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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Why the moral compunction against releasing the climategate e-mails?
Surely he knew by then that the “truth” always hurts after all, that’s why Wiki released what they did in other arenas?
If Wikileaks can’t aspire to be even-handed in its display of the grubby laundry of the worlds governments and institutions, its claim to be a force for the good starts to look very grubby itself.
Like the snow in London, Wiki’s whiter than white crusade quickly becomes dingy and soiled.
“Assange spent several minutes lamenting how he had found publishing them morally difficult because they boosted the arguments of global-warming sceptics.”
…. because (IMO) it would hurt the global leftist cause.
I rest my case:
Sexton says “Who is a messenger of what truth? Is there truth in the video at the top? Is a half-truth any form of truth? Mr. Assange is a villain because he is a despicable little person that has little regard for lives or livelihoods. Mr. Assange has shown his character well before any allegations or leaks of secret documents.”
Enneagram says:
December 21, 2010 at 7:22 am
Climate Gates emails were a serious matter while Weak-ee leaks are gossips, no comparison between the two,
There is no comparison between the two, except in the minds of those who cannot distiguish between laws which make it a felony to give away our national defense documents to hostile foreign nations in a time of war, and climate scientists fixing the peer review process so that other points of view cannot be heard.
Or perhaps it should be a felony to question the AGW science as well, is that what Foley Hund, J and Edim are saying?
Assange is a conspiracy theorist, like most radicals. His belief that the CIA entrapped him in Sweden is paranoia from his employees. Check out the bizarre truth by Michael C. Moynihan at http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/14/the-assange-employees .
The cable leaks do NOT promote the beliefs of the radical left. In fact they confirm mainstream views in the middle east (Arabs fear Iran as much as US and Israel, etc). Assanges’ views are so at odds with reality I suspect it’s the result of mental illness.
Wow this is amazing. The man obtains classified documents that shows no wrong doings, but rather frank descriptions of different people and places. The pinhead releases them for no other purposes than to hamper the U.S.’s ability to conduct foreign policy, all the while endangering the lives of some of the sources in the documents.
Nice, now we see where he attempts to take credit for the release of the climate-gate e-mails? All this after he released altered combat videos with malicious intent. And some here want to canonize this unscrupulous megalomaniac?
Oh, yeh, I forgot, many that pop by here are the ‘ends justifying the means’ type of people with little or no regard of how they wish to accomplish their goals. I find they are of the same ilk as the smallish people trying to convince the world that recent cooling is because of warming, now lies are truth and war is peace. Two sides of the same coin.
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.>>>
This is WAY to complicated an issues to explain in one comment in a blog forum but let’s at least touch on a few important points. The first is that anyone with a strong security in IT background can tell you that making data 100% secure is possible, but you’d never be able to use it. So you have to strike a balance.
Second, this is far more complicated to achieve than just “encrypt everything”. There’s dozens of operating systems, communications systems, network protocols and there’s no encryption method that spans all of them. Further, the applications can’t process encrypted data.
But the really big problem is human knowledge. How many people who use a computer really understand how it works? How many people know that time stamps are meaningless in the hands of someone who can change it with a few key strokes and leave it in the file system with a “last modified” date that matches?
Security measures are constantly being put in place by people who know what they are doing. Then they are run by people who are just following the process. Then someone who thinks they understand makes a change and doesn’t understand the impact of the change. Look at the major mess ups in terms of data security and you almost always find a story like that underlying it. The security as designed worked. Consider a couple of examples.
There was a large company, let’s call them Analysis who would process seismic data and provide recommendations to oil companies. In those days the data was sent back and forth on computer tapes. The security process required that tapes from oil company A be used only for A, tapes for B only for B, and so on. One day Analysis is getting ready to send a tape complete with analysis back to A and it breaks. They have no other tapes from A, and the results are urgent. Someone says, hey, we got lots of tapes here from B, we over write the data when we write the tape, so we’ll use one of theirs and no harm done. Pretty soon it is standard practice and no one is even bothering to segregate the tapes.
Only a matter of time before someone at A figured out that when his data was downloaded off the tape there seemed to be yet more data because B’s data file was actually longer than A’s, and so the last part wasn’t over written. So now A has some of B’s data, and promptly starts sending very short data streams for analysis as often as possible and soon has a database of almost everyone else’s data. Went on for a couple of years!
I had a military customer who shall remain nameless who put in a document management system that was air tight. No one could make a spelling mistake because once you typed anything in, you weren’t aloud to change it. You couldn’t add anything to an existing document, if you wanted to add a footnote you would have to type the whole thing in again because once a document was closed once it was immutable to prevent forgery. Then there was an interesting quirck that sometimes you could create a document, and based on keywords and other issues, the system would classify it accordingly and encrypt it. The commanding officer had it all torn out when he discovered that if he sent something sensitive to his boss at central command, it was classified at a level meaning that he couldn’t read is own document.
It isn’t simple, and even the ultra security conscious Israelis had a similar incident recently.
..I rest my case again, thank you James Sexton.
Foley Hund says:
December 21, 2010 at 9:36 am
I rest my case:
======================================================
Really? So when Mr. Assange released an altered video that gave an appearance of U.S. soldiers firing on un-armed civilians, only for it to be later shown that the weapons were edited out, does that not show you the content of his character? When he was asked not to release the documents because of potential risk to lives, and he released them anyway, does that not show you the content of his character? In the video above, knowing how the release of the e-mails came about and how he entirely failed to mention any of it, does that not show you the content of his character?
What ever point you’re trying to make, I’m not sure, but I’ll more than happily stand my statements.
Assange created his own trouble by letting his emotions cloud his judgment. He should have been more selective in the material he published. His antipathy toward the US is obvious and it caused him to misjudge the public’s ability to discern the difference between rapacious policy and frank talk from a diplomatic report. Rather than reveal wrongdoing in the league of the Pentagon Papers, his information mainly reads like schoolgirl gossip intended to embarrass the US. A few apologies among the actors, tightened security on communications and life goes on in the diplomatic world.
Assange, meanwhile, finds himself the target of outrage by a majority of the public that sees him as a petty tattler while the US has gained a great deal of sympathy it wouldn’t have otherwise had. No one likes an informer and Assange is learning that lesson the hard way.
The Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme.
“The first notice of the emails at WikiLeaks was 2009/11/21 at 2.50 AM Eastern (12:50 AM blog time). ”
My copy was downloaded 20/11/2009 07.18GMT
You have missed the boat on this one.
He did not claim anything other than releasing the file on his website.
We should be happy that Climategate was mentioned
Is there a moral or legal equivalence between leaking emails by scientists who are fixing the peer review process to keep other hypothesis from being published,
and publishing classified secure communications in national defense documents?
I don’t know, perhaps some are making that case and some are believing it. Should questioning AGW science and policies become a felony, as giving our troop and allies’ information to enemy nations? Is that what is being argued? Maybe John Kerry is right, and global warming is a strategic defense issue?
Kerry panel looks at climate change and national security
You see, now we are getting somewhere about the equivalence arguement.
Ian H says: …Yes I’m angry. People fought and died in the 20th century for freedom and to stop things like lynch mobs.
That’s an interesting bit of historical revisionism. And here I was thinking that the massive hemoclysms of the 20th Century were all about freedom vs. commie-fascist authoritarianism, with the bulk of the slaughter perpetrated by tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, etc. A few timely lynch mobs might have saved 100 million or so lives.
To those arguing that Assange did in some way “release” the CRU emails: How, exactly, did he “release” something that has already been released? The term “release” as used by Assange denotes (and only denotes) freeing from captivity, restraint, or control. Did Assange have exclusive control over the information prior to his supposed “release”? No. Did he release new information not included in the original release? No. His claim the “we [Wikileaks] released” the e-mails is false. His insinuation that he had a role in the release is false. Like Mr. McKitrick noted, he’s a “bloody poser”.
However, Assange had a role in disseminating the e-mails, code, and data. It may be a fair argument that in his unprepared remarks he simply used the less precise of two similar words. But that just makes the “poser” label stick even harder.
Assange is “supposedly” this highly talented hacker-type of a fellow specializing in releasing and disseminating secret information with years of experience. I would assume that a man engaged in such a practice for so long would know the difference between “release” and “disseminate”. But despite his experience, (or perhaps because of?), we are to believe that his use of the term is as precise as its used in massage parlors.
Ian H says: December 21, 2010 at 12:36 am
So much for America – . . .
Yes I’m angry. People fought and died in the 20th century for freedom and to stop things like lynch mobs. . . .
You are not angry, sir. You are confused, having taken to heart the view of America promoted by the Katie Couric school of journalism.
As one who fought in the 20th Century and as a friend to a dozen of those who died then, I assure you we knew what we were fighting for, and it was not the freedom to endanger the lives of others with self promotion.
True freedom entails taking responsibility for one’s actions, but that doesn’t mean merely reading the words, “. . . and I take full responsibility for that,” off a teleprompter. Taking responsibility for your actions means taking the consequences of your actions, personally.
MLK Jr violated segregation laws back in the 60’s, but he didn’t try to weasel out of the consequences. He went to jail.
People will doubtless die because of Assange’s actions. We’ll see how he feels about consequences.
@Enneagram
‘As Lord Monckton would say :”Climate Gate” was a different kind of “leak”: A bedwetters’ leak. :-)’
Haha, but I think the good lord would have a more creative description of the leaking event. :p
So I’m thinking more like this:
The aperture size of the CRU outlet made for a large detriment to let the information flow through the fissure and through that expenditure be exposed by its oozing divulge to tell a tale that transpired to percolate from the bottomless pit that is climate, just to let slip and make it public like Mr Assange’s espouse to drip and drool of a fickle trickle of an early discharge to spill the beans of historical ignoble, and to some odious, means.
Ian H says:
December 21, 2010 at 3:14 am
So if someone got ahold of all of your personal information; all of your emails and bank accounts and credit cards and private letters, emails, etc. and gave them to me, you’d be perfectly fine with me publishing them on my web site under the guise of the “freedom of the press”? It’s my right, full transparency, full disclosure? If that happened you couldn’t get to a lawyer fast enough. If you don’t think I’m right then I’ll send you my email and you can start sending me all your information. We’ll see how you like full disclosure.
[keep your antisemitic propaganda to yourself, and yes go ahead and accuse me of continuing the media domination of the world by jews. ~ ctm]
David L says:
December 21, 2010 at 11:40 am
Ian H says:
December 21, 2010 at 3:14 am
“So if someone got ahold of all of your personal information; all of your emails and bank accounts and credit cards and private letters, emails, etc. and gave them to me, you’d be perfectly fine with me publishing them on my web site under the guise of the “freedom of the press”?
I imagine that Ian H would argue that Assange, in His wisdom, would only publish information that would harm the wicked, and never, ever compromise the innocent.
Bah!
Julian is well out of order with this, if Wikileaks was about transparency, they’d blanket bomb the net with everything they have.
They have an obvious political bias, voiding their mandate, and their leader has fallen victim to his own fairy tale image.
I can’t help but think this WikiBleats is nothing but a shill for vested interests, posing as a free speech advocate while helping to prop up a fascist ideaology.
Again and again I will have to agree with Smokey.
Look a Watergate and Climategate.
On one side you have a Deep Throat, a leak. The Deep Throat risks a lot, and might break the law. The police and justice folks can go after them, and if they catch them they can be punished. Thats a part of the Democracy.
Then on the other hand you have the publisher. It can be The Washington Post or Wikileaks, Air Vent, WUWT, or whatever. Thats an whole other story. You cannot stop the publisher, its what is called free press. They can even protect their source.
Maybe the most important part of a democracy.
Its no use getting angry at the publisher the moment that newspaper hurts “your side”. Like, if you supported Nixon, and he had to go. And then in the next case support some other publisher. Like, Climategate.
You will have to distinguish between the acts of the Deep throat, and the publisher.
Otherwise you are entering a dictatorship.
If some published material can hurt “innocent” people is very sad, but why the heck is all those agenies here and there sending such material through the hands of some private soldier? Very amateurish, dont you think? If it is that important? WUWT?
I think this article, by Michel Chossudovsky, about the manufacturing of dissent (yes, dissent, not consent) is worth a read, in the present context:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21110
And a point I should have made in my previous comment is that my great fear is that the whole Wikileaks thing, phenomenon (anonymous, etc.), will bolster the case for clamping down, globally, on the freedoms the internet currently offers the global populace, the peasants, if you will. We could lose everything because of something they may have helped create in the first place. Now, why does that sound familiar?
Tim Ball: Jones’ action by calling in the Norfolk police was important because it stopped further disclosures until they finished their investigations
Assange is currently located at a secluded house near Bungay, coincidentally about ten miles from Norwich, home of the UEA and CRU. Maybe he and Prof. Jones can get together and sort out the issue, in the spirit of this festive season of goodwill.
If Wikileaks was responsible for the CRU emails theft leak, I am sure that Assange will apologise to Jones and that can be the end of the matter, and obviously Jones will drop all criminal charges against Assange that the Norfolk police would want to bring. If Wikileaks was not responsible they can have a good laugh at all of the fuss this is causing.
Climategate is small beer compared with what Wikileaks has apparently dug up. Climate skeptics, though dead right on one issue, are making a mountain out of a molehill here. More important is Wikileaks’ exposure of the war on terror as a war OF terror, against innocent civilians in Muslim countries, which a. is criminal in itself, and b. makes them even more angry. Despite the attempts of a few of Sarah Palin’s jackboot boys (above) to use this minor event to discredit Assange, he’s a hero all over the world, except to the American knuckledraggers who have sent death threats to him and his son, and their allies, a pair of jilted Scandinavian feminists.