Judge preserves privacy of climate scientist’s emails
blogs.nature.com
blogs.nature.com
It bothers me more than a little when research is funded by taxpayers, yet we taxpayers are forbidden from seeing what was happening with our money.
Even absent public funding, the nature of science is that, at the very least, all results, data, and methodological information should be wide open. When you add in that we're paying for it, I can't see where they get the right to conceal part of their work. If you don't want open books, then don't look for open funding; the private sector would be happy to keep your communications secret, if it's on their dime.
If you want all e-mails researchers write to be public, the researchers have to be informed about that beforehand.
I paid for the email server (or for its usage), for your computer and its software, and for your time. I've got every right to see how it's used.
In particular, with publicly-funded research, where we've got an extra step (or several) between the voters and those working on their behalf, the public has a right to know in order to tell their representatives whether they want the government to continue spending their money this way.
UPDATE:
I do not believe that those writing the emails had any legitimate expectation of privacy to begin with. It seems that employees don't generally have a right to privacy in their work emails. For example:
Courts have found that employers are generally free to read employee email messages, as long as there's a valid business purpose for doing so. -- http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/email-monitoring-can-...
It seems to me that support of FOIA laws is a valid "business" purpose.
Update response: The employer is the university, certainly not the public. (I’m also not sure why you are so quick to dismiss the importance of private communication channels. To me it seems important that people who work together can talk together privately, without the public knowing.)
Mann did not have (and shouldn't have expected) a right to privacy over his employer, the university. If they wanted to read his emails then they could.
But he might have had (and expected) a right to privacy over the general public, or more specifically organizations like the American Tradition Institute.
You can only get from "the university were entitled to read his email" to "the ATI were entitled to read his mail" by assuming that the ATI had that right over the university -- and that's pretty much exactly what the court case was about, which has just been decided in favour of Mann and the University.
So, yeah, support of FOIA laws is doubtless a valid business purpose, but support of FOIA laws did not require the university to hand over Mann's emails. And this has nothing to do with the question of the university's right to read Mann's email.
Although in terms of FOIA, as I understand it, one can expect unrelated emails of the request to not be released. But if one writes a small sentence relating to the subject of the FOIA request in an otherwise personal email, then it is subject to that request.
Doesn't make it so.
If anything, this type of incident serves as a reminder to our culture. It's so easy for communications to be copied and shared. That makes it all the more important that you separate your personal and work lives with clear digital boundaries.
>Judge issues final order. Affirms the university’s right to withhold scholarly communications and finds that the documents & personal emails of mine demanded by ATI were indeed protected as the university had contended.
So, he was probably using that e-mail for personal communication. Plenty of people do it (including most of my professors when I was in grad school), even if it's not totally good practice.
It is not at all unprecedented to ask for emails of State employees in a freedom of information request, though the scope must be pretty narrow to be successful. You may see, for example, requests being made for emails related to deliberations around specific procurements.
Personally, I think a blanket off limits approach to university personel is a slippery slope. People biased enough to be upset over a request like this should feel free to submit similar requests to researchers (at State institutions) whose results they disagree with.
One more point - no FOI request would ever have a chance of being approved asking for something like 'all emails from an email account' - these requests need to be very narrow and specific to be granted so it would likely be something more like 'emails related to one specific research topic in a specific timeframe'. So, folks who think they're looking for a broad selection of personal emails to find something personally embarrassing are off base.
The request for his e-mails had nothing to do with the scholarly process. When a professor wants to disprove another's research, he doesn't ask him to forward all his e-mails over. That's just not the way it works.
I've read a bit into the case, the original request for e-mails was from an attorney general with an anti-climate change agenda. He lost, so a private conservative organization with the same agenda filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the e-mails. They lost. This shouldn't be a surprise, the request was unorthodox.
All of which is to say that universities, even public universities, are not government entities in the same way that public schools are. It is far from clear to me that libertarians would support the idea of a private citizen working for a non-government organisation being compelled to hand over private communications by the government.
Of course I might be wrong about UVAs status, but I did a fair amount of searching, and could not find anything that would indicate that university employees were in fact government employees, and the information that I did find tended to support the idea that they were not. If I'm wrong about this, then the OP's position is easier to understand...
Since UVA employees's salaries are publicly available through FOIA (see http://datacenter.timesdispatch.com/databases/salaries-virgi...) I think that's one pretty good indicator of civil service status. In Virginia, the University is required to report salary information, etc, to the Virginia Department of Human Resources Management. They are able to adjust how they report salary information for employees who are paid a portion through endowments and other outside sources.
Now, I have no idea or information about the specific case with Mann - who knows, maybe he was being paid exclusively by some special endowment and so his records would not be subject to a FOI request - but I would have thought they would have used that in part of their justification for not complying with the request.
Also - I don't consider myself a libertarian so I won't speak for them - I'm just a big proponent of government transparency.
Don't get me wrong, the environment is important but maintaining it as is should not be a priority. Nature is not holy, but it is useful.
Re. your second paragraph, what do you expect the alternative to maintaining the environment "as is" to look like and why do you assume we (in the developed world, not to mention the rest) can cope with it?
It is useful to future generations as well, perhaps in ways we do not know.
Wrong site for this discussion though.
It's not a matter of whose "rights" are going to be violated, it's a matter of configuring property rights to improve human well-being.
Quote: "Satellite images of Bangladesh over the past 32 years show that the country is growing annually by about 20 square kilometres (7.72 square miles)" (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7532949.stm )
Now, it's true that that article claims that eventually sea level rise will overcome this, but the rate of sea level rise has actually not been accelerating in accordance with the predictions made back then - sea level has been continuing to rise at about the same low rate it had been doing for the last century. (Um, here's one source on that: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/current-wisdom-n... )
In short, if the people of Bangladesh have any reason to be concerned about "our lightbulbs", it's a distant future concern, not a current one.
If they aren't publishing, then that's when things get fishy.
Don't get me wrong. I think that Science is the time and again proven method and culture to move society forward. That said, Science has also become very politicized and needs to be scrutinized so that it remains trustworthy and beneficial.
Publications are all well and good, but with all the public money and resources being shifted toward climate study and CO2 remediation policies, I think that we should continue to look behind the curtains wherever we can.
No, it isn't. Scientists are not corporations.
How is being a corporation relevant?
Are you saying that Scientists can't have questionable motives, methods, and data that should be closely examined when what they're both doing has such a big impact on our world, but corporations do?
No. I'm saying "Read their papers."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/climate-change-scie...
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/61233/uk-climategate-inq...
Those are just 3 of the 8 organizations that determined that their findings were not the result of data tampering.
"The individuals concerned had no idea that their work would ever be of such high public profile, and as a result their record keeping wasn't very good," [Ron Oxburgh, formerly of Shell] said. "If I was asked to produce records of all of the research that I did 10 or 12 years ago, I would be hard pushed to do so."
Obviously they could have been more public with their data sets, algorithms, etc. but they're nowhere near alone in that regard.
And that's the whole point. How can they say that there was no tampering when everyone admits the "record keeping wasn't very good"?
They cannot produce research records from 10 to 12 years ago? Why not? Why would they throw such stuff out? Wouldn't they present all their research data when they submit to peer review? If not, why not?
Your articles mentioned that they did in fact hide their data, deleted emails to prevent going public. Why? If you look around you can find articles where they not only did not present their data for review, they actively prevented people they didn't like from getting access to it. Even after publishing in scientific journals. That's not good science.
Of course they should have been more public with their data, that's the whole point. But saying that, well, those guys over there were bad about it is not an excuse for them to use to refuse to present their data.
So, we can all agree that the findings are suspect because the data appears to be lost and/or incomplete. So I guess we just take their word for it then? I'm not a scientist but that's not how I've understood how science works. If an independent party, or even one that disagrees with them, is unable to recreate their findings then the whole thing is suspect and should be redone. By someone else.
But, this is global warming, where neither side is willing to agree to disagree. It's either you're a true believer or you are not, there's no room for discussion otherwise.
EDIT: typo
But what I am really interested in is reading any and all political stuff in those emails. Global Warming is too hot a political tropic to allow a few percent insiders to stir the pot to take away what little freedom we have left.