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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Those in the hacker community who have known about Assange for a long time know that he is a dishonest, democracy hating, plagiarist and rape fantasist. Case in point:
There used to be a site called Ogrish which hosted leaked war and terrorist videos. They dubbed this site ‘For those who can handle real life’. Assange and the hacker and 4chan types loved this type of online material. It’s their bit of fetish. Ogrish was hosted by ads for various ‘reality porn’ sites including simulated rape, bestiality, sex in public, and S+M. Assange was particularly impressed by the rape videos and then began practising simulated rape on his girlfriends.
Time passed and Ogrish became LiveLeak.com in order to jump on the user generated content gravy train. That meant removing offensive advertising and going mainstream. When this happened, Assange got the idea of blending LiveLeak’s concept with Wikipedia. WikiLeaks was born from that.
With that background we should not be surprised to learn about Assange’s rape case or his plagiarised credits. Even many of the so called leaked files he puts on his WikiLeaks contain nothing we don’t already now. Why? Because many of those leaked communiques are faked or edited to contain stuff we already know from months of news articles. Arabs don’t like Persians? Berlusconi a party animal? There’s nothing new in any of it.
As for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre be it noted that for an actor, and if the script requires it, it is part of their job. Members of the audience, however, have a moral duty to shout ‘fire’, and therefore have a moral right to do so. That is, assuming there to actually be a fire about which to raise an alarm.
“yet Mr Assange spent several minutes lamenting how he had found publishing them morally difficult because they boosted the arguments of global-warming sceptics.”
Interesting…aside from lying about it, he claims to wrestle with the morality of causing injury to the arguments of liars, but he has not compunction against releasing files that could (and did?) result in the deaths of hundreds of humans.
I would call him a lowlife snake, but I like snakes better than that.
A leak (in this particular sense of the word) is a one off. What has been leaked may be repeated, circulated, magnified, minimised, etc., but once information has been leaked, it cannot be leaked again.
Ian H. wrote “He isn’t a hypocrite.” Of course he is a hypocrite because he takes on the easy targets, the western democracies, not the likes of Iran, Russia, China, any middle eastern state, that truly abuses civil rights and have zero transparency. He knows no one gives a s*** about those countries because condemming them doesn’t work with their world view. Potentially putting our soldiers, agents, and diplomats in harms way by compromising state secrets does not make him a hero in anyway, it indeed makes him an enemy of the US. And don’t give me a song and dance about how American doesn’t have a free press anymore or is an opaque society, that BS and you know it. The stuff that is printed everyday about our leaders, left and right, would be a gulag sentence in many parts of the world or would have you sued to your last penny in some UK slander court, or dragged into the Human Rights Commission Courtroom for thoughtcrime in Canada.
If he has information about the banks or other financial crimes that occured in the US, i think it’s great that he publishes those, they are in fact CRIMES and should be dealt with accordingly and he should be rightly praised for exposing them. Compromising US security however should and will get him in hot water.
Ultimately I think he has no motivation beyond proving he can embarass the US and gaining as much fame as possible. He has done a good job in that regard.
I do not support anyone who is working to damage my country, its fairly elected government, or any of its citizens, most especially the ones putting themselves in harms way to protect the rest of it. Neither should any American.
I basically agree with what Smokey (December 21, 2010 at 4:30 am) says about Wikileaks. That reams of diplomatic cables and military communications were left hanging on some open tree waiting to be picked by any passer-by is incompetence at mind-blowing levels. No encryption? No private networks? Clearly some government IT hides need to be nailed to the wall.
However, the new Congress is going to update the Espionage Act to include the electronic publication of state secrets, and if they can build a fire under the useless Eric Holder (the Attorney General under Obambi), this slimeball Assange will end up spending many years in jail, if not facing a capital charge. Freedom of the press does not include espionage, which in wartime is a capital offense.
Frankly, I am not sure why anyone cares when Assange got hold of the Climategate materials, though it is presumptuous of him to imply that Wikileaks was solely responsible for releasing them to the media.
/Mr Lynn
As many here have posted, personal dislike of Julian Assange is different to criticism of his actions with regard to claiming credit for things which Wikileaks did not lead. I am not sure I am all that keen on the “no more secrets” philosophy – sometimes people need to be able to speak their mind without fear of it being spread far and wide; this being especially true of diplomats. This is a personal opinion that I am sure is not the same as everyyone else’s, but why then does one person’s opinion (Mr Assange) take precedence?
Where Mr Assange has overdone things, however, is to make threats to certain specific organizations (banks in particular – he claims to have information that will discredit at least one major banking group) and he is now finding that these groups have a bit more power than governments to affect his organization. Why is it only now that the payment agencies have begun to drop WikiLeaks when – if this was due to US government pressure – it wasn’t done earlier this year when the first tranche of Pvt Mannings’ document were released?
I don’t like conspiracy theories, but badly formed ones are even worse.
Roy wrote: “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? ”
Assange is not a journalist trying to expose corruptions. He is a foreign agent attempting to expose state secrets. There is a huge difference. One is commendable and is done every day by US journalists. The other is called “being a spy” and is a crime and is punishable by deportation or imprisonment. If the information is critical, and the only way to stop it from getting out is by offing the spy, that is perfectly acceptable when going through the proper channels.
He also wroge: “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.”
Hilary Clinton has been doing this for several weeks now.
First time in over a year of daily visits I am truly disgusted by the commentary on this site.
Assange alleged rape case is very highly political – the 1st woman invited him to her home and only afaik complains about no condom being used. Well, that is a bit hard to prove what actually happened isn’t it? Consensus on no condom, broken condom, what? She did however host a party for Assange later, which is not what most rape victims would do.
The 2nd woman has admitted to giving “oral services” to Assange in a movie theatre before they went on to spend the night together.
The accusations happened after the girls found out about each other and realized he was not a husband-type of guy.
Now, there are known rapists and child molesters at large in the EU. Where are their interpol arrest warrants? If there is no need for any evidence, anybody, that includes YOU, could be extradited anywhere anytime. Evidence? No need pal…
“WT says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Does it really matter who released the letters first? Do we really want to find out who was the first one releasing the truth and bash the others? The more people say the truth the better, isn’t it?”
I think you missed the point. The point is he lied. This is where character matters.
“Bulldust says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Agreed that this chap is a bit of a plonker, but I do wonder why the US is going out of its way to try and extradite him… I imagine the biggest worry is what he may have on a major US bank and threatened to release early next year.”
Actually, I believe it’s Sweden that is trying to extradite him.
“Ian H says:
The level of vilification and character assassination in these comments is disgusting. Apparently (shock horror) Assange likes sex. Is anyone surprised? I mean – he is a man. A man who likes sex – now there is a surpise! What is the big deal?”
The “big deal” is that it’s not quite that simple. He’s wanted for forcing women to have unprotected sex with him…an act which is against the law in Sweden where it aledgedly took place.
“…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 know when/where America proposed to extradite or murder this man. But don’t you find it somewhat hypocritical and ironic that the man who believes there should be NO secrets…is attempting to protect himself by keeping…secrets?
JimB
Boris Gimbarzevsky says:
December 21, 2010 at 1:38 am
FWIW:
tux:FOIA> TZ=UTC; ls -l FOI2009.zip
-rw-r–r– 1 werme users 64936854 2009-11-18 01:06 FOI2009.zip
tux:FOIA> TZ=PST8PDT; ls -l FOI2009.zip
-rw-r–r– 1 werme users 64936854 2009-11-17 17:06 FOI2009.zip
Those must reflect the timestamp on the Russian server (I think that’s
where I got it), as I first heard about the file on WUWT.
Assange is arcing high and fast. My hope is he will do like any other skyrocket ASAP.
Like Obama, when he first declared war on the US back in 2006 we would have been wise to take him seriously.
Now, like Obama, he has attracted a cult following of mindless tools who choose not to see him as he is.
His 2006 essay is disturbing- that he wrote it, and that we did not pay attention to it.
OMG they took credit for releasing the climategate mails, boo ho, oh, wait, wasn’t that exactly what they did?
Note that they don’t say that they were the first or primary release, only that they released it. One can question their omission of the fact that others released the climategate package first, but they’re not really required to, neither were the question asked by the reporter framed like they would have had to.
So essentially don’t throw stones in a green house.
“Smokey:
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.”
I actually deal with encryption solutions as part of my job. I can tell you that by and large, encryption adoption and implementation is not dissimilar from the PC backup scenario, that being that only people that have lost everything on their PC actually do backups. For the most part, only businesses that have found themselves on the front page regarding a data leak tend to adopt encryption.
In my mind, it’s like driving without auto insurance. You may save a little this year, and maybe next…but sooner or later, you’re going to find yourself with a very large problem that dwarfs the costs of protection.
JimB
It’s pretty clear that Assange doesn’t specialize in science and doesn’t know the details of this subject … his own ideas are pretty much the standard leftist line. But what he said at the end is perfectly in line with the proper role of science. Motives and credit shouldn’t matter in the long run. If he’s working for MI5 or FSB or CIA, that shouldn’t matter.
The only thing that matters in science is having all the facts available to all the people who can use them. Fighting with bullets of truth, as he said.
And Assange has helped awaken the public to the value of having all the facts, even if he was a latecomer to this particular set of facts.
Assange is an attention-craving idealist. Exactly the wrong kind of person you want with any kind of political power. In fact, at the risk of hyperbole, his behavior is very similar to Kim Jong-Il’s.
@monroe
‘WikiLeaks latest is a cloak for many things not the least of which could be rape.’
Apparently not only Mr Assange is wearing a tin foil hat.
As to the rape, it is only per the broad Swedish legal definition of rape that it might be interpreted as rape. It pretty much boils down to if he should have disclosed of not wearing a condom when she had asked him to use one. What’s probably uping the enforcement of rape charge at this state, instead of a lesser charge, if a charge at all, seem more be with the fact that he refused to be checked for venereal deceases, especially HIV and AIDS, which probably would freak out anyone that just had a one night stand, but for a fawning fanatical wikileakser and a religious person it’s probably a bit worse what with the trust issue to a person who can be defined as an authority figure no less.
The very same arguments used by the MSM against the publication of the climategate emails (they were private, they were stolen, etc) are being used on this site to inveigh against this guy.
On the other hand, the main newspapers in the US and Europe (the NYT, The Guardian, El País etc) have sequestered the information and are freely releasing it according to their own selective criteria, with much fanfarre, gaining readership by the mere confirmation of what are known to be the standard views of the US administration: Iran is this, Venezuela is that, and so on. In the meantime, the site that contained all the information is brought down and there is a coordinated effort to dismantle the organization and criminalize this guy, with calls for his assassination by all kinds of public figures. I wonder why nobody is asking for the assassination of the editors of these MSM newspapers. In the case of the New York Times, the editors are presumably American, so if the release of this information is grounds for “treason” charges, then I suppose American nationals who engage in this activity would be much more transparently guilty of treason against their country than foreigners who never sworn any allegiance to this country.
This is such a bunch of hogwash and a monumental exercise in hypocrisy. And Mosher’s ruffled feathers at the fact that someone else may even remotely hint at being among the first to release this info is a pathetic display of hypertrophied self-importance. The “first” was the person or persons who made the information available on the Russian site and alerted climate blogs of its existence. I suppose that person would have much more reason to be amused by Mosher’s hurt feelings, than Mosher has to be dismissive of whatever the wiekileaks guy has said about those emails.
Wiekileaks did post the climategate files, and they did so in spite of the fact they didn’t like what was in them at all. That is precisely what a belief in freedom of expression means. If you believe in freedom of expression *only* for views that you find to your liking, then I can assure you that the world’s most notorious tyrants have always been big believers in it. Many of you found the climategate emails good public information and defended them on those grounds, and justly hissed at the hypocrisy of those who invoked the stolen privacy card, but now you acting exactly in the same manner as they did.
Revealing secrets is a fine line between secrets that reveal potential wrong-doing as in Climate-gate, and secrets that reveal covert security maneuvers, as in intelligence gathering carried on in foreign countries or against hamper heads here (Lord I apologize for saying “hamper heads” and for the starving children in Africa). Only those with high moral fiber and an internal finely tuned sense of right vs wrong consequences should ever touch such an endeavor. Assange is a loose canon with no such internal compass. He placed men and women serving our country in jeopardy. He should be banned from ever crossing our borders in the US, and if he ever tries, he should rot in jail.
So for whistle blowers (and in the case of Climategate, he rode coattails for sure), be prepared to take responsibility for the consequences, be it praise for revealing wrong-doers and stupidity, or jail for harming those engaged in our national security interests.
Smokey, great, great comment.
We care about freedom of speech so much we’re leading the charge at destigmatizing people for criticizing Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. You seem to confuse freedom of speech with government secrets. Now if you ask the average American, I’m sure 50-80% of them would tell you that the media in the country and indeed the world has completely failed us, they no longer ask the right questions, they no longer say the right things when questions are not answered. That is where the majority of freedom of speech has been surrendered. It’s amazing to me that many citizens of other developed nations by contrast seem to swallow what the press says without a single critical thought. Governments, even freely elected open governments *must* keep secrets. They must keep secrets because they are open and they must expect that infiltrators are everywhere. If America worked like North Korea, the government could tell everyone everything because there wouldn’t be much fear of a leak. Why does an open government need to keep a secret? Because we do not live in an ideal world. Not every government in this world works the same way, with the proper representation of it’s people. If the U.S., in trying to deal with Iran, was also exposing all of it’s options on the table for dealing with Iran by being fully open, exactly how does that help world stability? It gives every advantage to dictators when open societies lay their cards on the table. Doing so is just plain stupid.
THIS IS NOT TO SAY that the amount of secrets held by Government is perfectly appropriate, or that no mistakes in the process are made (for political reasons or otherwise). I’ve worked with government workers long enough to know that they are lazy and often under-qualified. However if you truly and fully subscribe to Mr Assange’s idealism of governments where every secret is revealed you are being quite naive. Firstly, this episode about Wikileaks and Climategate demonstrates that he’s just in it for the fame, and doesn’t care about the truth. That should raise red-flags in your mind. Now, when you combine selective release of information with any form of idealism, you essentially have a weapon that in this case is directed against freely elected governments. It’s fair to say that in your support of Assange, you supported the downfall of a freely elected government in the United States. Second, Mr Assange’s website has a history of targeting only one side of the political spectrum. If you can’t see this then I’m sorry you’ve allowed your desire for Assange’s idealism to see sunlight to blind you to what he’s actually doing. Wikileaks tends to reveal information that can directly lead to U.S. soldier deaths, and no one else. Those are volunteers put in a situation they can’t control and this ***hat attention-craving idealist has decided to put their lives on the line.
I’m all for you if your goal is to embarrass politicians who are too proud and too dishonest, but if your target is a well-meaning volunteer soldier with a kid and a working wife at home, you’re nothing but a jerk.
I honestly can’t believe you support that kind of crap.
The truth of a fire being in the theatre is *NOT* what makes it acceptable to yell fire in a theatre. What makes it acceptable is that in yelling “FIRE” you are potentially SAVING LIVES in the case when there is a fire, and potentially HARMING LIVES if there is no fire. Can you see the difference? You are conflating the existence of truth with the necessity of openness, to your discredit.
In a way it is a good sign of success for those who actually exposed the fraud of global warming. Good work.
Mr Assange is beneath contempt and not worth worrying about, really. He’s not producing the intelligence, just inciting treason on the part of a few of the radical leftists who obtained there positions courtesy of Obama. That doesn’t really take a whole lot of skill on the part of Assange. Patriots will go behind Obama’s back and stop the leaks even if he won’t. Mr. Assange is completely irrelevant.
I’m more worried about the completely bankrupt ideology of people like the poster WT above. He/she seems perfectly ready to agree that it’s best for the “truth” of our soldier’s social security numbers to be know by all, the “truth” of what our planned troop movements are (to facilitate IED placement), the “truth” of what our assessments of dictator so and so are, etc.
People like WT need to go ahead and move to Somalia and make themselves right at home. That is the kind of world they advocate. But, instead of doing that, they wait and agitate in the the hope of taking the rest of us with them.
OK, he said “we released” the emails.
Well everyone knows WikiLeaks is just publishing or hosting information. It makes availale what someone else releases. It has always been that way, he’s not claiming anything new.
The files were released by person or persons unknown to a temporary site in the Ukraine(?) with a note that they would not stay there long. Please copy and distribute. “Limited time offer” IIRC.
I was on top of this as it was happening and don’t recall WUWT or CA hosting the files themselves though they were key in getting the news around.
In that case WL did play a key role in ensuring the diffusion of this critically important information.
Assange does not claim in that video to have had a world wide scoop or to be the exclusive source. Anyone taking that as a reason to start attacking him is more likely being ingenuous and using that as a surrogate because they are pissed off about him releasing some other information. Maybe they did not like seeing crazyhorse 18 murdering people in Iraq with a 30mm canon. Maybe they don’t like the cables release.
Either way this is much a fuss about nothing. WikiLeaks was important in getting CRU emails worldwide. There’s no point in bitching about “released” vs hosted etc.
Assange has stuck his neck on the line to get this stuff out in the light of day. He has balls. No one with any self respect would be sniping at him from the safety of their keyboard.
Who said he wasn’t a hypocrite?
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/WikiLeaksAssange/2010/12/21/id/380543
Mr. Irony, meet Mr. Bitter.