Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on Conservative Abuse of the Freedom of Information Act

In her latest Daily column, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia takes conservative groups to task for their misuse of the Freedom of Information Act. Controversy erupted in March when the Republican Party in Wisconsin and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan requested access to the emails of pro-labor professors in public universities in Wisconsin and Michigan, respectively. There is plenty of hypocrisy on all sides of this blowup, Dalmia notes, including the University of Wisconsin history professor who started the whole thing on his blog, by breathlessly excavating the vast right-wing conspiracy allegedly driving Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's anti-union legislation.

"But if conservatives are interested in protecting individual liberty, they sure have a weird way of going about it," she writes. "Not only do the means they are deploying not justify their ends—they actually impair those ends."

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