politics

Response to FOI: Don’t have information.

10 Comments

I have received a response from CRUT’s David Palmer. As some recall, I wished to learn details about confidentiality agreements between Crut and El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Evidently, whatever confidentiality agreements might exist, Crut doesn’t have them:

Dear Ms. Liljegren
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – INFORMATION REQUEST
(Our Ref: FOI_09-102)
Your request for information received on 26 July 2009 has now been considered.
Pursuant to your rights under section 1(1)(a) of Freedom of Information Act 2000 to be informed whether information is held, this letter is to formally advise you that we do not hold the requested information.
You have the right of appeal against this decision. If you wish to appeal please set out in writing your grounds of appeal and send to me at:
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
Telephone: 0160 359 3523
E-mail: foi@uea.ac.uk
You also have a subsequent right of appeal to the Information Commissioner at:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow, Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Telephone: 01625 545 700
www.ico.gov.uk
Yours sincerely

David Palmer
Information Policy & Compliance Manager
University of East Anglia

Response to Freedom of Information request (FOI_09-102)

The original letter below:

I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involving the following countries: El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Costa Rica
1. the date of any applicable confidentiality agreements;
2. the parties to such confidentiality agreement, including the full name of any organization;
3. a copy of the section of the confidentiality agreement that “prevents further transmission to non-academics”.
4. a copy of the entire confidentiality agreement,
I am requesting this information for the purposes of academic research.
All written agreements that we possess in relation to any data received from any country or geographic area are now all available via the Climate Research Unit website at: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/availability/. This page also has information regarding the compilations, processing and handling of any data received. The manner in which the station data was collected, the changes in national boundaries and entities, and the nature of the processing of the data by the CRU have all evolved & changed over the time of collection of the data. The agreements relate to the stations, which have stayed the same over the years, despite changes to national boundaries.

It will be interesting to learn whether everyone else gets similar answers.

10 thoughts on “Response to FOI: Don’t have information.”

  1. “this letter is to formally advise you that we do not hold the requested information.
    You have the right of appeal against this decision. If you wish to appeal please set out in writing your grounds of appeal and send to me at”

    What happens when you appeal, “win” the appeal, and they still don’t have the information? 😉

    Andrew

  2. You asked for information about any confidentiality agreements and the response is that they do have the information requested.

    But what does the response actually mean? As I see it there seem to be three possible mutually exclusive interpretations:

    1) They are saying that they do not know whether or not they have any such agreements with those particular countries, and that it is impossible for them to find out whether or not such agreements exist and that therefore they are unable to give you the information you seek.

    2) They are saying that they know that they do have confidentiality agreements but do not have access to any information about them, and so cannot give you the information you seek.

    3) They are saying that they know that they do not have any confidentiality agreements with the countries mentioned, and so have no information about such agreements to give to you.

    Until you know what their answer actually means it will be difficult to decide what action to take next.

  3. Ok,

    Now, ask for the data.

    Reference your request.
    Reference their denial.
    Reference Annex G which establishes their procedures for handling confidentiality agreements.

    1. the data.
    2. correspondence between the Office and Dr Jones relating
    to the existence of the agreements.
    3. a description of the procedures used to maintain records
    4. Correspondence with the 5 countries with regard to the possible existence of these contracts.
    5. Correspondence with this 5 countries about the potential breach of security relative to data those countries provided.

    You see, CRU are required to keep records and maintain them. If they think they might have lost the contracts, then they have an obligation to inform the countries. Especially since they posted the data. They can’t use their sloppiness to “reclassify” public domain data as confidential data.

  4. Steve–
    I’m waiting for everyone to get their responses. Someone can draft the letter we can each send for our five countries.

    Obviously, it makes no sense for them to be able to refuse distribution if they have no confidentiality agreements, but simply theorize that relevant ones might once have existed but they are too sloppy to keep them. That would make FOI toothless since they would pretty much always a) look for the agreements, b) find there aren’t any and then c) conclude the agreements may have existed but were lost and so d) refuse to give out the data!

  5. I got the “we do not hold the requested information” reply also (Iceland, Ireland, Greenland, New Zealand, Thailand). Agree with you, Lucia, on waiting until all of the responses come out and then going forward from there – It should be interesting to see how this proceeds.

  6. I already jumped the gun earlier today and re-requested the data in light of the MET Office memo regarding conditions for release of the data for academic purposes. My reply to Palmer (in part):
    .

    Mr. Palmer,

    Thank you for the reply. With that being said, I must say that I am disappointed in the response. The claim that such agreements exist – but have subsequently been lost – is a decidedly unsatisfactory answer. The statement that you do not have the resources to maintain the agreements, nor the resources to obtain permission for release of the data for scientific purposes, is a poor and untenable reason in light of the documentation presented at the internet location linked in your response letter.

    It is clear from the UKMO memo provided in the linked .pdf that it is the responsibility of the individual data center to make data available for legitimate research projects.. It is also clear from the UKMO memo that agreements are in place to allow use of the distribution and use of the data and software for scientific research (para. 1), under the condition that the data is used for scientific purposes and that the scope of the use is limited to a pre-defined scientific project. This memo clearly indicates that the individual NERC Data Centres may provide data for specific academic projects by individuals outside NERC Data Centre purview (para. 5). The memo also indicates that the aforementioned third party restriction covers redistribution of the data by individuals outside NERC Data Centres (para. 3 and 5-8) and use of the data for purposes that differ from the stated project. It is also clear that the code used to perform homogenization, gridding, and other adjustments is not subject to any agreements related to the individual station time series.

    Based on this information, I hereby submit an EIR/FOI request for:

    1. All original station temperature data used to produce the CRU gridded land temperature data set.

    2. The code used to convert the original station temperature data series into the gridded land temperature set, to include all homogenization adjustments, adjustments to remove non-climatic influences, and any other adjustment to the original station time series. Text format of the code in the native language is acceptable.

    To comply with the restrictions of use for academic purposes listed in the UKMO memo, I request this data for a scientific project with the following scope:

    1. Investigation of the effects of changing land use, urban heat island effects, and other non-climatic influences;

    2. Sensitivity analysis of parameters used to grid and adjust data;

    3. Sensitivity analysis of methods to calculate monthly means (e.g., min/max, max only, min only);

    4. Analysis of the source of differences between the CRU land temperature index and other indices (e.g., GISTEMP and NOAA); and,

    5. Analysis of the effect of using satellite-derived covariance information to interpolate between land stations.

    The expected duration of the project, from the time of receipt of the data, is no less than three (3) years.

    .
    Since they provided the memo as the evidence that they could not release the data, I am interested to see what the new excuse will be given that the above request meets the conditions outlined in the memo.

  7. Just to anticipate the next round:

    1) They do not physically have the confidentiality agreements.
    2) Such agreements are confidential and are held by another agency which in run informs them that they are bound by confidentiality agreements the text of which agreements they are not entitled to see because their existence is confidential.
    3) You would normally have the right to petition/appeal to the agency that has the agreements but the identity of the agency is a secret.
    4) Cheerio and bugger off.

  8. Mr. Palmer can probably count on getting FOIs till the data is freed.
    Actually, people should individually craft them adding requests here and there. That way he can’t do stock responses.

  9. Has anyone asked
    1)which countries they possess the confidentiality documents
    2)which countries they do not possess the confidentiality documents but believe they had them once upon a time

  10. FrancisT–
    A bunch of us picked 5 countries and asked specifically. This works better. People are asking various questions at this point. CRU has put up a web page which seems to suggest they have a confidentiality agreement with Bahrain. There are also documents from Spain and Denmark (I think.) Those don’t really indicate that confidentiality agreemnents are in place. The Danish (?) one only suggest that someone from CRU offered to be bound by one, but that’s not precisely evidence that the Danes held them to that.

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