From JunkScience.com
WashPost: Freedom of Information Act not for skeptics’ use
In a bizarre Memorial Day editorial, the Washington Post criticized climate skeptics for using the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents concerning Climategater Michael Mann from the University of Virginia.
The Post labeled the skeptics’ FOIA efforts as “harrassing” and “nuisance tactics.”
The Post, however, has been entirely silent on Greenpeace’s efforts to FOIA documents from the University of Virginia concerning Pat Michaels, University of Delaware concerning David Legates and from Harvard University concerning Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas — efforts that are truly “harrassing” and “nuisance” in nature as Greenpeace acted entirely in retaliation to the FOIA request concerning Mann.
The editorial is especially gross coming on the day when America commemorates those who died to preserve everyone’s freedoms — not just those of the politically correct.
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And I’ll add the post has been entirely silent on the fact the George Mason University, when asked by USA Today reporter Dan Vergano to produce documents related to the whole vindictive DeepClimate (Dave Clarke) and John Mashey assault on Wegman and Said at GMU. Vergano asked for “expedited service” and requests that “fees be waived”.
Not only did GMU comply, they did so quickly, without complaint, waived fees, and provided everything on a USB flash drive they sent to USA Today’s Vergano.
That is the starkest contrast to the whining , wailing, and gnashing of teeth surrounding the FOIA requests for other universities like UEA and UVA . It vividly illustrates the elitism and bigotry of the organizations and the people who believe themselves to be above the law as well as the organizations who fan the flames by coming to their defense citing “academic freedom”. Bottom line – use of public money makes the process and results open to public scrutiny to all who request the information, no matter who they are. Don’t like the scrutiny? Then don’t take the public money.
Steve McIntyre writes:
The difference in how academic institutions have responded to the seemingly similar requests in respect to Wegman and Mann is quite startling. George Mason gave expedited service to a request for Wegman’s emails; the U of Virginia has done the opposite. George Mason turned over Wegman’s correspondence with an academic journal without litigation; the University of Virginia has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation. Multiple academic lobby groups protested the production of Mann’s emails as a matter of principle; the same organizations were and remain silent in respect to Wegman.
What is doubly bizarre is that apparently this FOIA request has led to the discovery that Dr. Ray Bradley, Mann co-author with the hockey stick paper “MBH98”, apparently committed academic misconduct in his zeal to smear Wegman.
From Climate Audit:
…the README included by George Mason stated the “documents may not be forwarded to a third party”. It also included the GMU policy on academic misconduct, stating Bradley had violated the confidentiality terms – a point not reported by USA Today:
The materials in this USB are being provided in compliance with the Virginia FOIA. Many of the documents are published research papers that are copyrighted by their respective publishers. All other documents are copyrighted by Edward J. Wegman and Yasmin H. Said or by their respective authors. All rights are reserved. These documents may not be forwarded to a third party. Also included in this USB is the George Mason University policy document 4007 on academic misconduct. This policy requires confidentiality for all parties including complainants, in this case Professor Raymond Bradley. This confidentiality requirement was violated by Professor Bradley.
Also, last week, I sent an email to WaPo’s ombudsman, requesting space to rebut Bill McKibben’s senseless bloviation about tornadoes and climate change. No response.
In light of their non-acknowledgement of a similar process by Greenpeace using FOIA laws to get records on climate skeptics Michaels, Legates, Soon, and Baliunas, plus their non-acknowledgement of my request, WaPo’s editorial gist comes across like this:
One rule of use for AGW proponents, another for skeptics.
To me, it smacks of this sort of ugly thinking.
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“The Post labeled the skeptics’ FOIA efforts as “harrassing” and “nuisance tactics.”
Yup…. We learn’t it from Water Gatin, Climate Changin, Sierra Clubbin, Green Peas’n, Progressieves. We shore ’nuff did!
Is anybody really surprised that WaPo is opposed to light shining on the CAGW hoax?
Bob Diaz says:
May 30, 2011 at 3:15 pm
Big, Big Thanks for the video link, Bob! I will distribute this through several professional engineering and personal social networks. Finally, their peers are stepping forward and publicly refuting their deceits! ‘Hell hath no fury like a scientist that finds out he’s been lied to and made a fool!’
Climategate ‘hide the decline’ explained by Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller
I am sure Richard Nixon would have agreed with them
Nick Stokes says:
“That one would have taken years to fulfill.”
Nick, please stop. You’re embarassing yourself. It is the same BS argument that Queen’s University presented when Doug Keenan requested data from them through FOI – it was arduous, excessive, would cost money – the ICO (correctly) pointed out this was just stalling and worked out it would take a small fraction of the time claimed.
Do you really think such pointless hyperbole strengthens your case? It makes you look incompetent. Consider this example: two clerks in a finance department. One diligently files everything away at the end of the day, the other just dumps it all in a big pile. After a few months of this, the boss says there is a dispute on an account and he needs all of the paperwork on that one account. The first clerk simply gets the accounts from the filing cabinet, the second clerk throws up their hands complaining it would take days to do and they don’t have time. Clearly, the reason it takes ages is because the second clerk is incompetent.
At the moment, your hand waving about how hard all this is makes you (and the university, and climate scientists) sound like the second clerk. None of this *should* be difficult, if the people involved were remotely competent.
Finally, and this is pure speculation at this stage, I notice Chris Horner referred to the 34,000 e-mails as containing many “pages and pages of ads” – my guess is that they have folded the spam folder into the e-mails in an attempt to obfuscate and make inept claims about workload. I stress this is just my speculation at this time, although since there seems to be no reason to withhold spam, I see no reason why we shouldn’t get to find out whether this is the case at some later date.
If Watergate were to go down today, the Post would be on the President’s side, indicting their own reporter (Bob Woodward) and the information source (“Deep Throat.”)
Nick Stokes said
“It was a demand for code and personal emails.”
Wasn’t the code paid for by the public, and haven’t the public the right of access to it? If the personal emails contain requests to delete anything or ask for help in discrediting anyone – yes the public have the right! If climate scientists do not want to behave in a professional manner, then they should stop asking for public money!
Why in the world would anybody be left reading a “news”paper, who just editorialized against finding and reporting news?
What I find interesting is that the AGW crowd likes to ridicule the skeptics for suggesting any sort of conspiracy, or the AGWers infer a conspiracy from the skeptics arguments where there was no such implication. When the tables are turned and the AGWers must defend themselves, suddenly it’s all about nuisance tactics, harrassment, and efforts by the secret sycophants of the oil industry. I suppose the appropriate response is that the ridicule should be turned back on them with the addition of evidence and arguments to support that ridicule; something the AGWers were never able to supply. I will keep that in mind next time I argue with a Solar Effect Denier.
Shorter WaPo:
“Hey, FOIAs are for US to harass YOU, not the other way around!”
So Bob, do you think every scientist should have to jump through those hoops for just anyone who demands. Over and over?
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When an employees boss says jump, he jumps, or he finds another line of work.
If they had released their data, or at least made them publicly available in the first place, no hoop jumping would have been necesary.
Is there any surprise that Nick Stokes props up to defend slimy behaviour? He’s part of that clique.
There are a lot of people who are paid by public money to do their work. Should the public have access to every email, document, code etc. that they ever produce?
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Yes. (With the exception of documents that would expose private information. For example, the banks should not have to release any information regarding their customers private information.)
It’s a sure way to stop science.
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What science?
And someone should tell Nick Stokes that e-mails sent out from your work server, in your official e-mail ID, are not private e-mails. Those are property of the organisation and are treated as such.
He keeps repeating this discredited canard of ” private e-mails ” all the time.
Actually Nick, if Mann hadn’t been implicated by the climategate leak of having been involved in scientific fraud, no one would have asked for his “personal” emails. By using email to conspire to cover up what may have initially been an honest mistake, his emails became fair game. Of course Mann may be really worried about what may be in there, because conspiracy to commit fraud is a crime, though the people making the request aren’t interested in prosecution, rather they want to clear the record and spike Mann’s credibility once and for all.
Scientists really do need to put the data and code up so others can repeat their work. Without the data and code, verification is impossible, without verification, there is no science, just someone’s grandiose musings.
Nick Stokes wrote: The FOI applications to GMU and UVa are not comparable. Vergano asked GMU for maybe half a dozen or so specific official emails on paper submission and grants.
Wegman’s effort was much more narrowly focused and restricted to a short period of time. Besides that, Mann and his co-authors have repeatedly failed to respond to quite specific requests, as has been amply documented by McIntyre and others. The only consistent difference, manifest now over more than a decade, is Mann et al’s complete unwillingness to be scrutinized.
I agree with a later statement of yours that there is no compelling simple case that “public funding implies public availability”: confidentiality of personal information (as in clinical research), intellectual property rights, national security interests all affect the case for public availability. However, no compelling case for secrecy has been made in this case — it’s about climate, tree rings, R code, data that are available already (but the use of which, or specific version of which, is sometimes obscure), and an already publicly debated public policy question on which Mann et al have taken an extreme stand. And there is the fact that Mann signed the UVA computer use policy, according to which his UVA emails are not in fact “private” as that is usually understood (as his home emails would be, protected by the 4th amendment.)
I’ll add one other thing: there is a history of universities conducting incompetent investigations into allegations of wrong doing by faculty, especially grant-swingers. An interesting recent example was discussed over at Judith Curry’s blog about 10 days ago or so. Like other organizations that we are familiar with (fire departments, unions, police departments, the defense department) there are strong internal pressures to “look clean” while stifling the truth. It usually takes an outside agent with a prosecutorial attitude to ferret out the truth.
Yes, you do have to show your work. No, there is no “Don’t you know who I AM?” exemption.
2 feet bad, 4 feet good …
“They forget that as a tax payer I am paying for the crap that Mann produced, and by law I am allowed to look at it.”
You forget that you’re not a tax payer, you’re a serf.
But a serf with a scythe …
I’ve tried to comment on the WP site (see below). I get the “unable to locate page” message.
Please tell me that this is normal. The editorial is from Monday, 30th May. But I clicked through from WUWT, and they would have seen the IP address of the “denier”, so subsequent attempts would be blocked. Am I paranoid?
“The crudeness of the words used in this piece is beyond belief.
You say:
Cuccinelli’s demand is “chilling”.
The e-mails are public records in a “technical sense.”
The Climategate scandal was “trumped-up.”
Lines from the e-mails were “misrepresented.”
These FOI requests are “invasive fishing expeditions…pretext to discredit…”
Let me suggest that:
– you find the demand “chilling” because, had the judge allowed the demand, the result would have been more exposure of the idiocy of the hockey stick curve;
– e-mail exchanges on professional matters between professionals funded in part at least by the taxpayer should be in the public domain;
– since there has never been any suggestion that the data ( not just e-mails, but programmes, annotations etc. ) were fabricated, the Climategate affair cannot have been “trumped-up”;
– since the e-mails have been published in full, it is hard to see how they have been “misrepresented.”
– that the best way to deal with “invasive fishing expeditions” or a “pretext to discredit” is to disclose.
Ms Sullivan is reported as saying that Professor Mann will be shielded by “all available exemptions”.
Mann must be shielded. Jones has things to hide.
If you want to understand the true nature of Professor Mann’s work, then start with :
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/30/kill-it-with-fire/ “
It’s interesting that anonymous internet postings are held in low esteem, but the anonymous Washington Post editorials are for some reason held to a different standard. Why? I’m a WashPost subscriber, and I can assure you, that the paper regularly publishes editorials like the one referenced above that would be labeled “troll bait” if they appeared on a poorly moderated internet site.