One Man's Leaker . . .

. . . is another man's journalist.

Amused to watch from a distance the East Anglia controversy over the leak of "hacked" emails regarding climate research. If it wasn't so darned significant, it would just be another example of insider academic politics aired large -- reminded of the Georgia history department document dump of a couple of years ago.

As the sides trade attacks, the first line of defense is a violation of privacy. OK, not attempting to know what goes for FOIA in the UK, but if this were an American public university, pretty sure those emails could be accessed directly under state laws. It speaks more to being careful what you put in your emails when you are at a public institution. What really hurts these professors is their inside jokes and barbs at opponents taken into the light of day reveal something they certainly did not intend as they believed they were chatting among like-minded colleagues.

When Daniel Ellsberg opened up his files to the New York Times, thus creating the Pentagon Papers crisis, he was reviled by the U.S. government for violating the 1917 Espionage Act by leaking national security documents. Ellsberg saw it as a duty:

I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.

Somebody at East Anglica thought the same. It's possible to have hacked the email system and recovered those emails, but far more likely that someone with access did the deed -- an insider who either had their own Ellsberg moment or had been wronged and decided to go Deep Throat on his enemies.

If you want more Pentagon Papers, the Wikipedia entry is a good starting point.