08-12-2009, 12:41 PM
It wasn't a hack, it was a leak.
If it were a hack, it had to take place over several months: the BBC meterologist (Paul Hudson who wrote the article"What Ever Happenbed to Global Warming," I believe) was funneled emails concerning him in October. FOI2009.zip contains emails from November 12, 2009. The BBC reporter/meteorlogist claimed he got the exact same set of emails in October, which can't be true. The dates don't match.
If they're looking for wi-fi breaches, they missed the whole point, these weren't purloined letters from when Phil Jones used the public wifi at Copenhagen airport or anything like that. They were comprehensively selected for content from a set of email accounts and directories. It's perfectly possible someone could do that remotely, but it doesn't add up, because the last email was November 12 and the emails came out in the zip too quickly, it takes time to work through a scad of raw material and narrow it down to 200 MB uncompressed data. Assume the people doing that are Russians in remote Tomsk, and add a lot more time.
They're not really serious about thinking someone hacked them through their wifi. They're looking for a way out. If they can show persuasively the emails and documents were hacked rather than leaked, they can probably have them excluded from evidence.
Here's what logically happened: someone at UEA had access to Hadley CRU's directories. Chances are that was someone in the climate research unit. Hadley CRU was so lax about securing files internally, at UEA, that there was plenty of plausible deniability for the leaker to make a move. The move probably came after trying to work within the system, to get these guys to reform. No luck. Then the data are linked to from a pro-AGW site. Removed. What's left but to go full bore public? The emails themselves talk about leaving stuff out on insecure FTP servers, about unreliable colleagues and about global cooling after 1998.
That the data were stored on a university server in Tomsk is really meaningless. I don't believe Tomsk is a closed city anymore either, although I could be wrong.
If it were a hack, it had to take place over several months: the BBC meterologist (Paul Hudson who wrote the article"What Ever Happenbed to Global Warming," I believe) was funneled emails concerning him in October. FOI2009.zip contains emails from November 12, 2009. The BBC reporter/meteorlogist claimed he got the exact same set of emails in October, which can't be true. The dates don't match.
If they're looking for wi-fi breaches, they missed the whole point, these weren't purloined letters from when Phil Jones used the public wifi at Copenhagen airport or anything like that. They were comprehensively selected for content from a set of email accounts and directories. It's perfectly possible someone could do that remotely, but it doesn't add up, because the last email was November 12 and the emails came out in the zip too quickly, it takes time to work through a scad of raw material and narrow it down to 200 MB uncompressed data. Assume the people doing that are Russians in remote Tomsk, and add a lot more time.
They're not really serious about thinking someone hacked them through their wifi. They're looking for a way out. If they can show persuasively the emails and documents were hacked rather than leaked, they can probably have them excluded from evidence.
Here's what logically happened: someone at UEA had access to Hadley CRU's directories. Chances are that was someone in the climate research unit. Hadley CRU was so lax about securing files internally, at UEA, that there was plenty of plausible deniability for the leaker to make a move. The move probably came after trying to work within the system, to get these guys to reform. No luck. Then the data are linked to from a pro-AGW site. Removed. What's left but to go full bore public? The emails themselves talk about leaving stuff out on insecure FTP servers, about unreliable colleagues and about global cooling after 1998.
That the data were stored on a university server in Tomsk is really meaningless. I don't believe Tomsk is a closed city anymore either, although I could be wrong.