item comes up: it’s the booklet of incoming kindergarteners from my kids’ school that was emailed to their parents. It’s got photos and information for all the kiddos. No one can figure out why that would get flagged.
🤷🏻‍♂️

There are a few responsive documents on this computer for the Turning Point USA search term...because I’ve been writing a paper on right-wing attacks on faculty. That paper isn’t published, so those documents are exempt under the Public Records Act, at least on my understanding.

Now we’re back to trying to get ahold of my browser history, this time on the second machine. There’s nothing that would raise any eyebrows or red flags, much like on the first machine. But we need to look for it all the same.

So far we’ve been at this for about an hour. That hour of my time has been provided free of charge to the good people who paid the university to do this invasive and ridiculous search.

What I’ve learned from this process, beyond the way in which the Public Records Act basically exists for the purposes of faculty harassment, is that MacQuisition is...not great.

I’m supposed to teach my last class of the semester in 25 minutes in a different building. There’s no chance I’m going to be on time. Zero.
That’s going to make me very sad.

We’re taking photos of the empty browser history in Firefox, a browser I don’t use anymore. We had to use Firefox years ago in order to access one particular university hr website.

And that’s the end, folks. There was, as expected, literally NOTHING that responds to the terms in the public records request. Nearly 90 minutes of an invasive politically-motivated fishing expedition, brought to you by the people most famous for their love of campus free speech.

The point of this search wasn’t to inquire into matters of public record. It was to harass several university personnel into silence. This is the FOURTH such search for one of my colleagues in under two years. It’s designed to chill speech...so I’m committed to be loud about it.

I’m heading to class now but I’ll be very happy to answer questions you might have when I finish around 2pm.

Thanks for following along with Public Records Theater. I can’t promise this’ll be the final installment since we also have a document hold in anticipation of a lawsuit.