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The fund's executive director, Lauren Kurtz, said laws addressing online harassment are "behind the times." They tend to focus on bullying of children, not adult victims.

Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, said that while the conservative groups had pursued researchers’ emails in the name of transparency, there had been “complete lack of transparency in how they were running their own organization.”

Justice Kennedy’s replacement will influence how we protect our air and water, as well as how we respond to climate change, for generations to come.

The presence of people like Milloy shuts out the voices of qualified scientists in the public policy arena, said Augusta Wilson, an attorney with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

This coordinated assault on science in the name of transparency will ultimately harm not only the health of the American people, but the scientific endeavor as a whole.

Despite the administration’s claims that its actions put “America first,” they will in fact undermine our economic competitiveness and our position at the forefront of scientific research.

To date, the tracker has 96 entries, including 41 examples of outright government censorship. For instance, “on December 20, 2017, ninety-two documents describing national parks’ climate action plans were removed from the National Park Service (NPS) website.”

“Political and ideological attacks on science have a long and shameful history, and such attacks are the most dangerous when carried out or condoned by government authorities,” said Lauren Kurtz, CSLDF’s executive director.

The project, called the Silencing Science Tracker, has so far assembled 96 entries of federal restrictions or prohibitions on climate science since November 2016. The database is built from media reports, and it's searchable by agency, date and type of action.

The Silencing Science Tracker is intended to capture government attempts to restrict or prevent scientific research, education, discussion or the publication or use of scientific information. The tracker contains a table of entries, drawn from media reports, which will be updated on a regular basis.

The session “Legal Advice for Scientists Interested in Activism” is one new addition to the conference program. Lauren Kurtz, an attorney with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, said she suggested it after working with organizers of the March for Science — most of whom were researchers with no previous activism experience.

Legal protections for scientific research materials vary widely in the United States, according to a new Climate Science Legal Defense Fund report, leaving scientists and universities vulnerable to malicious open records requests and endangering the scientific endeavor.