[silk] US Gov't Scientist Fired for Web Post (fwd)

[rishab@xxxxxxx (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh)]

many of you must have read the reports in the media. here's a mail from
the guy who was fired. sorry if this is a duplication.
-rishab
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Forwarded-by: "David Richter" <davidric@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

From: Paul Atkinson

US Gov't Scientist Fired for Web Post (Freedom & Politics)

By manuka
Sun Mar 18th, 2001 at 01:43:41 AM EST
  
 There's an email circulating lately amongst folks in and near the
remote sensing community; Ian Thomas, a scientist with the USGS, was
fired after posting a map to his web site (Google Cache), that showed
the distribution of caribou calving areas in the politically-sensitive
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This action, which was in line
with 20,000 other maps he's produced over the last few years, caused Mr.
Thomas to be unceremoniously terminated without notice. His website and
work taken offline entirely, and it is believed this was politically
motivated. ANWR is a rather sensitive and controversial topic lately in
government and environmental circles, with the Bush administration
wanting to open it up for petroleum exploration. His email follows and
speaks for itself.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 17:00:32 +0100
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <XXXXXXXX@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: IMAGRS-L@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: update from Ian Thomas

----- Begin Included Message -----

FYI:
Please CC any return email to mailto:free_world_maps@xxxxxxxxxxx Please
feel free to forward this email to other lists and media contacts!

Please also check the following news
story: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010315/t000022700.html

Hi All,

Well, I have been fired for posting to the internet a single web page
with some maps showing the distribution of caribou calving areas in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

My entire website http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/ has now been
removed from the internet. This represents about 3 years worth of work
and 20,000 plus maps showing bird, mammal and amphibian distributions,
satellite imagery, landcover and vegetation maps for countries and
protected areas all around of the globe. As far as I aware it was one of
the biggest collections of maps online and certainly the biggest
collection showing maps of biodiversity and the environment. The website
was often visited by over a thousand visitors each week. In addition, I
was fulfilling roughly a dozen requests for geospatial data and
information from colleagues, other researchers and the general public
each day.

All of this comes as a rather big surprise to me. I was given no chance
to remove the webpage or even finish writing an appeal before my
position was terminated. I was working under a contract so I believe I
have very little legal recourse. I have received no written explanation
(or even an email) stating the exact reasons for the termination decision
and I understand that even though this would be a reasonable courtesy to
expect, it is unlikely to be forthcoming.

>From my viewpoint my dismissal was a high-level political decision to
set an example to other Federal scientists. I base this belief on the
following information I received from a colleague in Alaska who is a
leading researcher on the issues involved:

"I really hope you don't get fired. In fact, had the timing of what you
did not been so inappropriate based on everything else that was going
on, I doubt that anyone would have noticed. Your work showed a lot of
initiative..."

"...the fallout would not have been so great had the subject matter not
been one of the three USDOI super hot topics with the new administration
and had we not been briefing the Secretary at the nearly exact time your
website went up. Everyone is nervous and as I mentioned earlier,
consistency in presentation is paramount."

So now, I believe my only recourse is to appeal to the general public in
the hope that in the future what just happened to me will not happen to
others.

I would recommend anybody in a similar circumstances to contact the fine
people at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility or a similar
organization.

The response and support I have received from friends online has been
truely amazing. I very much appreciate how quickly people have acted on
my behalf and helped publicize my plight and I especially wish to thank
the international mapping community...receiving letters of support from
far away places cheers me up no end. Please feel free to forward this
email to other lists and media contacts! I would also be grateful if
anybody who misses all the maps I put on the internet please contact the
USGS to let them know and to ask that the maps be reposted.

I feel very bad that these events are also affecting my colleagues at
Patuxent. Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing researchers
and everybody I worked with is very supportive.

Many, many thanks for your support,

Ian Thomas <free_world_maps@xxxxxxxxxxx>

The Details:

Nobody instructed/authorized me to post the web pages on Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. It was done on my own initiative. I was working on land
cover maps for all National Wildlife Refuges using the new National
Landcover Datasets. Last week I published over 1000 land cover maps
online covering every National Wildlife Refuge and National Park in the
lower 48. (These maps have now been removed from the internet too).
Similar land cover data for Alaska were not available but the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge had a good landcover map so I included it.

In the past, I helped produce the only set of maps online showing all
bird species distributions in Alaska. In addition I have produced online
mammal distribution atlases of Africa, maps for tigers in asia and I was
working on digitizing North American mammal range maps produced by the
Smithsonian Institution.

I have also been conducting background research to prepare proposals to
study the effects of mineral extraction on biodiversity and protected
areas on a very large scale. One such proposal that I was preparing
would have looked at exporting analysis and mapping methods applied in
the United States to other regions of the World such as Africa. The
proposal was co-sponsored by the Mineral Division of USGS and the World
Resources Institute.

The migration of caribou in North America is the closest thing that we
have to the great mammal migrations that occur in Africa. African
protected areas are also under great pressure from possible development
for mineral extraction. So the carribou distributions that I found on
the Fish and Wildlife Service public website were of particular
interest. I have also worked for several years on maps of migratory bird
distribution patterns. I therefore have a great interest in other
migratory animals as many of the temporal mapping problems are similar.

I was completely unaware that there was anything wrong with publishing
ANWR maps. I have never been informed of any agency restrictions or any
other guidelines on publishing maps depicting ANWR...I only now have
been informed that there is a two week old agency "communications
directive" that limits who is allowed to distribute new information on
ANWR within my agency.

I thought that I was helping further public and scientific understanding
and debate of the issues at ANWR by making some clearer maps. I also
hoped that colleagues in USGS would see the maps and then contact me if
they needed additional mapping help. I was careful to quote my sources
and explain what I had done. I made no statement about what the maps
might mean with regard to oil development of the refuge.

The web pages were put up on Wednesday, March 7, last week. The first
thing I did when I put the ANWR pages up on the internet was to inform
other USGS Biological Resources Division mapping people and other agency
(Fish Wildlife Service and National Park Service respectively) GIS
people through email that they were on the web. Informing other Federal
colleagues and agencies immediately upon publication to the web appears
to me to be the only reasonable review process available, seeing as
there is no internal review website currently available...I have never
been informed of any other established proceedure for review of web
content on our site. I actually haven't had any complaints about or
requests to change any other map on my website...

I assumed that if anybody had a problem they could contact me directly
and quickly and appropriate steps could be taken almost immediately. I
received one warning from a colleague that the maps I put on the
internet should be removed. Unfortunately, it was sent on Saturday so I
did not receive it in time. I think the decision to terminate me was
taken before I even got to work on Monday.

I also assumed that because all I was doing was esentially presenting
existing public information in a clearer and improved format, there was
very little need for any extensive review other than the steps I took.
Indeed the changes that I made to the original Fish and Wildlife Service
(FWS) web maps were simply to digitize them ("trace"), then overlay them
on satellite and vegetation maps and then summarize how may years
specific areas were a high density caribou calving area. I found a
similar (poor quality) summary map on the FWS website that allowed me to
check the accuracy of my simple analysis.

I was unaware that FWS had updated the data. There is no mention of
updated information on the FWS website. This new data has still to be
made public.

If my maps were inaccurate in any way so are the public FWS maps I
copied....(please refer to
http://www.r7.fws.gov/nwr/arctic/pchmap2.html#section6) I think that
over the last three years I have put more maps up on the internet (at a
guess approaching 20,000 to 30,000 static individual maps) equalling any
other website on the world wide web. So out of the tens of thousands of
maps (and hours) I finally publish one that got me fired....I suppose
the odds were going to run out eventually....

I am concerned that other Federal researchers may easily make the same
mistakes I just made and should learn from my example what happens if
you're not careful.

Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing researchers and
everybody I worked with is very supportive.

Ian Thomas

Former Mapping Specialist at the:
GIS & Remote Sensing Unit
Biological Resources Division
United States Geological Survey
Patuxent Wildlife Research Center

----- End of forwarded message from glen mccready -----