Michael, the saboteur?! Part 2: asking for email

Last updated on March 1, 2013

By Michael Karnerfors 2009-10-31, continued from part 1

“Every Swedish citizen shall be entitled to have free access to official documents, in order to encourage the free exchange of opinion and the availability of comprehensive information.”

The paragraph above is the first act of the second chapter of The Freedom of The Press act, a cornerstone of the Swedish constitution. In short chapter two, titled “On the public nature of official documents”, says that if I as a Swedish citizen wish to take part of any official document, I am entitled to have swift access to it, no questions asked.

The term “official document” is rather wide and includes pretty much any document in a publicly funded institution, exceptions being only work in progress, private non-work related messages, and documents that have explicitly been classified as non-public.

This is one of the first things they bring up in Swedish law classes. I had an introductory law course in the mid 1990’s while getting my Masters Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. With the perverse pleasure that law-wranglers find in exploring the consequences of laws, the lecturer exemplified the extent of chapter two thus:

“You are perfectly allowed to walk into any public institution and say: “Hello. I intend to cause this institution some harm. Would you be so kind as to hand over today’s mail please?”, and they are compelled by the constitution to grant your request”.

Yes, even the mail of a Swedish public institution are official documents. Pretty much any document that comes into, or comes out from such an institution is official, and as such all Swedish citizens are entitled access to them.

Skip forward about 14 years and we land on October 5, 2009, when a question popped into my mind: does this include emails to university employees as well? A quick ask-around and the question was answered: yes, it does. Emails to and from publicly funded Swedish universities are subject to chapter two, and as such they are official documents.

So I posted a request to the registry office of the Royal Institute of  Technology (KTH), asking for the emails of Peter Szakalos, five years back. I knew from a private contact that KTH uses Microsoft Exchange as their email system. I further knew how easy it is to make a copy of an inbox in MS Exchange and save it to a file. I made the request unspecific in order to save them some work in that they shouldn’t have to have to sort through the email for specifics. Just grab the official part of the email and send it as an archive file. Piece of cake.

The question everyone keeps asking me at this point is “Why?”. The answer is: curiosity about the discussion that led up to the conclusion that copper corrodes in anoxic environments and that KBS-3 may fail the authority review. Who was involved? Was there any sort of pressure on Szakalos? What parties are interested in this and have they been trying to get involved? Are there “politics” and non-scientific interests trying to push the result either way? That’s why… and also partly because I figured this ought to be a unobtrusive, simple request that causes no particular disturbance to anyone.

I had no idea wat was about to happen…

The first hint that this might not be as smooth a ride as I expected was when the registry office at KTH mailed back after two days (so much for “as soon as possible” spelled out in the constitution) saying that they had received the request and intended to send the materials over… on paper.

Five years of email correspondence on paper?! I asked them: “are you sure about this? It’ll just muck things up for both parties”.

They replied and restated their intentions because “KTH’s policy is to always send paper copies when official documents are requested”.

Well “fine” I told them, I cannot ask them to break offical policy, but “isn’t it at this point prudent to ask for an exception from or an expansion of the policy”?

They didn’t email me back on that. So I waited a day… and then another day. Not a word from KTH. More days passed. Eventually I almost forgot about it. I figured maybe they were trying to find away out of sending the whole thing on paper because, in the words of Douglas Adams, “the mere idea is, quite clearly, utterly ludicrous”.

Two weeks later on October 21, a friend of mine that knew of the request for email calls up, tells me to go to the homepage of “Ny Teknik” (translates to “New Tech”), a Swedish weekly tech newspaper. He tells me to scroll down the main page. What I found first made me laugh out loud, for real. And then my mind reeled when I read further, and realized my request had turned out to be everything except unobtrusive.

There were speculations about the nuclear industry trying to sabotage and silence Peter Szakalos.

What the fuck had I done?!

To be continued…