UEA footdragging - Part 2

At the end of Part 1, your “Big-Oil” funded, shadowy, conspirator was reeling from the righteous blows of the Freedom of Information loving UEA and its downtrodden ally, Mills & Reeve. But “Big Oil” never admits defeat, not even in the face of “overwhelming consensus.

So the next sneaky strike was electronically launched…

As before emails/letters sent to me are in italic, my responses in bold

I note your statement that, in your opinion "The University has complied with the substituted decision notice of the Tribunal dated 18 January 2012 and proposes to take no further steps".

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More UEA footdragging (Part One)

This is a guest post by Don Keiller.

As many readers at Bishop Hill are aware I won a “major FOI victory” over UEA last December.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the Tribunal Decision would have been the end of the matter. However UEA and their increasingly rich lawyers had other ideas. Is it simply coincidence that Mills & Reeve are building shiny new offices here in Cambridge? 

What follows is, by necessity, a considerably foreshortened summary. The total correspondence between, myself, the Tribunal Judge, Mills & Reeve and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) comes to over 40 pages. To make this story easier to follow, quotations from emails/letters are in italic for those sent to me, with my responses in bold.

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Misunderstanding FOI

Charles Moore writes about FOI at the Telegraph and it is clear that he is not in favour.

[T]he effect of FoI is to promote dishonesty and concealment. I pity any biographer of any prime minister from Tony Blair onwards. He or she will not be short of government paper. Thanks to the computer’s power of infinite reproduction and the advent of the email (to whose implications, by the way, FoI gave no thought), he will drown in material. Because of the cant in which modern administrative documents are expressed, words like “openness” and “transparency” will be spattered over thousands of pages. But there will be no such openness or transparency. The big decisions will all have been made in whispers in a corridor, or abbreviated in a text message. To find out what happened, the biographer will have to rely solely on the fallible memory of elderly ex-ministers and officials.

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The Liberal War on Transparency

Chris Horner's new book has hit the shops in the US, covering the whole gamut of attempts by bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic to evade their obligations under the FoIA Act. There's plenty for climate geeks to enjoy. Here's a taster. They don't work for you, you know.

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ATI statement on UVa FOI case

This just in from the American Tradition Institute

Yesterday the American Tradition Institute (ATI) participated in more than four hours of oral argument in the Prince William County Circuit Court, in its effort to have faculty emails which were paid for by the taxpayer, in pursuit of taxpayer funded employment, declared public records, declared subject to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA) and released under that Act. The trial-court level judge ruled from the bench, siding with ATI on the first two questions, with the University of Virginia on the third, while rejecting the arguments of intervenor Michael Mann. ATI's comments on this development are as follow.

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Virginia court rules against ATI

I've just had word that the Virginia circuit court has ruled against the American Tradition Institute, declaring that the University of Virginia does not have to release Michael Mann's emails. If I understand it correctly, the ruling is that correspondence between academics is in some way proprietary and therefore it is up to the university whether they release the information.

More once the ruling becomes clearer.

NOAA slips up?

Chris Horner sends details of a FOIA request he made earlier in the year. He was seeking details of correspondence between NOAA's Tom Peterson and Thomas Stocker, the head of IPCC WGI. It is hoped that this correspondence might throw some light on the mysterious email sent by Stocker to IPCC lead authors in the wake of Climategate.

Surprisingly, NOAA seemed to have slipped up rather, failing even to acknowledge Horner's request. Apparently, under US law this amounts to constructive refusal, and Horner can now move to seek an immediate judicial remedy.

As Horner comments in his email:

We will soon learn out how badly the global warming establishment wants to fight to keep this, and similar public records, from the public. Will NOAA disregard the caviling from usual suspects and promptly move to produce the record, which should take mere minutes? Or will it heed the calls and hunker down, risking a certain judicial order affirming what an inspector general has already concluded.

IPCC-related records in the possession of government employees (or accessible by them, now that we know about third-party servers established to dodge FOI laws), are indeed agency records subject to release to the taxpayers who underwrite the IPCC enterprise.

Update on Sep 6, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The complaint has now been lodged and can be seen here.

UN ruling: EU must reassess renewables policy

Pat Swords points me to this press release from the European Platform Against Windfarms.

The Compliance Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which enforces the Aarhus Convention, has released its final findings and recommendations regarding the case presented by Mr. Pat Swords, a chemical engineer from Ireland (1). In a nutshell, the UN is saying that if the EU wants to be in compliance with the said Convention, to which it is a party, it must have its 27 Member States properly reassess their National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAP), and submit them to popular consultation. The Aarhus Convention requires that, in matters affecting the environment, the citizens be consulted in a transparent manner before any policy is embarked upon. The Convention applies principles adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro.

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End of the CMEP road

My long struggle to find out who attended the BBC's seminar on climate change has come to an end (if you are not familiar with the story, buy the Conspiracy in Green pamphlet - see sidebar). Readers here will recall that the seminar appears to have been attended by a bunch of NGO people, who decided that there was a consensus on climate change that meant that sceptics could be sidelined in the corporation's output. The BBC Trust then falsely reported that the decision had been made by leading scientists.

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IPCC seeks to influence UK FOI laws

For much of the year, the House of Commons Justice Committee has been conducting a post-legislative review of the Freedom of Information Act, its work taking place in the face of a concerted effort by the bureaucracy to push it into accepting the idea that the Act should be neutered.

The review has now ground to a conclusion, and the news is, on the whole quite good. For example, from the recommendations comes the welcome news that the committee favours a tightening of the legal ramifications for breaches of the Act.

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Unequal and opposite reaction

A week ago, Simon Jenkins took a swipe at the Freedom of Information Act in the pages of the Guardian.

Blair made almost all public documents discoverable, down to the contents of every laptop, the first draft of every email, every text message, every scribbled note. It was, he now says, "utterly undermining of sensible government". Jack Straw and the former cabinet secretary, Lord (Gus) O'Donnell, agree with him. Total disclosure, they say, has damaged honest civil service advice and stifled confidential debate among ministers. Stupid amounts of official time and money are spent conserving archives and responding to FOI requests. There must be some limit.

The similarities to Paul Nurse's misrepresentation of the FOI Act are striking, and the result has been identical: a slapdown from the chairman of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, Maurice Frankel:

The act exempts information where disclosure is likely to be harmful and/or contrary to the public interest. It permits a ministerial veto over any order to disclose in the public interest. Some information is exempt regardless of harm or public interest.

Jenkins claims the level of disclosure extends to "even the most personal communication between individuals". It does not. Personal information, about family matters for example, is vigorously protected. But officials cannot circumvent FoI by discussing government business via personal email accounts.

Mandarins flout the law

It seems that while Tony Blair was in power, a secret email system was put in place in Downing Street so as to avoid FOI laws. All manner of other breaches of FOI laws were also everyday occurrences.

Information commissioner Christopher Graham claimed secret documents were being destroyed and Whitehall officials were using private email addresses to evade scrutiny.

This is not much of a surprise to BH readers. It is also a commonplace here that the situation will not change until the law is amended to allow prosecutions of these breaches of the law - until the statute of limitations is extended the mandarins will continue to flout the law and to thumb their noses at the electorate.

Horner's latest FOI success

Chris Horner of the American Tradition Institute has got hold of the emails of some academics working at Texas A&M and Texas Tech universities. He has written about what he has found here.

[The emails] reveal a sophisticated UCS operation to assist activist academics and other government employees as authorities for promoting UCS's agenda. This includes "moot-courting" congressional hearings with a team of UCS staff, all the way down to providing dossiers on key committee members, addressing in particular their faith, stance on gay marriage and stimulus spending. Of course.

This also includes directing the taxpayers' servants to outside PR consultants -- apparently pro bono or else on UCS's dime.

Giving FOI officers a break

Among my email correspondence relating to the Climategate affair, there are many expressions of sympathy for David Palmer, the UEA Freedom of Information officer. Although his involvement in the various false statements issued by the university cannot be determined with certainty, one did rather get the impression that he was struggling valiantly to comply with the legislation.

This cannot have been an easy task. A blog posting (here) by Paul Gibbons, an FOI officer in local government, reveals some of the pressures that senior officials in public bodies use to try to corrupt their FOI staff:

FOI Officers often find themselves in tricky situations. I’ve referred previously to a meeting on one occasion where the Mayor of London’s then Director of Communications once lightly suggested that if I couldn’t be more helpful, I and my team might find ourselves redundant. Wiser heads calmed the situation but I suspect I’m not the only FOI Officer to find themselves on the wrong side of an argument with the powers-that-be. Other FOI Officers I know have been persona non grata in parts of their organisation. And all for doing their jobs.

As Gibbons says, requesters should give FOI officers a break.

Boulton says free the data

The Geoffrey Boulton's Royal Society report on Science as an Open Enterprise is published today. The headline findings are, unsurprisingly, that science should be more open with its data:

• Scientists need to be more open among themselves and with the public and media
• Greater recognition needs to be given to the value of data gathering, analysis and communication
• Common standards for sharing information are required to make it widely usable
• Publishing data in a reusable form to support findings must be mandatory
• More experts in managing and supporting the use of digital data are required
• New software tools need to be developed to analyse the growing amount of data being gathered.

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