No, seriously, this is the sort of link to a wonkish and/or geekish document that I'm a sucker for and you never read.

Specifically, did you read Chapter Five: "SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF AUTHORSHIPS IN
TEMPERATURE RECONSTRUCTIONS"? (sorry, statisticians tend to shout). It's kind a disturbing to a civil libertarian, as I know you are too: They analyze coauthors of paper build up several maps of this Dr. Mann's professional relationships.

Stop and savor how you'd feel if a whackjob RightW...er, hypothetically, let's say a whackjob LeftWing Congressman hires a statistician from the Assassin's Guild (or an assassin from the Statistician's Guild, it' not entirely clear) to go analyze your professional working relationships, and reports back to the Republ...er, Democratic whackjob complete with half a dozen maps of your colleaugues, and--get this--an "allegiance index" based on this analysis. It seems to be some technical term related to correlation in the social network, but it's certainly emotionally-loaded and has ominous overtones of the Betrayal Myth. Imagine what that RightW...LeftWing whackjob could do with that. Imagine what Joe McCarthy could have done with actual incontrovertible scientific evidence of betrayal backed up by a fancy-schmansy "social network analysis" and Allegiance Factor. Scientific guilt-by-association...science in service of witch hunts. What irony.

Actually, what's eating the ninja statisticians seems to be a feeling that they're not getting a big enough share of government money:

Conclusion 3. As Statisticians [sniff], we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community [sniff] that rely heavily on Statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream Statistical community [look piercingly over glasses]. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering [raise eyebrow] and yet apparently [ironic twinkle] no independent Statistical expertise was sought or used. [pregnant pause]

Recommendation 3. With clinical trials for drugs and devices to be approved for human use by the FDA, review and consultation with Statisticians is expected. [sniff] Indeed, it is standard practice to include Statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy when public health and also when substantial amounts of monies are involved, [sniff] for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made based on Statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by Statisticians should be standard practice. [sniff] This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and Funded accordingly.