Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
A judge has ordered the University of Virginia to release Professor Michael Mann’s emails pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Mann is the climatologist who developed of the “Hockeystick” graph, which became the icon of the IPCC climate alarmism … until it was shown to be what Dr. Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature [BEST] project called “an artifact of bad mathematics”. Mann claimed that the ring widths of a few trees in the US Southwest somehow revealed the temperature history of the planet. Seems extremely doubtful. Mann also features in the Climategate scandal as (inter alia) the scientist who (at a minimum) forwarded a request to illegally destroy emails that showed Mann and other scientists conspiring to subvert the IPCC process.
Me, I’m opposed to going the legal route to solve scientific problems. I’d like to think that scientific disputes could be settled between scientists. I have a very deep aversion to what in my childhood was known as “calling the law on a man.” I grew up in the old tradition of the American West, which held (and for me still holds) that calling the law should be the last resort, when all other methods have failed.
However, in this case, all other methods have failed. Professor Mann is famous for saying that asking him to reveal his data is “intimidation”. Even a Congressional committee hardly dented him. And the climate science community is famous for never, ever, ever saying anything negative about another climate scientist. Bad form to speak ill of someone’s work or actions, don’cha know, they might return the favor. And given those two facts, I fear that the legal route is the only one open for those who want to find out what Mann did while on the Virginia taxpayers’ dime. However, taking this route immediately raised a veritable poolpah of claims that this is invading Mann’s privacy, or that it is treading on Mann’s intellectual rights, or inimical to his scientific freedom, or other claims along those lines.
For me, the issue in this case is very simple. It is generally spelled out in the Employee’s Manual of almost any large organization, institution, or business. It says that while you are working for your employer, your time is not your own. What you write is not your own. What you produce is not your own. What you patent is not your own. What you email is not your own. What you discover is not your own. None of what you produce on company time belongs to you.
It belongs to whoever is paying you. Period. It’s that way for the majority of employees of virtually every large concern, and has been for many years.
So all of the squawking about “privacy” and “intellectual rights” and “private emails” is nonsense. If Michael Mann wants his emails to be private, he should be self-employed. If he works for a business, those emails are the property of the business. And if he works for the taxpayer, if the taxpayer is funding his work, then nothing done on “company time”, none of his work and none of his emails and none of his data or his computer code, are “private” or “personal” or “his intellectual property”. They are, as the court ordered, subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
Mann, however, has found a curious ally in this fight, as reported in the “Old Virginia Watchdog“, which says:
ATI [the organization that brought the suit] hailed the decision as a victory for transparency, but there are concerns in the academic world that such measures could threaten the scientific community.
The faculty at UVA issued a statement the day of the ruling to that effect. Mann also has found an unlikely ally in University of California Berkeley physicist Richard A. Muller, who famously denounced the hockey stick graph as “an artifact of poor mathematics.”
“We need some degree of privacy,” Muller said Thursday in an exclusive interview with Old Dominion Watchdog. “Scientists alone should decide how and what to publish in their results, looking at private files in a public setting is an unfair standard.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dr. Muller. If this was Court TV, I’d expect the lawyer to say “Assumes facts not in evidence”.
Who said anything about whether or not scientists should “decide how and what to publish”? As far as I know, no one has told Mann, or threatened to tell him, what or when to publish. Dr. Muller is falsely casting the issue as one of “prior restraint on publication”. He is wrongly claiming that someone is trying to decide what Mann can publish, which is a very serious charge with First Amendment implications.
Where is the evidence for that, for prior restraint? The FOIA request is nothing of the sort. It is a request for emails from six years ago and older. How Dr. Muller got from a request for six-year-old emails, to his claim of prior restraint or conditions on publication, is difficult to understand without drawing perhaps unwarranted conclusions.
The article continues:
Muller said he believes that public oversight could interfere with the scientific process and sees the FOIA request as an “indirect attempt to shut down Mann’s scientific work.”
If Mann ever gets around to actually doing some scientific work, as opposed to churning out endless attempts to justify his “artifact of bad mathematics”, I suppose that someone might try to shut him down. But that’s just a fantasy about an improbable future.
More to the point, again Muller is spinning this as being about the future, when it is about the past. People want and have a right to know exactly what transpired between Mann and his partners in “crimate” (the intersection of climate and crime). It’s not about trying to shut down Mann’s future work. The Climategate emails pulled back the curtain on a host of very ugly, anti-scientific, and possibly criminal actions. Mann was shown to be up to his neck in them, and the taxpayers have a right to know just what he did and didn’t do while they were paying his salary. Has nothing to do with an “indirect attempt” to do anything. We want to know what he did.
“I may disagree with his scientific analysis, but I object to him coming under public inquiry,” [Muller] said, invoking Voltaire.
Voltaire is famous for saying (but it seems never actually said)
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire didn’t mention public scrutiny, however. Nor did Voltaire mention trying to evade responsibility. Mann’s work is one of the cornerstones of the AGW movement, which aims to restructure the economy of the entire planet … and Dr. Muller doesn’t think that every aspect of Mann’s work that was paid for by the taxpayer should receive the closest scrutiny possible? Why is that?
I do not know why Muller doesn’t want people to look into Mann’s past, but he’s definitely concerned about it. Perhaps he is concerned that people might look into his own past actions, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just paranoia, the university variant of the fear of the MIB coming to spy on them. Whatever it is, it is important enough for Muller to invent a claim that the issue is prior restraint, which is very odd regarding a request for old emails. In any case, the article continues:
Muller said he is glad the emails came to light, but feels the “ends — snooping in on private conversations — do not justify the means.”
What is it with these guys and their idea of “it’s mine, mine, mine, you can’t see it!”. Those are NOT PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS, Dr. Muller. They are part of the work product of Dr. Mann’s paid employment. They are the property of the University of Virginia, they were paid for by the Virginia taxpayer, and (as the Court has ruled) they are subject to inspection by private citizens. Why is that so hard to grasp? Heck, I can paraphrase Voltaire myself, try this:
“I may disagree with Mann’s scientific analysis, but I will defend to the death the public’s right to see what he has done.”
The article goes on to say:
ATI’s request is separate from the investigation launched last year by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who battled the university for similar documents in 2010 in the hopes of prosecuting Mann.
As I said above, I don’t like the legal route, particularly the Cuccinelli route. But the other so-called scientific safeguards have failed, leaving little option.
Muller stands by his rival even more stridently in that case.
“A public reprimand is unnecessary,” he said. “Their reputations in the science community have already suffered; that is the most appropriate punishment.”
That is patent nonsense. Mann is still feted and lauded, his papers are still accepted without the kind of suspicion appropriate to his past deceptions. Phil Jones is still churning along in his job. Trenberth is agitating to try to reverse the null hypothesis. The idea that the reputations of Mann and the other the Climategate conspirators have suffered is absolutely untrue.
But even if their reputations had suffered, Mann and the Climategaters are still leading the charge to impoverish the world and restructure the global economy, and Dr. Muller wants to make the claim that Mann should not face responsibility for his (perhaps criminal) actions because his reputation has supposedly suffered?
My goodness, a suffering reputation. Does it hurt a lot when that happens? Those university professors must be the real sensitive types. See, outside the ivy halls when someone does the things that Mann and the Climategate folks did, they can’t just whine “I’m an oppressed scientist and my reputation hurts already!” and expect to walk away scot free.
Beyond the ivory tower, people who deceive and subvert and collude end up hurting in more than their reputations. So I fear that Dr. Muller’s elitist claim, that the most appropriate punishment is to spank them across their academic reputations (and besides they’ve already been spanked enough), just reveals how truly distant the mainstream climate scientists are from the real world.
Mann and the other Climategate participants have never taken responsibility, much less apologized, for their actions. They have stage-managed the so-called “Investigations” so well that nothing at all was investigated. Yes, the investigation found nothing in Mann’s emails … because the investigators didn’t even look at the emails. In addition, not only did Mann never answer the important questions about the emails, he was never even asked about the emails. That’s not an investigation, that’s a joke.
And now Dr. Muller wants us to just forget about it and move on, because he thinks that the poor scientist babbies have suffered enough …
Suffered enough? They haven’t suffered at all, Dr. Muller. So far they have denied responsibility entirely. They have skated completely, to the applause of their co-conspirators and well-wishers, and go around proclaiming their innocence. And Dr. Muller, now you want to pat them on the head and say poor oppressed scientists, your reputations have suffered enough, go and sin no more?
I’m sorry, that’s not going to happen.
Given what we know, that Mann and others stand convicted by their own words for some actions spelled out in the Climategate emails, and that there is very strong circumstantial evidence of him and the others having done a variety of other unethical or perhaps illegal things, the reputations of Mann and the rest of the Climategate crowd have not suffered nearly enough. In this Climategate list I include any actual criminals, as well as the lesser malfeasants, corrupters, and data manipulators; those who looked the other way as others manipulated the IPCC results; those who aided and abetted them to do things like pack the peer review panels and intimidate editors; those who conducted sham “investigations” and covered up the egregious actions; and those who merely cheered them on in their dirty fight.
If this had happened in a business setting, where their loss in reputation would truly be commensurate with their actions, after the things that they have done few of the whole crew would be either employed or employable.
w.
JEM says:
July 3, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Derek Sorenson – it depends on the nature of the system.
No, it doesn’t. Although most non-technical people think that https is about verifying a website’s identity, that’s not really what it is for. It’s about encryption. You can record whatever you want, but if it was send via https – end-to-end encryption – then you need government-scale code-breaking to read what was transmitted.
BTW it’s Sorensen, not Sorenson. But I’ll forgive you, because everyone makes that mistake 🙂
Well stated. Well argued. Well put!
R. Gates doesn’t know when to stop digging.
It is, in fact, worrisome.
Scott Grim wrote: In any case, regardless of where the written stipulations governing his professional behavior and the quality of his research products might reside, one cannot formally accuse Dr. Mann in a court of law of unprofessional behavior, and of producing fraudulent research materials in violation of written standards, without first citing the documented requirements which describe specifically what it was that was expected of him, and without demonstrating specifically how Dr. Mann failed to comply with any written requirements and stipulations which applied to him.
That is of course true, so this is a good time to remind everyone that Mann has not in fact been formally accused of anything in a court of law. He (or rather UVA) is the subject of FOIA requests from public citizens, and subject to requests from VA AG Cuccinelli that loosely approximate a search warrant, or the sorts of requests that might be made by a Government Accountability Office or Congressional oversight committee, or a federal agency that investigates allegations of scientific misconduct. The question is whether there is sufficient justification for UVA to continue to stonewall, especially in light of the prompt response of George Mason U to a similar request, and the response to a Greenpeace FOIA request. This is a long way from a court of law. What Mann and defenders are calling “intimidation” looks to others like “oversight”, but we are a long way from a court of law.
> Who said anything about whether or not scientists should “decide how and what to publish”? As
> far as I know, no one has told Mann, or threatened to tell him, what or when to publish. Dr.
> Muller is falsely casting the issue as one of “prior restraint on publication”. He is wrongly
> claiming that someone is trying to decide what Mann can publish, which is a very serious
> charge with First Amendment implications.
Actually, I think you’re misinterpreting Dr. Muller here. He’s not talking about prior restraint on publishing; he’s talking about forced publication of things that the scientist doesn’t want to publish, which is what the FOIA would do. That’s pretty clear from the full sentence in the interview: “Scientists alone should decide how and what to publish in their results, looking at private files in a public setting is an unfair standard.” (Technically, that’s two sentences joined by a comma splice.)
> How Dr. Muller got from a request for six-year-old emails, to his claim of prior restraint or
> conditions on publication, is difficult to understand without drawing perhaps unwarranted
> conclusions.
I’m on your side — I think the FOIA requests are legitimate and Dr. Mann should be forced to comply. But Dr. Muller did not claim what you claim he did, and I think you probably owe him an apology on that.
Willis,
“If this had happened in a business setting, where their loss in reputation would truly be commensurate with their actions, after the things that they have done few of the whole crew would be either employed or employable.”
You just are NOT GETTING IT!! Government officials, employees, lobbyists, business acquaintances, their friends, families, sexual toys, activities, posessions,,, are NOT to be questioned by the public. Do you understand???
“We need some degree of privacy,” Muller said Thursday in an exclusive interview with Old Dominion Watchdog. “Scientists alone should decide how and what to publish in their results, looking at private files in a public setting is an unfair standard.”
An unfair standard of…what, exactly? Truth? Value?
This statement can only logically be understood as making any sense if the underlying assumption is that scientists are people of a higher morality and ethics than everyone else.
I once, naively, felt that way, too. I was raised in an environment of great geniuses accomplishing difficult things, but I’ve come to understand that these were scientists whose experiments were given immediate feedback by physics. Ethics didn’t come into it; it worked, or it didn’t.
I’ve since come to realize that scientists are just smart people. Intelligence doesn’t translate to ethics or philosophical truths, however, which is the primary reason why Plato isn’t our best-loved philosopher. Some scientists are vain, some are socialists, some are fascists, some are AGW, some are Skeptics, some are company shills, some are government shills, some are gamblers, alcoholics, or abusers, and some think the ends justify the means…scientists are people, with all their foibles and temptations and needs.
Given that, Muller’s statement is simply scary. If scientists alone decide what to publish, then they can cherry-pick data, and even if someone else goes to the expense to gather similar data and make it through the group-think gauntlet to publish, it comes down to one study vs. another…where one of the studies is lying. Without the ability to see the original data, and ALL the data, science where physics isn’t an immediate arbitrator becomes just he-said she-said.
We have heard of one case (could be apocryphal, since it hasn’t been FOI’d) where a researcher gathered a lot of data that turned out to have results that didn’t fit the meme…and chose not to write a paper, thus keeping the data under wraps. If this were true, is this ok with Dr. Muller? How would this contribute to our understanding of what nature is actually doing?
Dr. Muller, at this time those that declare themselves to be Climate Scientists are reshaping our world and our economy, and they are no more innately ethical than the rest of us sorry souls. The FAIR standard is to treat them as the people they are, with all the pimples and flaws that that implies. I believe in treating people with respect until they show that they aren’t deserving, but with the gift of that initial faith comes this responsibility for me…trust, but VERIFY.
Eric James Stone says:
July 3, 2011 at 5:46 pm
As I pointed out, the files are not “private files”. So his second half of the sentence is at best completely wrong and at worst deceptive.
And as far as I know, there is already an exemption in the FOIA for things that are in preparation. So I’m unclear what threat you (and Dr. Muller) think is supposed to happen. He did not give examples of it ever happening, nor have you.
Your claim desperately needs an example of someone, anyone, anywhere, whose unpublished work was made public as the result of an FOIA.
Muller quite clearly claimed that the issue was prior restraint. You are correct that he did not identify if he was speaking of prevention of publication, or forced premature publication.
Since:
1. The Mann issue is about SIX YEAR OLD EMAILS, and
2. I know of no one whose unfinished work has been “outed” by a FOIA request, and
3. Neither you nor Muller have provided such an example,
all we have is inchoate fears. There’s no way on earth I’m going to apologize for what I said. Muller is claiming that the issue is his fears about publication of scientific results, when the commotion is all about Climategate and Mann’s actions in the past.
So I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry for what I said to Muller. Muller owes us an apology for misrepresenting the situation, claiming that someone somewhere is trying to prevent Mann publishing or trying to force him to publish prematurely. That’s just a fairy tale. You might apologize to folks who tell fairy tales to try to convince you they’re right.
Me, I just call them on their booshwa …
w.
PS – Looks like my hunch was correct. Further research finds this, which is a recognized exemption to the Virginia FOIA law. The following are not subject to FOIA:
In other words, Muller’s fantasies of premature publication of scientific results are specifically dealt with in the Virginia law. That law specifically exempts the unpublished scientific studies that Muller claims to be worried about.
His fears (and your restatement of them) are groundless, his claims are meaningless, and his picking Mann as a test case to comment on is … disappointing. In any case, Eric, Muller has paranoid fantasies that FOIA will force premature publication. He hasn’t read the Virginia FOIA statue. And no, I don’t think I misunderstood him. The issue is not what he says it is.
Derek Sorensen – https is transport-layer security. It has nothing to do with how the mail is stored on the university’s mailservers.
@Ian W
“When a grant or research contract is agreed the University is required to define the number of hours that will be worked by each grade of staff and student on the project. The precise costings of these grades are detailed in terms of standard hours or course release and stipends.”
While my NSF grant requires me to account for student and postdoc hours, it does not specify a certain number of hours of work for me (perhaps because I do not buy out teaching time). Rather, my compensation is written in terms of a 1-month salary at 100% effort. My university pays for 10 months per year, and I get an 11th month salary from the grant. During that time, I am considered to work full-time on the grant project. In reality, I work every month on the grant in at least a part-time capacity (compensated by my regular university salary since the activity is part of what my university expects/encourages me to be doing). But one month per year I focus full-time on the grant (without a teaching assignment) for which the grant pays me. I am required to have one month of vacation each year with no pay, although I typically take several smaller vacations throughout the year rather than at once. I think this is okay, but again no one really keeps track of how many hours I work or when I am present. But work doesn’t get done by itself. If I don’t have a good work ethic, it will soon be apparent from results. In that case, it will be hard to get grants in the future and the evaluations by my chair will be lower.
Willis – now the question is how broadly the judge will permit the university to draw that exemption.
If, for instance, Mann had other unpublished materials – drafts, etc – that contradicted the stuff for which he’s now (in)famous, would the university object to its release under that exemption?
Further, would the university object to release of emails or other communication referencing that material or even hinting at its existence?
Most importantly, if they did, would the judge permit them to get away with it?
JEM says:
July 3, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Good questions, don’t know the answers.
My guess is that, as has happened time after time, the University and/or Mann will now come forth with reason after reason why they should be exempt. Hopefully the judge is going to apply some kind of “reasonable man” standard.
w.
R. Gates says:
July 3, 2011 at 3:08 pm (Edit)
Mann himself has said that he forwarded a request to illegally destroy emails that were the subject of an FOIA inquiry.
Yes, R. Gates, when a Mann says he did that, that gives me certainty that he has done unethical, and possibly illegal, things.
If you’re not certain that Mann asked a co-conspirator to destroy damaging evidence, you’re deliberately not following the story. He admitted doing it. It’s not my claim or my fantasy. If you don’t have “certainty” after Mann admitted it your transmission needs adjusting.
Why on earth should I be “impartial” when Mann has admitted he acted unethically? I’m partial to the idea that we know he has done some wrong, there’s good reason to suspect he’s done more, and I’d like to see the evidence.
I would love to see him undergo a real trial. Absent that, I am overjoyed that the judge has finally called Mann to show his cards. Not because I want to see him suffer without cause. Quite the opposite.
See, I (and many others) WANT TO FIND OUT THE TRUTH about what Mann did. That’s why the six year old emails are what was asked for under the FOIA. So we can find out what happened.
It is the opposite of your incorrect claim that I want to convict him without evidence or trial. I want the evidence to come out, I want to get to the actual facts, so we can see if he is guilty of further transgressions than the ones he has admitted to.
You and Muller think Mann should walk. I say there is plenty of evidence to call him to account, and I’m glad it’s happening. Lets get to the truth.
w.
shows that these clowns in academia (as in politics) believe the laws do not apply to them. apparently laws are only for the little man.
Theo Goodwin says:
July 3, 2011 at 7:34 am
“You want to be more careful. The prevailing thinking in the business and legal community is that all your communications belong to the company if you are on company property or on private property but using company communications equipment. The entire nine yards is worse, but I won’t bore you. Some executives with clout have exceptions written into their contracts.”
A corporation does not acquire ownership of private property merely because it is located on their premises. They have no more right to go poking around inside your personal cell phone than they have to look inside your wallet or your jockstrap. They don’t own your car or its contents just because it is parked in their parking lot.
Sun Spot says:
July 3, 2011 at 12:43 pm
It’s possible but unlikely unless every packet that flows through every digital communication channel is recorded. Even then it’s difficult to sort out what you sent or received through google mail from a zillion other data packets that have nothing to do with google mail. The primary difference here is that google mail post office is owned and operated by google and the browser inside your company firewall is a just that – a browser – and the corporate communications channels can’t distinguish the text in an email from any other data that flows to and from the browser. Pretty much only he who owns the POP server can easily archive the email that flows through it. Down at the router level a data packet containing email text is indistinguishable from all the other packets. At the transport level there’s nothing special about google email in other words.
Of course if you’re using a corporate workstation where the software on it is set up and maintained by the corporation then all bets are off. They could be recording every keystroke and every website you visit and things of that nature. So if, for instance you used your corporate workstation to access your private bank account the corporation could record your account number and password and some enterprising IT flunky could rob you and many other employees blind, do wire transfers to an offshore bank account, then hastily get on a plane to some Carribean Island with no U.S. extradition rights and live happily ever after. The company whose policies allowed such theft to occur would probably get its lunch eaten in court when the harmed employees sued them. So it isn’t likely that such policies would be sanctioned.
I guess the long and the short of it is that surveillance is always possible but any modest effort at privacy, such as using google mail for personal business instead of corporate email address, is very likely to remain private and won’t be routinely archived by the corporation who happens to own the workstation no more than it would routinely, as a matter of policy, record your private bank account number and password.
A personal cell phone or tablet adds another layer of privacy. So long as you use a data link provided by the phone company and don’t connect to the corporate LAN then your privacy is as good as the phone company can provide which is pretty damn good but of course the determined and well outfitted spy can still eavesdrop even on that.
@Dave Springer
I was referring to corporate intranets. You sound a bit naive about the degree to which big brother Corp. is watching, I suspect you are in management !
In my opinion, the AGW scam needs to have the “hockey-stick” in order to survive. Muller is a strong man-made global warming advocate. He is doing his best to keep the stick alive… including throwing Mann under the bus in order to save it. What Muller doesn’t want to happen is have more things revealed that further destroy the credibilty of the hockey stick, thus no more investigations of Mann and the emails. I think Muller definitely tipped his hand in this regard when he gave testimony to congress earlier this year concluding that the data the team used was excellent, even though the “BEST” project he was leading had just begun examining it.
Dave Springer – three different layers:
1) Hosted personal email e.g. gmail, yahoo mail, etc. – any institution that does not have policies preventing or restricting institutional use of personal email is asking for a legal bruising.
2) Outsourced corporate email – contractually any email hosted on such a service is the property of the contracting entity (university, corporation, etc.) and not the individual.
3) In-house mail infrastructure – once again the email is not the property of the individual.
Dave Springer – oh, and if the university or corporation is paying for your phone, pad, laptop, whatever they absolutely do have the right to go poking around in it.
And if you, personally, are using it for corporate or institutional business then you may have opened it up to their lawyers through your own actions.
Muller: “Scientists alone should decide how and what to publish in their results, looking at private files in a public setting is an unfair standard.”
“Private”? In making this overtly infantile ex post facto appeal solely to the concepts of “should” and “unfair”, Muller is already admitting that he has lost the argument as to what the FOIA very intentionally does in fact require by law – which is public transparency of most of what our publicly financed and constituted by “we the people” Governmental system does in that capacity, including its governmental scientists; and which is exactly why the FOIA came into existence in the first place as an explicit and necessary recourse available to “the people” within advanced societies necessarily based upon the primacy of actually functional individual rights, and as directly opposed to the operation of those systems based upon a dead-end Master-Slave ideology.
The evolutionary contrast between the operation of this kind of truly enlightened Governmental system which is based upon the functioning inputs and actions stated as codified rights involving the free speech, vote, and liberty of individuals within that system – and that of an equally opposite regressive, evolutionary throw-back kind of Governmental system based upon the Totalitarian rule of the rest of its individuals on the part of an old style Dictator, Oligarchy, King, or Theocracy – could not be more stark, probably to both Totalitarians and Individuals alike.
And the contrast is only demonstrated once again by the current onslaught against individuals by this very same anti-progressive elitism, controllism, and parasitism, but now merely repackaged and sold under the unhinged, delusional “perception is reality” verbiage of an allegedly “fair”, “caring”, “sustainable”, “correct”, “equalizing” or “socially just”, even “salvational”, etc., Communist or Socialist-Fascist Party.
Nah, in listening to Muller’s desperate pleas, I only hear the same old grossly supremist claims and machinations of the ipcc’s Post Normal “Climate” Science style Masters, who at a very basic level just don’t like individualism and are apparently existentially threatened by a society whose Governmental System is based upon it.
Remember Arthur Andersen’s collapse, based on ethical lapses? That’s what happens in the private sector, and there is no reason that same standard shouldn’t apply to ivory tower types.
I emailed Dr. Muller and I found his thoughts interesting to say the least and seems to have no conception of what FOIA is. I said his emails were subject to FOIA but with the usual exemptions for personal and so on his response was “Some degree of privacy is good for research. If I have to be wary every time I give an opinion, it stifles communication. There are times when it is important to be candid, and “public employees” will stop being candid if they know that everything they say will be on the public record.
He also said “Why? The “as a taxpayer” is a cliche. There are lots of things that taxpayers are not allowed to know, such as personnel records of employees, complaints they make about their bosses, etc.” I said we don’t want personal records what are you talking about and he had no answer.
You’re missing a “not”, I believe: “…that you would not want read out loud in court.”
Speaking of which, it’s a tad or two overdue, no?
Anthony: It’s my impression that there’s a lengthening list of purportedly latest-greatest most transparent data sets, from ARGO to BEST, which are mysteriously laggard in being opened up. Suspicious minds suspect desperate efforts to “fix” them behind the scenes (perhaps employing the very experienced “Harry”?).
A listing with timelines might make a very provocative post. Should you be inclined to be provocative. 😉