From a Heartland media release:
FEBRUARY 19 — The Heartland Institute has sent legal notices http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/19/heartland-institute-sends-legal-notices-publishers-faked-and-stolen-docume to numerous Web sites, blogs, and publications asking them to take down the stolen and forged documents and what it views as malicious and false commentary based on them.
The following statement by Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely “at” heartland.org or 312-377-4000.
_____
“We realize this will be portrayed by some as a heavy-handed threat to free speech. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect Internet fraud, and there is no right to defamatory speech.
“For 28 years, The Heartland Institute has engaged in fierce debates over a wide range of public policies – school reform, health care, telecommunications policy, corporate subsidies, and government waste and fraud, as well as environmental policy. We frequently and happily engage in vigorous, robust debate with those who disagree with our views.
“We have resorted in the past to legal means only in a very few cases involving outright fraud and defamation. The current situation clearly fits that description, and our legal counsel has advised that the first step in defending ourselves should be to ask the blogs to take down the stolen and forged documents.”
President
The Heartland Institute
jbast”at” heartland.org
312-377-4000
_____
The Heartland Institute <http://www.heartland.org> is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site http://www.heartland.org or call 312/377-4000.
====================================================================
Here’s the letter being sent to some websites and bloggers, DeSmog Blog and Greg Laden of ScienceBlogs (already in legal trouble over the Tallbloke libel) both got copies.
February 18, 2012
By e-mail to: editor “at” desmogblog.com
By Federal Express to:
Mr. Brendan G DeMelle
Editor
DeSmog Blog
[street address redacted]
Seattle, WA 98117-2303
Re: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-and-strategy
Dear Mr. DeMelle:
On or about February 14, 2012, your web site posted a document entitled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” (the “Fake Memo”), which is fabricated and false.
On or about the same date, your web site posted certain other documents purporting to be those of The Heartland Institute (“Heartland”). Heartland has not authenticated these documents (the “Alleged Heartland Documents”).
Your site thereafter has reported repeatedly on all of these documents.
Heartland almost immediately issued a statement disclosing the foregoing information, to which your web site has posted links.
It has come to our attention that all of these documents nevertheless remain on your site and you continue to report on their contents. Please be advised as follows:
1. The Fake Memo document is just that: fake. It was not written by anyone associated with Heartland. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact. Publication of this falsified document is improper and unlawful.
2. As to the Alleged Heartland Documents your web site posted, we are investigating how they came to be in your possession and whether they are authentic or have been altered or fabricated. Though third parties purport to have authenticated them, no one – other than Heartland – has the ability to do so. Several of the documents say on their face that they are confidential documents and all of them were taken from Heartland by improper and fraudulent means. Publication of any and all confidential or altered documents is improper and unlawful.
3. Furthermore, Heartland views the malicious and fraudulent manner in which the documents were obtained and/or thereafter disseminated, as well as the repeated blogs about them, as providing the basis for civil actions against those who obtained and/or disseminated them and blogged about them. Heartland fully intends to pursue all possible actionable civil remedies to the fullest extent of the law.
Therefore, we respectfully demand: (1) that you remove both the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents from your web site; (2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (3) that you remove from your web site any and all quotations from the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (4) that you publish retractions on your web site of prior postings; and (5) that you remove all such documents from your server.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you require any further information.
Very truly yours,
Maureen Martin
General Counsel
original Heartland PDF is here: Tier One – DeMelle
No sign yet that the BBC or the Guardian have been issued this formal legal notice. But their actions were arguably far more serious than the small-fry. Presumably HI would need advice from UK lawyers – but there is plenty of time to proceed with all this. If only for the embarrassment factor for Richard Black, I hope HI start on the BBC soon. Black’s behaviour was atrocious, way outside BBC reporting guidelines, and he needs to be called on it.
Hunt says: Heartland still has a link to the illegally obtained “climategate” docs:
The climategate docs were such a huge public interested that they were investigated numerous times and e.g. the UK information commission stated the FOI law had been broken by those writing the emails.This certainly is a public interest defence to what you correctly point out would be unwarranted publication otherwise.
The Heartland Documents show no law breaking, they show no impropriety. Even if the public interest is “helping the planet” … it is impossible to show anything in these documents that demonstrate the Heartland Institute was not helping the planet.
About the strongest defence anyone can give is: “they didn’t show the institute was doing what we thought would help the planet”. Which if that were applied, would mean no one of earth was entitle to privacy because according to the BIG-OIL funded eco-zealots, mankind is a plague and so none of us by existing is helping the planet.
@Charles.U.Farley
“Your side of the fence couldnt get the goods either legally or factually, they had to steal them and fabricate something up ( spot the trend line anyone?) ”
hockey stick shaped by any chance?
i’ve often wondered if the hockey stick is actually based on the amount of fabricated data, hence the blade beginning when it did and the projection for even more fabricated data to feed the gravy train
I think the Heartland Institute went overboard with this. This isn’t the 1940ties (when would havt to ask only the NYT and the WashPost to keep things out of the public), the cats are out of the bag (both the forgery by the alarmists and the real documents) and playing Barbara Streisand isn’t going to help.
Now, if they had asked bloggers to take down obviously false statements (or at least distance themselves clearly from false statements), they would have my full sympathy.
MangoChutney
Sorry what ? I was replying to Hunt ! so what part have I got wrong or don’t understand ?!
Aside from any real vs fake, and publicly-owned vs privately owned issues relating to Heartland vs Climate, there’s another important difference: The content.
While the climategate emails contain stuff that the team would prefer to keep private, I’m not aware of any really confidential personal & financial information in them. If there is, it hasn’t been widely published or discussed/ For example, I don’t think the climategate details contain something like Phil Jones’s credit card number, or personal bank transactions details, or a list of every paid project he’s done in the past few years.
On the other hand, putting aside the obviously faked strategy memo, the supposedly authentic budgets and so forth do contains lots of personal details of Heartland, it’s employees, and it’s donors. And people are already making use of that information, not only merely by publishing, but for example, by contacting organizations that Heartland has interacted with and demanding they stop.
So what you have is documents obtained by fraud, containing very sensitive information, and then people using that sensitive information – in conjunction with fraudulent information from the faked document – for purposes that are best harassment, but may well fall under torts like tortuous interference and/or interference with contract.
While heartland has a legal basis, it’s arguable that it better to let these site go on posting the fake docs. It clearly demonstrates how fraudulent these blogs and organizations are. If they want to wear a big sign around their neck announcing their credibility, ethics, and motives, why not? They can paint the scarlet letter on themselves.
Let them go on. Why is one obvious fraud different than hundreds of more subtitle ones. Let’s the big ugly lie meet the light of day and color every other statement they make.
“Since that type of neighborhood is usually poorly served by transit..”
Buses run down 15th Ave NW and 8th Ave NW to/from the city. They’re both short walks from the address in question. Given his environmental concerns, I’m sure he uses them often.
Give it to Police, what proof do you have that the constabulary isn’t involved?
My god look it’s very simple he says something was stolen I say if you have proof had it to the police that has nothing top do with the police being involved now or tomorrow but has a lot to do with making statements of fact where you have non !!!!!!!
The headline here refers to the documents as “stolen” yet, five days after their becoming public, Heartland has not confirmed the authenticity of a single document, and stated that only one is fake. There are freely available binary compare software tools that Heartland could have used to verify the authenticity of these documents in just a few minutes and state unambiguously if the documents are stolen or not. But Heartland has chosen not to do that.
The simple response from anyone getting this letter is this: “What stolen documents?”
Anthony
Does this notice mean that you will likewise have to clean up your previous blogs on the subject in order to remove adverse comments from the likes of Chris Colose, Karl L or even William M Connolley. Unfortunately, you will be damned if you do and damned if you don’t, especially from people like Connolly, a veteran in the area of censorship.
Heartland Institute says, ” Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”
Didn’t take long for Heartland Institute to back off its mission and turn to the intrusive power of government when it wanted something from the government. So much for the statists at Heartland Institutes belief in the free market.
Phil C:
Heartland has already stated that the memo was fake. They’ve done so more than once.
@Matt
Apologies, I didn’t realise you were responding to Hunt – please ignore
The HI legal notice to the blogs and news outlets has multiple purposes. Among them, it is a “high ground” effort to limit the damage to HI’s reputation – a step that also limits the amount of money (“damages”) the criminal will have to pay to HI when caught and successfully prosecuted. While self-serving, amongs lawyers, it is considered a very ethical thing to act to limit the residual harm so as to reduce the cost to the criminal. Some lawyers would let the damages pile up so as to economically destroy the poor sod that stupidly thought they could get away with the fraud.
I say criminal as it is a criminal act to engage in fraudulent activity through the post or by email, in this case by representing oneself as a different person so as to obtain confidential business information.
Nothing like this can be said about the unauthorized EAU email releases.
The Heartland statement icludes this demand:
“(2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents;”
I disagree with this, and I really, really cannot understand it.
Anthony’s paraphrase says that they are after “what [they view] as malicious and false commentary based on [the documents].”
But this demand #2 does not confine itself to certain types of statements.
I suspect that like me, Anthony is not completely comfortable with demand #2, either.
Anthony, respectfully, would you mind clarifying your view of this? Because I think that the position that has been staked out with this demand is ultra-extreme and likely to be pounced on by the other side, if it hasn’t already. I think a clarification from you would be better coming sooner rather than later. This is not the White House where we float trial balloons before deciding what position to take.
Thank you.
RTF
“that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents”
That’s heavy-handed. There is nothing wrong with “referring or relating to” these documents, particularly to point out that Heartland flat says one is fake and it has yet to confirm the others are accurate copies of real documents (vs. versions slightly edited to make Heartland look bad).
The last resort of the warmist fanboys is defending defamation of their enemies with forged documents? And they appear here in droves, calling this defamation “free speech”?
Warmist fanboys, you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel if that is your point.
Taxpayer funded work that is supposed to be disclosed and publicly available ‘illegally obtained’?? I thought leftwingers were supposed to be in favour of hacking government computers, Wikileaks and all this ‘whose street our street’ stuff?
Dactyloscopy, (n) the examination of fingerprints (The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary)
Fingerprints do get left behind at crime scenes, Even the craftiest of perpetrators forget to wipe up everywhere,
The faker of these documents obviously had not encountered Kleenex.
Interesting. The Heartland Institute cannot allow itself to appear over aggressive, it needs to maintain its decorum and reputation, although it will certainly and rightly, defend itself and its interests. The warmist camp has already grasped this, but are too busy celebrating their imagined immunity to realise that they are in a very serious situation, especially deSBlog.
I doubt that Heartland will punish deSBlog as fully as they deserve, although, if some blogs do not withdraw specific comments, allegations and links, Heartland may have no alternative but to use a more heavy handed approach. Something they are clearly within their rights to do.
Garrett says:
February 20, 2012 at 4:39 am
Heartland does not have to suck it up. It is not CRU. If CRU felt their emails had been hacked illegally then why did that organization do nothing? Heartland had information stolen and it was added to a fabrication. Ignoring climate science, any organization that this happens to should act quickly act vigorously to defend itself.
I agree the CRU e-mails were “stolen”. Why CRU has done nothing about it says more about them than Heartland acting in this manner to defend themselves. CRU sucks.
If Joe Bast wants to clear this up, all he has to do is post a screen-save of the email sent with the attachments. Then we call all see what documents were actually attached and to whom they were sent.
Perhaps Joe Bast accidentally sent this email to the wrong person and he doesn’t want that Anonymous Donor to know he messed up.
To John Anderson. I complained to the BBC about the Richard Black article, his response was :
Dear Mr Thorpe-Willett,
Thanks for your email. You will be pleased to know that I did indeed phone the Heartland Institute before writing the article.
However, the basis for your complaint is false as seven out of the eight documents have not been dismissed as fakes – in fact the Heartland Institute acknowledged they were real documents, emailed out from the Institute.
Best regards,
Richard Black
—–Original Message—–
From: geoftw@gmail.com [mailto:automail@metafaq.com]
Sent: 17 February 2012 17:29
To: NewsOnline Complaints
{Feedback Type:} I would like to… Make a complaint
{Complaint type:} BBC Online
{Complaint about:} BBC News Online
{Complaint category:} Factual error or inaccuracy
{Complaint title:} The article was inaccurate as a document was fake
{Complaint:} The article by Richard Black lacked balance or journalistic
investigation. All documents were considered as real without any effort
to verify as such.
In fact at least one document has been declared a fake, did the
correspondent contact Heartland and ask them for a reaction, or did he
just print verbatim without verification?
{URL:} http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17048991
{Reply:} Yes
“(2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; … (4) that you publish retractions on your web site of prior postings;”
Don’t these two contradict one another? How do you do “4” without violating “2?”