The Harvard ‘plumbers’
We at the Washington Post are all too familiar with important people who feel the need to find and close leaks to the media.We knew back in the 1970s when Richard Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ secretly tried to find who leaked classified information and then decided to expand their activities to include breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building. A big scandal followed.
But one of the last places we expected officials to be secretly scouring e-mail accounts to plug a leak was at Harvard University, which is held up as a bastion of academic freedom where respect for professional educators and freedom of thought is paramount.
Alas, we learn that not even Harvard is exempt from the plumbing mentality. The Boston Globe reported that top administrators at the university secretly went through the e-mail
