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.
At 8:27 AM on 16 December, niall had written about the confiscation of Tallbloke’s router:
Just what the hell gives you to think that they’re after “FOIA’s identity,” anyway?
If they can pull from Tallbloke’s router “the MAC addresses (think fingerprint) of each device he allowed to talk on his router,” then every damned time Tallbloke uses any of those devices, the warmunist Geheimesicherheitsdienst can not only track his location but monitor any communications he might undertake.
While that’s not likely to get los warmistas any closer to punishing FOIA – who is almost certainly not in direct or even indirect contact with Tallbloke – it will certainly provide them with potentially actionable intelligence on the activities and identities of the “deniers” with whom Tallbloke communicates.
Let’s all hope that Tallbloke gets a-churning with that libel lawsuit against Laden et alia ASAP, and that he also seeks civil action for compensatory and beaucoup punitive damages against the local and national governments. He’s gonna need to replace every gadget he’d ever had connected to that router.
Also, he should donate those previously-connected devices to some charitable service which will distribute them to other folks who can’t afford the purchase of same. This will, of course, leave the warmistas chasing people texting about plum duff recipes and accessing “furry” pr0n, and more power to ’em.
Hot Damn! This is gaining further traction, in main stream press!
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov’t Help Hide Climate Data?
By Maxim Lott
Published December 16, 2011
| FoxNews.com
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/16/complicit-in-climategate-doe-under-fire/?test=latestnews#ixzz1gjmemjzx
@ur momisugly William Old
My comment to your original post was supposed to be polite and finished with a cheeky grin – or at least it did in my brain. Your reply is rather over the top.
Sorry – didnt mean to set you homework, but your reply certainly confirms what I have professionally known for years – that coppers generally dont know the law beyond quoting statutory provisions parrot fashion. All coppers can regurgitate the statutory definition of theft, or their powers under PACE, but almost none of them know any caselaw. You have even read the pertinent extract from a relevant case and haven’t been able to identify the straightforward legal principle at play. I am not surprised.
Might I suggest that you read the main paragraph of the judgment relating to a section 8 warrant again?
“Given their knowledge of the first claimant‟s role as an expert witness over many years, I do not consider that either the officers or the justice could have been satisfied that there were reasonable grounds for believing that the first claimants‟ computers would not contain material subject to legal privilege or special procedure material. It seems clear that they did not address the question. Had they done so, they must have come to the conclusion that the first claimant‟s computers might contain such material. …………… Accordingly in my judgment there was no jurisdiction to issue the warrant in the form in which it was sought and issued. Accordingly I would quash the warrant on this ground, and grant the relief sought, namely a declaration that the entry and search of the premises, and the seizures made in the course of the search, were unlawful.”
Remembering that special procedure material includes journalistic material, then please substitute “expert witness” for “journalist blogger”.
The case provides that if a magistrate can be shown not to have had a reasonable belief under PACE section 8(1)(d) that there was NOT special procedure material (which includes journalistic material) on computers mentioned in the warrant, then he had no jurisdiction to issue the warrant in the first place.
The police here knew TallBloke is a blogger. They sought a warrant for “computers and associated equipment” – that means all computers at the address. The police were under an obligation to tell the magistrate that his computers were likely to contain journalistic material (for which a warrant under section 8 PACE is not available), since they knew he is a blogger/journalist. They almost certainly did not. That is evidenced by the fact that they obtained a section 8 warrant – if they had told the magistrate this then a section 8 warrant would almost certainly not have been granted.
So it is arguable that the magistrate cannot have had a reaasonable belief that there was no special procedure material on the computers. If this is so he then, as happened for these reasons in the case I mentioned, the warrant can be held to be unlawful.
“Please, please, please, folks… much of this is uninformed rubbish from grandstanding idiots.”
So, again, from one grandstanding idiot, to another……………
Tucci78 says:
December 16, 2011 at 1:37 pm
>>>>Well, for all the “Liberal” idiots’ fantasies about how their Mombasa Messiah was gonna “Change” everything, the Gitmo madrasah is still open and going strong, >>>>
Seems Obama just signed in to law the bill that allows the President to declare a person an Enemy of the State and disappear him. And most of our traitors in DC did too.
I am sorry Anthony but a Congress Critter that votes FOR a bill denying an American citizen his Constitutional right to a trial is a traitor to that document IMHO.
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/december152011/defense-bill-tk.php
At 8:42 AM on 16 December (gotta beg the readers’ pardon; I’m playing catch-up here) CaffeinatedSheep had posted:
Tsk. You’re making the mistake of thinking that these warmunists are smart instead of demonstrating the feral cunning so common among petty criminals. To continue:
But los warmistas haven’t got anything in the way of “science,” damnit. That’s been their problem since this whole preposterous bogosity got started back in 1974.
There really isn’t anyone of senior rank among los warmistas who hasn’t “put personal gain ahead of objective science,” meaning that there’s absolutely nobody out there in this complex confidence game who can “Repair the trust.”
The very few climate scientists who aren’t numbered among the C.R.U. correspondents who got pantsed in the Climategate disclosures – i.e., those who weren’t actively participating in the suppressio veri, suggestio falsi scam perpetrated in a simulacrum of scientific proceedings – are either “lukewarmers” like Dr. Judith Curry or implacable “deniers” like Dr. Richard Lindzen.
The latter have already been extensively demonized by the warmarxist MSM, and review of the Climategate communications (especially in the FOIA2011.zip tranche) indicate that the “lukewarmers” were being schemed-against by the members of “Mike’s Hockey Team” in the years before the events of 17 November 2009 yanked down their drawers to expose their shortcomings.
To put it simply, there is no professional ethical integrity among the credentialed quacks who make up the warmista “science” establishment. The more we look into it, the more certain we become that there never was.
They can’t “Repair” a structure that never had any substance to begin with.
Forget about making bricks without straw. On the warmunist side, they never even had decent mud.
Gail.
Couldnt agree more. Its an absolute disgrace.
Anyone stop to think this might be a tactic in the strategy to climb-down from seriously over-reaching and suicidal financial/climate policies by government.
Expose the corruption in climate science and then claim to have been misled.
David Cameron using Tallboy as proxy to flush passkey without appearing to confront the team directly?
Re; davidmhoffer says @ur momisugly 12:49 pm
True, but now make that portable. It’s still not entirely practical to use in the field and would be far better to do as the police have done and take the drives back to a controlled and secure environment.
Tucci78 Dec 15th 1.43pm –
Here you go – http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/
Scroll down to “Generation by Fuel Type”. As at 23:00 UK time, wind is producing 2.1% and we’re importing 4.3% from France (nuclear of course).
John Law says:
December 16, 2011 at 5:03 am
How will the Norfolk police get all that kit on their bicycles?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Why do you think they only took two lap tops and a router??? It was all they could carry!
JOSH, new cartoon to go with your last one.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/15/josh-on-the-skeptic-computer-raid/
If Tallbloke were to enter into libel cases separately against Doctors Laden and Mann in their respective countries, would that not be a “can-opener” that would potentially require exposing documents that here-to-fore have remained behind legal barriers?
My take on Tallbloke and Greg Laden:
http://blackswhitewash.com/2011/12/16/im-back-things-just-got-serious/
JPeden says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:02 am
roh234 says:
December 15, 2011 at 10:17 pm
You know this new health care bill? Actually, a big part of the change that will happen is pulling your stupid-ass nuts out of the fire, because those of us who live in the progressive states fixed half those problems you are living with a long time ago. Yet you are the states that seem to be sending more than your share of testicle dangling tea-baggers to DC to complain about the very progress that is going to keep your 11 fingered offspring from the misery that your created environment imposes on them.
Yep, we’ve observed how you OWS parasites and California sure do get it all fingered out, and o’so “naturally” without the need of any TP at all! Now all you need is some more of Robbinghood’s and Little Moonbeam’s all purpose magic manna to more completely fill your quavering fingers to the brim with more of that same old Commie crappola that has “sustained” you so well thus far, forevah! No doubt it tastes as good as it does in North Korea? Where they apparently haven’t learned by echoing fragmented noises in the streets to count beyond “4″, either? And, please, don’t you be going and telling Maiden Michelle on me while she and the PBS Teletubbies are trying to achieve a new jumping jack record. Otherwise you just might could be outed as a raaaaacist!
They weren’t my words and neither would I say that to any American. I was pointing to Anthony that Greg didn’t change his bigoted rant. Don’t accuse me of being a watermelon and read everything.
LOL!! we should root for the hackers to be caught and prosecuted! [read and you will understand]
Dilingpole of the Telegraph wrote:
“If a whistleblower leaks information in the public interest – as Climategate and Climategate 2.0 clearly are – then he is pretty much immune from prosecution. (Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998”
I read the ACT, key line: “(b)that a person has failed, is failing or is likely to fail to comply with any legal obligation to which he is subject,”
Defense Witness #1 Phil Jones
Defence witness #2 Keith Briffa… etc……
They would have to explain every FOI email and every delete email!
Tucci78 says:
December 16, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Just what the hell gives you to think that they’re after “FOIA’s identity,” anyway?
If they can pull from Tallbloke’s router “the MAC addresses (think fingerprint) of each device he allowed to talk on his router,” then every damned time Tallbloke uses any of those devices, the warmunist Geheimesicherheitsdienst can not only track his location but monitor any communications he might undertake.
Fair point, if a bit scary in its implications. At this point, I’d guess somebody knows they can’t contain FOIA, so they’re hoping to shut up some of the people who turned the leak into News, perhaps get people to think more about them as “bad, nasty hackers don’cha know?” and think less about the contents of the emails and what they mean, though that is unlikely to be communicated down the line to the PC-nappers in such blunt terms. The disposition of ridiculous amounts of money, prestige and power depend on the “science” or lack thereof, so it probably isn’t realistic to discount such ideas as paranoid fantasy anymore. It’s not like there aren’t history books full of precedent for this sort of thing. Still, we know so little about what is really happening behind any given curtain and there are so many players, factions within factions even, (and still the chance that the leaker is a defector from The Team) that the best play would seem to be to continue turning up the heat on the Warmists and see who sweats (a kerchief, Mr Mann?). Talk about it and keep it out there and see who sweats the most. And of course, we could wake up in the morning and find that FOIA has adjusted the thermostat all by himself again.
Atomic Hairdryer;
True, but now make that portable.>>>
Ask, and ye shall receive.
http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Search.htm?term=TC-L52BN-AR&DefSort=Y&findin=allproducts&SearchType=1
Maybe if we ALL start mentioning that a certain “someone” has contacted us with a passcode, things might get very interesting. Sort of like shouting “bomb” at an airport. 🙂
.
NORFOLK POLICE TO FOIA: GIVE YOURSELF UP OR THE CUTE LITTLE PUPPY GETS IT!!!!
Bravo to Lord Monckton! I would urge anyone who has information to help him in this vital effort to bring some accountability to this cabal.
@tallbloke
I would recommend getting new equipment if they bugged it.
clipe says:
December 16, 2011 at 3:00 pm
“Expose the corruption in climate science and then claim to have been misled.”
Then the political leadership would have to admit that they let themselves be misled.
Has that ever happened in the past? I do not remember any such case right now…..
Send them a picture of a huge crowd,
caption.. “Where’s FOIA”
Make sure Jones’s and Mann’s and Big Al’s faces are in the crowd..
Jockdownsouth says:
December 16, 2011 at 3:04 pm
No fair!
Currently producing 1059Mw from metered capacity of 4006Mw. 26.4%
Be honest when running something down!
DaveE.
Blade says:
December 16, 2011 at 10:04 am
All good information…. but now we also perhaps know why FOIA11 put this second tranche of files out in the way he did. The encrypted section may well hold something VERY embarrassing for someone with the power to wake up the Norfolk Constabulary and get them to cooperate with the Met (not a simple telephone call) and presumably some of the ‘police’ were not from either force.
So FOIA11 has a large collection of extremely politically threatening emails that might deprive people of their Agenda 21 privileges and access to significant amounts of several governments’ funding…. Leaving it on her/his hard drive is NOT secure as said ‘police force’ could arrive at dead of night and remove it. So encrypt it with almost unbreakable encryption and put it out on the ‘net with tips to sites you _know_ will download and publish what they can read – it is now immortal. The sites and their visitors will also comment on the large impenetrable encrypted file. This FOIA11 knows will cause considerable if not unbounded concern in the circles trying to hide what they believe is in that encrypted folder – as they perceive it as a significant threat to their plans.
The key would have been loaded to several places on the ‘net unobtrusively – say hidden in images of muffins on multiple recipe sites – before the main CG2 tranche was published, using a cell phone, netbook or tablet that has now been physically destroyed. Perhaps there is a bot somewhere on the ‘net that is checking that FOIA11 has logged on in the last 10 days and if not the ‘bot will email the key to all available emails found on say Tallblokes Talkshop, WUWT, RC or The Air Vent and perhaps even hard coded to Lord Monckton.
The files and the key are already on the web – going around pulling hardware from the skeptic blogs will not work – even if ‘they’ find FOIA11 or foment enough annoyance, all FOIA11 needs to do is stop logging into the web or a particular site – and their worst nightmare may occur.
At 5:09 PM on 16 December, Ian W writes:
Hm. Let’s travel back to 17 November 2009, at which time FOIA2009.zip hit the ‘Net.
Right then and there, among los warmistas there had to have been a classic “Omigawd, they’re on to us!” moment in which they realized that EVERY GODDAM THING that had been archived on the servers at the University of Easy Access’ C.R.U. had fallen into the hands of those they had condemned as “deniers,” many of whom (myself happily included) would like nothing better than to put them off a pier into deep water with cured quantities of Quickrete® ’round their ankles, and then make bets on how long it’d take for the bubbles to stop coming up.
Those complicit in the AGW fraud knew right goddam then that the supposed-to-be-confidential communications of their credentialed “climate science” charlatans were off the reservation and running wild through the badlands.
They either knew right away that what had been “stolen” (i.e., copied) from those servers was stuff that would implicate them, or they learned shortly after FOIA2009.zip’s release got them steppin’ and fetchin’ to comb through the sources of that file’s contents just precisely what the “hacker” had gotten access to.
And it’s obviously stuff that can perp-walk a lot of expensively-dressed warmunists out of their offices and into durance vile, live on TV.
Continues Ian W:
Which begs an important question. If anybody had knowledge of what was lurking in those hard drives at the C.R.U., it was the same warmistas who’d been criminally evading the Freedom of Information statute demands for access to specific portions of those materials. The operators of the henhouse knew precisely what the “Foia” foxl had gotten in among, right?
So how the hell come these government-connected bastids are only now moved sufficiently to desperation that they’re starting to send their uniformed thugs to harass Tallbloke and – eventually, we can presume – the rest of that “Army of Davids” who have been exerting themselves in the blogosphere to press for honest skepticism in the consideration of the great gaudy “We’re All Gonna Die!” man-made catastrophic globular worming fraud?
I mean, we know that los warmistas are stupid.
Cunning, sure. All criminals are cunning in direct proportion to how successful they are in their thefts and scams and serial murders. But smart?
Nah!
But are these warmarxist whackjobs better’n two years slow on the uptake?
Hairdryer, apples and oranges. Removing a multiTB drive array for archival isn’t the same as doing the same with a processor. The issue of claims for civil damages remains, but the drive array does not have perishable, location or connection specific information on it. The laptops likey do: remote drives, vpn connections, network mounted volumes, etc. My mobile and my laptops both gsm location aware applications that configure the wick and network settings based on location, if the coppers wandered off with those machines- then they would lose data. Not to mention the possibilites for a location aware corruption tool. The portable disk duplicators, which have a significant law enforcement market, are purchased to preserve information and protect officers.
I called the IT cops at my friendly ticket writer’s local, they archive and log everything onsite; before removing EVERYTHING, to include bringing in an electrician to pull hard wired power supplies. They scoffed at this article, if they had a warrant, they wouldn’t have left the mobile, servers, old pc, any media, Tallblokes collection of bagpipe tunes on cd, notwithstanding. Tallbloke would have spent hours signing inventory logs as they filled the truck.
Their opinion, halfhearted fishing expedition to make someone with a white shirt happy. Taking the router was laughed at, if you weren’t taking everything, what would it have that wouldn’t be at the teleco/isp.