Actually, you may be right. It is illegal to delete material under the FOI and telling other people to do the same would be a conspiracy.

From the FOI act of 2000

77.
Offence of altering etc. records with intent to prevent disclosure.
— (1) Where—
(a)
a request for information has been made to a public authority, and
(b)
under section 1 of this Act or section 7 of the M1 Data Protection Act 1998, the applicant would have been entitled (subject to payment of any fee) to communication of any information in accordance with that section,
any person to whom this subsection applies is guilty of an offence if he alters, defaces, blocks, erases, destroys or conceals any record held by the public authority, with the intention of preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of the information to the communication of which the applicant would have been entitled.

I don’t mean to suggest that the Constables or the NDET are currently investigating the behavior of the gentlemen from EAU, CRU or Penn State. Nor am I alleging that Jones, Mann, et al did anything illegal. But it sure smells funny and if the Constables are looking for evidence of a conspiracy I suggest they review the “can you delete” exchange between Jones and Mann.

Jones – “Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?…Keith will too…Caspar to do likewise.”
Mann – “I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP.”

So if it was illegal for them to delete emails then it would potentially be illegal for them to conspire to delete them. And while Mann now denies deleting emails, that denial is irrelevant as it relates to “conspiracy.”

‘We’re the National Domestic Extremist Team and we haven’t had our breakfast yet !’

They made painfully slow progress, coming up against both incomprehension and inertia in Whitehall and some legitimate concerns about the cost of the whole project. Then in stepped a man who changed everything.

At a lunch at Chequers, the creator of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, explained to the prime minister just why setting government data free was important, a vision he’d already outlined in a speech at the TED conference where he got the crowd chanting “raw data now!” I’m not sure whether he got Gordon Brown to join in with that chant around the Chequers dining-table, but he was given the job of making it happen.

Well done Tim. And I was just thinking that both he and Rory are in that large and reasonably interesting set of people I’ve met just once. (Gordon hasn’t yet had the privilege.)

I believe the timing is very good for what we all want to see with climate data – and then source code (and hopefully the earliest web publishing of papers, using something like http://arXiv.org). Just in case people missed this in the early hours London time. How I spotted the story then I have no idea. It’s been linked from the BBC front page from this morning but that’s not how I found it originally. That part’s murky. And sorry to interrupt this thread except it seems very in line with what Boudu‘s just said to the Norfolk constabulary. All great stuff.