Tuesday
Dec202011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Justice Committee call for evidence
Dec 20, 2011 FOI The House of Commons Justice Committee has now made a formal call for evidence into the operation of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Committee invites written evidence on the issues set out below (although respondents are welcome to address additional issues):
- Does the Freedom of Information Act work effectively?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Freedom of Information Act?
- Is the Freedom of Information Act operating in the way that it was intended to?
The deadline for submissions is Friday 3 February 2012.
Reader Comments (27)
Greg Laden latest:
There's lots more following that, like grovel and don't sue me.
Sorry for the interrupt.
Hysterical climb-down from Laden. A coward as well as a bully, it seems.
On the FOI issue, though, this is clearly the opening shots of the establishments attempts to redo FOI. It has proved utterly embarrassing for OLAM (Our Lords And Masters) and they are determined to get rid of it.
The campaign has been building for months. The opening salvos were fired at the end of the Parliamentary white washes.
Expect more.
There is no reason why all 'public' documents can't be hosted on a server and made accessible by everyone for minimal cost (if any). If the main objection is due to 'time/difficulty/costs involved' (as a means to argue for a restriction on FOI requests) then the idea of a central server holds even more sway.
Something else just made me laugh. I originally learned about the changes to Laden's post from a Leo Hickman tweet two hours ago (a complete fluke - I was looking at his feed because our respected host had engaged him on a related matter this afternoon). It now looks like this:
Glad to have your support, Mike, as always.
People are as free as their information.
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I assume in each of those 3 questions, the ending *for the public* is implicit.
the real enemy is academic publishing, surely. publish in a wiki way is obviously better...although tamino and rahmsdorf would not enjoy it
I will be contributing comments to the Justice Committee.
Having recently been through three iterations of FoI and an appeal to the Information Commissioner's Office with the UK Environment Agency where they connived to hide serious wrongdoing which was only exposed at the end of the process (with added info about how they previously orchestrated obstructions!) I think that the process actually lacks teeth.
Where public bodies have been shown to resist the release of information exposing wrongdoing then there should be unequivocal sanctions for the individual perpetrators of the obstruction in the form of fines at a minimum - these people need to take individual responsibility and not have the organisation (i.e. the taxpayers) fund a "fine" for the organisation and everybody simply sails on doing what they were doing (example - UEA CRU).
We have seen the subjects of FoI actually being involved in the winnowing of information - this is surely logically very wrong. The situation was saved for us by the ICO appeal which drew in people from outside the cabal who simply and independently did their jobs by the actual rules.
There must be flexibility to talk freely about issues inside public bodies but there must also be areas where records are kept and those records are formalised "on a server" and open to scrutiny as should be the case of a public body actioning a statutory duty.
In the UK we have a culture of public bureaucracy which seeks to grow itself in an inverse relationship to it's accountability. I see only two ways to address this:
a) Cut the workforce so that they have no time to empire build and intrigue.
b) Enforce rigid personal accountability.
FoI should have very sharp teeth indeed - at the moment the sanctions look like "three strokes of a dead lettuce" - and let that be a lesson to you.
Send them this post. It is clear from the emails Jones lied to CRU and UEA on the state of the raw data being requested. He admitted in 2009 to actually not having it. He also lied about the DoE statements.
He is in deep trouble and CRU and UEA need to realize Jone will take the university down with him.
AJS:
An excellent article - well done. There is no reason why you can't submit it to the Justice Committee. It just needs a bit of editing, proof-reading and tidying up.
It is no wonder that after Climategate 1.0 Jones was in the mental state he admitted. He must have realised that the attempted cover-up of all his abysmal life-time's work was being revealed and showing his work was nothing but BS. And it is confirmed now as being worse than we thought.
Your final paragraph rings totally true. You forgot to add the nuclear industry. All my work from the late 70s onwards was fully verified and archived (code, data, configuration etc) and is totally retrievable to this day. Nothing was ever thrown away or over-written. Procedures would not allow it. There is no professionalism in climate "science".
Does the Freedom of Information Act work effectively? Not for little people, but it almost seems to work as designed for the establishment.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Freedom of Information Act? It's strength (for the establishment) is that it provides a façade of accountability, there is no strength for little people; it's weakness is the 6 month statute of limitations, and that fact it's full of interpretation loopholes. It should be a 6 year statute of limitation, same as financial rules.
Is the Freedom of Information Act operating in the way that it was intended to? Intended by the establishment? Probably not, some FOIA requests worked, clearly the intention was only to provide the façade of accountability, not actually provide accountability, so it will be tightened up or abandoned all together, which is clearly what this "call for evidence" is all about, more window dressing.
I fear "frosty" is correct.
This review will doubtless result in making the FOI process even less efficient than it already is at holding secretive bodies to acount.
Excellent work AJS.
If you are going to submit it I would recommend toning down some of the commentary - e.g. "He’ll return to this subject in a gross and pathetic way in 2009". The content of the emails and the picture of deceit and incompetence they illustrate is sufficiently damning.
AJS/Phillip Bratby/Nicholas Hallam
My sentiments exactly.
This is a worthwhile submission but in its present form it would end up in the "round file" very rapidly.
Cut out the editorialising, the assumptions about Jones' motives or state of mind, or anything else other than the emails and reasonably objectivie explanation of their meanings.
Personal attacks will not go down at all well.
(WWS's first comment is a useful contribution as well).
Will consider it. Was not sure a Yank's inputs would carry weight.
As I noted on Cheifio's blog, the anger in the post derives from my work at NASA, where two destroyed shuttles and many lost lives were the result of shoddy analysis and subsequent decisions. Jones' attitude grates on the soul of us who know how reckless he has been in this.
Hopefully we may see before the February 3rd. deadline :-)
AJS:
I'm sure one of us in the UK could submit it (with your permission) if you were reluctant to do so.
Having read AJS's 'submission': PHEW! The stand-out comment - there are so many - has to be this for me:
This prompts me to ask, just when is someone from the RS (say) going to stand up for science and the scientific process and declare the results of CRUs work null and void? (I know the answer: when they start having snowball fights in hell).
Your words are now in a PDF on my Kindle, AJS - I hope you don't mind.
Bish: Sorry if I'm turning this into an AJS thread. Feel free to snip me.
AJS's final para in his 'submission' seems to be truncated:
I figure it should have continued: ...while thousands upon thousands of people will lose their lives or have their livelihoods destroyed as a result of trillions upon trillions of dollars being diverted in a massively hubristic attempt to modify man's interaction with technology and nature.
I, like others think that the Climategate1 & 2 emails show it is not working and how it has been "avoided" without any form of accountability.
"evidence into" - evidence is never "into" anything; it may be "related to" or "regarding", or even "of", to name but a few.
AJ writes:
"If this had been data on medical trials for drugs, structural testing for foundations, buildings or bridges, or safety data on cars, trains or planes the man would be fired and possibly charged with some form of criminal negligence. But this is climate science, where professional rules of conduct are apparently optional."
Sorry, AJ, but medical trials are full of crap (sorry) like this - in terms of bad inferences and shoddy statistics, but certainly sheer bad recordkeeping, probably orders of magnitude less frequent. The larger trials have enough money to have dedicated and specifically trained staff for medical trial record-keeping.
Phil: If you did not have enough money for storing temperature data and an audit trail of your own changes, then perhaps, you should not have provided support to efforts at rearranging the world's economies with your product. All the money spent flying to Tahiti all the time...how much money would two tape drives have cost the CRU??
It should be obligatory to archive all data and sufficient related information to permit replication. In that event, it would reduce the tendency for pal review and also reduce the number of papers published to those that make a geniune contribution to the science.
I cannot think of a good reason why this should not be the case, particularly in climate science.
How is it possible to combine the shoddy abysmal handling of data records, which is documented in the CG1 and CG2 emails by CRU officials in their own words, with belief that one can direct the multi trillion dollar reorganization of the world economies???
FOI in all relevant countries needs to be much stronger, not weaker.
The hubris of people who want to run the world knows no bounds.
My understanding is that in the UK, requests for information relating to climate change (including IPCC-related enquiries) fall under the Environmental Information Regulations which I believe derives from the European Convention, as opposed to FOI which is UK. This inquiry is only to do with FOI.
However I think EIR already tends to be stronger than UK FOI.
Richard
I was meaning to take a look to see if EIR was covered by this review. If not, why not?
BH
Not really sure, but I expect it's something to do with FOI being UK statute and EIR being European Convention.