UPDATE: 12/21/11 4PM -BBC covers Tallbloke, finally, Richard Black still silent- Norfolk constabulary to share hand-off Climategate investigation, and Greg Laden caves – see below
Dec 14th -The first blogger to break the Climategate2 story has had a visit from the police and has had his computers seized. Tallbloke’s Talkshop first reported on CG2 due to the timing of the release being overnight in the USA. Today he was raided by six UK police (Norfolk Constabulary and Metropolitan police) and several of his computers were seized as evidence. He writes:
After surveying my ancient stack of Sun Sparcstations and PII 400 pc’s, they ended up settling for two laptops and an adsl broadband router. I’m blogging this post via my mobile.
That means his cellphone. In his blog report are all the details. including actions in the US involving WordPress and the US Department of Justice. Jeff Id at The Air Vent also has a report here.
Strange and troubling that they’d seize his computers for comments dropped onto a US service (wordpress.com) from the cloud. There wouldn’t be any record on his PC’s of the event from FOIA’s placing comments, that would be in the wordpress.com server logs.
Either there’s more than meets the eye or they have no idea how the blog system works.
UPDATE: I’ve been in contact with Roger (Tallbloke) and he tells me that he is not a suspect, and that they’ll clone his hard drives and return the computers to him. – Anthony
UPDATE2: 12/15/9AM It seems that the story has gone viral on blogs. Four skeptic blogs are in the top ten of all WordPress blogs today. While I’ve seen 2 at a time on CG1 and CG2, four has never happened before. This is from my wordpress.com dashboard:
From top to bottom, WUWT, The Air Vent, Tallbloke’s Talkshop, Climate Audit.
UPDATE3: Delingpole in the Telegraph thinks its going to escalate
UPDATE4: Horner in The Washington Examiner weighs in
UPDATE5: The Guardian picks up on the story here
UPDATE6: Jo Nova suggests it is a form of intimidation
UPDATE7: Josh weighs in with two cartoons
UPDATE8: Greg Laden on Scienceblogs accuses Tallbloke of being a “criminal” – a claim really over the line and over the top. Clearly this is outside of the Code of Conduct for Scienceblogs.com (contact page here) Of course, after reading the rant of hate this man has for anyone not like him, especially Americans in some states, I suppose it’s just another day for him. Update: I sent off a complaint to the editors of Sb about this, and it appears that Laden has been asked to remove the libelous language, though the post remains as does his hateful attitude in comments.
UPDATE9: Lord Monckton to pursue fraud charges against Climategate scientists: Will present to police the case for ‘numerous specific instances of scientific or economic fraud’
Monckton: ‘I have begun drafting a memorandum for prosecuting authorities…to establish…the existence of numerous specific instances of scientific or economic fraud in relation to the official ‘global warming’ storyline…they will act, for that is what the law requires them to do’
Story at ClimateDepot here
UPDATE10: More than a couple of people have asked me about computer security in the last couple of days, especially after the Tallbloke raid incident.
I’m offering a simple security solution for those that want to protect their files: a USB flash drive with built in hardware security. See it here
UPDATE11: A copy of the search warrant can be seen at Climate Audit
UPDATE 12: The BBC’s Richard Black is silent, probably because he can’t “… find an angle that will allow the BBC to maintain the usual warmists good, sceptics bad holding pattern”.
UPDATE13: Tallbloke apparently is going to take legal action against ScienceBlogs and blogger Greg Laden over his libelous article (now modified to not be libelous) accusing Tallbloke of being involved in criminal activity, and is soliciting barristers. Laden says on his blog in comments:
“I think he’s a criminal for being a climate denialist. Sue me. “
Looks like Greg Laden will get his wish.
UPDATE14: Rep Markey has an “off with their heads” moment, Jeff Id explains how the connections being made are preposterous.
UPDATE15: Tallbloke has decided to take the libel issue with Laden to tort. A letter from his attorney is posted.
UPDATE16: Planetsave makes another libel with the headline: “Criminal Who Manufactured Climategate Caught?” The clueless writer, Zachary Shahan, is about as far away from understanding journalism as anyone I’ve seen. He’s in for a nasty surprise as Tallbloke has added him to the tort list.
UPDATE18: UK cartoonist “Fenbeagle” has done up a Star Wars parody in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back. Mike Mann, Phil Jones, Jawas, and a Wookie are featured.
UPDATE19: Tom Nelson points out that Laden seems to have caved to impending legal action: Warmist Greg Laden: Did I say that tallbloke is a criminal? I meant he’s not a criminal. Details here
UPDATE20: Tallbloke reflects on the solstice and says that questions are starting to be asked in the UK.
UPDATE21: Tallbloke reports that:
In a sudden new development, your correspondent has learned that Norfolk Constabulary have decided that climategate is too big for them to handle. According to an un-named source, they intend to hand over the inquiry to another force.
This follows on the heels of a ‘request for a contact’ at Norfolk Constabulary by Lord Christopher Monckton in connection with his intention to have the police investigate revelations in the ‘climategate’ emails placed in the public domain.
UPDATE22: Donna LeFramboise writes in the Financial Post:
This is all rather chilling. It appears that being the proprietor of a blog in which strangers leave links pointing to material on third-party websites now exposes one to being raided by the police.
UPDATE23: The BBC finally gets around to covering the seizure episode almost a week later, unsurprisingly, the very biased Richard Black isn’t the reporter.
tallbloke says:
December 14, 2011 at 5:05 pm
They were polite and promised to return the kit after cloning the disks.
They say I am not a suspect for any crime.
============
so mate, if your’e NOT a suspect??? what right do they have to copy your personal info and be intruding on your life then??
Its like a scene from “A shot in the Dark” isnt it?
A bunch of Clouseau’s all stumbling around and getting the wrong suspect.
Its obvious that they have no clue who theyre looking for, heck , Mr FOIA could be looking over their shoulders right now and theyd have no idea, but thats what happens when you try to cover up a lie, one thing leads to another and before you know it youre intimidating people, kicking their doors down, treading on their rights and acting like tyrants.
Just to cover up a lie. A climate conspiracy.
I really, really do hope that Mr FOIA drops the passphrase soon and i really do hope the rest of whats in the file is so destructive that completely blows this whole climate charade wide open so we can at least prosecute those at the heart of it and also get a return to common sense and some kind of normal behaviour, this certainly isnt.
Instead of going after the liars at uea, at penn and nasa theyre trying to cut off dissent and kill the truth in favour of what their political masters want.
Well, the truth will out, it always does and no amount of gaming, fixing, lying, cheating or threatening will stop it.
Its as inevitable as the fact that agw is a fantasy generated by scheming mendacious hypocrites, pretending they care about this world but proving all along theyre only interested in dollars.
Come on Mr FOIA, strike one for freedom.
Request for Cartoon by Josh ?
Pentium II 400s .. man.. Tallbloke really needs some funds from Big Oil to run his climate skeptic’s operation! 🙂
Morons are raiding the wrong damn place….
Richard S Courtney says:
December 15, 2011 at 1:22 am
“Thirdly, it is very, very probable that UK security agents know both the contents of the encrypted Climategat 2.0 files and the identity of the Climategate leaker. GCHQ is extremely competent and its staff working in the Donut probably sorted those things out within hours of being asked. ”
No, Richard, at the moment nobody on Planet Earth can crack the encryption. This is the newest report I can find about progress in attacking AES 256; still falls short of a practical real life attack.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/new_attack_on_a_1.html
“As our attacks are of high computational complexity, they do not threaten the practical use of AES in any way.”
Since even a teenager would know there could be no trace on Tallbloke’s computers (still less his ADSL router) to lead the police to FOIA that can’t be their purpose.
But if he is suspected fo being (or aiding) FOIA then having his router and his computers makes very good sense.
He doesn’t need to be a very likely suspect for the police to need to actively rule him out. I suspect it is just a routine bit of policing, albeit with garish levels of over-manning. I bet at least one of the officers was there just as a health-and-safety rep.
Cellphone was the established usage of the lingo in the United States from the time these devices were first introduced into the U.S. market. Motorola setup a prototype cellphone netswork elsewhere in California, and then established a commercial cellphone network in Los Angeles. Our company delivered the first retail sale of their new cellphone, and I was given the task of arranging with FEDEX to have it delivered by FEDEX to the first customer. FEDEX lost it (chuckle), and it was a circus as they tried to tell me they COULD NOT possibly lose a shipment, but they did (LOL). Must have been two firsts in one outing. FEDEX eventually found the lost shipment, and we were off and running with cellphone service in Los Angeles. The local managers hounded the district manager to have one of these new cellphones installed into my automobile, because I had to spend most of the day sitting in traffic on the L.A. freeways as I went to appointments in the three counties.. They liked to see him get all red in the face as he reminded them there was no way he was ever going to authorize the >$1.00 per minute air time charges for them to talk to me…. Kind of different than today.
When Motorola introduced this new product, they gave us some extensive training. The first cellphones had to be installed in the trunk (boot for you corssponders) of an automobile. An antenna had to be fitted in back with the cable running into the trunk with the cellphone. Motorola was quite insistent upon their new product being described as a cellphone or mobile cellphone. This was to distinguish the new cellular communications technology from the already decades old mobile telephone services that did not employ the cellular switched mobile services. Until very recent years or perhaps even to the present, there were still some of the older non-cellular mobile telephone services still in service in some of the more isolated regions of the Western United States, where cellular networks were not established or available. So, mobile cellular telephone, mobile cellphone, or cellphone; the cellphone moniker Motorola chose to describe the device has been the normal terminology for it in the United States.
About week ago I posted a comment asking if it was wise for us to be speculating on the identity of FOIA as the Norfolk fuzz were presumably adding ideas posted on WUWT to their “leads to follow up” file.
Anthony replied REPLY: Not likely, I have information that they have no interest in pursuing the case further. – Anthony
I think that the information that Anthony had been given must have been misinformation, intended to keep the flow of useful leads coming. It is now clear that they have *every* interest in pursuing the case further.
Before people rush off in the land of tinfoil conspiracy over Tallbloke , lets remember the present UK government was not in power during the period the leaked e-mails cover and that there may be good reasons to think the current UK government would have no issue with the last one having embarrassing information made public. Lets leave the conspiracy calls to those that claim all AGW skeptics are in the pay of ‘big oil’ and are part of the ‘organized’ disinformation campaign.
Way to go, Airstrip One!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Airstrip_One
We in Oceania salute our brave comrades, who courageously deployed a force of only 6 enforcers from the Ministry of Truth, to seize a vast and dangerous cache of two laptops, and a deadly hair-trigger router.
John Smith says:
December 14, 2011 at 5:06 pm
“They’ll “fit him up” meaning that the cops and the media and probably some sleazy politician will have arranged to frame him as a cyber terrorist.”
It’s even easier than that. While you’re “helping with enquiries,” giving statments to the enforcers from the Ministry of Truth, if you say something that disagrees with what they found on your laptop (or anywhere else), bam! they’ve got you for lying to investigators.
Anthony can probably expect Barbara Boxer and Janet Incompetano to arrange a visit from some helpful government advisors.
Of course the real issue here is that people are assuming that this is the Norfolk Police investigation into a UEA “hack driving this. The truth is this was instigated from across the pond, the UK plods are just carrying out orders.
Police Priorities
The Norfolk rozzers
—a half a dozen of them!—
take stuff from Tall Bloke.
Seriously, they
need six cops to hound a
sceptic? What a joke.
Sex slavery and
similar crimes increase, but
they search blogging folks.
Other malefactors
ignored are those who push the
global warming hoax.
RichardSmith says:
December 15, 2011 at 12:37 am
@davidmhoffer
Where did I suggest that the recent posts on WUWT ‘sparked an international investigation’?
My point was that the efforts to track down FOIA are ongoing and speculating about the identity of FOIA are out of place.>>>
My point was that there was no way the discussion in WUWT had anything to do with the investigative processes that were clearly well under way already. The impetus to investigate (whatever it is they are investigating) began long before that thread, and would have happened regardless of the WUWT existing or not.
Further, if you were paying attention to what I wrote in that article, I went to considerable lengths to explain what enterprise class email systems looked like. My purposes in that regard were to clear up various matters of confusion regarding the technology that were recurring in various threads, and to expand (not narrow down) the list of possible suspects by showing just how many possible ways those emails might have been obtained.
So in essence, we agree. Speculation about the identity of FOIA is nigh on useless because of the broad number of ways the information could have been obtained. I was just simply explaining why that was, while clearing up some misconceptions. The police are going to investigate for reasons entirely their own, and unknown to us (also not worth speculating about) but I can assure you that the chattering of the masses affected their actions not one bit.
Let’s face it, how does one go about giving a Nobel Prize to an anonymous leaker? This person or group must be found so that they may come forward to claim the prize. Seriously though, how can one see this as any other than an attempt by the authorities to ferret out a key cyber clue. It does demonstrate how desperate they are, if this is to be the approach. Or, perhaps they already know who the leaker is, and are in the process of gathering evidence to lay charges upon arrest.
This is probably one of the best things that have happened for skepticals. Usually the injured party (skeptical Bloggers in this case), win hands down re public perception of an issue (ie AGW).
At 3:20 AM on 15 December, AdderW writes:
Sorry, no can do. The police confiscated his pencilbox.
Can they have my laptops?? Norfolk and chance!
Is it not curious, one can spend years trying to get a public funded scientist to release their data and meta data (McIntyre vs Mann, and many other examples) or one can submit FOI requests to the IPCC (found guilty of subverting the scientific process on numerous ocassions) reciepients of world wide attention for their policy recomendations affecting every man woman and child on the planet, and have these GSE efforts stonewalled to no end, but on the otherhand you can be a common citizen, with a deserved reputation for being an open minded well informed, well educated man, and with nary a notice the authorties can come into your home and take all your computer files and poor through all your private records. It just ain’t right.
They might really be worried about the rest of the emails and the cops are being told to get them.
Maybe they’re looking for the rest of the email and the password before climategate 3 and they’re caught by surprise, again. This is big money and they know they’ve been caught in the fallacy of their own arguments. Who know how deep this runs?
If climategate 2.0 was really such a bore, and really had nothing of interest, they would not be doing this sort of raid/intimidation.
We are getting close.
So, It wasn’t the milkman, it was the police.
You must also remember that cellular phone is not a clever name. Each tower had a range where it would be the primary tower. That range was called a cell. The way I saw it originally, and this was back before there were any digital towers anywhere, was to have a chart full of hexagons. Each hexagon had a little drawing of a tower and represented the tower’s cell and that represented the range in which the tower would be the one to carry the call. When I saw the idea drawn out, the name cell phone made perfect sense to me.
This thing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000
is a nightmare.
“Agencies with investigative powers:
“…Charity Commission
“…Department of Agriculture and Rural Development for Northern Ireland
“…The Pensions Regulator
“…Scottish Environment Protection Agency
“…Scottish Ambulance Service Board
“…Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust”
In the UK, just about anything that can call itself a “government agency” can investiagte you, intercept your communications, surveil you in any number of ways, electronically and physically, and the act,
“…prevents the existence of interception warrants and any data collected with them from being revealed in court.”
I believe they must have the right to take anything they like from you if it prevents deaths and child abuse,but surely they must tell you why they are confiscating your possesions?