While Wikileaks makes headline this week for releasing thousands of diplomatic cables, clueless journalist Tom Chivers of the telegraph does a roundup of “Wikileaks’ 10 greatest stories“. He lists this without realizing that Wikileaks was late to the party started on Climate blogs, including Climate Audit, The Air Vent, Climate-Skeptic.com, Lucia’s Blackboard, and WUWT.
More than 1,000 emails sent over 10 years by staff at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were posted on Wikileaks after being accessed by a hacker. They appeared to show that scientists engaged in “tricks” to help bolster arguments that global warming is real and man-made. One said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The report was described by sceptical commenters as “the worst scientific scandal of our generation“. The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, stepped down from his role in the wake of the leak, although following a House of Commons inquiry which found that he had no case to answer he was reinstated.
This reporter’s lack of research aside, the Wikileaks issue and it’s damaging impacts are summed up quite well in this article from the Globe and Mail by a former diplomat who was responsible for reporting on human rights violations:
It’s not just the militant activist in Guelph, Ont., reading the cables. It’s the military dictatorships and the secret police in capitals all around the world. In the days and weeks ahead, people who dared to share information with U.S. diplomats will be rounded up. And thousands more who may have been willing to pass on pictures of tortured bodies will keep them in the desk drawer instead.
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>>Three: a significant lost of allegiance to the US government by its citizens
We have the same problem in the UK. There is a whole strata of society who hold British passports, but hold allegience to other, often highly unstable, regimes. You could not trust them with sensitive information, or to support the nation in a time of crisis.
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Long time reader, you’re going to have to be a bit more explicit. So far, I haven’t read anything coming out of the diplomatic leak that was even news, the closest being that China may be getting as tired of North Korea antics as everyone else and concluding that NoK is no longer worth the trouble as a client state. If anyone’s found any scandal, they aren’t calling attention to it. And Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source, if the subject is in any way political.
Both the military and diplomatic leaks damage the US’s ability to conduct foreign policy, and are of classified material. The ClimateGate leak wasn’t of classified material, and did reveal a real scandal.
I think it behooves all of us to understand that privacy is the major part of freedom. When privacy is taken from us, that’s one thing, but when we give it away at every turn is another. When we give our privacy away, we give our freedoms away. I used to get on the internet and post comments in this or that blog. I don’t anymore. I don’t twitter or facebook. Nor do I visit or post on any of these entities. And the blogs I comment on have been much reduced.
Likewise, our government has been giving away our national privacy by lax use of electronic media.
Interpol is on the case. Julian should be nabbed shortly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/30/interpol-wanted-notice-julian-assange
Philip Thomas at 5:10, interesting point by “pettyfog says:
December 1, 2010 at 5:25 am
You can take some stuff in the Telegraph seriously. Seems to me this reporter just plays fast and loose:
…posted on Wikileaks after being accessed by a hacker.
It’s pretty well established that the email package wasn’t a hack, but a leak. As much by the lack of personal messages as the subject itself.
Hackers hack, they dont sort and collate.
Later he does call the incident a leak. All well, what difference to the yokels reading it?”
So, maybe another facet to the determination by some to relentlessly refer to the leak as a hack?
Assange is a master hacker who does sort and collate, right?
I wonder what the accepted truth will be for the true believers shall be next week? Month? Year?
Or as you aptly note, next election?
The Telegraph piece simply confirms the degree to which journalism has sunk into the gutters. It is no longer about factual reporting, just about filling column inches and to heck with fact or even accuracy. In fact, facts often get in the way of sensational headlines – so the heck with fact and accuracy!
kramer says:
December 1, 2010 at 5:53 am
How I’d love to see wikileaks post documents from international climate talks among governments and NGOs…
=========================================================
Yes, me too !
It is the fact that, so far, no climate related documents have emerged from the vast amount of material released that is making me suspicious.
That a subject so-vital-to-the-existence-of-mankind should not ‘get a mention’
at all is a bit disturbing.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says:
December 1, 2010 at 4:28 am
“What the media is reluctant to investigate is Assange and WikiLeak’s connections to Pirate Bay and the Russian Business Network with whom they share servers. The Pirate Bay was being funded by a very wealthy business heir who was also a financier of extremist racist groups.”
What on earth are you on about? There’s no link – just the fact that they all have to use servers in places where they won’t be shut down by Western governments, even if for very different reasons. Your slur on Piratebay is just bizarre – would you like to clarify? Or is it just total nonsense?
As we know AGW is the most important issue of our time. Therefore I am very interested to read what the state department has to say about it. The Wikileak documents must be full of information about the climate politics of important countries like China. Please, WUWT, show us. What I have seen up to now is this:
From the disingenuous NY Times:
Hypocrites.
The Telegraph seems to suffer some sort of bipolar malady. It employs Louise Gray, who writes some of the silliest, unscientific and unsabstantiated rubbish one can find in the meeja, but it also employs Mr Dellingpole, who is at the opposite end of the spectrum and whose writing is witty and insightful, however one regards the content.
And to me, exposing Climategate was entirely justified in the interests of truth and accountability for the Revenue while the Wikileaks cannot be justified as they genuinely put the lives of informants in peril and seems to be based on the same sort of morality as bonking to promote chastity.
While its true that Wikileaks weren’t first to break the Climategate files, the site did make the files available to others that aren’t readers of great sites as mentioned above.
Just like science, politics must be transparent for good of its citizens. Sites like Wikileaks are actually doing the job that the media is supposed to do. Unfortunately, most of the media is tied up in corporate interests and has failed in its role as the Fourth Estate. The mainstream media’s biased global warming coverage is a prime example of journalistic integrity taking a back seat to corporate interests.
It would be very hypocritical to admonish people like Assange for the leaked diplomatic cables while applauding the leaking of the Climategate files from the heroic whistle blower. Its best not to act like the NY Times with its corporate influenced example of hypocrisy.
Remember that a lot of these private discussions have led to treaties that undermine the constitutions of countries and in essence, erode the rights of citizens living in these countries.
What would the Founding Fathers do if they were alive in today’s society?
Well, the competence of the journalist aside, Assange actually takes credit for the release of e-mails. Why anyone gives this lunatic the time of day, I’ll never know. We don’t even know if the cables he’s released are accurate. Remember the film footage he released showing U.S. soldiers gunning down allegedly un-armed civilians? He edited the weapons the insurgents out. Assange is a person of horribly flawed character.
I picked this link up from CA…. this is Assange taking credit for releasing the e-mails.
Pamela Gray says: “…When privacy is taken from us, that’s one thing, but when we give it away at every turn is another. When we give our privacy away, we give our freedoms away…”
Or more accurately you give up a portion of your freedom whenever you allow anybody else or any other body to assume your responsibilities for something. By shifting your responsibilities to others you are giving them power over you, which erodes your own freedoms.
I believe that this is an inside operation that is aimed not only at improving Israel’s image in the world at a time when she really looks quite bad but also as a means of blackmailing the United States government into going to war against Iran,” Mark Glenn said in an interview with Press TV.
The best way to judge the “seriousness” of the Wikileaks matter is to assess the actual action taken by the US Government regarding the whole thing. OBJuanCan’tOB and the CIA and the State Department and the Defense Department and the FBI and the Attorney General and Everybody Else have done NOTHING. Soooooooo… it’s either DOESN’T MATTER, Orrrrrrrrr… it’s all part of a great TOP SECRET Operation to do something about something, or the present administration is the most incompetent and stupid in the history of the United States of America. In any case, it really doesn’t matter if you can’t do anything anyway. Right? Left? Hi Diddle Diddle Down The Middle? Surf’s Up!!!!
Tom Chivers is a lightweight, he used to work for the Grauniad(sic) and even they seemed to have sussed out that he’s an ill educated copy and paste merchant. He must have a silver tongue to have landed a job at the Telegraph or maybe his dad knows the editor?
The pride you so obviously take in your role in disseminating a few, cherry picked, quotes out of context from an enormous amount of hacked private email with the probable intent of disrupting the Copenhagen climate talks is really….touching.
*http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/387i.pdf
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/07/findings-muir-russell-review
http://www.research.psu.edu/news/2010/michael-mann-decision
“The Government agrees with, and welcomes, the overall assessment of the Science and Technology Committee that the information contained in the illegally-disclosed emails does not provide any evidence to discredit the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change. We note that similar findings were returned by both Lord Oxburgh’s and Sir Muir Russell’s reviews. In particular, we note the findings of the Muir Russell Review: that the rigour and honesty of the scientists are not in doubt; that there is no evidence of bias in data selection; that there is no evidence of subversion of peer review and that allegations of misusing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process cannot be upheld.”
In your defence you’ve probably ensured that a large amount of pretty incomprehensible data has now found its way into the public domain for ‘citizen scientists’ the world over to misinterpret at their leisure.
Like Geoffrey Lean, for example.
Sadly the telegraph is not the paper it was. Cannot think of a decent UK newspaper at all.
Tim Williams – troll, I assume?
As thousands of others have noted, there was nothing ‘cherry picked’ or ‘out of context’ about Climategate, nor were they in any way, shape, or form ‘private’ emails – they were work product of government employees.
Both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell panel were stocked with UEA cronies and folks with a track record of alarmist positions, and both were patently (and perhaps intentionally) incompetent.
The Mann whitewash gave him a pass not because his science is right but because he’s a rainmaker for the university he’s at.
You’re suggesting that we’re better off leaving the misinterpretation of the data to Mann, Jones, et al? Jones can’t find his data with two hands and a flashlight, and the only thing ‘incomprehensible’ about it are the undocumented adjustments and statistical fiddles applied to it by NOAA, NIWA, Mann, etc.
Go away, troll, and do your research.
barbarausa says:
December 1, 2010 at 3:55 am
such a proposition can easily be checked against the facts.
It looks like a journalist who simply hasn’t bothered to put any effort into looking at the facts.
Neither did the gross error get past the editor.
@max Hugoson
This leak came from the US Department of Defense not the US Department of State. This is still related to PFC Manning and his passing of information to Wikileaks. See this link from a few months back: http://www.examiner.com/pop-culture-in-hartford/evidence-ties-wikileak-documents-release-to-pfc-bradley-manning.
This is a result of information sharing across agency boundaries and the “disgrunteled employee” willing to put people at risk to show how cleaver he thinks he is and to punish his employer (the U.S. government). A selfish act rather than selfless, foolish only in that the USG gave that level of trust and responsibility in PFC Manning.
Trev says:
December 1, 2010 at 8:14 am
There is one. The FT
That is because you are only reading the superficial content of the leaked material. Intelligence agencies will be cross checking and collating that information against thousands of bits gathered by other means. It is that cross checking and assembling a picture from hundreds of bits of information where the damage will come.
Agent x told them 2 years ago that a certain fact was true. Now they have an independent confirmation of that event. If they match no big deal. If they do not match Agent x has something to worry about.
There are lots of things that are classified not because they are “secret” but because by classifying them you deny confirmation of the truth of rumors. By denying confirmation, you increase uncertainty and force the other side to expend more resources and time to verify information. You increase the noise level and lower the confidence in each bit of gathered data. Highly sensitive information can be compromised by trivial details.
For example a story running around in the 1990’s was that a top secret Soviet military operation was once compromised by an intelligence analyst noticing that a certain small town in the middle of no where in the Soviet Union was suddenly doing very well in local soccer games in the local news papers. That led him to find out why and the result was that those improved soccer scores were due to a sudden influx of very fit military people who were working on the project.
This is the sort of “that is odd” observation that will come out of detailed examination of the leaked material.
Everyone knows that internal advisers in country ABC do not think well of one of our diplomats but now that we have direct reports about what was said in confidential cables, those reported events can be compared to intelligence reports coming from other sources at the time. Like in mystery novels where the bad guy is tricked up because he says something that could only be known by a direct participant of an event, there are now outside independent confirmation of hundreds of thousands of minor details which over time will point to certain individuals as the only possible source for information. That is where the harm lies, not in the superficial details that diplomat A thinks diplomat B is a fool.
Larry