Updated: 8:30PM PST, statement from ATI received via email, see below. – Anthony
BREAKING:
Steve McIntyre sends word that University of Virgina has been ordered to produce the Mann emails and documents sought by the lawsuit from the America Tradition Institute (ATI). Only one little hitch. Get a load of this excerpt from the court consent order:
“All Exempt Information contained or discussed in any pleading, motion, exhibit, or other paper filed with the Court shall be filed under seal.”
Steve writes:
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A consent order was entered into today in respect to FOI requests to the University of Virginia under Virginia FOI legislation from the American Tradition Institute. The order in case CL-11-3236 dated May 24, 2011 stated:
it is therefore ADJUDGED ORDERED and DECREED as follows: The Respondent [UVA] shall complete its supply of requested documents no later than 90 days after the date of this order and will supply them in electronic form.
As I understand the order, information claimed to be Exempt Information will be filed under seal and, after examination of the Exempt Information, the Parties have an opportunity for in camera review.
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For those not familiar with the legal language, in camera means:
In camera (Latin: “in a chamber”) is a legal term meaning “in private“.It is also sometimes termed in chambers or in curia.
In camera describes court cases (or portions thereof) that the public and press are not admitted to.In camera is the opposite of trial in open court where all the parties and witnesses testify in a public courtroom, and attorneys make their arguments in public to the trier of fact.
UPDATE: First impressions about “sealed” may be wrong. Apparently, there is another way to look at this. Sealed documents may not be the permanent situation, just the initial one, to give a chance for both parties to get a handle on some information that may need to be withheld for a valid reason. Reader JD writes:
Anthony, I am a lawyer in Ohio and a climate realist. (don’t claim to be an expert in Virginia law, but from a general perspective as a lawyer, I think I see the gist here) I see this order as being a decent preliminary step forward in transparency. Apparently, the court has indicated that it is rejecting blanket exemptions by UVA. To save time, the court is telling the parties to see how much they can agree is subject to disclosure. Following the UVA’s almost certain claim that some of the information requested is exempt, the court will initially have the claimed exempt materials reviewed in private (in camera).
This is only logical because if some information is to be truly exempt (for instance, the names of informants, potentially in criminal cases), the only way to give meaning to the exemption is to have some sort of private review. When the court rules on the virtually inevitable exemption claims of UVA, then we will have a good idea of whether justice and common sense will be achieved. At this point in time, the court is merely following a sensible preliminary procedure.
STATEMENT FROM ATI:
Statement:
http://www.atinstitute.org/court-orders-university-of-virginia-to/
Chris Horner writes:
In short, the University was forced to part ways from supporting the PFAW/ACLU/AAAS/AAUP demands and Mann’s interests, and start working to make itself look less bad to a court. Beginning by agreeing to let us see it all — ‘it’ being the records as described in the AG’s CID — and begin the process of identifying what within that ‘all’ it was going to fight over and why. See attached.
So we get it all, and electronically, including the coded material oddly delivered in printed form when mailed to us last week.*
They must isolate and declare what they declare exempt and we’ll present what of that that’s withheld, that we want released, to the judge to decide whether it is rightly exempt under a specific FOIA exemption. What isn’t stamped is ours at that time w/o further fight. It is the University’s burden to argue that what they’ve claimed an exemption for must not be released, i.e., be returned to them.
*On Friday, with a hearing looming, they turned over a stack of records, apparently hurriedly produced, after we filed suit on Monday, with enough having become enough. Although a few decent items slipped through, inter alia affirming that ClimateGate appeared on its face to be, at least a couple of respects, they clearly turned over as much chaff as they could scrape together from the review they had largely been avoiding undertaking in the first place (pages and pages of ads in email threads, and the like) to show volume if not actual cooperation. But that era is over.
I’m wondering who the major donors to UVA are.
Alumni. Kluge use to contribute a lot, but the grim reaper got him,
I just saw this at Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7348/full/473419b.html
According to this, GMU is dragging their feet in investigating Wegman.
Tom B said:
“They now have a hard, court ordered, deadline. No more evasion. The documents and priv logs must be in the possession of the plaintiff and/or court 120 days hence. Period.”
True. But if the judge is politically sympathetic to the AGW side, he could agree with UVA’s objections to releasing the most damaging documents (for whatever superficial reason) and we would still not have the transparency that is sought.
First, in camera review is an appropriate step if UVA believes some of the emails should meet a FOIA exemption. As some have noted, it is possible that there are emails that have nothing to do with the global warming issue that got caught up in the screen.
Second, if UVA is on the ball (as they should be), there should have been no opportunity to delete/modify records. I have been involved in some similar legal requests in a private firm, and a tech team promptly copied hard drives etc. and then the legal team ran searches to see what should be disclosed and what could be protected. (Of course, if Mann cleaned drives and records before the request, we may never know.) I would be shocked if UVA’s general and outside counsel weren’t tightly controlling this process – at least from the point the FOIA request was received and possibly even before that in anticipation of the request.
Finally, I was a science major and the most telling fact for me is the secretive behavior of the warmists. A scientist should be throwing open the windows and screaming “come look at what I have done! I think I have proved “X”! Can you find any error in my work?” I understand and work in the commercial world where secrecy is necessary to protect investment, but the warmists’ work should have been open book.
Regrettably and embarrassingly my alma mater continues to wreath itself in in-glory.
@wobble who said:
What principle might that be, the fact that they have no principles? What stretch of the imagination supports a claim that publicly funded research is not subject to public scrutiny? I cannot imagine a principle that justifies fighting a legitimate FOI request through non-compliance and unjustified delays rather than arbitration or consent decree and, failing that, court review. UVA did not step up to their public obligations from the very start and that is why their Attorney General got involved. Then they fought him! Every UVA action has been inexcusable from the very start.
Ya boy, global warming is a real problem threatening the whole world—only you can’t kiss and tell about it—that’s how dangerous it is.
Since this is a University we are talking about, they most likely have their own e-mail servers and these would be backed up with great frequency. You can’t just delete e-mails from a database or file; you would have to either have to hack the backup files or delete them entirely – oops we don’t know where that backup went… The problem with this strategy is you would need to lose a lot of backups. I wonder how many years they keep them? This should be written in an IT policy for the University.
Most institutions would be backing up their entire e-mail servers on at least a weekly basis with deltas taken every night. You don’t want to lose your e-mail – trust me.
The problem is Dr. Mann might have used non-University e-mail accounts – its absolutely frightening how sloppy many people get about where they type in information. So you may only get bits and pieces of a story (assuming there is one).
In any case, I hope this can set an example for any research conducted using public money. There is no justification that the public cannot view what they paid for; only excepting where privacy concerns of people used in the research should be protected. If University researchers want to be able to hide their precious data they should find other methods of financing their work.
read the documents and timeline posted on UVa’s website – also note the following
I’m also of the opinion that secrecy makes no sense here. While the pay is piddling, the opportunity to have your study bathed in theater lights and listed as the major attraction on the marquee and handbills is one of the (if not THE one) best rewards for one’s endeavors. Unimpeachable research methods would be the icing on the cake and worthy in its own right of such adulation. Could it be that we are letting in sloppy Ph.D. candidates who are now the rotting apple scientists in what was once a sterling profession? The stalling makes no sense.