Coming up: the recent incident at UU

Hello everybody!

The character of this blog entry is: sarcasm! If you can't handle that then please don't read any further. Intolerance of sarcasm can be expressed as seizure, heart attack, brain damage and blablablabla....

I will write a blog entry on the recent small incident between me and the Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology (ICM) at Uppsala University. At this moment, I just sent an email to the prefect, vice prefect and secretary at the ICM. Incidentally, I found out that the vice prefect of ICM is one of the professors I contacted earlier, before this incident started. Well I guess he must've been too busy to look into this matter. Hopefully my email will be well-received. Also, I posted a status update on my twitter to make sure that people know I sent the email. To tell you the truth, when I heard from my sources that people still follow the event by checking my twitter, I felt honored. I mean, when so many professors and faculty members put down their work to make sure a poor little student like me can receive so much unwanted attention, how can you not feel you are in the center of all the spotlight? Just like a Hollywood star! And guess what, one of my friends who happened to have a law book next to his hand, showed me this:

Tryckfrihetsförordningen 2 kap §1

Till främjande av ett fritt meningsutbyte och en allsidig upplysning skall varje svensk medborgare ha rätt att taga del av allmänna handlingar.

Tryckfrihetsförordningen 2 kap §14

Myndighet får inte på grund av att någon begär att få taga del av allmän handling efterforska vem han är eller vilket syfte han har med sin begären i större utsträckning än som behövs för att myndigheten skall kunna pröva om hinder föreligger mot att handlingen lämnas ut.

Tryckfrihetsförordningen SFS 1949:105

If you don't understand Swedish, use Google Translate. Basically it says that since I am a Swedish citizen, I should be able to get all the information per request. And the government is not allowed to speculate what I am doing in a broader-than-necessary spectrum to try to stop me from obtaining the information I'm after. University is a governmental organization, thus, it is bound by offentlighetsprincipen. Theoretically, all the documents are public, even the emails circulating inside the ICM can be accessed by me whenever I want. For instance, one of my friends at KI even told me that it's not recommended to write down personal stuff using the work email, because everything can be seen by any random person. At KI, it's said that some journalists ask the institute for more information than necessary, just to test if KI staff knows the law. I have a feeling that UU should also be put on the test, and I do worry about the performance of UU staff relative to KI staff.

Anyway, when I have time I will collect the information and write down a timeline for the events that occurred. If there is anything that I demand of ICM, it's a formal apology. I want the person who wrote down my twitter "Leo Kinmann" to step out, and apologize to me for exposing my privacy in front of the whole department. I dare to say this, now that I know my rights as a Swedish citizen.