This is almost as clueless as the raid on Tallbloke by the police looking for scraps. But it does underscore one thing – investigators are clueless and so is the major press.
For the record, I don’t know who “FOIA” is either and given the stunning lack of success (and poor judgement demonstrated recently) in investigation two years on, I doubt they’ll ever discover who it was. – Anthony
Guest post by Jeff Id
Their Side – Bloggers “knew” FOIA emails were coming
I just had a phone conversation with Leslie Kaufman of the NYT on the ‘hacker’. She was careful to call the FOIA people by that PC name. Rule 1 – Don’t offend the witness unless you want them upset. I didn’t really want to do the interview because these things don’t usually go well for me and it took me several days to make time. Unfortunately my Achilles heel is that I tend to say what I think. — I know you are all surprised.
She asked several questions about the hacker and said that her job was to investigate that aspect and not the climategate emails – which she believed had been covered. Of course I took a little time to explain the science of the issue and even brought up the conversations between the Dept of Energy and Phil Jones. In general, she seemed to repeat the opinions of the climategate committees despite the blindingly obvious problems in meshing any of their conclusions with reality. She said it was well covered that the researchers hadn’t been ‘open enough’. If that is the limit of the curiosity of your audience, it didn’t seem worth getting into.
One thing I did make clear and have made clear before, I don’t want to know who the FOIA gourp/person is because I’m not going to be willing (or technically able) to protect them – so if FOIA.org reads this, don’t tell me. My life is fine the way it is and the last thing I need is a leftist Justice department with an overstock of rubber gloves visiting my home. Leslie was very interested in whether I knew who the ‘hacker’ is. I had to tell her several ways and times that I really don’t know. I even told her that I used to think it was a student, to which she later questioned why I don’t think it is a student any longer. (Implying that I knew something). Hopefully, you can understand the direction of the interview from this. She said it was her mandate to follow this portion of the story.
For the readers here, it isn’t that I don’t believe it was a student, it is that I don’t know either way. Some friends with more knowledge than I on computers have pointed out some fairly technically sophisticated behavior in the releases which make me reconsider. I brought up the RC hack to Leslie, pointing out that no adult with sensitive information would release it that way. It’s a prank-like behavior. Of course, there is a certain narcissism which comes with a hacker mentality that sometimes delays the adult thought process. When I was in college, a stunt like that would sound like fun. Now — NO effing way.
I once met a 25 year old guy who had been caught hacking, and later hired by a security company. Despite having been “caught”, he was so cock-sure that he was flat nauseating. Either too dumb to know he wasn’t as smart as he thought or too young to have the social skill to refrain from flaunting his smarts. It is a culture of some computer programmers (sorry guys), which the ‘adult’ of my story believed he had risen to the top of. — Look what I can do! I often wonder if the hacker culture recognizes the vastly superior work built into the technology of the things which they program on.
This is not to say that FOIA.org released the emails out of narcissism or proof of superiority. Readers here understand that. Instead, it was done of understanding with a slight hint of that hacker mentality. They/he/she hold a recognition that the math and science are being perverted, data was absolutely covered up where necessary and the known results were without a doubt exaggerated to promote the cause. In my conversation with Leslie, I took the time to explain that I was not a denier and that any scientifically minded person knows full well that the basic effect of CO2 warming is incontrovertibly true. She suggested to describe me as a Lukewarmer, to which my reply was that I don’t even like that name because I don’t know how much warming there will be but due to current political mechanisms, there is a systematic exaggeration of the science.
Anyway, the most interesting point of the conversation came out when she said in very rough paraphrase ‘Their side is that the email releases were known to you ahead of time.’
The ‘their side’ was fairly interesting as we know the “Climate Scientists™” are in good contact with the NYT as are the government agencies. It could have been nothing but often when you hear inflection of how something is said, you can get the meaning. I took it as though she had been talked too by someone of the opinion that the three blogs mentioned in the DOJ letter were intimately involved.
The fact that I have done nothing wrong does not relieve me one tiny bit regarding the police. This is especially true when a billion dollar industry is involved. Those who haven’t dealt with law won’t get that. What gives me comfort is that this blog and its global friends have a wide readership means that ANY direct police action will have a wide public audience – not that it will stop the crazy stuff anyway. That is the limit of my protection.
As I have written before, I think Leslie has it right. Some powerful idiot(perhaps a congressman), who doesn’t understand blogs, internets (love the plural) or techie things in general with more than one button, thinks that the bloggers were in direct communication with FOIA. This is the single reason that I can make sense of for the confiscation of Tallbloke’s computers. Any other potential communications can be taken in pristine form right from the blog logs at WordPress.
Anyway, the conversation came across as some verification of my theory on why Tallboke had his computers confiscated. As always, I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks.
UPDATE: Hilary Ostrov has an interesting piece on Climategate events in timeline format. She muses that a story in the Guardian may have had something to do with all this. – Anthony
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@ur momisugly FergalR: if I stacked myself behind six or seven proxies at an internet cafe with no cameras and paid cash you would have no hope in hell of tracking me. Everything you want to do on the iinternet can be totally anonymous and untracable. Do not kid yourself that it is otherwise.
Scott Ramsdell says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:18 pm
And his is the only IP address that showed up in the WordPress logs during the time in question? That is NOT all.
It’s interesting that with all the discussion in the climategate emails about hijacking peer review of manuscripts that there doesn’t seem to be anything about attempts to rig review of grant applications. It’s hard to imagine that The Team wasn’t engaged in making sure the money went to their friends. This might be the straw that FOIA is holding back.
bubbagyro says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:29 pm
Isn’t this just how the Spanish Inquisition went about its work? If anyone would point crookedly at the Inquisitor, that person would end up on the rack or on the fire, labeled a sorcerer or witch. There is nothing new under the solar panel sun.
__________________________________________________
No, I don’t agree. Please read the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
Perhaps you’re thinking of Salem Witch Trials conducted by Civil Authority and Puritan Clerics?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
Excerpt:
“The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused but not formally pursued by the authorities. All twenty-six who went to trial before this court were convicted. The four sessions of the Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, held in Salem Village, but also in Ipswich, Boston and Charlestown, produced only three convictions in the thirty-one witchcraft trials it conducted. The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were executed by hanging. One man, Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea and was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so. At least five more of the accused died in prison.”
The similarity is that not believing in CAGW is now akin to being perceived as a witch. Fortunately the Courts are too busy these days.
Remember what happened to Richard Jewell?
Be careful Jeff ID.
@Dave Springer December 22, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Dave –
Since the incoming email came from Russia, would it not suffice to email it to a cohort in Russia who was internet savvy and then have that person email it to the bloggers, less headers, etc.?
DirkH says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:41 pm
“Good way to get sued, and without actually being a journalist, a judge will not grant you the right to not reveal your sources or anything. Some fine advice that is. Do you hate Jeff like you hate Willis?”
There’s no federal shield law for journalists in the United States. It was just an excuse to give to the other journalist. State laws vary. Whether bloggers are journalists depends on the circumstance. A blog is certainly a journal. Jeff is a well known widely quoted author for his journal. If he makes even a modest living out of it he should qualify. It’s not illegal to lie except under oath or to an officer of the court except where the lie constitutes a libel or slander. Saying an unnamed insider at UEA is the perp is not a libel or slander without a name attached to the perp who many then have a grievance if innocent. If a reporter publishes an unverified story given to them it’s the reporter’s ass on the line for not verifying.
And no, I don’t hate Jeff. Why would I? Jeff never threatened to censor what I write because he disagrees with it like Willis did. I don’t hate Willis. He threatened me, I threatened him in return. He followed through and I’m following through. If he cares to apologize I’ll back off but it’s always been my opinion and I made no secret of it that his writing is all fluff and pretty pictures and otherwise usually shallow and riddled with errors. But I wouldn’t be rubbing his nose in it if he hadn’t threatened to clip comments of mine where he was convinced the science was wrong. He’s the king of wrong and couldn’t correct me on his best day and my worst.
Steve Garcia says:
December 22, 2011 at 6:55 pm
“Since the incoming email came from Russia, would it not suffice to email it to a cohort in Russia who was internet savvy and then have that person email it to the bloggers, less headers, etc.?”
There are more anonymous proxy servers in Russia than Carter has Little Liver Pills. The last thing to suspect is that FOIA is Russian. The first thing to suspect is FOIA was using an anonymous proxy. Those IP addresses are published, there are a thousand or more of them at any one instant in time, and the list changes constantly and quickly such that about half of them are not working at any given moment. They mostly seem to be located in eastern Europe for some reason I never wondered enough about to investigate. Back when I was running a big controversial blog I could always tell when I was getting tagged by a proxy user as the domain would resolve so somewhere in eastern Europe and we had effectively zero actual members who lived there or would be interested in intelligent design which is pretty much a controversial subject only in the United States.
A visiting scientist. Understands the scam. Couldn’t play the game. Had access. Oh, just a minute there’s a knock at the door.
@alex Avery says: December 22, 2011 at 5:14 pm
You have it absolutely spot on.
It is as essential that it was a “hacker” as it is that the “hacker” was in the pay of BigOil. In other words, it is an article of faith.
I mean no disrespect to Catholics to point out that it would be as much a waste of time to engage a Cardinal in a debate about virgin birth or papal infalibility.
But at least a reasonably sensible Cardinal would point out, if sufficiently goaded, that it was indeed an article of faith and he wasn’t about to reconsider the point. Alarmist journos don’t even have that amount of honesty.
[SNIP: Larry, that sort of allegation really needs a link to back it up. Supply the link and we’ll allow the comment. OK? -REP]
I think this tops the NYT’s reporter’s zany theory.
Could it be an honest journalist, if they even still exist?
After reading hro001 and a thousand other comments, finally got off physics and around to think on this matter.
This seems to make more sense, it seems to fit better:
Long ago trusted national ‘journalist x’
Has long time ties to the environmental “Cause”
Brought in by the “Team” as their instant mouthpiece
But he/she needed complete inclusion to the many facts
The science is deep, needs complete notes
Handed the keys to the e-mail system for simplicity
The many years click by
But, ‘reporter x’ secretly does have some core ethics
After all, he/she is a reporter, a teller of truth
Knows the it must be written at some time
But shocked by their moral-less tactics of the “Team”
Rumors of “One World Government” cues dishonesty
Can’t publish through the employer/editor
They would never let it see the light of day
Too risky
Had to find some other method to broadcast the story
No, not a story, the key emails would do
Releases what seems enough…
Climategate I
But the train keeps choo-chooing along
All culprits whitewashed swiftly and squeaky clean
‘Reporter x’ also knows the whitewashers far too well
Hears of $37 TRILLION of global taxes with a capital T
Waits for next COP but too late for 16
Ten times more this time for COP17….
Climategate II
Topped with “Team” list of heart-tugging justifications
But the last one, the $37 trillion, is the one that tells it all
Corruption at the highest peaks
For it is that very last point that doesn’t seem to fit those above
Well, maybe something close, maybe not.
“I often wonder if the hacker culture recognizes the vastly superior work built into the technology of the things which they program on.”
I did a lot of that vastly superior work and quite frankly it isn’t vastly superior. It was clever stuff no doubt but not notably more clever than what hackers do. The difference is I parlayed a love for hacking computer hardware and software as a young man in the 1970’s into a senior R&D engineering position at a Fortune 100 computer company in the 1990’s and was very handsomely rewarded for my cleverness there. It’s wonderful to love what you do but it’s wonderful cubed if someone will pay you to do what you’d do in any case.
I love commenting here but I’m still waiting for a Fortune 100 oil company to start paying me for it. 😉
It doesn’t have to be “one of their own”, it might have been anyone at the University depending on how their network is configured. It isn’t unusual for college students to “browse” a network to see what resources are shared out. What generally happens in my experience is lets say for a unix variant, a machine has a filesystem that it shares out for NFS mounting but the access rules aren’t very strict. Maybe it gets shared out to the entire campus network. Someone has a Linux box in their dorm or office or laptop that is accessing the network via wireless. They “mount” the shared filesystem and have access to the files which they copy locally and are done.
Works pretty much the same way with Windows. In fact using something like Samba providing a Windows interface to Unix filesystems can even cause more security issues.
The point is that in most cases I have seen of unauthorized access to things, it has been due to the server involved having shared the resources to a broader audience than was intended or required and basically someone was unwittingly given access. Heck, it could have been anyone depending on how their network is built. Could possibly have been some curious Computer Science student taking a night class browsing the campus network for all we know.
Blaming such incidents on “hackers” is generally the first refuge of the incompetent.
Steve Garcia: I am surprised you, Anthony, even went through with the interview
Steve, I thought Jeff Id did the interview.
” noaaprogrammer says:December 22, 2011 at 4:53 pm
It was done by the Chinese, in a government sponsored lab, with a keyboard. ”
LMAO. Good one. Seriously has anyone looked at the number of part time students, perhaps foreign exchange, who worked in the IT department at CRU? Hell hath no furry like a motivated and PO’d geek. If CRU is like most universities the IT is a revolving door every semester for compsci students working part time. Over a 5+ year period it would have to be hundreds.
Short of a confession they are not going to get FOIA.
Painful though it is for those involved, this whole story is a distraction from the contents of the Climategate 2 e-mails. That it the sole reason for the investigation into the identity of the whistle blower (and whistle blower they are, whether insider of otherwise). It is designed to put us off the scent. I look forward to more discussion on C1 and C2 (or even the opening up of C3?)
Oh, and papal infalibility(sic) went by the way side for Catholics some time back. Apparently.
I’m with TRM above. That is fairly typical even in business situations with high IT turnover.
So if these “climate scientists” are telling people that some bloggers knew in advance…then who are they telling?
Perhaps the police that raided Tallbloke were goaded into it by these “climate scientists?”
I guess that’s better than Mann finding an investigative journalist – get an actual police investigator to do your bidding instead.
Given that this is now the time of year (ho – ho!) that traditionally, many of us exchange carefully-considered, hand-picked, gift-wrapped parcels of all sizes as tokens of goodwill between us (Damn! I wonder what’s in THAT box??? Mmmm… that’s funny – there’s no to/from on it but it sure feels a TON!!), might I offer likewise something in kindred spirit to our intrepid reporter. It’s just a little something which might prove edifying at work, hopefully help in understandig this assignment a little quicker… 😉
Best wishes.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2pupvDXO6w&w=560&h=315%5D
Record your conversations with these people. It’s perfectly legal if you tell them you will be recording the conversation. Record while you tell them this. As soon as you tell them this they will hang up. Post that recording to your blog so we can laugh at the fact that they do not want someone they are interviewing to be able to have proof of what you said.
remember kaufman’s 15 Dec NYT article on Tallbloke:
15 Dec: NYT Green Blog: Fresh Climategate Patter by Leslie Kaufman
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/more-climategate-buzz/?ref=lesliekaufman
which linked to the following HuffPo artlicle by DeSmogBlog’s Brendan DeMelle, which Kaufman described as the Norfolk Police “taking some ribbing” online. here’s some of the ribbing!
“There is a vital public interest in confirming that the UEA emails were criminally hacked and in turn, identifying those responsible and their connections.
Among many reasons for continued police diligence, climate scientist Phil Jones said he contemplated suicide after the initial email theft in 2009. So it is important for investigators to get to the bottom of this crime in order to mete out at least some justice for this baseless attempt at character assassination of climate scientists.
The ongoing harassment of climate scientists – including death threats in several cases – cannot be ignored by law enforcement agencies. If police were able to confirm the identity of the UEA hackers and bring them to justice swiftly, it would hopefully have a chilling effect on the vicious smear campaign against climate scientists.”…
“British officials should also seriously consider the suggestion from Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Edward Markey that the U.S. intelligence community should assist in the investigation.
Markey explained the significance of this investigation in a statement:
‘This is clearly an attempt to sabotage the international climate talks for a second time, and there has not been enough attention paid to who is responsible for these illegal acts. If this happened surrounding nuclear arms talks, we would have the full force of the western world’s intelligence community pursuing the perpetrators. And yet, with the stability of our climate hanging in the balance with these international climate treaty negotiations, these hackers and their supporters are still on the loose. It is time to bring them to justice.’
Whatever the reason for the low UK police expenditures, it is clearly time for a more coordinated international investigation into this crime.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/uk-climategate-investigation_b_1113849.html
the MSM pretty much ignored Cimategate 2.0, with Revkin, Black and others more interested in demanding action from the Norfolk Police. you could call it the MSM’s meme for Climategate II.
indeed, Kaufman with Justin Gillis were on Page A8 in the Print edition of NYT on 23 Nov, with:
New Trove of Stolen E-Mails From Climate Scientists Is Released
For instance, a cryptic e-mail apparently sent by Dr. Jones, a researcher at East Anglia, said, “Basic problem is that all models are wrong — not got enough middle and low level clouds.”
Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA, said he found such exchanges unremarkable. He noted that difficulties in modeling were widely acknowledged and disclosed in the literature. Indeed, such problems are often discussed at scientific meetings in front of hundreds of people.
Of the new release of e-mails, Dr. (Gavin) Schmidt said, “It smacks of desperation.”
Dr. Mann said he hoped the fresh release, apparently first posted to a computer server in Russia, would provide new clues for the British police as they seek to catch the hacker or hackers.
“Who are the criminals?” he asked. “Who is funding this effort, not just to steal these materials but to promote them?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/science/earth/new-trove-of-stolen-e-mails-from-climate-scientists-is-released.html?ref=lesliekaufman
once you realise the MSM are nothing more than advocates for “the cause”, it makes little sense to agree to be interviewed.
When skeptics talk about motives for releasing the CG1 and CG2 emails they usually mention just two, a desire to save humanity from the scam or a desire for revenge after being mistreated. But the range of possible motives is much larger. The motive might be bribery. That would mean that CG3 is loaded with scandal. If it is bribery then everyone on The Team might know who FOIA is but they dare not name him/her because that would hasten the dreaded CG3. Oddly enough, bribery might explain why The Team insists that FOIA is a criminal. Of course The Team would not admit to the public or the police that they are being bribed.
I have nothing to prove here. I am just suggesting that we should consider a wider range of scenarios when we ponder why the emails were released and by whom.
Why is so much UK police time and effort being spent trying to track down the source of the disclosure of what has been described as normal banter or gossip between scientists?
If I was a UK taxpayer, that is the question that I’d be asking.
“…Anyway, the most interesting point of the conversation came out when she said in very rough paraphrase ‘Their side is that the email releases were known to you ahead of time.’…”
In that case, we’re all in trouble. Because we all know that FOIA is holding the “secret word”, the one that releases the REST of the e-mails.
We may not know the CONTENT of the remaining emails (other to say that surely, it shows climate scientists behaving badly), but we do know the upcoming sh*t-storm will be very messy.
The files have already been released (under Climate Gate 2), they’re just locked. Ask the next reporter what THEY would do if they got the password that unlocks the rest of the emails, instead of some “denier” site? As impartial reporters, would they look?