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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

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.

guelo 14y ago
They're after the scientists' personal emails, that's a bit much and obviously just a fishing expedition for the next ginned up scandal.
- yock 14y ago
  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.
  - rm999 14y ago
    From the researcher's facebook page: >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.
  - arrrg 14y ago
    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.
    - cantankerous 14y ago
      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.
    - CWuestefeld 14y ago
      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: 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-employer-read-30088.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/email-monitoring-can-... It seems to me that support of FOIA laws is a valid "business" purpose.
      - arrrg 14y ago
        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.)
        talmand 14y ago
        I think his point is that there shouldn't have been an expectation of privacy in the first place.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    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.
  - shardling 14y ago
    A university email address is a personal account. A lot of older academics will only have the one account that they've been using since the 80s.
    - talmand 14y ago
      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.
      - rm999 14y ago
        You're arguing vague semantics. He used it for personal e-mail, that's what is relevant here.
        talmand 14y ago
        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.
    - crusso 14y ago
      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.
  - gadders 14y ago
    Agreed. Who thinks work email addresses are personal ones?
rjsamson 14y ago
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-virginia-state-employees/ 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.
rm999 14y ago
>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.
Joeboy 14y ago
If an academic sends / receives emails to do with, say, a student's medical issues, or an allegation of sexual assault, should those be public?
- underdown 14y ago
  a FOIA response would have that information redacted
demallien 14y ago
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?
- rjsamson 14y ago
  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.
  - demallien 14y ago
    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...
    - rjsamson 14y ago
      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-virginia-state-employees-details/ 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.

guelo 14y ago

They're after the scientists' personal emails, that's a bit much and obviously just a fishing expedition for the next ginned up scandal.

yock 14y ago
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.
- rm999 14y ago
  From the researcher's facebook page: >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.
- arrrg 14y ago
  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.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    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.
  - CWuestefeld 14y ago
    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: 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-employer-read-30088.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/email-monitoring-can-... It seems to me that support of FOIA laws is a valid "business" purpose.
    - arrrg 14y ago
      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.)
      - talmand 14y ago
        I think his point is that there shouldn't have been an expectation of privacy in the first place.
- cantankerous 14y ago
  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.
- shardling 14y ago
  A university email address is a personal account. A lot of older academics will only have the one account that they've been using since the 80s.
  - talmand 14y ago
    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.
    - rm999 14y ago
      You're arguing vague semantics. He used it for personal e-mail, that's what is relevant here.
      - talmand 14y ago
        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.
  - crusso 14y ago
    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.
- gadders 14y ago
  Agreed. Who thinks work email addresses are personal ones?

rjsamson 14y ago

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-virginia-state-employees/ 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.

rm999 14y ago

>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.

Joeboy 14y ago

If an academic sends / receives emails to do with, say, a student's medical issues, or an allegation of sexual assault, should those be public?

underdown 14y ago
a FOIA response would have that information redacted

demallien 14y ago

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?

rjsamson 14y ago
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.
- demallien 14y ago
  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...
  - rjsamson 14y ago
    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-virginia-state-employees-details/ 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.