In writing my previous post on the “Climategate” break-in to the University of East Anglia computer system , I remained unclear about who was actually responsible for the break-in theft of the emails, which were then selectively quoted to promote a bogus allegation of scientific fraud.
Looking over the evidence that is now available, I think there is enough to point to Steven McIntyre as the person, along with the actual hacker or leaker, who bears primary moral responsibility for the crime.
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25 July 2009: The next day McIntyre announced that he had got a mass of CRU data, essentially all that sought in the harassment campaign, from “a mole”. Note that this may be true or may be misdirection to protect external hackers. In any case, it is clear that his harassment campaign was going hand in hand with attempts to gain unauthorised access to CRU computers, and did not stop when its supposed goal was realised.
Over the next few months, CRU started preparing a response to McIntyre which resulted in the creation of a file called FOIA.zip. Over the weekend beginning Friday 13 November, someone located and copied this file from a back-up server at the university’s Climatic Research Unit, and distributed it widely among anti-science blog sites, including McIntyre’s. It’s unclear whether the extraction of the file required sophisticated hacking, simple illegal entry to a poorly protected site, or McIntyre’s “mole”. What is clear, as this report notes is that going after FOIA.zip indicates that someone in McIntyre’s circle of supporters was responsible.
[...]
Having received the stolen emails, McIntyre played a prominent role in disseminating dishonest and misleading claims about their contents, focusing on the phrases “trick” and “hide the decline” which were used to suggest a conspiracy to commit scientific fraud. In fact, as the U Penn investigation found, these claims were baseless. “Trick” referred to a clever way of combining data, and the “decline” was not a decline in global temperatures but a well-known problematic feature of tree ring data.
Just to repeat: sure as shootin', if and when the police find the CRU hackers, it will be one or more of the bloggers hanging around Climate Audit.
6 comments:
I think Quiggan is an economist, not a climate scientist.
Quite. Dude from Crooked Timber. Should have known that.
I thought that this: "CRU started preparing a response to McIntyre which resulted in the creation of a file called FOIA.zip." was a denialist myth.
Did CRU create such a file, or did the hacker?
Yeah I noticed that, and I'm still not sure what the answer is. I read it as most likely saying "CRU prepared a response [just in case the request was judged legit, though I think it was turned down], and the hacker turned this into FOIA.zip".
Government Funding / Research Scandal
(**Updated March 15th** - Participants)
Visit the website that the Canadian House of Commons and many Universities across North America have as well.
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It's an ingenious form of white collar crime:
PHD credentials / contacts, an expendable family, participation of a dubious core of established professionals, Government agency funding (identity protected by Privacy Commissioner Office), unlimited funding (under the guise of research grants), PHD individuals linked with the patient (deter liability issues), patient diagnosed with mental illness (hospital committed events = no legal lawyer access/rights), cooperation of local University and police (resources and security); note the Director of Brock Campus Security.
This all adds up to a personal ATM; at the expense of Canadian Taxpayers!
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Google
Medicine Gone Bad
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http://medicine-gone-bad.blogspot.com/
bigcitylib:
The "sh-3.1$ exit\n" bytes show that the e-mail attachments were most probably cracked, not leaked. Though I'm not so sure about the code and data files.
-- frankbi
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