Saturday 17 April 2010

Oh, Now I Wish I’d Made A FOIA Request….

It seems some of the police are suffering from a massive disconnect between what their job actually is and what a citizen’s rights actually are.

It appears those who made FOIA requests to the climate scientists are finding themselves on the receiving end of a phone call from the Old Bill:
In a letter to the Financial Times, Sebastian Nokes, a climate change sceptic and businessman, said he was interviewed by an officer who "wanted to know what computer I used, my internet service provider, and also to which political parties I have belonged, what I feel about climate change and what my qualifications in climate science are. He questioned me at length about my political and scientific opinions".
Well, the answers to those questions should have been: ‘None of your business, none of your business, none of your business, none of your business, none of your business and none of your business.

Now, don’t you have a real job to do, like protecting us from the deadly menace of knife-wielding maniacs?’
The police have a duty to investigate the alleged crime, but this kind of questioning smacks of something far more sinister because a person's political and scientific views are being weighed to assess his likely criminality in the eyes of the police officer.
And that marks a turning point in the public’s relationship with the police.
Now you might ask how else the police are going to establish who is a suspect. After all, you would certainly ask people about their views if you investigating a string of racist attacks. But this is not a violent crime or a terrorist matter: moreover, Nokes had simply sent "an FOI request to the university's climate unit asking whether scientists had received training in the disclosure rules and asking for copies of any emails in which they suggested ducking their obligations to disclose data".

On that basis the police felt entitled to examine Nokes on his views.
Let’s hope he told them where to go; if any actually complied with this, it will merely encourage them to consider it a legitimate line of enquiry in future investigations…
What this adds up to is a failure of understanding in the police force that one of its primary duties is to protect the various and sometimes inconvenient manifestations of a democracy, not to suppress them.
Indeed.

It’s about time they were reminded of this. Forcibly, if necessary.

7 comments:

Jiks said...

Yes, this sort of stuff is very poor, to put it mildly.

I seem to have posted rather a lot in various places bashing recent police activities but I'm not anti-police, I'm very much in favour of law and order. I just wish, as you say Julia, that they would focus protecting us from real crime rather them protecting the authorites from us.

Many US law enforcement agencies have the motto "to protect and serve" ... would that that was the case here.

Joe Public said...

Good to see the Guardian is alert to History stories.

I flagged NDET story (sourced from WUWT) to G.O.T. on 9th Jan, & he publicised it on 10th Jan.

woman on a raft said...

If this is all the same Sebastian Noakes (just checking) then he has properly spooked them.

The blog Watching the Deniers* thinks there is something fishy about people who make FoIs and that it is highly suspicious. Blasphemy, in fact. They have decided that if a lot of people ask for FoIs, that amounts to a DNS attack. How very dare anyone question them.

Noakes is unperturbed. He is fully identified on Amazon, where he sells his business books, and is not an easy person to intimidate, having already had a run-in with Credit Suisse First Boston when it sacked him for being a reservist in 2000. I haven't checked the outcome of the case, but the BBC describes him as:

"Mr Nokes, a graduate of the London Business School, has also served as a regular officer with the Gurkhas. He joined the RAF reserve in 1993."

I hope Noakes managed to sell the police some books. Highly cheeky of them to waste his time answering questions which a quick google revealed to be in the public domain.

I've got a suggestion for the cops. Fraud isn't easy to prosecute but if the CRU have been misrepresenting data in order to get research grants, that could be obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception. The police may think that last week's report clears UEA of that, but they are wrong in the same way the Catholic church is wrong about how it investigates itself and finds itself blameless.

*I've linked to the cache version to wind them up. They really hate Noakes. He advised people to ask for information audits if they don't get replies.

woman on a raft said...

Nokes, Nokes. Spelling it right would help.

Chuckles said...

Self selecting focus groups, telephone surveys and all that.

Brian, follower of Deornoth said...

I carry a Swiss Army Knife in my pocket, too. Come and get me, Pig Bastards.

JuliaM said...

"I seem to have posted rather a lot in various places bashing recent police activities but I'm not anti-police, I'm very much in favour of law and order."

Ditto. But they don't help themselves, do they?

"Good to see the Guardian is alert to History stories."

This is why blogs are beating the MSM at their own game! If only more people relied on them...

"If this is all the same Sebastian Noakes (just checking) then he has properly spooked them."

Good for him!

"I carry a Swiss Army Knife in my pocket, too. "

I used to carry one in my bag. Bought it on holiday in Cornwall years ago (I needed the bottle-opener bit) and never thought twice about it.

Now it's in my drawer, useless to me or anyone else in an emergency. Just in case some idiot wants to make a point and get a quick arrest.