UPDATE: Andrew Revkin responds with an update on Dot Earth, which I repeat here. He now agrees that privacy expectations were not justified in the UEA Climategate emails. Perhaps now we’ll see some discussions of them, with publications of selected Climategate emails, on Dot Earth in the future.
– Anthony
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From the NYT Dot Earth Blog, Monday, Nov 29th, 2010:
[Nov. 29, 3:41 p.m. | Updated In the last couple of days, some conservative commentators have compared the treatment of the East Anglia climate files in this post with the dissemination of Wikileaks files by The Times and charged that a gross double standard exists.
I’ll note two things about my coverage of the unauthorized distribution of the climate files:
First, while I initially did not publish the contents of the climate files and e-mails (at the request of Times lawyers, considering the uncertain provenance and authenticity of the materials at the time), I did (from the start) provide links to the caches of material set up elsewhere on the Web.
Second, in the rush on the day the files were distributed across the Web, I called them “private” when, in fact, I should have said their senders had presumed they were private. As I’ve said off and on since then, given that much of the research discussed in the exchanges was done using taxpayers’ money, any expectation of privacy wasn’t justified.]
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The NYT published details in 2005 about US efforts to eavesdrop on Al Qaeda, and is publishing info from the stolen Wikileaks Iraq messages, but they they wouldn’t publish the ClimateGate emails.
Mr. Revkin, your selective bias, and the bias of your newspaper (and your Dot Earth Blog) is screaming loudly for all to hear.
From Powerline blog:
The New York Times is participating in the dissemination of the stolen State Department cables that have been made available to it in one way or another via WikiLeaks. My friend Steve Hayward recalls that only last year the New York Times ostentatiously declined to publish or post any of the Climategate e-mails because they had been illegally obtained.
Surely readers will recall Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s inspiring statement of principle:
“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”
Interested readers may want to compare and contrast Revkin’s statement of principle with the editorial note posted by the Times on the WikiLeaks documents this afternoon. Today the Times cites the availability of the documents elsewhere and the public interest in their revelations as supporting their publication by the Times. Both factors applied in roughly equal measure to the Climategate emails.
Without belaboring the point, let us note simply that the two statements are logically irreconcilable. Perhaps something other than principle and logic were at work then, or are at work now. Given the Times’s outrageous behavior during the Bush administration, the same observation applies to the Times’s protestations of good faith.
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h/t to WUWT reader “rk”
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sharper00 says:
November 29, 2010 at 4:52 am
“Sharperoo justifies the NYT stance “
No I’m not justifying any stance. I’m pointing out that there differences between the two situations such that it’s perfectly possible and reasonable to uphold given principles but reach different answers concerning them.
Of note is the usual suggestion that any disagreeable comment is “diversionary” or a troll of some sort i.e. everyone believes as the poster does and only people pretending not to post in order to create trouble.
===================================================
Sorry, but it is troll like behavior when evidence and facts clearly disprove your ideas.
Has anyone searched thru this latest dump for comments concerning climate or weather and related? It would be interesting to know what the ptb really think about it.
@Theo Goodwin
“here are no private emails on my work computer.”
Subject to the rules and regulations of you employer perhaps but they vary wildly.
@hunter
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but you should show us just one climategate e-mail that was private in nature. “
They all were until and unless approval for release under the relevant FOI laws.
If you don’t believe me submit a request to every public university in the UK for all emails written by all staff members on record. You’ll invariably be told “No”.
“Otherwise, a reasonably well informed person may look at what you claim and decide you are either completely ignorant of the subject or just putting out deliberate untruths.”
Yes yes everyone who disagrees with you is woefully ignorant or a deliberate liar, someone who denies the facts you might say.
The quote from Revkin leaves out his response added to the very charge raised here. Talk about hypocrisy.
Revkin: “UPDATE 11/23[2009]: The line above has been widely interpreted below and around the Web as implying that The Times is laying off looking into these documents even as the paper has been quick to publish or report on other documents of uncertain provenance. A quick scan of the original news story and these posts shows that we’re actively reporting on and citing these documents. And of course there’s more to come.”
Pubic interest? Was that a Freudian slip or a tacit admission that the New York Times has an abiding interest in seeing American get screwed?
They are truthful! : Obviously they are in total accord with these leaks, they are not being hypocritical.
@sharper00 says:
November 29, 2010 at 2:26 am
You make a fair point, kinda, and I note that both sets of information are publicly funded. However, in the case of Climategate the public was paying to be informed, not stonewalled, whereas in the case of military/state communications we are paying our government to stay informed but keep the details secret until those details are no longer in play.
“…pubic interest…” lol
The reason there is hypocrisy is easy to understand. AGW solutions involve leftist solutions; bringing awareness and credibility to climategate would hamper those leftist (final) solutions.
Interesting… when you look up the “A” records(IP address) of wikileaks.org it returns:
wikileaks.org. 2014 IN A 184.72.37.90
wikileaks.org. 2014 IN A 46.51.171.90
Then when you do a WHOIS on those IP’s it returns that they are both owned by:
OrgName: Amazon.com, Inc.
OrgId: AMAZO-4
Address: Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
Address: 1200 12th Avenue South
City: Seattle
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98144
Country: US
Nah… I must be dreaming….
Shaperoo: while I was employed incoming phone calls were not logged but all outgoing phone calls, the numbers called, and the the times were. The company paid for the phones and the calls. My e-mails were never considered private. The company owned the computers. These climate frauds (i.e. not scientists) were taxpayer funded – lavishly. Get real.
Sharperoo-look up Walter Duranty- the NYT Pulitzer winnning Reporter who knew and
covered up the death of Millions in the Ukraine and Crimea just because they were ‘inconvenient ” . Yet the NYT refuses to acknowledge that Duranty was a knowing and willing participant in Stalin’s Genocide. That is an “Inconvenient Truth”…
BTW I knew a Ukrainian immigrant who escaped that…
Nice work guys, you completely destroyed shaperoo’s sad attempt at logic. It continues to amaze how alarmists think. It seems they have no concept of reality and always bend every fact to fit their preconceived agenda.
In many ways they are like an adulterous spouse who blames their own actions on the person they are betraying. The human mind can work in strange ways, an alarmist mind appears to always work in strange ways.
I am no friend of the NYT, but it’s only fair to point out that both the NYT and Wiki-Leaks redacted the files that they published. They removed names and, in at least one case, Wiki-Leaks did not publish at least one one cable that might damage the public’s interest.
sharper00 says:
November 29, 2010 at 5:57 am
@hunter
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but you should show us just one climategate e-mail that was private in nature. “
They all were until and unless approval for release under the relevant FOI laws.”
ummm, trolleroo, if this were correct then it would NOT have been found that they failed to comply with UK FOI.
And only the statute of limitations prevented their prosecution for that failure to comply with the LAW.
Damn it! If we don’t bring the left back to the center, the backlash WILL send all of us back into the dark ages when ALL science was forbidden/jailed/executed, and pew taxes reigned supreme.
Idiots! Such idiots!
Solutions are what is needed; http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/30503
Are you accusing the CRU chaps of performing priate correspondence on paid work time? Or did they only use the emails fro private use during their lunch breaks. I doubt is and the emails had time stamps.
And guess which newspaper supplied the NYT with copies of the cables ? Apparently, The Guardian–one of the five newspapers that had an advanced look at the cables-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/29/the-guardian-gave-wikilea_n_789091.html
The military and other government agencies involved in national security do not spend money on advertising. CAGW business opportunists do.
Which group do you think a “principled” newspaper must protect?
Keep that in mind when dealing with the NYT and other “news” media.
Curiousgeorge: are you insinuating that AGW is proceeding have a look at your recent pillar of support AMSU 600 mb Global temps BELOW average now. LOL
Each day I start my computers at work, a privacy policy pops up telling me I have no privacy.
Government agency (which includes contractors) communication via computer telecommunication is not covered by privacy law. Sharper00, no offense but you are only repeating talking points and have no idea what you are saying.
Scientists are not sacred cows.
@H.R.
“whereas in the case of military/state communications we are paying our government to stay informed but keep the details secret until those details are no longer in play.”
The problem is with the criteria for “secret”. Once there’s a “secret” category the criteria for what goes in there and increases over time, eventually encompassing “Everything we’d find inconvenient for the public to know”. I remember reading an article before about the difference between the way the average American perceives foreign policy versus the way the people in the foreign countries perceive it. A big part of that difference is the way the US government presents itself to the American public versus the reality for those on the business end of those policies.
The issue then becomes, does the American public have a right to know how their government interacts with other nations? I’d say the wikileaks release is too much in that it likely compromises security (although they did offer to redact such details) but the previous situation was too heavily weighted in terms of obscuring the reality of policy.
“if this were correct then it would NOT have been found that they failed to comply with UK FOI.”
They failed to comply with FOI by saying they were going to delete emails which could be subject to an FOI request. You (or anyone) doesn’t have an automatic right to see any and all emails as suggested here nor is there any guarantee that even specifically requested information will be made available.
“ummm, trolleroo”
A contrary opinion? It must be someone who secretly agrees with you but is only pretending otherwise! Thank goodness your opinions are all so outstandingly correct it’s actually impossible to disagree!
Why does the hypocrisy meter flash like that on Firefox 3.6.x on Linux?