By charles the moderator
While the identity(ies) of the source(s) of the Climategate files has never been identified, long time readers of WUWT and Climate Audit are quite familiar with the Climategate timeline as it unfolded here, there, and throughout the blogosphere.
We have open sourced the history and it was written up by the players.
We have the original notice of the emails, which went live on 11/19/2009
We have The Mosher Timeline. We have The CTM story. Both of which began on 11/17/2009
Now, basking in the celebrity spotlight from the various leaks of diplomatic communications, Julian Assange and wikileaks has attempted to take credit for things that they had little to do with. In this Video, Mr. Assange takes full credit for the release of “over ten years’ worth of emails.
Wikileaks role in the release of the Climategate files is, to say the least, exaggerated.
Over on Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre recounts:
Assange falsely claimed that the Climategate emails were broken by WikiLeaks. This is obviously untrue as CA readers know. I can date WikiLeaks’ entry by contemporary comments. The first notice of the emails at WikiLeaks was 2009/11/21 at 2.50 AM Eastern (12:50 AM blog time). The emails had been downloaded by many people (including me) from a Russian server on Nov 19 and had been downloaded by WUWT moderators on Nov 17. A contemporary comment in a CA thread says that WikiLeaks was down and refers people to megauploads. WikiLeaks has not even been a major reference for Climategate – that belongs to eastangliaemails.com (originally anelegantchaos.org) which was up on Nov 20 and provided a searchable database.
After an extensive Google search, I can find the first mention of wikileaks involvement on the web about 19 minutes earlier than Steve McIntyre found.
Paul Z. says:November 20, 2009 at 11:39 pm
The emails are on wikileaks.org now:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails,_data,_models,_1996-2009
I think it is safe to assume that since we were all glued to our screens for those couple days that it is unlikely the files were available from wikileaks for over an hour before the comment above was placed.
Mr. Assange’s indiscretion is not going unnoticed though. He has been called on this story by some of the UK press.
Mr Assange has lied about aspects of his work. At a public meeting in London, he falsely claimed that the ‘Climategate’ emails from the University of East Anglia were first published by WikiLeaks. In fact, the emails were published by specialist climate websites in America and Canada – yet Mr Assange spent several minutes lamenting how he had found publishing them morally difficult because they boosted the arguments of global-warming sceptics.
I think Ross McKitrick’s comment on Climate Audit from the earlier link sums up Assange’s performance best:
What a pair of blowhards. They were obviously unnerved by the question. They evidently like leaks that embarrass their political opponents, but in this case they found themselves tagged with a leak that had damaged the side they like; and since it seems to be more about political warfare against governments they dislike than some impartial ideal of transparency and freedom of information, they were stuck scrambling to make up a story about how it really served some nobler purpose. Of course they should simply have said that they weren’t the source of the leak, that it was in full circulation long before anyone looked to them for a copy and they didn’t know much about the details of what followed. But that would have been too humble, especially in front of a room full of simpering hero-worshippers. So they pretended to be insiders and proceeded to deliver a few minutes of sheer drivel.
While I was in the UK last fall, there was brief interest by the UK tabloids in the Russian angle, and an article appeared in the Daily Mail speculating that Russian intelligence officials had hacked the UEA and stolen the emails. But nobody took that line seriously and the story died within 48 hours. If Assange has a shred of evidence to support his lunatic theory he should release it. What’s with these secret communications between him and UK intelligence: out with it, Mr Wikileaks! Bloody poser.
On this issue at least they are nothing but fakes and cretins. Saying that UEA released all the background emails and whatnot to provide the full context is beyond idiocy; and Assange’s discussion of the “trick” is just painful to watch.
Now trying to backtrack wikileaks involvement, we find that:
Way back at 4:09 Pacific Time on the 19th the first mention of wikileaks occurred here on WUWT:
Jagman619 says:November 19, 2009 at 4:08 pm (Edit)
Someone who has the file, please post it to http://wikileaks.org/
Which did not go unnoticed. It is around that time that I submitted the files to wikileaks. Was I the first? I have no way to know. It was a frantic day.
But if Mr. Assange wants to clear the air my IP address is 20880.64.xxx
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If ever there was any doubt that wikileaks was a tool of the establishment, this video clip certainly clears that up.
Wikileaks is without doubt a co-intel-pro “controlled dissent” front organisation.
Essential reading : http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22389
The fact that Assange spins the significance of the “trick” with the official line is all one needs to understand their MO.
The biggest mistake such fools make is assume that they can continue to lie and deceive with impunity. Sure that lady in the audience was too dim to see through his bullsh!t but the chances are that she was a stooge anyway. She certainly does not represent the the majority who no exactly what was meant by the “trick” and can see from this pantomime that Assange is lying his ass off.
Wikileaks was as late to the ‘Climatgate’ party, if not more so than most of the MSM.
All Wiki leaks hit the headlines the minute they are released. Which shows that they are officially sanctioned.
The MSM did not want to even acknowledge the CRU leak. That is because it was a real leak and the MSM had no script and were clueless as to how to handle it.
Wikilleaks are fake and anyone who supports them financially needs to seriously re-evaluate that decision.
Ale Gorney says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:59 pm
“McKitrick’s are the most revealing and embarrassing part of this story IMHO.”
Really? McKitrick has touched a raw nerve obviously. He has examined Assange’s conduct and asked this question – why did he allege to being reluctant to release ‘his’ climategate emails? Is Assange acting as a neutral purveyor of information or does he filter according to his political beliefs? To make this simple observation is no more partisan than to state that Stalin spouted communist ideology, or that Goebbels was a fascist.
I find it quite bizarre that anyone would claim to be the first to host foi2009.zip in an age where every file download has a timestamp. Just checked my downloads folder and discover that I downloaded f0i2009.zip on 19/11/2009 at 18:16 PST from the Russian ftp server while it was still possible. The first comments on the WUWT story on the climategate files are timestamped about 11:00 PST on 19/11/2009.
Last year I hadn’t even heard of wikileaks and the blogs I frequent that were analyzing the climategate emails were WUWT, climateaudit and SDA. Once the Russian server was no longer hosting the file, it was available via bittorrent and I had a copy for a few months on my bittorrent server.
I know little about Assange except that his recent actions might be an excuse for statists around the world to clamp down on the internet and that he’s not very bright if he claims to have had a major role in distributing the climategate emails; a statement easily shown to be false by the thousands of timestamps of files downloaded by people before wikileaks even knew about the climategate emails.
Assange’s current location, a mansion near the village of Beccles, is just a short drive from the University of East Anglia. Perhaps they will invite him over for afternoon tea to sort it out.
Assange did publish the emails. Much of the MSM tried to ignore and suppress the leak. You have to give Assange credit for that
Have I missed something here? Assange doesn’t say in the video he was the first to leak the emails. Ok he says he leaked the emails but perhaps so did a couple of sites about the same time, this just seems semantics to me.
I have zero sympathy for a father who abandons his newborn baby.
Oh Lordy, interweby mis-information, who’d a thunk that, eh?
“I am sorry the MSM is not reporting proper information on “climatechange”.”
“What is it?”
“Its big swirly thing no-one understands. But that’s not important right now as an un-elected gubmint needs to suck more on the taxpayer tit to feel its doing “something” to “combat climate change”.
Ian H says
December 21, 2010 at 12:36 am
“…So much for America – land of the free. What a joke! First amendment – freedom of the press. Don’t make we laugh. We see now just how little Americans truly care for these principles when they propose to extradite and murder an editor for simply publishing a story and telling the truth….”
I don’t understand you. Freedom of speech is the freedom to be able to speak your mind. However there are limits: you can’t yell “fire” in a movie theater for obvious reasons. In addition, what does the freedom to speak your mind have to do with someone else taking communications that were meant to be private and making them public? By your logic you should post your credit card numbers and bank account numbers here for all to see. Freedom of speech right? Or maybe you’d be okay with Assange publishing your credit card information? It’s the freedom that you have to give me the information, not my freedom to take that information from you.
I think your whining about the wording of Mr Assange’s unprepared and unscripted answer to a difficult question really quite pathetic and does you no favours. He did not claim to “break” the climategate emails, just do what his organisation does with all its material – release it! If Wikileaks released the emails on 29/11/2009, you can be certain that they had the emails long before that and were checking them for their authenticity. Someone sent Paul Hudson a copy of an email asking for verification in October!
Wikileaks deal with a whole lot more important information than the climategate emails. For example they released this, which puts your petty bickering into perspective, I think you’ll agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
Dear Charles the Moderator
Let him have his day because surely the East Anglia police will now be able to wrap up their investigation and press charges as they now know who to arrest and charge for releasing all that information that proves that wikileaks is on the right track in uncovering fraudulent misrepresentation of information by massively taxpayer funded nerds.
Cheers
Denis of Perth
I’m sort of wowed by the some of the comments. Lots of smearing in the pro and con wikileaks comments, but at end of day its just going to be an odd footnote in history. But Ale Gorney’s smear of Ross McKitrick was an obvious and pathetic ad hominem attack, and blatantly so for anyone who read McKitrick’s remarks.
But the truly SIGNIFICANT thing here is that bandwagon jumping is a proxy for the tide. Opportunists always clamber aboard after the fact and then claim it was their bandwagon in the first place. His “moral” comments aside, Assange has figured out that Climategate isn’t going away, the tide is turning, and will sweep the charlatans away. So he mumbles something about morals and supporting skeptics as a sop to his anti-establishment fans, but still wants to claim it was his bandwagon.
On the other side of the fence, Mr Al Gore has been quietly distancing himself from enthanol from corn as being not such a good idea after all… and you can just see that the first major opportunist to jump on the CAGW bandwagon and claim it was his is quietly edging over to the side and dragging one foot on the ground.
One thing about opportunists is that they sense the turning of the tide of public opinion and knowledge, and they are a proxy for where those are going.
Keep firing boys, the alarmists haven’t broken and run yet, but their lines are faltering and their generals keep on screaming CHARGE! but from the back of the ranks, not the front.
Thanks for this site Anthony. And keep the ammo… I mean articles… nah, ammo, coming.
“I have zero sympathy for a father who abandons his newborn baby.”
Do you have any sympathy for a father who had his child ripped away from him and fought in courts for nine years to see his son? Any sympathy for the six months he spent in therapy after he broke down? Any sympathy at all for a father that will never be a part of his childs life?
theduke says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:57 pm
This guy Assange will never receive the full measure of opprobrium that he deserves. He spoonfed the leftist media and now they are turning on him. Just desserts.
Just want to point out that the correct phrase in that context is “Just deserts.” Desert, meaning “deserving; the becoming worthy of recompense” from the root word deservir (to deserve) is pronounced like “dessert.” The desert that means “arid wasteland” is from the root word deserere (to abandon).
If the Swedish allegations are correct then Assange has serious moral shortcomings. Furthermore I think there is little doubt that he is anti-American. Those are good enough reasons for Americans to dislike him, but they certainly do not justify the hysterical reaction of those American politicians and media commentators who called for him to be assassinated.
In Russia, despite the end of Communism there, some journalists who have dared to investigate corruption in the regime have ended up dead. Is that the sort of comparison that would appeal to the American Right?
Some of the leaked documents show that the American government has a contemptuous attitude to many of its allies, including Britain. For example there is the case of the autistic man searching for information about UFOs who easily hacked into the Pentagon’s computers, thereby exposing the Pentagon’s woeful lack of security. The Prime Minister requested that because of fears over the man’s mental health, he be tried in Britain. Wikileaks exposed the arrogant and insulting nature of the US response.
Instead of calling for the assassination or execution of Assange, American politicians should be travelling around the world to issue grovelling apologies to their allies.
All this has little to do with Assange wrongly claiming credit for the release of the Climategate e-mails but that is a trivial matter compared to what Wikilieaks has revealed about the attitudes of American politicians and diplomats.
Thanks, ctm – this is exactly as I remember it, the comment on getting the files to wikileaks included.
Also, Steve McIntyre’s comment, which you quote above, is spot on in regard to the files being on anelegantchaos.org (later: eastangliaemails.com) on Nov 20th – because I was glued to the PC on those days, and sending links to the various files to my friends who couldn’t stop gasping with disbelief.
If Assange had moral hiccups about publishing these files, why didn’t he have moral hiccups about publishing stuff which endangered the lives of e.g. interpreters in Afghanistan?
Will, that’s also my impression: a “controlled dissent” front organisation, put up by the usual suspects, pushing homeopathic doses of thruth in a sea of irrelevant chatter, aka “Spielmaterial”, for us, the people, to chew on. Steve Short, in a comment over at Jeff Id’s explains it very concisely:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/wiki-liars/#comment-41183
“…So much for America – land of the free. What a joke! First amendment – freedom of the press. Don’t make we laugh. We see now just how little Americans truly care for these principles when they propose to extradite and murder an editor for simply publishing a story and telling the truth….”
Yes you do. I used small words and everything.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to be able to speak your mind. However there are limits: you can’t yell “fire” in a movie theater for obvious reasons.
Here we go; the old “fire in the crowded movie theatre” exception; the beloved excuse and prime example of all who want to limit freedom of speech. Let me point out that there are some circumstances in which you CAN yell fire in a crowded movie theatre. In particular you are quite justified in yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre if indeed the movie theatre is actually on fire! Since nothing Assange published is untrue, I fail to see how the “fire in the crowded movie theatre” exception applies.
As it happens I did send Mr Assange my credit card information when I used my credit card to make a donation. He has my name and credit card number and everything. Yet amazingly it seems he has chosen not to publish that information on the web! Fancy that! Do you think that might be because my credit card information doesn’t meet the requirements for publication on wikileaks?
Mr Assange didn’t take information from anyone. He was given it by a courageous and/or deluded young individual apparently working for the US army. Mr Assange is under no obligation to keep US secrets and since he found the information to be interesting and of public interest, chose to publish it. That is what the news media does and is entitled to do.
By your insane logic, our esteemed host should be tried for treason for discussing the contents of the climategate emails. After all those were `stolen’ – right?
Anthony – could we PLEASE have a preview button so that people like myself who make the odd formatting error can patch them up before exposing them to the world.
[ The lack of a preview / edit button is a “feature” of WordPress and beyond the control of Anthony. -MOD]
[about the only perk a moderator gets from those stingy evil overlords is the ability to edit our own comments. ~ ctm]
I’m continually perplexed by Americans desire to associate private behaviour with political message.
Assange’s sexual behaviour is of no concern to us. It’s between him and the courts. If he’s guilty he should do the time, but until then he is innocent.
Continually harping on about it, in an attempt to smear his political message, is effectively an ad hominen attack. Which posters on this site go mental over when it is one of their favourites.
Play straight! Attack his message by all means, but only that.
Reply: I did ~ ctm
This man Assagne is David Icke’s alter ego?
http://www.publiceye.org/Icke/IckeBackgrounder.htm
Kudos for a fine and informative article, Charles. While I find Mr Assange a revolting and self-serving publicity hound and all-around reprehensible character, there is plenty of opprobrium to go around for everyone concerned.
The U.S. is no different than any other country regarding its behind the scenes machinations, when they think that their diplomatic communications are confidential. This episode is like the climategate emails; for example, when it is admitted privately that it is a travesty that no evidence of AGW has been found — while publicly stating that AGW is much worse than we thought.
Julian Assange has stepped on too many toes, and like Al Capone [who couldn’t be nailed for his real crimes, so was convicted of tax evasion], Mr Assange is going to pay the price for being the snitch, as an example to others. And of course, for revenge.
Even though I find Julian Assange to be a thoroughly reprehensible character, I come down on the side of freedom of the press, including total freedom of the internet. The public should be made aware of information whenever possible. The onus should be on those in possession of information to protect it, not on those into whose lap it occasionally falls.
It baffles me why encryption is not required in government [and business] communications. Allowing hundreds of thousands of social security numbers and other personal information to fall into the wrong hands via a stolen laptop, simply because a password wasn’t mandatory, is inexplicable. It’s like leaving loaded guns around to be found by monkeys.
And the fact that a private first class [a one striper] in a highly sensitive position with little supervision was easily able to download reams of video and other information and send it to Wikileaks should be a loud wakeup call to the military and the government. Like making sausage, the public does not need to know the process; only the end result, which is what affects their lives. It is the process that must be cleaned up.
Yeah I don’t buy what is said in the video at all, not that Assange say’s he scooped anything as I don’t believe he does, he does give the impression that Wikileaks was a main source of the climategate leaks when it was really was not. The files were out there and they had no choice but to go along. That’s what my dodgy memory of events recalls anyway.
Assange at the end of the video mentions bullets of truth in the historical record allowing us to progress, I hope he means it and hope he realizes that the truth is an absolute and as foreign to the left as the right.
This guy reminds me of Al Gore–taking credit where none is due. What a pair of despicable jackwagons.
This guy is very much like Carlos the Jakal.
A complete poseur.