Without making any statement about the climate change debate itself...
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.
The issue here doesn't have anything to do with Federal funding of research, but the fact that he is technically an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Freedom of information laws vary by State, but in general, employees of State Universities are State employees, and as such information related to their positions, etc may be subject to a freedom of information request. I'm not intimately familiar with the FOI laws in Virginia, but I do know that they require salaries of all State University employees be divulged under a FOI request (you can get that information here: http://datacenter.timesdispatch.com/databases/salaries-virgi... or any other number of places)
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.
What constitutes a "personal email?" I can't find it explicitly stated anywhere whether this was a personal email address or his official university address, but if it's the latter I can't see how that is at all construed as personal.
You're conflating meanings of the word "personal". It meant the email address assigned to the professor. He's not an elected official. Somebody's payroll being underwritten by tax dollars doesn't, on its face, entitle the public to their "personal" communications. It's a ridiculous notion especially in this case because this attack group wanted the emails to smear all parties involved. The court was wise to protect a reasonable expectation of privacy on the part of the staff at the University.
I do not think that matters one bit. It’s pretty clear to me that morally, communication someone wrote with the expectation of privacy should not be made public unless there is evidence for criminal wrongdoing. You do not get to change the rules after the fact.
If you want all e-mails researchers write to be public, the researchers have to be informed about that beforehand.
If you ask me to pay for your research, how can you claim that I'm not entitled to see the communications you've done in the process of that research?
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:
"Privacy" means more than one thing in this context.
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.
You seem to be arguing that making e-mails public in the future would be good. Maybe. But making e-mails written in the past with the expectation of privacy public? That seems ill-advised to me.
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.)
This. Not to mention, if I knew my emails on my University account would be subject to public scrutiny, I'd just use another email account for all of my dealings.
A lot of music companies think that they have a physical monopoly on how digital music is distributed... since the 80s.
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.
Just because that's the only email address they use doesn't mean it's their personal account. It's the only account they use that's provided by a third party. If they quit their job and they lose the account, it wasn't their account in the first place.
No, it is not. He can use the account for personal email but that does not make the account itself personal. If you use an account provided by a third-party for personal emails then you cannot expect that email to remain private. It is subject to whims of the third-party and applicable laws.
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.
>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.
>the nature of science is that, at the very least, all results, data, and methodological information should be wide open
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.
I'm curious - a quick look at your comments history shows you to have a fairly libertarian type of political leaning. But in this specific case you seem all for the government intruding to force one organisation to hand over information to another. Why the change of heart on the role of government?
I don't mean to speak for CWuestefeld, but from my perspective its about transparency in government. Mann is/was a government employee (I'm not talking about federal funding, but the fact that he was an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia through UVA), and as such should be subject to the same laws and ideals governing transparency with regard to government workers (and resources), from the Governor down to low level bureaucratic civil servants.
It is my understanding that university employees are not civil servants. According to Wikipedia, public universities in the US on average receive only 43% of funding frOm government, the rest is made up for by student fees and endowments. Also according to Wikipedia, UVA has the biggest endowment of any public university in the US.
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...
Interesting point to think about, however the % mix of funding source has little to do with whether employees of an organization are classified as civil servants. An example of this would be departments of transportation or other toll collecting public agencies - generally tolls and fees provide the bulk of the funding with taxpayer dollars making up a smaller percentage, yet the employees are very clearly civil servants.
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.
Every Libertarian I have ever met or talked to has been absolutely rock solid on the position of government transparency, which is what he is arguing for (he certainly doesn't get a choice to not pay for this research, the IRS frowns on that).
These findings and proposed hypotheses likely influence policies which financially hit just about everyone. Billions of tax dollars have been diverted on the basis of climate research. Is it really an extravagant demand to know what these scientists' discussions amount to?
Isn't that a bit like saying, "If you want to know what Monsanto is up to, read their publications"?
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.
Monsanto is spelled with an "M". There's another difference.
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?
> 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?
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.
I think you need to reread your own articles. They don't necessarily agree with your conclusion. Yes, they were all cleared of "wrong-doing" but all of them mention the fact their data is still suspect because of the things you mentioned. In essence, my interpretation is that they didn't necessarily do anything wrong in the legal sense, they just didn't present good science.
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.
You and I both know that the most WTF results are not published precisely because you can't write them up in any way that would be reproducible.
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.
If they want people to not care about their emails, stop using Global Warming to take away our freedoms (I can't get a decent light bulb anymore because of this shit) and make 21 century living unreasonably expensive (yeah, we need gasoline).
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.
That depends on your point of view. The environment will outlive you by a significant margin and since the planet itself enables all life and everything on it then it could be argued to be the closest thing to a 'god' that we have.
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?
Not to diverge too much from the article (which should be about expectation of privacy rights) and get into politics and moral philosophy, but people in Bangladesh could just as well be like "quit using your lightbulbs to violate our property rights."
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.
First off, Bangladesh has been on-net gaining land mass in recent years.
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.
Yes, it does seem a rather one-sided article. Notice how they give a quote as to how the scientists are being "attacked" by people "abusing" public records and FOIA laws. No real indication of why these people are using public records and FOIA laws nor what it is they wish to find.
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.