Personally I don’t think Russian spies had anything to do with it. A our own Charles The Moderator recently explained in The CRUtape Letters™, an Alternative Explanation, it is looking more and more like a leak than a hack. I’ll have a much more detailed post on this soon.
From the Telegraph
Climategate: was Russian secret service behind email hacking plot?
There was growing speculation on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the ‘Climategate’ scandal.
Thousands of emails, from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were first published on a small server in the city of Tomsk in Siberia.
So-called ‘patriot hackers’ from Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service, the FSB, to attack websites disliked by the Kremlin, such as the “denial of service” campaign launched against the Kavkaz-Tsentr website, over its reports about the war in Chechnya, in 2002.
Russia, a major oil exporter, may be trying to undermine calls to reduce carbon emissions ahead of the Copenhagen summit on global warming. The CRU emails included remarks which some claim show scientists had manipulated the figures to make them fit the theory that humans are causing global warming.
Achim Steiner, the director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the theft of emails from CRU, which is a world-renowned centre for climate research, had similarities with the Watergate scandal which brought down US President Richard Nixon.
But he said: “This is not climategate, it’s hackergate. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place [the Watergate building] where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so.
“So the media should direct its investigations into that.”
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.
“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he told The Times.
“If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random at all.
“This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs.”
Mr van Ypersele said the expose was making it more difficult to persuade the 192 countries going to Copenhagen of the need to cut carbon emissions.
“One effect of this is to make scientists lose lots of time checking things. We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators,” he said.
However he insisted the emails did not change the science. “It doesn’t change anything in the IPCC’s conclusions. It’s only one line of evidence out of dozens of lines of evidence,” he said.
A Russian hacking specialist told the Mail on Sunday: “There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been. There has been speculation the hackers were Russian.
“It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.”
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Good Grief!
If they can’t blame “BIG OIL!!”, scream “Reds Under The Beds!”.
What’s next? the return of Joe McCarthy?
“Are you now, or have you ever been a ‘climate denier’?”
I guess this means the Cold War is officially back? Given the current economic situation I don’t think starting a Cold War back up with one of the BRIC countries is a good idea.
I also wonder if the leaker(s) are going to expose themselves this week. When you think about it the e-mails and code started the ball rolling now what would be better than the whistleblower coming out the week of the Copenhagen and derailing the whole thing. That would be just, I don’t think words could describe it.
Is this revenge for the Briffa team “leaking” the Yamal data so McIntyre could find it??????
Just kidding…. Sort of. Though if it was the Russians, it was probably an attempt to validate their refusal to sign another climate treaty. They have exhausted the money they could get from Kyoto, and another treaty would not bring them the same profit Kyoto did. Remember, the Russians fought tooth and nail against Kyoto…. that is until they realized they could make tons of money from it.
So let’s assume Boris did it. So what? If there wasn’t any “there” there, it would have been for naught. Would the evidence be any less damning if Osama bin Laden did it?
Wow! And they claim we come up with crazy theories. I am so sorry Michael Crichton is missing all the fun.
Is this from the circle-the-wagons playbook or have these folks stopped by some of Amsterdam’s coffee houses on the way to COP15?
I salute our Russian comrades. Perhaps we can have them over for lunch and throw them a ticker tape paraid.
A DOS attack and a breakin are two completely different thing. DOS is kid stuff, breakins (at a reasonably secure installation) are far more difficult.
I love these ads – find a Russian babe today lol. Not really that probable an explanation – this is a leak, probably from a long time sysadmin who was treated like dirt.
That said, sysadmins do tend to see themselves as masters of the universe so they should’ve all gotten along well.
I cannot believe anyone felt these inane ruminations were print-worthy.
I also cannot believe that people are still using the word ‘theft’. As far as I know CRU has not been deprived of any of the data. CRU has been deprived of the cloak of secrecy under which Professor Jones had been operating. When information is divulged, it is a leak, not a theft. Absolutely pathetic that ‘theft’ is getting mileage.
Here’s the money quote:
Don’t think, react!
Thinking about it a bit… Thats not so funny…
I often encounter in my objection to American police state tactics the statement “Well, if you have nothing to hide then what is the problem?” If private citizens are being denied privacy, then what possible right has tax payer funded climate research to privacy?
So is he saying that if good old western hackers had been responsible, the e-mails would not have shown evidence of any skullduggery? 😉
It was a hack.
No, it was a leak.
No, it was a hack.
No, it was a leak.
The whole “discussion” misses the point. In fact, the “discussion” itself is a distraction from the most damning part of all and that is the evidence revealed some of the most disgraceful practices of science. It’s bait-and-switch; it’s the key secret of magic — misdirect someone’s attention from what’s really happening.
So when bureaucrats speak of theft, note how they also protest the proper response of science (where the MET office states that they’ll take another look at the data).
The ponzi scheme continues to crumble and more of its victims (scientists) are starting to speak out. And there’s a certain kind of dark humor in the response of some of those scientists whose shady practices have been exposed as they try to keep with the program as the edifice they toiled so hard to erect crumbles around their heads.
Weak arguments actually. The anonymous proxy server that was used to post on Climate Audit was located in Russia; and the files were uploaded to a Russian site (though, they could as easily have been uploaded to something like “Megaupload.com”). (If Gavin Schmidt is to be believed, that attempt to access RealClimate’s site was made from a Turkish-based proxy server.) If it WAS sophisticated and expert Russian hackers, wouldn’t they have covered their tracks just a tad better?
This is little more than random speculation, less sophisticated than what was bandied about here and on Climate Audit for the first couple of days.
Now, if Phil Jones were to come out and say that he’d collected all of these gems into a single file…for whatever reason (and they really don’t seem to be responsive to the FOIA requests), then it would be more believable. Otherwise, how’d they get just “on-topic” stuff, rather than the usual drivel we all produce (“going to lunch, wanna come?” etc.).
Of course, if it is a hack, it could have occurred some time ago – and it took a while to filter out the truly banal. The CRU has not actually said when they they think they lost the data (but then, look how long it took them to figure out they’d, err…misplaced the raw temperature data. Well, maybe.)
I notice that none of this speculation is coming from the UEA (or the CRU…). It looks like some classic misdirection (I note the story started appearing in the British press in a big way shortly after Monckton’s Climategate piece was web “published”. In that document, he referred to the information release as being the act of a whistleblower. Again, his assertion is speculation, but this might be the “comeback” from the AGW crowd.)
At the end of the day, who cares. There’s no suggestion that any of it has been tampered with. The emails and code show what they show – and the CRU (and a number of senior scientists) have clearly been shown to be acting in an unprincipled fashion.
The Times is running similar rubbish. See comments, the public isn’t buying it and who can blame them.
Same nonsense at the Daily Mail with usual tabloid poetic license.
The Times says upload to Russian server was done from Saudi. How convenient to implicate Saudi, given their ministers comment a day of two ago (that the BBC appear to have been instructed to play down). Where’s the proof for any of this? Proxy anyone? Let’s at least see the IP addresses.
What a joke this is! The AGW alarmist community is doing their damnest to portray this as a hacking issue not a ethics issue.
The files were probably “carefully selected” by people within CRU in response for a FOI request.
Posting a zip file on an ftp site is not rocket science. It’s more like climate science. LOL.
I’d rather the media dig more into the emails and code and speculate less on how they appeared. Not to knock what you guys are doing in reposting the article. The major networks just seem to have stopped at Mann’s trick and they fail to discuss the shoddy coding, peer pressuring scientists and print media (magazines and reporters), and an intent to discredit legitimate scientists who disagree with their dogma. I’d hate to see the whole conversation steer away from the deceit and fraud and towards the intrigue of who leaked it.
A leak is much more damaging than a hack so they will persevere with the “hack” meme.
There is a tiny flaw with that cunning plan though isnt there?
Russia stands to make billions on the carbon credits showered on them to buy them off, this backdoor bribe has already cost the EU billions, the Russians are sitting on a pile of carbon credits that are worth next to nothing as it stands, only if the CTS/C&P et al carbon trading markets take off will those credits be worth anything, so in fact Russia has a vested monetary interest in the scam taking off?
The old phrase ‘who benefits’ is all too valid in realtion to the AAM fraud, power/politics/money and the interaction between them.
Russian hackers are obviously a conceivable culprit, and the IP address has been known for quite some time. However, there are no new arguments in favor of this hypothesis.
Moreover, it’s much more important to trace the IP addresses of the guys who were manipulating or announcing the ZIP file than the servers they used to spread the file. And this would indicate that they were close to Moscow, not Tomsk.
The possibility that it was done by a whistleblower hasn’t been given any blow by these new reports.
Fearless leader vs. moose and squirrel. LOL
Nyet. ☺
OT, but I think it deserves attention. Myron Ebell of the CEI has a post at Pajamas Media that discusses a significant slip up in Holdren’s testimony to Congress on the 2nd.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-obamas-science-adviser-confirms-the-scandal-—-unintentionally/
here are the most pertinent paras.
When Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and other Republicans on the committee challenged Holdren’s analysis of Climategate, the president’s science adviser responded by repeating that it was just a small group of scientists engaged in some narrow research. Any mistakes or misdeeds on their part couldn’t possibly compromise the scientific consensus, which is as strong as it is vast.
But when asked about some of his own extreme statements and predictions, Holdren replied that scientific research had moved on from the latest UN assessment report in 2007. The most up-to-date scientific research was contained in a report written by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and released last summer. Holdren mentioned and referred to this report, Copenhagen Diagnosis, several times during the course of the hearing.
I remember when Copenhagen Diagnosis came out because nearly every major paper ran a story on it. Global warming is happening even faster than predicted, the impacts are even worse than feared, and that sort of thing. I also remembered that the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis included many of the usual conmen who are at the center of the alarmist scare. So I asked my CEI colleague Julie Walsh to compare the list of authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis with the scientists involved in Climategate.
I’m sure it will come as a shock that the two groups largely overlap. The “small group of scientists” up to their necks in Climategate include 12 of the 26 esteemed scientists who wrote the Copenhagen Diagnosis. Who would have ever guessed that forty-six percent of the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis belong to the Climategate gang? Small world, isn’t it?
Did you catch that? The “small, insignificant group of scientists” comprise almost half the authors of one of Copenhagen’s leading documents. But, just move along, nothing to see here!
Deflection and distraction.
I’m surprised they haven’t tried blaming the other pantomime villain: the Saudis.