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Joe says:
I think the best legal recourse for Gleick is to come clean, get a VERY speedy trial, and wrap it up in November-ish just in time to make Obama’s lame-duck list of Presidential Pardons.
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Robert Brown says:
Whether or not one favors this sort of thing often depends on whether or not the person obtaining the documents illegally is acting in a way one perceives of as being beneficial (to one’s personal prejudices, if nothing else). One can work back through many famous cases from Viet Nam down through the present where documents have been “outed” by a process that strictly speaking breaks the law, but where what the documents reveal seems to justify the action a posteriori.
Climate skeptics, for example, speak of the individual(s) who outed the “Climategate” postings as being some sort of hero, in spite of the fact that what he or she or they did is almost certainly, strictly speaking, a criminal act. Of course so is some of what was being revealed by Climategate emails — arguably criminal acts.
In at least the U.S., there is now some degree of protection for “whistle blowers” — people who violate a privacy law to reveal overt lawbreaking on the part of somebody else. Of course this law is hardly consistent, and there are countless exceptions especially where “national security” or “government” is concerned, which is why Wikileaks is in such trouble. Nor does the open publication of “leaked” documents consistently reveal lawbreaking in the first place — in many cases it is merely embarrassing or something that really is private and none of anyone’s business.
For these reasons I think the best thing to focus on in the case of fakegate (why is it that since Watergate — which has nothing to do with a gate — all subsequent leaked documents have to have a “gate” appended? Human language is so strange…;-) is not so much the nominal legality of the alleged phishing of the documents but rather the far more serious charge of fraud. Turnabout is fair play (legal or not, it is fair) so if Climategate was “good” then Fakegate might have been “good” if it weren’t for the “fake” bit!
After all, who bloody cares how climate skeptics are funded, or if? Talk about major league tempest in the smallest of teapots! There are (as has been pointed out) mountains of money available, much of it from highly suspect sources, for any work that supports the “cause” of CAGW and its solution, mandatory carbon trading and the deconstruction of modern civilization. Is there some sort of rule that states that climate skeptics have to be brave and self-sacrificing and pay for their own efforts? Not at all — but of course one way the warmists like to claim that skeptics are biased is by alleging that they are really the catspaws of Big Oil or Coal Mining Capitalists, and are being paid to promote a point of view they don’t even really believe in, in exchange for being made wealthy by under the table payoffs.
Which is truly, truly laughable. I wish. In case any Big Oil execs are listening, don’t hesitate to make me an offer. I can be easily be bought, especially to do work I’m doing anyway without any sort of compensation. Goodness, I guess it is time for me to take a trip down to the Caymans to set up my very own offshore account.
Not.
Sigh.
No, the real issue is the Fake bit. Faking documents to smear an entire body of individuals so that they collectively are taken less seriously in a scientific debate is appallingly unethical, and whether or not it is against civil law, it is almost certainly not outside of the realm of lawsuits seeking compensation and restoration of reputation. Granting agencies should also take careful note, as this is precisely the sort of fraud that corrupts grant funded research in this arena — using any means necessary to not only fail to give fair consideration to opposing arguments, but to destroy those who offer those arguments by any means necessary. That is (and continues to be, at least for me) one of the most shocking things revealed by the Climategate documents — that a cabal of scientific researchers would actually conspired to have journal editors and individuals who sought to publish legitimate scientific results that contradicted their own results discredited and fired. They tried to professionally ruin people for the sin of disagreeing with them!
If you want something that will crush science, it is letting this sort of thing go unpunished. I still await “justice” here, in the form of actual censure and professional consequences for those involved. But I suspect that I will wait for the rest of my life for that.
For justice in the Fakegate case — well, I’m guessing that one thing the Heartland institute does have is enough money to sue the hell out of people for fraud and slander. I’m also guessing that at least some of the individuals involved have gone beyond the bounds where even the most tolerant of wink wink, nod nod, you know what I mean you know what I mean is going to be an acceptable solution. There will indeed be some public eviscerations now, in an effort to salvage what little is left of an already shabby reputation for self-policing of clearly inappropriate means and methods in supposedly scientific inquiry.
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