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.
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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
What is it with Laden? Has he learned nothing from his tantrum over the general reaction to his calling Tallbloke a criminal? Does he think he’s above the law?
And I read somewhere that the FBI say it’s not within their jurisdiction. Not even identity theft, internet phishing?
Hmph. The US probably has more lawyers than the ROW combined! This probably doesn’t do your economy any good, but surely one of them can figure out what crime has been committed?
looks like temps will be quite negative anomaly again for February LOL poor warmistas
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
sceptical says (February 20, 2012 at 5:47 am)
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.
—————————————
You want them, perhaps, to send in the heavy mob with baseball bats??
What can you say? Heartland are a fantastic bastion of truth, justice and the skeptical way! Its a travesty whats happened, and I only hope those rotten warmist thugs are locked up for a long, long time and forced to read Jo Nova’s Skeptics Handbook.
This has not been established to date. The underlying principle has not been established. How do you know the CRU were stolen, hacked or acquired via deception? How do you know they weren’t leaked?
Heartland is a PRIVATE body while CRU is a PUBLIC body, publicly funded and publicly accountable. Those emails belong to the public. If CRU felt they had a legal case then why didn’t they send out public legal notices????
The other thing to remember that at least 1 of the Heartland documents is fake. While CRU have never pointed to any single email as being fabricated. The fake doc is being used to smear and damage Heartland. Can’t people see the issue here. They might even have copyright issues with some bloggers.
Snapple says:
February 20, 2012 at 6:16 am
“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.”
Have your brain checked. One of the documents is a FORGERY.
To clarify further to my last comment.
“They might even have copyright issues with some bloggers over the other documents.
to any former victims of the Lizard ‘Ban hammer’…here ya go:
http://diaryofdaedalus.com/2012/02/20/charles-johnson-publishes-the-heartland-institutes-email/
At a dinner party at our house last night, the topic was “doctrine and truth”, and the general attitude toward these topics was expressed by two quotations from H. R. McMaster’s book Dereliction of Duty, referring to the unauthorized printing of The Pentagon Papers
Needless to say, the young folks at our party — many of them US Marine veterans of multiple combat tours in Iraq and Vietnam — were entirely familiar with McMaster’s principle of “Be First With the Truth,” (which has been universally adopted within the UWS armed forces).
Moreover, McMaster’s book has appeared in multiple editions of the USMC Commandant’s Professional Reading List (which is highly recommended) and nowadays General McMaster commands CJIATF-Shafafiyat, the primary restoration-of-justice effort in Afghanistan.
It appears to me that the US Armed Forces thoroughly appreciate a principle that the Heartland Institute has utterly failed to grasp: the vital role in democracies of open critical discussion, as an essential corrective to arrogance, weakness, lying, and abdication of responsibility.
That is why the Heartland Institute should embrace the Marine principle “Be First With the Truth”, not the principle “Be First to Threaten Litigation”, because most folks recognize, as a matter of plain common sense, that suppressive legal bluster is a royal road that leads straight to “arrogance, weakness, lying, and abdication of responsibility.”
I think what we see here is a direct result of all the confabs and getting together with media consultants the Alarmists were talking about not that long ago. You remember surely,where the said they had to refocus on “messaging” to figure out how to get their message out, as the evil deniers were making progress in showing how bad and nonexistent the science is behind AGW, in large part because of the Climategate emails.
They were and are desperate to find some way to neuter Climategate, and IMO you can bet that this Heartland theft and fraud was orchestrated deliberately to muddy the waters and take the sting out of Climategate. You can tell that from the talking points the trolls keep spinning and the blogs and media are adopting, why, if you don’t like our theft then that means you have to ignore the shocking, TRUE, malfeasance shown in the Climategate emails.
This smells very focused and deliberate, regardless of the ineptness of the execution. The leftist media and their supporting blogs will never care or mention the differences between public and private institutions or the fraudulent, forged documents, all that’s important to them is to get a gotcha moment to build their propaganda on. One has to wonder what the world might be like if they put this much effort into the actual science instead of propaganda.
Kids usually have night fears so they hide beneath the blankets. If challenged, they can become aggressive as they don´t like to face truth. As long as they play with their favorite toys, like “global warming”,etc. and feel being indulged and retributed by others, everything is fine, but there are responsibilities in the world, you know, and they can´t irresponsibly spoil things around, making their families and society suffer through actions like building “wind mill towers”, etc.: Gigantic and useless toys, just for the sake of their satisfaction, destroying all achievements, developments and evolution of the human kind.
It is not a matter of applying without reasoning such a crazy “precautionary principle” and do whatever they like without taking into account the consequences. In the history of our planet many ideologies have brought not other but deep suffering and nothing of the paradises they so illusorily promised. So take it cool, relax and think if all this is not falling in fanaticism.
Putting aside the strategy doc for a moment, I really can’t believe people are talking about copyright with regards to the other docs.
If somebody obtained a copy of your personal financal documents by phishing or pretexting, or whatever you want to call it – and then arranged for unredacted copies to be published all over the internet – do you really think your biggest complaint (and your own legal redress) is going to be based on copyright?
A physicist says:
February 20, 2012 at 7:02 am
“Needless to say, the young folks at our party — many of them US Marine veterans of multiple combat tours in Iraq and Vietnam — were entirely familiar with McMaster’s principle of “Be First With the Truth,” (which has been universally adopted within the UWS armed forces). ”
Do they also tolerate being smeared by fabrications?
cui bono writes “I know little of US law ”
It may be more complicated. I believe desmogblog is based in Canada. We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which covers what is in the US First Amendment; but it is different. It could be interesting, legally, how this turns out.
Heartland said:
““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.”
——-
So I would hope that the Heartland Institute will openly condemn the release of all the Climategate emails as well as all the defamatory speech direct toward the scientists involved.
Private organizations have proprietary information. They have the right to closely hold information.
Public Organizations have no such right.CRU/UV/ Etc. all use our tax dollars.
FOIA is what it is all about. If they are ashamed of the process at which they arrived
at their conclusions, then they stonewall. I am convinced that the Climate gate
release was an inside job.
Heartland was an attempted smear.They got chaught…
there seems to be a difference…
Are CAGW espousers really willing to argue that the public doesn’t have the right to see emails that should have already been released under FOI before they were leaked? But the public has the right to see documents (including confidential financial documents) obtained by fraudulent means from a private entity that is in no way subject to FOI? Is there a First Amendment right to forge documents?
I’m all the way with Heartland Institute on this.
sceptical says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:47 am
To you and all the others who believe that Free Markets mean no government. The purpose of having a government is to protect one’s rights from those who would seek to initiate force, or commit fraud. The latter is very much on display right now – HI had every right to seek redress in via legal action, or if it comes to it, in court.
A physicist says:
At a dinner party at our house last night, the topic was “doctrine and truth”, …
But right back at the dissembling on Monday AM, huh?
Do tell, what is the UCMJ position on lying, forgery, theft, espionage, and distribution of confidential materials? Perhaps you should ask Pfc. Bradley Manning.
Uh-huh.
A physicist says on February 20, 2012 at 7:02 am
It seems that you have gone beyond the unintentional parody horizon.
I must also congratulate you on your brazen hypocrisy. Great work.
I agree with Cadae, the main document was an obvious fake and a cursory read exposed it as a fraud to all but the most gullible. The very thought of someone wanting to prevent teachers from teaching science is comical to anyone here. The word “science” of course was being used as a synonym for their AGW cult beliefs. While the conflation of terms has always played a big role in the AGW propaganda the minion that wrote it didn’t have a clue. Made perfect sense to him, right? LOL
Steve S says: “Heartland has already stated that the memo was fake.”
“The Memo,” yes — they have stated that & I referenced that fact. But they remain silent on the remaining 100 pages of documents released. Authentic or not? If they’re not Heartland’s documents, then who are they to tell anyone to take them down?
Snapple said on February 20, 2012 at 6:16 am:
At this post Snapple said on February 19, 2012 at 9:23 am:
Which got this reasoned reply from DirkH on February 19, 2012 at 9:45 am:
So Snap-Snap-Snappy-Snapple, did you have a problem with DirkH’s reply that warranted reposting your request at a different piece?
BTW, speaking of possible violations of the law, Snapple is a trademark of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group. You did get permission to appropriate their trademark for use as an anonymous blog handle, right?