It's perfectly okay to say all communication on a particular project of public interest should be open. Fine, set up a public mailing list and tell people to us

It's perfectly okay to say all communication on a particular project of public interest should be open. Fine, set up a public mailing list and tell people to use that instead of private email. It's a lot less okay to lead people to believe their communications are private and then demand to read their email after the fact. What if Alice, in what she believed to be a private email to Bob, truthfully criticised Carol for being a vindictive jerk, and in the meantime Carol has climbed the political ladder and now has the power to sabotage Alice's career? If Congress or whoever wanted that sort of oversight, they should have said so upfront, not to try to apply it retroactively.