When Bob Mhoon e-mailed several Tarrant County College officials in April, the firebrand critic of the college district was hoping for action. But he wasn’t expecting the reaction he eventually got – including what appears to be a change in policy on who reads whose e-mails at the college.
What Mhoon discovered was that some of his e-mails to TCCD board members were also being read by the chancellor’s office, technically the servant of the board. What’s still not clear is whether the reading of the e-mails by people they weren’t addressed to violates any law or college district policy.
The board, of course, is proceeding with the Trinity bluff campus, the project that Mhoon was writing to oppose, as well as the taxes to fund it – $203 million to finish a project whose costs have exploded as though it were a federal defense contract.
Mhoon, who frequently files requests for records from TCCD, is an outspoken opponent of the downtown Trinity bluff campus. He e-mailed his board of trustees representative, Randall Canedy, at Canedy’s official TCC address on April 29 to try to convince him to eliminate the three-cent tax earmarked for the project, which the trustees eventually approved on May 12. Mhoon requested a “read receipt” on the e-mail, which would indicate that Canedy had read, or at least opened, the message.
“The intent was to provide him info that would allow him to go to the board during the meeting and confront the issue of whether the downtown Trinity River bluff campus should be completed,” Mhoon explained later.
His e-mail to Canedy was read – but not only by its intended addressee. Instead, the read receipt came back from Bill Lace, executive assistant to Chancellor Leonardo de la Garza. “I was puzzled,” Mhoon said. And he suspected something was up.
Mhoon knows something about computers and communications (he’s been building his own computers since 1965 and teaching computer classes for years). And he knows something about intelligence gathering – he was a submariner in the Navy aboard the USS Ray SSN-653, tasked with spying on Russian subs as they were launched off the Barents Sea port of Murmansk. “I’m very sensitive to this,” he said.
He did some further tests, e-mailing trustees Robyn Winnett and Bobby McGee and requesting read receipts. “Immediately, almost, I got responses from Dr. Bill Lace,” Mhoon said. “And to me that pretty much proved they were monitoring the messages sent to board members via their TCC accounts.” Mhoon saved the e-mails and the responses from Lace. He couldn’t tell, he said, whether Canedy and the other trustees were receiving the e-mails along with Lace or whether the messages were being diverted before they ever got to the trustees’ e-mail boxes.
To get to the bottom of things, Mhoon sent more e-mails, to the trustees, the chancellor’s office, and the college’s information technology department. No one called or e-mailed Mhoon back. Two trustees claimed they had no idea the chancellor’s office had been going through e-mails meant for them. Contacted by Fort Worth Weekly, Bobby McGee, the trustee who represents West Fort Worth and some northwestern suburbs, said it was “news to [him]” that e-mails to him were being read by Lace. “I get many e-mails from Mr. Mhoon,” he said. “This is the first time I hear of it [e-mails being intercepted].” He suggested contacting the chancellor’s office for an explanation.
Winnett, the trustee representing the North Side, South Side, downtown Fort Worth, and Saginaw, said that she had asked Lace to “screen e-mails sent on behalf of TCC; this would include all general information,” she said. “This however did not include review of my personal TCC e-mail address. Anything addressed to my TCC e-mail, I check that directly. I have received many of Mr. Mhoon’s e-mails.”
Winnett said that she’s not “computer savvy” but that she didn’t believe the administration could read e-mails meant for her alone. “I consider that confidential information,” she said.
Canedy, the other trustee involved in the saga, who represents South Arlington (including Mhoon’s neighborhood)and Mansfield, did not respond to e-mails and phone calls seeking comment for this story. When Mhoon called him, blocking his number from caller ID, Canedy said he was unwilling to talk over the phone. Neither de la Garza nor Lace responded to e-mails from the Weekly asking for comment on Mhoon’s complaints. Lace said during a phone call that he was busy preparing for a board meeting.
When he got no response from the president of the board of trustees, whom he also e-mailed, or the chancellor’s office, Mhoon wrote a letter to the Dallas office of the FBI on May 8, which he acknowledged was a “legal Hail Mary” attempt to get an official investigation and possibly sanctions. He explained what he believed was happening and stated that he believed his constitutional rights – of free speech and to petition for a redress of grievances – had been violated. The FBI did not respond.
Don Jackson, an attorney and a professor of civil rights in Texas Christian University’s political science department, saw the situation as more clear-cut. “The key is whether there is an escape clause [a condition that allows a party to break its contract] that affirms a right to monitor,” he said. “The next thing to determine is whether the trustees were clearly informed of the policy. If none of these things are true, it does seem to be a clear invasion of privacy.”
Another attorney, Frank Colosi, who has worked with the Fort Worth chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, thought that the chancellor’s office may have overstepped its bounds but that legal action was unlikely to succeed. He said the district is on solid legal footing monitoring trustees’ e-mails if the trustees have no expectation of privacy. “If I were to hack into TCC’s system and read e-mails, that’d be wrong and illegal,” he said. “But for people within the organization, it depends on whether there is an expectation of privacy. It didn’t sound like the trustees were objecting to the practice, just that they weren’t aware of it.”
The district’s IT policy says that “accessing another individual’s account, private files, or e-mail without permission of the owner” is prohibited.
A TCU spokesperson said that at that school, “examination of information [transmitted electronically] without authorization from the owner is a violation of the owner’s rights to control his or her own property,” except in cases where the school is investigating violations of its policies or preventing system damage.
Lace did respond to Mhoon on May 14, more than two weeks after Mhoon first discovered the problem and two days after the board approved the final budget for the Trinity bluff campus, with Canedy voting in favor of completing the highly controversial project.
“Mr. Mhoon,” Lace wrote, “all e-mails sent by you to board members at their tccd.edu addresses now go only to the individual addressees.” Whether this means that originally the e-mails didn’t go only to the trustees’ individual addresses is not clear.
“It seems clear to me that this is an admission that he was intercepting and reading messages,” Mhoon said. “[It’s] probably academic, but he references only my e-mails. Wonder if that means he was only reading mine?”
The district sent a statement to Mhoon and the Weekly on May 19. It said that e-mails to trustees “have been and continue to be received by each board member as per his or her request, as recipients of the messages. Specific e-mails being sent to certain board members (as recipients), were rerouted to the college district’s public information officer, at their request, so e-mail requests for public information could be fulfilled. This rerouting request underwent a thorough legal review before it was implemented.”
“I think it got to the board president, who told the chancellor to do something about this,” Mhoon said. And changing the college’s policies, or at least the chancellor’s office’s practices, regarding e-mails, he said, “was probably the quickest way out of the pit.”
