…this is now. And what a difference a year…or…something…makes. A compare and contrast of the New York Times’ ever-flexible standards of what we need to know:
“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”–New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009
“The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.”–New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents
These are our principles, and if you don’t like them, we have others.
I think it is well recognized these days that the New York Times is nothing more than a left-wing sheet.
Walter Duranty would be proud.
Time to put the Grey Lady down.
Just don’t call it a “death panel.”
The real guiding principle is that whatever is harmfull to the United States gets published.
NY Times motto: “All the news that fits our views.”
The next person who calls them “objective”, “unbiased” or “the paper of record” gets a kick in the nuts.
“All the news that’s fit to print. (See the bottom of Page ZZZ79 for the definition of ‘fit.’)”
I think wikileaks is acting unethically in this case, but:
You don’t see a difference violating the privacy of private scientists and exposing the secrets of the big bad authoritarian government? Are you all a bunch of state-huggers?
Also, the commie-pinko Obama administration wants the documents secret, and the NY Times releases them anyway, and therefore the NY Times is a biased left-wing sheet?
Oh Bob, if you’re not being sarcastic, you are nuts. But yes Bob, there is a difference. One is theft, the other is espionage which used to be punishable by death.
One other thing. Those “private” scientists were colluding and cheating on the taxpayer dime, not their own.
What do you mean, “privacy,” Bob? I thought those scientists were discussing the results of their publically-funded research, not the results of their wive’s last ultrasound or whether one of their children was gay.
Plus, the real story wasn’t so much what was in the emails – and they were damning enough – but the contents of the Harry_Readme file.
Scientists engaging in publicly-funded research that is intended to inform government policy (and in this case, they were actively lobbying for it to become policy) are effectively agents of the state and any communications that touch on the integrity of the research are the taxpayer’s business. If they don’t want their junk touched, they can do their research on their own nickel and not lobby governments to adopt their conclusions as policy.
For those concerned with whether the research was publicly funded, let me ask you this: should publicly funded scientists using publiclly funded telescopes such as Hubble and Kepler be allowed to withhold their data for N years? Should publicly funded scientists be allowed keep their data secret until a publishing embargo from a private journal like Science or Nature expires? These questions aren’t related to the NY Times, but I think they are more important to ask, given that the issue matters to a lot of us, and it is something we could actually change.
The ClimateGate emails exposed no embargoed data, only communications regarding the integrity of the data and the conclusions drawn from them. If there were similar internal communications casting doubt on research published from Hubble or Kepler data, that would not be covered by an embargo and the scientists involved should have no reasonable expectation of privacy should those communications be leaked.
That said, even if such embargoed data were to turn up on WikiLeaks someday, I would not throw a hissy fit over it.
Regardless of whether impropriety is suspected, I’m asking whether publicly-funded scientists are entitled to engage in an arrangement that results in a publication embargo? More crucially, because it involves a much longer stretch of time, should scientists working on tax payer funded research get a proprietary period? I think the arguments above regarding the lack of privacy that should be given to the climate scientists preclude embargoes and proprietary data periods for tax-payer funded research, and I thought, at the very least, this might be food for thought for some of you.
Any problems with the NYTimes publishing Sarah Palin’s emails from her personal Yahoo! account, which were also obtained illegally?
Back to the subject at hand, Bob. The whole point was your comparison wasn’t the apples and oranges you claimed. Those cable weren’t intended for the “public eye” either. That the NYT would print one and not the other merely points out this story was too good to pass up as everyone was doing it. The NYT was not alone in ignoring the email scandal. Most of the MSM did too despite the public interest in trillions of potential taxes and fees the NYT and others would be too happy to see us pay.
This will be my last response on this subthread since it is getting off-topic, and I kick myself everytime I play into your disingenuous hands by replying.
Scientists performing publicly funded research get embargo periods because their contracts with the government allow it. From that standpoint I have no problem with it.
However, the reason the government allows the embargo period is the power of the peer reviewed journals, which have policies not to publish works that have been previously released. That combined with the “publish or perish” culture artificially inflates the power of the journals. Some journals have misused that power to subvert science by blackballing authors with heterodox views, while allowing much crap to earn the “peer-reviewed” seal of approval. These practices got an unwanted but much-deserved spotlight in the ClimateGate emails.
A government policy disallowing publication embargoes in contracts would be an entertaining thing. It would require scientists to choose between staying on the gravy-train and angering the all-powerful journals. I suspect many would choose the former, requiring them to find alternative avenues of publication, and smashing the power of the journals.
Bob,
“When you take the king’s shilling, you are the king’s man”…if scientists avail themselves of federal funding, then they are subject to the strings (and limitations) attached to it. Nobody forces funding upon anyone…
As for the NYT issue, the hypocrisy here would be shocking if it were not old news. This is the NYT, after all…
Wait…what? Bob, in what field do scientists willingly embargo their data? Everyone I know wants to get the stuff into print as fast as humanly possible, to preserve priority claims. Heck, this is why arXiv.org exists, because the few months a journal takes is too slow for most people. Indeed, there’s a nontrivial amount of concern within the community about people pushing things into print too fast and it not getting sufficient review (e.g. Imanishi-Kari).
Nemo, I am being off-topic (re: the NYTimes), but I’m not being disingenuous. I appreciate your last comment, and I particularly found your last paragraph interesting. I find the proprietary period even more interesting than the embargoes however — they are basically payment to the scientists, and yet folks like Carl seem to think that publicly-funded scientists shouldn’t have private conversations about their publicly-funded research, which implies that they aren’t entitled to their proprietary periods, and leads to the conclusion that they shouldn’t be paid that way.
Look sorry for the “de-rail”. The NY Times got plenty bashed in a rather homogeneous way before my first comment here. The reactions to my comment (“no private data on the king’s shilling”) made me think about proprietary data, a subject I find quite vexing. I hope some people found the subject interesting.
But if you feel the NY Times wasn’t bashed enough above, have at it! Damn that liberal rag!
Notice that he never actually addressed the discrepancies between the NYT’s actions in each case, only diverted the discussion into a side issue that he found “interesting”, and then concluded with snide remarks that failed to actually state a serious position on the matter at hand.
Sheesh, I feel like Hobar Mallow after reading these comments.
Big D, I already said I think there is a difference between exposing what the government is doing, and exposing what private citizens are doing, even if the private citizens will eventually help advise policy-makers, and even if the private citizens are doing publicly-funded research. Surely there are people who fit the latter category here. To make up an example, I think NASA ought to hire Rand, and they ought to listen to him. If they did, I don’t think anyone ought to steal his email, and if his email is stolen, I don’t think the NY Times should publish it, even though Rand’s opinions would be influencing public policy. And lets say that Rand is actually a BS artist, and is just pushing all this stuff about how HLVs are wasteful to further his libertarian agenda. Even then, I don’t think Rand’s private email should be published. Why? I suppose it is because I think the email theft is actually worse than Rand BSing the government (which has the resources to watch out for itself by gathering multiple opinions).
I have a hard time to getting worked up about the NY Times — the information was going to be easily accessible from wikileaks or from similar sources anyway, once it was stolen. The initial theft is the bigger concern.
Bob,
If Rand was working for NASA (he is waaaaaaayyyyy too smart to do that….), and a question about the nature of the advice he was giving to NASA came up, and the nature of that advice was revealed in email communications with NASA, I would no more defend his privacy rights regading those emails than I do those of the charlatans at CRU. Simple enough, if you are engaged in communications with a government entity (or with others involved in similar work with that same government entity) and accepting funding for the work associated with those commuications, you cannot claim them to be private or privileged. As for the nature of the harm involved, even if the government considers the harm to be acceptable, I (a taxpayer) do not, and I have a right to know how my money is being spent.
As for the NYT simply doing something that everyone else was doing, it is a question of principle, something which I know most on the left find alien, but which does matter. The WSJ, for instance, made it clear that they would not participate in Wikileaks publicity machine or further their agenda, the NYT had no issue with it, their pious whining regarding Climategate notwithstanding. Even if one accepted the NYT excuse, wouldn’t the ‘it was going to get out anyway’ argument fail in the case of Climategate? After all, no less a right wing rag as the Guardian freely published and commented extensively on the emails….
Scott, I think you’re making perfectly fine arguments, and I think reasonable people can disagree about how much privacy Rand should have if he sends email while working for NASA. If it helps, I think the NYT should have published the relevant info from the climategate info, but omitted non-relevant personal comments (eg “I find Nigel insufferable”). But I also think it would have been ok if the NYT had refused to publish the info from either leak. And I think it would have been ok if the NYT had published the climate emails but refused to publish the diplomatic cables.
The only thing I feel strongly about is this: Because of the differences between private citizens and governments, and because of the differences in the importance of the leak themselves, I think it is wrong to say that the two leaks are equivalent and therefore should be handled via one overriding policy. I think the victims were different enough and the public policy implications were different enough that the editors had to make independent judgment calls.
folks like Carl seem to think that publicly-funded scientists shouldn’t have private conversations about their publicly-funded research
Er…Bob, would you care to define the meaning of “private” in this context? If the conversation is about “Will this research get me tenure?” I would agree it’s private, because it concerns the private concerns of the individuals in question.
But if (as was the case) the conversation is directly about the concerns of the funding agency and the public policy questions it sought the research to address, I’m completely failing to understand your definition of “private.”
To put it another way: you sound like if I e-mail a fellow employee about a matter directly concerning company business, the company has no right to examine the e-mail. That’s absurd.
I suspect you are defining “private” in terms of the means of the communication: was it sent from gmail accounts or university accounts? Was it folksy and chatty or formal-sounding? Was it signed “Prof. Reginald Foo” or “Reggie?”
But the long-established general way of establishing whether something is “private” is not founded on these incidentals — but on the content of the communication. Is Reggie talking about his salary, his family, his chances at promotion, sounding off about his personal politics? That’s private. Is he communicating business matters? Stuff directly related to the funding agencies interests? Not private.
I have a hard time to getting worked up about the NY Times — the information was going to be easily accessible from wikileaks or from similar sources anyway, once it was stolen.
So you’d be OK with purchasing stolen goods? After all, if you don’t, someone will. The stuff has already been stolen! Or do you suspect in that case that the existence of demand helps stimulate supply?
Is he communicating business matters? Stuff directly related to the funding agencies interests? Not private.
From a personal email account? I don’t agree — you’re right that I think personal email accounts are private regardless of content, just as a wallet or purse in a locked desk is private even if the desk is in a corporate or government office.
On a purely pragmatic and not principled level: I think creative people need rough drafts to be private. If you tell a scientist that all his communications about publicly funded research are public, he’ll be inhibited about discussing half-baked ideas, and that inhibition is not in the public interest.
Somewhat similarly, it is in the public interest for dipolomats to be able to report things privately. The American public may have been done a favor by the leak of the cables, but I’m sure it was also done some harm. I personally would be in agony if I was the NY Times editor and the cables got dropped in my lap.
About my comment about not getting worked up about the NY Times — I wasn’t making a comment about principles at all — as I said, the principle of the thing is agony-inducing for me. I certainly wouldn’t want to purchse stolen goods. I’m just acknowledging that this is all angels on the head of a pin, since the info was already in the hands of people who can self-publish.
On a purely pragmatic and not principled level: I think creative people need rough drafts to be private. If you tell a scientist that all his communications about publicly funded research are public, he’ll be inhibited about discussing half-baked ideas, and that inhibition is not in the public interest.
There’s a solution to this, Bob. Don’t accept public funding and don’t admit to malfeasance in your emails.
Once again, Bob tries to deflect the topic by yelling “Squirrel!”.
Karl, no, that’s not a solution from a pragmatic point of view, at least, not if you’re asking scientists to choose, for the reasons Nemo mentioned. Overall, government funded science & engineering & medicine has been an enormous benefit to this country (and to humanity), and a solution would explain how to get the same benefits some other way and would explain why scientists would go for it. Corporate-funded research is often too short-sighted, and non-profits can’t compete with the government.
Larry, if you would prefer to post a comment along the exact same lines as “time to put the Grey Lady down”, why not just post it?
Why are you so insistent on changing the subject? The subject is the hypocrisy of the New York Times in how they covered Wikileaks and the ClimateGate leaks. Try sticking to the subject for a change.
Carl started it! 🙂 He asked “What do you mean, “privacy,” Bob?” Was this wrong of him? Was it wrong of me to react? Was it wrong of you to go off-topic & complain about me instead of staying on-topic?
I’ve made a couple of posts that point back to the original thread that discussed the NYTimes publication of Sarah Palin’s emails, and then Bob’s view that private communications should be made public. Both responses went in to void; although I saw one briefly made it to the conversation.
Anyway, there is proof that a “bob” once thought it was perfectly fine to post stolen material, read material, and that private emails by people paid by the government should be made public.
“Scientists” who live off of the public treasury and use their position to argue for curtailment of economic liberty and growth are nothing more than criminals. They are rent-seeking criminals who should be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. These people have NO right to privacy, whatsoever.
Climate change is a criminal fraud and people who promulgate it on the public dime are bilking the public.
That’s interesting. Let me know if you find that link. I don’t know what I said. What I think now: Sarah Palin was using her private account to do government business (ie to govern). I see government business carried on by a government official as different from government-funded research carried on by a private scientist. I also think that private email should never be hacked (except possibly by law enforcement with a search warrant, I guess) and just like the climate-related email, I think the New York Times should publish only the information in the public interest (in this Palin’s case, government business) but should omit her private information and certainly not quote it. Did I say something different than that?
A little googling reminded me that Palin asked her staff to communicate official business to her using personal email accounts, and to not use the government email accounts because they would be public, while personal email accounts would remain private. Palin’s press secretary said she was allowed to keep official government e-mails confidential if they fall into certain categories, such as “deliberative process.
I wonder what Palin thought of the climategate email.
Overall, government funded science & engineering & medicine has been an enormous benefit to this country
Then enlighten us Bob. Why not do away with the (too short-sighted) corporate type?
Curt, don’t be silly. Short-sighted profit-oriented corporate research is incredibly beneficial to this country too. We’re better off if we have both kinds. (And of course short-sighted vs long-range is a continuum.)
Bob, don’t be silly. Corporate-funded research is often too short-sighted. Right?
Sigh. “Short-sighted” sounds pejorative, right? I only meant it as “too short-range when the goal is basic research that might only have a practical payoff in the long run”. Whether any activity seems too short-range or ltoo ong-range is always going to be relative to your goals.
Whether any activity seems too short-range or ltoo ong-range is always going to be relative to your goals.
If the goal is employment, the longer the better.
From a personal email account?
It’s not a “personal” e-mail account if it’s on the university’s servers, bob, any more than the Speaker’s .gov e-mail account is “personal.”
I think personal email accounts are private regardless of content, just as a wallet or purse in a locked desk is private even if the desk is in a corporate or government office.
Bad analogy. Your wallet or purse is private because of its content, not because of the container. Imagine you buy a USB drive, bring it to work, and download a bunch of work stuff onto it for use at home. Because you bought the container, does that turn the contents into your private property? Let’s not be silly. Neither common sense nor the law would agree with that.
Nor, as a scientist, do I agree at all with you that scientists need some venue for or period of highly private speculation for half-baked ideas. Science doesn’t work like that, and I would challenge you to find me any historical instance whatsoever in which it has. Science works in the bright sunlight every step of the way, with everyone free to examine and criticize every single step, all the time.
I think you are dragging over a false analogy from government. I certainly agree government needs a venue for and time of private speculation and the flinging about of half-baked ideas. But that’s because government is very different from science. Science is about discovery, government is about making painful choices. (If the choices aren’t painful, we don’t need laws, courts, jails and guns to enforce them.) If government tried to operate as science does, it would grind rapidly to a halt.
I think the original problem was, indeed, that the climate studies people slid into the temptation of wanting to influence policy and out of their appropriately neutral role as discovers. It’s as if the men who built the atomic bomb decided they wanted to have a role in deciding how it would be used. That would have been madness. Imagine the conflict of interest! Teller, for example, had a very strong vested personal interest — a point of pride — in proving his configuration for the thermonuclear bomb would work. Would you really want him influencing Truman’s response to MacArthur’s request to use nukes on the Chinese?
The very fact that they were embarassed by revelations of their “private” e-mails tells you that they had slid (or wanted to slide) from the Guild of Merlin to that of Arthur — that they were now in the government business, where they should not have been.
Carl,
Minor point, the first Hydrogen bomb was detonated on 11/1/1952, considerably at which time the whole point of using nukes on the Chinese was moot. If Teller had been using his influence to advocate such actions, it would have been two years earlier (roughly nov/dec 1950), and 9 months AFTER Truman approved the H-bomb development (1/31/1950). The underlying point you make, however, is still quite solid.
Bob,
I won’t defend Palin’s use of private email accounts. If she had been planning a conspiracy to overthrow the government, would you argue that stealing the emails would make them out-of-bounds? When one is conducting government business (and Carl correctly points out that the emails in Climategate were in fact from PUBLICALLY FUNDED email systems on servers owned by public universities), using a private email as a ‘dodge’ to avoid being outed is indefensible. If Nixon was taping White House conferences on a privately owned tape machine with tapes he bought with his own funds, would that make it unreasonable to expose them?
If you want to make the case that using such ‘illegally’ obtained evidence in a government prosecution was out of bounds (the so-called ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’) I would endorse your point of view, but if you want to make the (quite frankly lame) argument that ‘creative types need privacy in their deliberations’, then I simply say (as has been said above) don’t create records of your conspiracy, and don’t take government money to advance the cause.
Arguing that the NYT’s double standard can be defended because in one case the miscreants were private citizens (they were not acting in that capacity at the time) and in another case that the miscreants were in the government strikes me as special pleading in the extreme. I simply do not believe that the NYT would apply this standard if the ideological positions of those being exposed were reversed. Perhaps you might (to be fair, I rather doubt it), but the NYT has long since been revealed as a partisan rag. Don’t get me wrong, I think that there is a time and place for partisan rags (I am a daily reader of the Guardian, for example), but you cannot be the town whore and still lecture others on virtue.
Scott, I was thinking of the “Alarm Clock” design Teller proposed in 1945 or so while still at Los Alamos. Recall he was passionate about the “Super” then, in the face of great skepticism among other scientists that the thing could be made to work at all. Had he had the political influence to say well, we just have to try or else we’ll all be speaking Chinese it might well have got built, and used. (Given that Sakharov used a very simliar design for his Sloika device, it probably would have worked, too.)
In fact, it may be reasonable to believe that he (and Bethe, and a few others) did have undue political influence, and that the thermonuclear bomb was built as early as it was in part because of the personal vanity of those atomic scientists who wanted to see their assertions about what would work proved out.
Now I personally love The Bomb, and praise its early development as having not only saved my grandfather’s life — he was in the Pacific, training for the invasion of Japan — but also short-circuited a World War III that not even crazy Uncle Joe Stalin thought he could win.
But I’m surprised that no one on the other side realizes the powerful caution that the story of the political influence of the atomic scientists in the early Nuclear Age should urge when we contemplate their 21st century heirs: the climate scientists. You do not want scientists mixing in policy. The skill set of a top scientist is nearly complementary to that of a good and moral political leader.
Karl, no, that’s not a solution from a pragmatic point of view
Yes, it is a solution from a pragmatic point of view. It inserts a degree of accountability in research with profound impact on human society.
Overall, government funded science & engineering & medicine has been an enormous benefit to this country (and to humanity), and a solution would explain how to get the same benefits some other way and would explain why scientists would go for it.
This is a no brainer. Private funding. It’s like the US government paying for the Media. If all the money comes from one source, then that source controls what scientists do. I think there’s already several examples of extraordinarily wasteful government policy that undermine the myth that government funded science is an “enormous benefit” to society.
First, we have a large number of low return Big Science projects: the Superconducting Super Collider, the International Space Station, ITER, Japan’s Fifth Generation program, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Human Genome Project (before Celera Genome got involved). Most of these had some relatively valuable scientific return, but they cost a lot of money for what they returned (hence, the use of the term “low return”).
Second, we have a massive economic inefficiency by encouraging smart people to work in academia or government instead of business. I believe this sector has the risk of degenerating into an employment program for smart people.
Third, there’s no objective measure for the scientific value of blue sky research and government metrics of performance typically don’t assign a value to such research aside from research events like publication/presentations and evaluation by peers (both which can be and IMHO are gamed).
Fourth, such funding mechanisms provide an avenue for government propaganda (which is part of the concern I raised earlier on).
Finally, when we have generously funded government funded research, we remove incentive for the private world to do its own research. Why pay to do your own research when you can mooch on a government contract to obtain the same stuff? This helps break innovative linkage between R&D and industry.
I think over the past forty to fifty years, we’ve already seen a decline in the quality of research due to the prevalence of government spending. Many of the big private R&D efforts (Bell Labs, PARC) have been discontinued or downsized. In my view, the entire realm of science is threatened by a wave of mediocrity and unaccountability with public funding being a key component.
Carl,
My father was a VERY junior scientist on the Manhattan project (he was part of Fermi’s team), and he loathed Teller with every fiber in his body. His description of Teller (which I won’t repeat for fear of offending the audience here…grin) provided my pre-teen ears with a whole new vocabulary, though I still am unable to completely replicate its richness and thoroughness. Suffice it to say he felt that Teller was a political animal with few interests in life other than burnishing his own reputation at the expense of any other lifeform within a few light-years. Your assessment of Teller (and Bethe, who dad actually liked) is spot-on…
I have always wondered if Teller had somehow been disgraced in such a way that the whole idea of thermonuclear weapons was somehow discredited, and abandoned as a dead end. This is not entirely inconceivable (neural networks were, for instance, largely abandoned in the 70s and early 80s due to a single article by Marvin Minsky that turned out to e grossly mistaken), and would have led to an interesting state of affairs. Fission nukes are far less potent, and thus a substantial number would be required for even a moderately successful countervalue attack on a serious enemy. Counterforce strikes would have been out of the question, and while ICBMs would have been workable in a limited sense, they would have been most unlikely to have become as dominant as they are now. Hence we might argue that by 1960 or so the arsenals of the superpowers would have been extremely nasty, but probably insufficiently so to utterly deter a largish war if one broke out through miscalculation or escalation.
My point (yes, there is one) is that perhaps Teller did us all a favor, despite himself. Like you, I love the bomb, though it is a love mixed with deep sadness. Dad never doubted the rightness of what he did (one of his closest friends from his university days was incinerated at Hiroshima), nor do I, but watching Iran edge closer to this capability leaves me with a loathing for a fate that gives us the power but also gives it to them…
This is a long thread with a lot of points. I have to disagree with some of the positions. My thoughts…
My thoughts are private until the day technology figures out how to read them. They remain private regardless of the subject. They remain private regardless of my employment. If I choose to share some of those thoughts I can do it publicly or privately regardless of content or who may employ me. I own my thoughts.
The channel I use to convey thoughts may be private for a time but it should always be understood that at some time it may be made public. It doesn’t matter who owns the channel or who I may be trying to influence.
It may be illegal or not to retrieve and/or convey my private thoughts. That’s a separate issue that courts decide.
Revealing private information to cause harm is a moral issue. The NYT has proven its desire to harm America by it’s selection of what it reports. They are free to say almost anything. The public is free to stop buying that rag or boycott its advertisers.
Conspiring to lie to the public is a moral issue. It doesn’t matter whose dime it’s on. Fraud of such magnitude as climategate should have serious negative impact on those that would act so fraudulently.
Life is a box of chocolates and that’s all I have to say about that.