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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It wasn’t a hack and it doesn’t have the Russian fingerprint on it, IMHO.
It was a “class act”, but it was focused untirely on a specific archive that was being prepared for a FOIA request that was denied, and it happened right after that denial became known.
The data were not fished through by a rogue hacker who then spent several hundred staff hours ‘preening’ it during the following 10 elapsed hours. “Does not compute”…
The “negative space” is all wrong. A “hack” would have included any non-tech juicy bits too. It would have been a wider net on the email side. More people and more topics.
This was an “inside created FOIA archive” and it was sucked down in one quick go. THEN it was datestamp washed, moved to an anon reserver in Russia, and then to the world. That bit was a preplanned bit of class.
So, IMHO, it was either an inside leak (most likely) or a fumbled permissions that let it go from the external server rather than locking it down when the FOIA was denied (i.e. someone let it go as planned under FOIA instead of locking down due to change of direction.)
The other thing is that Russian Hacks are typically “by the book”. They leave lots of fingerprints. If they had the logs showing that type of attack, it would be talked about. What they did was shut down an external server. Just all wrong. A Russian Hack that got into the email archive and wandered around would have had UEA not having email service for a couple of days as the server was forensic analyzed and the “new server” was being security prepped. (Even if they had a hot spare, it would have the same vulerabilities, so it could not be put into service until patch checked and security audited).
So at the end of the day: Charles The Moderator has clue and has it right. Jean-Pascal and Steiner are having paranoid fanatasies.
At most, a sympathetic Russian hacker might have aided the leaker after the fact with a washing post, or an open Russian Relay was used by a “smart but lucky” external person who discovered an accidental permisions fubar let him grab the FOIA archive.
I also, again, need to point out that there is no crime here. Under UK precident, “vandalism for a greater good” is A-OK. This was clearly for the greater good (Head of the unit DID step down, no? Denials of the content are missing, only claims that it was OK to fudge the books and suborn the Peer Review process are being offered in defense). So we have clear evidence that the evil was being done… and that means that to expose this “for the greater good” is a legal and moral act (per UK Precident set by vandals who were pro-AGW being let free). Now I may think that was a very stupid precident to set; but it was set and now holds.
The LSM dodging bullets again.
Does it really matter who sourced the leak? Russian Secret Service, the Global Sceptic “Conspiracy” or funny looking dudes from another planet. Or that they utilised the latest “hacker” techniques or simply resorted to magic and witchcraft.
Talk about being in denial. They can’t stay there forever though.
That the “story” is mostly sourced from UN and IPCC seniors speaks volumes. Light goes on, Cockroaches scurry for cover.
Roaches blame light switch operator in warehouse food theft scandal
Me too. He saw all this coming and like you say it is a real shame that he isn’t here to see it.
Ok,
I know I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, but aren’t scientists SUPPOSED to check their work?
If The Team doesn’t have the time to check their own work because they are too busy doing damage control then… GIVE US THE DATA! and we’ll check it for them! Everyone’s happy, right?
“All this was in the hands of the BBC and its correspondent in mid October. ”
Not all of it — just some CRU emails (1255558867.txt) whining about a column written on Oct. 9 by Paul Hudson, BBCs reporter on climate change, questioning GW. The last of those emails was written on Oct. 14. In a brief message on his blog, after the FOIA.zip release, Hudson said he received the emails related to his column on Oct. 12, but he could be fuzzy on that, and it could have been the 14th — (and it’s unknown who sent them and from what address, since the BBC has gagged Hudson on the issue).
Meanwhile, the last file date on the entire set of emails in the FOIA.zip is Nov. 12. So, when Hudson got that small set of emails, the .zip file was still being compiled.
I don’t see how this can be anything but an inside job. The only other explanation is that some outside hacker had undetected access to the UEA CRU computers for at least a month — not likely, even for the digitally-challenged CRU crew.
“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.”
Yes, scientists have better things to do than “check things” (things like data, analysis, uncertainties) – afterall, they have conferences to jet off to.
It reminds me of a bit of dialogue in a Goon Show (1950s) – I don’t recall which one:
Willium: “Russian frogmen done it.”
Neddie: “Why, what motive would they have?”
Willium: “I don’t pry into their private affairs – I just accuses them.”
(or something like that)
Now, those guys seemed to manage to get all sorts of things past the BBC censors – we could do with them now.
The mechanism by which the files entered the public domain does not seem particularly germane. The fact is, they shed some much needed light on the analytical methods, professional practices, and political machinations of a very small climate science clique. Perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps by design, those responsible for the disclosure have acted in the public interest.
Ed Miliband, UK energy secretary, also stated on radio this morning that ‘politicians can’t be expected to understand the science’.
So: the high priest now says he can’t be expected to justify why he’s doing what he’s doing. But he’s going to do it.
Exactly what you would expect from a molly-coddled little boy brought up in Hampstead to a comfortable existence but nonetheless is an ardent supporter of socialism.
A sense of entitlement, but no expectation that he should have to justify the reasons for his entitlement.
That’s UK politics for you.
There are some opinions on Climategate at http://www.extrinsic.blog.com/ that may be relevant to this thread.
“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.”
So by (AGW) logic, since all sceptics are either amateurs or amateur scientists, surely the alternative alternative explanation is that it was the work of … drum roll … Peereviewedpublished climatescientists themselves!
Just an observation – wouldn’t it have saved the scientists an awful lot of time and effort and avoided all the nasty FOI if they simply released the data and code in the first place? Or was that just another “trick” to “hide the decline”?
An old lawyers trick is apparently to keep asking the same question in many different ways until the story cracks and the truth exposed. So keep asking those questions!!
I agree that this was most likely and internal leak. Surely there must have been one honest, ethical scientist among the 25-30 working at CRU who decided to blow the whistle.
Doesn’t anybody here think that it may be BOTH a leak and a Russian thing? I mean, whoever leaked the information may have done so because of receiving a very nice economic reward from the russians. And he probably didn’t need to do anything, only point out where the file was and what passwords were needed to access it. Then the russians would have done the rest.
3×2 (23:31:57) : Bulldust (21:19:18) :
I am so sorry Michael Crichton is missing all the fun.
Me too. He saw all this coming and like you say it is a real shame that he isn’t here to see it.
How do you know he’s not enjoying it? Lack of proof (of his presence) does not equal disproof (that he’s not there).
I note that the accusations of theft and Russian involvement don’t come from CRU. There has been remarkably little speculation about the cause of the data release from them, apart from the initial knee-jerk reaction of hacking.
In fact, I seem to recall them going along with the leak suggestion – perhaps because they know a lot more about the subject than they are prepared to admit.
If they were convinced it was not a leak, I’m sure they would have been shouting it from the rooftops.
My view is still that it was the guilty party(ies) who collected the emails together ready for disposal, and that a ready prepared folder was discovered by the leaker who decided to “save it” in the public domain rather than see it obliterated.
The Russian server was simply part of the mechanism to obscure the trail back to the leaker.
@AnonyMoose
“What idiotic secret operation would announce the stolen files on a server in their own country? Maybe the media thinks the Russian secret agents work the same way the climate secret agents work…”
Quite correct. So Russia is off the hook.
We should consider who will benefit most from this. Surely China, with it’s expanding economy, needs Copenhagen to fail the most. So it must have been Chinese.
Or Indian…..
This claim is nonsense. Although Russia generally is a denier, it stands to make money from the carbon trading scam.
What was the motive for the alleged hackers?
Was it known that CRU was playing fast and loose with the data and the code?
If you wanted to discredited climate scientists, would you hack CRU, GISS, etc?
I don’t think anyone knew what could be found there so a hacker is unlikely to aim for CRU, whether he was directed by the FSB, “Big Oil”
Last date in emails: Nov 12th, 2009
Date of letter refusing FOI: Nov 13th, 2009
Says it all.
Thanks, Anthony. The Boris Badenov, Natasha Fatale, and Fearless Leader cartoon made my morning.
Bullwinkel was great. I loved that cartoon.
We could remake it…
“Hey Phil! Watch me pull warming out of my hat! Oops- looks like I used the wrong rings!”
This article, in today’s London ‘Times’ seems more up to date on the facts of the email disclosures. It is becoming increasingly clear that a concerned person within the CRU revealed these emails rather than, that they were ‘stolen’ or hijacked.
See: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6946281.ece
A successul crime investigation must discover a motive. The argument supporting a so-called motive for Russian implication is naive at best, deliberate misinformation at worst. It’s rather like the worn out cliche about big oil funding skeptics.
The truth is oil producers and oil exporters will continue to sell oil. If that was not the case the market would not have lifted oil prices from below $40 to over $70 this year alone. These conspiracy theorists need to use a bit more of that grey matter between the ears.
The inconvenient fact for those propagandists shouting “the Ruskies did it!” is that Russia has much to gain if a binding emisions target is agreed in Copenhagen and much to loose if it isn’t. Since the collapse of the Soviet union in 1990, the loss to Russia’s heavy industry has been so great that they are nowhere near the CO2 emission levels they had then. This is why they will stand to gain as a net exporter of CO2 emission certificates as they can sell unused capacity to the West. The reality is, the Kremlin would be as miffed about missing out on the bonanza as the alarmists would be miffed about missing out on the chance to impoverish the world.
Or maybe a bloke working there just copied a bunch of files onto a USB stick?
But I suppose an exciting story about big-oil/russian/chinese superhackerspies makes much more sense.
From the UK Theft Act 1968 –
“Basic Definition of Theft
(1) A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and thief and steal shall be construed accordingly. ”
Who has been permanently deprived of anything here? Revelations are not theft! Indeed who has been dishonest?
I saw the stories on the net and thought, oh man, now they’re
blaming it on the “Red Menace”. When I navigated back to your
site, I lost it! Thanks for the laugh. The Russians must be laughing
too. 192 countries making any decision….wake me when it’s over.
I can’t wait for the president to show up after they’ve divided up
all the U.S. wealth.
I read that the EPA is set to self-destruct early this week. You know,
you can’t pay for entertainment like this.