Bishop Hill FOI-ing Paul Dennis
Aug 17, 2011 Climate: CRU FOI Paul Dennis left this comment on the Suspicious Mind thread:
...yesterday the UEA did receive a FOIA request for copies of all my correspondence, email and mail, between myself and McIntyre, Condon, Watts, Mosher and Fuller. This is an interesting list of names. It's public knowledge that I had sent maybe 10 emails to McIntyre over the past 4 or 5 years some of these asking about the climategate release of emails, 1 email to Condon sending him a copy of my paper on the Gomez Glacier which had relevance for his work on Antarctic temperatures, particularly with reference to the lower Peninsula. It's not, as far as I know, on the public record that I had a very brief correspondence with Tom Fuller immediately after climategate. This amounted to 2, maybe 3 emails. To my recollection I have never corresponded with Mosher or Watts. I have never spoken, or written by any other means with any of the named correspondents.
I have no objection to these emails being made public. Indeed if I had copies of them I'd post them on the web. Unfortunately, I rigorously delete all emails I don't consider important after about 2 months from my PC's and the server. I'm sure the university will have copies and can provide these. It will be a paltry return!
What interests me is the selection of names. Not being drawn to conspiracy theories I'd say these few were selected because they are seen by some as central to the release of the emails either through the initial announcement of 'a miracle has occurred' or through the publication of a synthesis and interpretation of the events (Fuller and Mosher). The requester is on a fishing expedition. If I were more cynical I'd say that the requester may have had some inside information as to the fact I had written to, for example, Fuller in response to his request to answer some questions.
Interestingly the requester justified their claim (not that any justification is needed under FOIA) as:
"Release of the information is in the public interest because it will contribute significantly to public understanding global warming disinformation."
I'm sorry to disappoint but my correspondence with McIntyre, Watts, Condon, Mosher and Fuller will add absolutely nothing to this particular debate. If the requester wants to know my views and stance on the science I suggest they search the various blogs where they will find I make all my contributions in public and generally restrict myself to scientific matters in which I have a degree of knowledge.
Reader Comments (44)
"I have no objection to these emails being made public. Indeed if I had copies of them I'd post them on the web. Unfortunately, I rigorously delete all emails I don't consider important after about 2 months from my PC's and the server."
I do not understand this at all Bish, you have so much more experience than me/us when it comes to this subject but any person at the UEA or involved in a FOIA is allowed to delete?
It is admirable that on either side of the debate that someone says "I have no objection to these emails being made public", but in all honesty, this has been going on for way to long for anyone delete anything!
How does anyone get to the real truth unless all is available. Trust me, if I deleted emails in relation to the companies I have worked for... I would be looking for a flight home. No one who wants to cover their ass would ever delete anything...unless!
"I rigorously delete all emails I don't consider important after about 2 months from my PC's and the server".
Emails take up so much server room? Who decides what is important? Who pays the bills? Smoke? Mirrors?
"help stop disinformation"
I hope you're right, Bish, but the absence of emails to Mosher and Watts may serve to reinforce the requester's conspiratorial view. It depends why he thinks they exist, I guess.
Is it suspicious that the Bish isn't on that list?
I suspect that one of the reasons to delete e-mails is to make it easier to find what remains and is important. When I worked at the University I would usually get 50 or more e-mails a day, and finding the ones that were important wasn't always that easy among the rest. In my case I would usually delete within a couple of days, or delete as read, rather than keeping them around.
But, as I discovered when I retired last year, the University policy on keeping not only e-mails but also papers and raw data is quite narrow and restrictive, and even raw data is supposed to be disposed of a short while after the contracts are over.
As many university faculty discover when they retire, their replacement is not in the same speciality, and the space is needed for their material, so yours goes out. And even prior to that storage space is somewhat at a premium, so there is always a selective filtering going on. Not that this is necessarily a good thing, since the University got a new contract in one of my areas just after I retired, and most of the useful stuff had been "binned" for a couple of months. The same philosophy applies to my knowledge with federal labs, and we have been unable, on occasion, to find experimental data from the 80s, when it was needed for new work.
When I worked for a v large company between '99 - '05 we were instructed by the IT dept to delete everything we no longer needed from our email accounts regularly, or Entourage would gradually become unusable. They informed us that it was all backed up on the Group's servers.
"Release of the information is in the public interest because it will contribute significantly to public understanding global warming disinformation."
Sounds just like the claptrap that Zed comes out with!
Pete H:
As an IT guy, I can tell you that this is not an uncommon method for the handling of important email archiving. Basically, you have your own email folder in which you can see and delete any email you want... but that does not mean it is gone. All of your emails are also stored in another location that you do not have access to. None of the emails are actually gone, you simply don't have access to them. Which prevents you from covering up for something you should not have done.
So unlike in your example in which you would get in trouble if you deleted things you were not supposed to, in this method of archiving it doesn't matter what you delete because your employer still has a copy of the email.
It is a little more time consuming on IT (in general) to have to dig up emails that have been requested because the user (accidentally) deleted it (which is why many IT don't even acknowledge that it exists, the user will be more cautious in selecting what to delete). However, in an FOI context regarding emails, it is better to just skip the user entirely and have IT pull the emails from the archive.
Basically, if you really wanted to know if any wrong-doing took place, why would you trust the person you thought was doing wrong to provide you will all the documentation to prove they did wrong? Wouldn't it be better to skip the user entirely and have an IT person pulling emails from the full archive without the user having any say?
@Matt K - "Wouldn't it be better to skip the user entirely and have an IT person pulling emails from the full archive without the user having any say?"
I read Paul Dennis' original posting suggesting he had been advised of the request and not that he was expected to respond to it, but I may be misinterpreting his words.
I find the fact he has openly acknowledged that he has had a request is far more open and transparent than the, er, alternate approach adopted by others in the same organisation.
I best faculty meetings at that place are interesting...
Re: Pete H
Communication companies (ISPs) and Financial Institutions are the only ones who have a legal requirement to retain all email.
The ISP must retain email data (not content) which includes when you logged on and what email you sent and received. This has to be retained for 6 months.
Financial Institutions have to keep all email (including content) for 6 years.
There is no legal requirement for other institutions to keep all email. This does mean that they do not have to keep some of the email, just that they do not have to keep all of it.
Paul Dennis deleting email between himself and the named people, after a couple months, would not contravene any regulation that I know of. Had he deleted them after the FOIA request was received then that would be a completely different matter.
"There is no legal requirement for other institutions to keep all email." In the US this is wrong. Any governement entity (most) that classifies an email as a "record" must keep the "records" for the specified period of time.
Pete H,
Terry S, Matt K and Heading Out are quite right. I receive anything between 50 and 100 emails a day, most of it junk. I delete them from my PC's within about 2 months of either sending, or receiving them if I don't consider them worth archiving. In this instance all my emails with the named correspondents were deleted from my PC's sometime between 2007 (when I first corresponded with McIntyre) and early 2010, a minimum of 18 months before the FOIA request came in. If necessary copies can be recovered from the university's backup servers.
Pete H, FOI requests only oblige you to release documents you hold; it does not require you to hold any particular documents. What documents you are required to retain depends on other laws, and in many cases there are no particular requirements. The only real exception is that yoiu can't delete documents that have already been requested. It is risky to delete documents which you expect may soon be requested, unless this is done as part of a normal process, but even that is only risky, and not clearly illegal.
Re: Paul Dennis @ 7:43:
It will be very interesting to see whether Paul's deleted emails can be recovered from the UEA server. If they are, what does it say aboutt he Russell Inquiry's failure to do the same with Jones emails that may, or may not, have been deleted? I thought that the Thunderbird email programme that UEA uses was meant to present insuperable programmes even for a computer expert like Dr Sommer who was brought in to help Sir Muir with such problems. Could things be different when the target is a supposed climate sceptic?
'disinformation' - only a global warming nut could have come up with this word.
One can ask for emails between Acton, Jones, and members of the Outside Organization, using the same logic presented.
If I was FOI-ing Paul, I'd like to know if some of those wicked UEA Josh cartoons brings out a smile!?
The only groups who use the term "disinformation" are leftists and conspiracy theorists. The only groups who have policies of disinformation are governmental: CIA, etc.
During all my professional years I've never deleted a single mail, I just move it to my trash folder (or an archive folder), that way I can always find stuff. Also, I can find all mails I've ever sent in my Sent folder. Why would anyone delete mail? I just can't come up with a reason.
Pax
I assume it's a case of how important you feel the e-mails are and if you feel you'd have any reason to keep them.
A bit like bank statements, some people keep an archive of theirs, others keep the last one or two, the rest going into the "round file".
I've kept the odd e-mail from previous jobs, of the "Who's a good boy" type, the rest get deleted and the Recycling Bin gets emptied every so often too.
Paul Dennis - thank you for the integrity which you display.
"Release of the information is in the public interest because it will contribute significantly to public understanding global warming disinformation"
If this is acceptable as sifficient reason to release E-Mails, then surely it should be included in all future requests to UEA and elseware.
Sause for the goose etc...
Let's turn to Phil Jones, the CRU's director of research, for some words of wisdom on FOI requests:
"If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone."
"I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable!"
"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?"
"You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4."
What would happen if someone were to compare the UEA's email archive with the chronology of Phil Jones' email deletion?
...(the single most baffling scientific question ever confronted by East Anglia's intellectual elite).
Surely the interesting thing here is that someone is aware of the emails to Fuller.
I guess the policeman stepped out of his office leaving the file open on the desk again huh?
Just goes to show how fatal a wound Climategate was, to these activist-scientists.
Geoff Cruickshank: "someone is aware of the emails to Fuller"
I disagree...as Paul Dennis guessed, this is just a fishing expedition, naming some bloggers who published the Climategate emails early (Condon, McIntyre, Watts) and the authors of a Climategate book (Mosher, Fuller). It looks like the FOI requester "got lucky" in finding correspondence with Fuller; he missed on two of the five names, so there doesn't seem to be any inside information there. [Or he's very clever in *appearing* to take a scattershot approach -- I guess it depends on how suspicious one is!]
I worry. It's always hardest for the heretics.
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Is the requestor anoymous?
Is the requestor anoymous?
All FOI requestors are supposed to be anoymous except for when the Police get the info ;)
Yes the requester is anonymous. At least the requester is anonymous to me.
“Thunderbird”
Thunderbird is just an email client (viewer) like Outlook and any number of alternative programs. When used with a local server, as is almost certainly the case at UEA, it simply provides a window into the user’s mailbox on that server. Despite appearances, they are not ‘on’ the user’s PC - a situation that immediately becomes apparent when the server is down for maintenance.
To claim that the use of Thunderbird prevented analysis of the emails is complete bollocks, as we have sadly come to expect of Sir Muir.
James P
we have limited file space for emails on our mail server and are advised to manage emails on both our PC's/Macs and server by either deleting, or archiving, or a combination of both. Presumably organisations have a backup server on which deleted files are stored, similar to the trash bin on our PC's?
Re James P.
Not strictly true. Most of the clients revealed in the emails were standard POP, and later POP/IMAP clients. Standard behaviour for POP is usually for the server to hold the emails until the client (Thunderbird, Qcom etc) connect and then emails are downloaded to the client. Once downloaded, they're gone from the server unless the server's configured to keep backup copies. IMAP servers extended POP's functionality and let users do more on/offline working, including storing email on the servers instead until explicitly deleted. Then the server may just tag emails as deleted so they can be restored if necessary. Everything appeared to be pretty standard so should not have prevented any proper analysis.
Much of the rest is the usual users vs sysadmins vs policy mail management challenge. Worst to manage is probably Exchange/Outlook given the propriatary nature of MS and the way it uses databases for email. Users are usually given mailbox quotas and if those are exceeded, mail from the online store has to be deleted before any new emails can be sent/received. Educating users to make offline folders can be non-trivial. Policies for email retention also spawned a small industry providing add-on tools to archive Exchange/Outlook for both online and offline mboxes.
How CRU's email system was configured and how it was used should help pinpoint how the emails were obtained, so from user's computers or just the backup server. Comparing on/offline mailboxes may show whether requests to delete emails to avoid FOI requests were carried out.
They`re not very good at these fishing expeditions, Greenpeace have Pat Michael`s e-mails and I believe Willie Soon`s and have had them for a long time too, but don`t appear to have found any smoking guns. Be interesting when Manns emails come out I`ll bet.
I expect a trashing as was done to Wegman.
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It will of course be most interesting, where these emails turn up when the FOI'er gets them
Ie 'disinformation' is a clear indication of a certain mindset..
Can we start a sweepstake on the identity of the requestor? I'm guessing they'll reveal themselves after the receive the "damning" evidence - i.e. correspondance with climate deniers, some of whom probably have links to big oil like occassionally buying gasoline.
My crystal ball - okay wild guess - tells me the requestor is a lady in the United States, first name begins with A.
Copner - My guess would be John Mashey
Here's something that may be of interest:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/02/04/steve-mcintyre-and-ross-mckitrick-part-1-in-the-beginning/
kfr | February 5, 2010 at 9:32 am | Reply
Has anyone thought to FOI Paul Dennis’ emails to McIntyre (re guardian article linked to above) since he is also UEA? Seems only fair in the circumstances.
AH
"Most of the clients revealed in the emails were standard POP"
I stand corrected, then. I thought that IMAP was pretty universal in organisations, as distributed mail is harder to administer. Oh, I see.. :-)
Copner
I agree with you. The combination of "disinformation" and "public understanding" is a giveaway. As here:
http://tinyurl.com/3bj4u3n
Aug 18, 2011 at 11:40 AM | geronimo
I don't know about Dr.Soon's e-mails, but GreenPeas does NOT have Dr. Michaels' e-mails... yet. UoVa was apparently quite happy to supply the e-mails in question for a modest administrative fee but GP dropped their request as soon as Cuccinelli went after Mann's e-mails. You can imagine why.
Paul Dennis,
I appreciate you sharing with us. This is the first appearance of normal that I have sensed from UEA. Thanks.
It would be interesting to know if this new FOI request (whoever the requester is) is processed quickly with no delay compared with FOI requests delayed/denied from skeptics.
Then if it turns out to be of non-skeptic origin then that would be evidence that preferential treatment/bias still remains in UEA.
John
I would expect that Acton has already "scrutinized" Paul Dennis's e-mails.
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