Jeff Id at the Air vent writes about the recent UEA/CRU announcement that the Climategate files were all left on a single server. Gathering them into one zip file and posting on a Russian FTP: “not so sophisticated”.
That and Sir David King – making up stuff.
I still say that PJ (or someone with equal pull) told everyone in the shop to delete whatever incriminating messages/documents they could find…so the users themselves deleted the most valuable items…thereby marking them for easy collection.
Then someone with true IT savvy and insider access gathered them all together using backup software and put them on the single server.
>>So it all comes down to either a deliberate leak or
>>sloppy ‘housekeeping’ or a combination of both.
Deliberate prank, more like.
This is a Uni – a bit of a giggle to liven up Rag Week??
.
My understanding of UK law is that stolen material is perfectly admissable in court. The concept of the “fruit of the rotten tree” is a purely US concept relating to one of the amendments (i forget which one, the one that says that evidence has to be collected correctly).
A judge can accept any evidence collected by the police even if it was, for instance, found during the raid of the wrong property due to a typo on the search warrant.
1) I would ask to see the server. There’s no server that I’m aware of that would’ve housed the collection of emails going back some 15 years. Is that all users for 15 years? How is it that the email server (or backup or whatever) also contained so many data files? Were they really keeping their general documents, their data and their emails all on one server for 15 years? Fire the IT guy too.
2) This stolen data could be used for prosecution, as all of it, or a large share of it should have been available under FOI. The culprits cannot use their unlawful refusal to share this information as a defense against it’s use in their prosecution. The stolen gun issue is somewhat different, as the stealing of the gun was a crime, and the drive by shooting was a crime. In this case somebody ‘stole’ what is essentially public domain material. It would be like disallowing the use of a newspaper story as evidence because the police found out about the crime in a newspaper that was stolen from somebody’s front porch.
None of that withstanding, these people’s academic career’s should be over. There’s clear evidence that these people were not engaging in science here. The ‘Rules of the Game’ pdf file should be evidence enough of that, let alone the email exchanges. Science doesn’t ‘hide the decline’, it openly discussed the decline, or any other equivocating evidence, or any unexpected outcomes or data. That is science. Fun to watch these guys concoct their tale though, plausible deniability and so forth.
RoyJ
Watson was lying through his teeth. Are all these “climate scientists” at UEA trained in the art of lying?
It was an inside job.
My money is on someone who had always had doubts about the hockey stick and blew hot and cold (pun not intended) over the reconstructions. He was never totally trusted and came in for a lot of criticism, being the ever-present side-kick. His illness and problems with Yamal gave him lots of time to think about his work and he decided he couldn’t take any more of the defending the indefensible and the hassle on his return to work. Ably assisted by his younger and more sassy “loose cannon” colleague, he was able to assemble the FOIA file and release it to the world.
Now who could that be?
I have been greatly amused to read Monbiot’s mental and moral gymnastics in blaming “deniers” for the appointment of Pachauri to the IPCC (and thereby enabling Monbiot to declare him anathema and spawn of the Evil Ones:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/feb/02/climate-change-hacked-emails
“The US government immediately complied. Once it had extracted Watson, it accepted Pachauri as his replacement. The very qualities which made him acceptable to the climate change deniers in the White House – he wasn’t a climate scientist, he had friendly relations with business – are now being used by climate change deniers as a stick with which to beat him.”
Stunning cunning, bizarre spin eh? It reminds me of the kind of logic you find in medieval witchfinding manuals.
Now, just as point of interest and in no way intended to argue with you, but… from their perspective this is the same as someone gaining access to your naked pics on your computer. You still have them, they weren’t stolen, just copied and made public.
However, to continue the analogy: in this case the released pictures showed that the gold medal olympic women’s weightlifter was, in fact, a man. So does that negate the manner in which the pictures were obtained?
@Code Tech
Sorry to disappoint you but there are no naked pics. Except on the Heathrow security scanner, of course.
OK, I was being mischievious with that point. But I resent the comparison with a weightlifter of either gender.
Re: “Gathering them into one zip file and posting on a Russian FTP: “not so sophisticated”.”
Yeah, right. You expect a reasonable person to believe that, the ‘not so sophisticated’ part, not the ‘it was on one server’ part.
Whoever had the complete deep knowledge of the subjects and people involved must have been internal or tightly bound. That is the only way to allow the accumulation of the correct files, all of the correct files, and only the correct files.
Come on King, you look a gullible fool!
Has anyone considered that copies of files were made over a longer period and the zip file itself was then built outside CRU?
Maybe someone at CRU just left work with a DVD in her purse each week.
Is this likely? Why or why not?
Don’t forget, these folks were sending money to personal bank accounts in Russia for daily amounts of less than 10k. Briffa was also out in the sticks of Siberia. It’s possibe that they understood the regional server situation was open and took advantage of it…
It seems far more likely to me that it was an outside job but with inside help. Someone inside probably gave network systems access to someone else who had sufficient technical skill to zip up a big folder of stuff that seemed like it might be important and/or damaging but lacking a scientific background.
This is evidenced by the fact that over 95% of the emails are purely housekeeping and of no use to anyone but do serve to prove the validity of the truly damaging mails (hide the decline, trick, etc.).
As I see it the Norfolk Police are caught in a difficult political situation. The UK government and media have spent some effort in keeping the “Hacker” story alive. The idea of a “Leak” is unacceptable to the UK government as it would imply an individual who felt the whistle needed to be blown on gross malfeasance. The hacker story can be spun to look like a fishing trip by evil skeptics who are taking small particles of dirt out of context. The Norfolk Police may now be under pressure to return an inconclusive finding. If they conclude that this was a hacking incident this may provoke the whistle blower to subsequently reveal themselves. A whistle blower publicly revealing themselves after the authorities have released an official hacking claim would be even more politically damaging than an admission that this was a leak. The tactic of delaying the investigation and hoping people forget will no doubt be tried, despite this being the age of Little Brother. Some delaying techniques we may expect could include;
A – Changing the personnel in charge of the investigation
B – Losing files in the floods of 2010
C – Opening endless “new lines of inquiry”
D – Involving extra departments or agencies
E – Interrupting global popcorn supplies
Tom (11:12:24) :
“TerryS, Is there an Admin. command to remove the headers etc.? Someone?”
Depends on how the files were received. If they were intercepted over the network, then you could use tcpreplay to send only the bits you were interested in (send network framing + bits 1024 to 5000 of the data portion of the packet, assuming the headers are in bits 0-1023 of the data portion of the packet for example). This would assume there were tcpdump type files (network capture files) which were not in the archive. So, capturing/sniffing at the network level may not have been the route used. Given the time span involved, likely these were flat files somewhere.
If the files were not intercepted at the network level, and were flat files somewhere, copy and paste the body would get the contents without the headers. This would be easy for an admin to do by pulling a user’s mailbox and opening the sent items folder. Copying the non-email files would also be trivial for an admin.
Copying and pasting into a new document would also take care of the file date mystery, as the new document would use the system time for the file creation stamp.
Wonder if Jones’ arrogance bit him here? I expect he would be the type to treat the admins poorly.
Veronica (England)… I wasn’t comparing YOU to a weightlifter… lol
You know, I’ve been predicting the wheels falling off this thing for years now, the whole house of cards has been increasingly unstable… but I never, ever guessed that emails and other files would be released.
I guess, being an IT guy myself, I “assumed” that someplace with a bigger budget would have top-notch IT people. And now I’ve been reminded what happens when I assume.
@Chilled Out
Typically the distinction on whether stolen evidence can be admitted in court is who acted in bad faith. In the Lichtenstein case, the government was “buying” evidence of fraud instead of obtaining the information legally.
When the information is obtained “illegally” by a non-government organization for a purpose other than prosecution with no expected remuneration, case law in most countries tends to lean towards admissible. In the CRU case, there was no unreasonable search and siezure by authorities violating the rights of the accused. Where you would run into trouble is if you can establish that someone in an official government capacity encouraged the theft. Either way, the point is moot because the CRU folks in question are ineligible for prosecution under the UK foi laws.
Not A Carbon Cow, Thank you for the information. In my minds eye I see PJ with a double scotch as he reads his email; again. To keep track of what he has read he x’s the stuff he thinks should be kept private. He does not want the public emailing everybody who is on his list. If he then adds the Briffa stuff and files and grant money, PR pieces etc. it adds nothing really. The heart beat seems like PJ’s… & his fellows. Time will tell.
“It is interesting that Phil Jones and the CRU are self evidently not very good when it comes to understanding how to work with computers.
However the IPCC rely totally on the computer derived research of these people.”
BINGO, on the MARK, right on. Recently I was discussing with a friend the 787 passing the “weight test”. That’s where they weight the wings with sandbags until they BREAK to get the “max load”.
My friend, who works for a company supplying high speed data gathering equipment to CERN said, “WHAT? ! ? They still do a physical test?” I noted (from my civilian aviation experience, and keeping up with the industry over the years, “Yes, the FAA is rather ‘anal retentive’ about getting that sort of testing done.”
My friend and I then both noted: Computer models are great (I’ve been doing Finite Element work for 25 years!) but there is NOTHING like a real PHYSICAL test to verify YOUR COMPUTER MODELING WAS CORRECT.
Hum, possible with a 787. Not so possible with Earth 1.0
Max
@Chilled Out, and L Bowser
Head over to John O’Sullivan’s ClimateGate site:
http://www.climategate.com/climategate-professor-phil-jones-could-face-ten-years-on-fraud-charges
There was another article that pointed out while the emails may have been “stolen”, they weren’t obtained illegally by prosecutors, and that’s what counts. I can’t seem to find that article at the moment.
The E-mails and documents could have been leaked as there where offered to the BBC three weeks before they ended up on russian web site.
Some of the zipped documents where copied at 4.30 am, on new years day has anyone picked up on this?
Just had letter from Joan Ruddock, MP Minster of State at the Department of Energy & Climate Change. After all that is on the web and in the papers about climategate to get this letter is like reading a Monty Python sketch.
“the data hacking incident”
“the government does not provide funding for the CRU”
“temperature analysis is confirmed by two entirely independent analyses. Carried out the the USA by the NASA and the NOAA”
“We can also take confidence that the UEA temperature analysis has been peer reviewed in numerous scientific papers over the last twenty years and been assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its last three reports. the IPCC has issued a statment which supports this in detail.” Joan Ruddock MP
REPLY: No the BCC emails thing with Paul Hudson is wrong, he only confirmed that emails in the FOIA2009.zip file contained communications to/from him from weeks before, leading to his concluding the whole file package to be authentic. He described it in such a way that many people got the wrong meaning.
KONRAD
I have some more for your list
F National Security
G not in the puplic interest.
H No man power to carry out the work
I lack of funds
Ian, The time stamp of my 64,936,854 bytes, FOAI Zip file was loaded on Friday, Nov. 20th, 2009.
Re Sir David King.
I am reminded of a famous quote attributed to Bacon:
“He doth like the ape; the higher he climbeth, the more doth he show his arse”
I’m sorry, I’ve just had another thought. If the original data of temperature records have been “lost”, how the hell did these e-mails survive?