Thursday
Dec152011
by 
Josh
Josh Helpful notice for the workplace - Josh 136
Dec 15, 2011 Josh Following the Norfolk police raid here is a helpful notice for the office, corridor, train, airport, waiting room...
;)
Dec 15, 2011 Josh
Reader Comments (81)
Dec 15, 2011 at 8:36 PM | BBD
With regard to stolen e-mails, technically the MPs expenses scandal and the criminal prosecutions of the worst(?) offenders were as a result of documents stolen in electronic form. Would you regard the "thief" as someone who should be prosecuted or a public spirited individual?
Christopher Galley, the civil servant who passed confidential documents to Tory MP Damian Green?
EU chief accountant Marta Andreasen?
Unknown (to me at least) leaker of Stella Rimmingtons book?
Going further back in time how about Sarah Tidsall? Should the Guardian have destroyed their copies to protect their source?
Thanks
Sandy
BBD
Also what about leaks on rendition and Guantánamo Bay?
Thanks Again
Sandy
I might add that having the metacoded copyright does give a timestamp which is hard -- but not impossible -- to fake. TerryS makes the reason why a registered copyright is important -- the date of creation is in the hands of a third party.
TerryS, DPdlS;
Thanks for your responses.
BH
James Annan's comment where? Sorry if I'm being slow.
SandyS
You are attempting to create a false equivalence between UEA and:
MP's expenses scandle
Christopher Galley
Marta Andreasen
Unknown (to me at least) leaker of Stella Rimmingtons book
Going further back in time how about Sarah Tidsall?
Guantanamo and rendition
It's not convincing.
Dec 15, 2011 at 10:45 PM | BBD
Why?
Dec 15, 2011 at 10:45 PM | BBD
After a couple of minutes thought.
In my opinion if I regard any one of those listed as doing the right thing then it is difficult if not impossible to regard others as a thief/wrong-doer. Kind of along the lines of one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
The winners write history.
What's your position?
Sandy
I'm off to bed now, but I'll look for your answer tomorrow lunchtime.
from Hickman's piece:
"A number of climate scientists and bloggers are known to have been questioned by the police"
who are the "climate scientists" "known" to have been questioned? i only know of sceptic bloggers who are not "climate scientists" but who reported they were questioned by Norfolk Police.
BBD -
Presumably our host is referring to this:
at Greg Laden's blog which calls Tallbloke a thief.
Annan's is a pithy and completely accurate comment.
Sandy
As it was. You are trying to create a false equivalence.
And there is the physics, which tends to get glossed over in sceptical arguments.
As a physicist said: you can't fool nature.
the uniform MSM/AP report gives the impression Tallbloke could be involved in emails "STOLEN" from UEA...
16 Dec: WaPo: AP: UK police seize equipment as part of investigation into ‘Climategate’ email scandal
British police say they have seized equipment as part of an investigation into thousands of emails stolen from the University of East Anglia two years ago...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/uk-police-seize-equipment-as-part-of-investigation-into-climategate-email-scandal/2011/12/15/gIQAPWYOwO_story.html
15 Dec: CBC: AP: ‘Climategate’ police raid targets computer equipment
No arrests during raid of West Yorkshire property
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/12/15/technology-climategate-police-raid.html
16 Dec: Sydney Morning Herald: AP: ‘Climategate’ police raid property
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/climategate-police-raid-property-20111216-1oxcj.html
HaroldW
Which I've been agreeing with all night. Tallbloke is innocent, OK?!
weak BBD...very weak...the physics...you sound as lame as Connolley
Adam Corner profile (from link): Adam Corner is a research associate at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK. His research interests include the communication of climate change.
15 Dec: New Scientist: Adam Corner: Climate change drops off 'hot topic' list
This year's British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey comes complete with gloomy headlines on public opinion about climate change. Compared with surveys in 1993 and 2000, concern about the seriousness of environmental threats has decreased, and the number of people saying they were willing to pay more for environmentally friendly services has dropped significantly...
The survey's authors suggest that the lingering effects of the 2009 Climategate affair – the release by climate sceptics of private emails between climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) – has knocked people's trust in climate science.
To those who observed the deafening silence that greeted the release of yet more of the hacked UEA emails last month, this is a curious explanation. It has become a media truism that the fallout from Climategate dented public confidence in climate science. But the few polls that have asked directly about it, which the BSA did not, have painted a more nuanced picture. A US study in 2010, found that Climategate primarily influenced those who were already sceptical.
Beyond the somewhat spurious Climategate angle, are the BSA findings really as worrying as they seem?...
In fact, the most recent polling from the US – where scepticism about climate change has become a badge of honour for political conservatives – suggests a small but detectable upward trend in the number of people who agree that human activity is causing climate change. And in UK polls more recent than the BSA results, which were collected in 2010, levels of concern are once again increasing.
It is true that there is a large gap between public doubts expressed about the reality of climate change and the weight of the scientific evidence...http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21289-climate-change-drops-off-hot-topic-list.html
digenes
I'm puzzled. Weak? Explain, please. You've lost me here.
15 Dec: BBC: ‘Climategate’ inquiry: Police raid West Yorkshire home
The inquiry started after emails from the university’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) were hacked in 2009…
The US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) studied every email that had been hacked at the Climate Research Unit, based in Norwich…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-16202580
amazingly, Reuters includes Disney video from Fantasia:
14 Dec: Reuters: Edward Hadas: Casting the runes on climate change
Something has gone wrong with global warming. It’s not that the world has stopped heating up. It’s that the anti-warming political movement, which seemed almost unstoppable when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, has stalled.
Last week’s United Nations climate change conference in Durban ended with little more than an agreement to talk some more about what to do next. Even that was too much for Canada, which has just said no to emission-reduction targets...
While only experts can judge the strength of the scientific evidence for man-made climate change, no technical knowledge is required to be troubled by the way the activists present their case. The willingness to describe knowledgeable opponents as “deniers,” a word previously used only for fantasists about Nazi atrocities, suggests a very unscientific attitude...
The “Climategate” emails show scientists so passionate about their beliefs that they are unwilling to brook opposition. Fervor seems to have led to overconfidence. The status of the claim that recent years have been by far the warmest in a millennium has been downgraded from certain in 2001 to likely or mistaken (depending on the expert consulted).
The activists’ excess of passion and certainly has led them to a dogmatic conviction that a radical policy — rapid and sharp reductions in carbon dioxide emissions — is required to save the world. Since industrial economies cannot yet function without using large amounts of energy generated by burning carbon, the anti-carbon prescription equates to a campaign against prosperity — tough on rich countries (too tough for Canada to bear) and practically a sentence of economic stagnation for poor ones.
Such draconian measures only make sense if global warming is exactly what devout affirmers say it is — hazardous, accelerating, man-made and about to go non-linear (science-talk for catastrophic). Otherwise, a more moderate strategy makes sense...
Why do activists show so little interest in such a sensible compromise? I blame the sorcerer’s apprentice. In the 1797 poem by J W Goethe (familiar from in the Walt Disney film Fantasia), this clever student is able to invoke — but not control — the magical-technological ability to turn a broom into a water-carrying machine. The man-made global warming activists tell a less poetic version of the same story. It goes like this: we have learned how to use the energy stored in the earth to serve our purposes, but do not know the spell which keeps the unleashed energy from destroying us — and we have no equivalent to the poem’s old master to rescue us from our carbon folly. Halfway countermeasures are likely to replicate the apprentice’s effort to stop the broom by splitting it with an axe — he ended up with two brooms and twice the trouble. Under the circumstance, moderation would be madness...
If climate change is to be taken seriously, the IPCC and UN conferences need to have less madness and more method.
http://blogs.reuters.com/edward-hadas/2011/12/14/casting-the-runes-on-climate-change/
typical of NYT, the “ribbing” link at the end of this piece links to HuffPo (in case u don’t want to go there). if u do click on the link, u will face a top story: “‘Skeptics Of Global Warming Are A Well-Funded Cult’” Nice.
15 Dec: NYT Green Blog: More Climategate Buzz
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Could the police be pursuing leads on several fronts, however?
Tallbloke also posted a copy of a letter that he said was from the United States Department of Justice and was forwarded to him by Automattic, the parent company for WordPress.com. Automattic is a company that hosts WordPress.com Web sites, including Tallbloke’s.
A spokeswoman for Automattic confirmed on Thursday that it had received “a preservation order” from the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, the police have been taking some ribbing online from folks who feel they have not done enough to catch the culprits who distributed the hijacked e-mails.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/more-climategate-buzz/
apologies for so many posts, but:
16 Dec: Independent: Steve Connor: Blogger's computer seized in 'Climategate' police raid
Norfolk Constabulary, which is leading the inquiry into the theft of thousands of emails from university computers, said nobody was arrested during Wednesday's raid.
"This is one line of inquiry in an investigation started in 2009," it said. A spokeswoman refused to say whether it was the first time computers had been seized during the two-year investigation...
The blogger – whose real name is Roger Tattersall – is a digital content manager at Leeds University. In an email to The Independent yesterday, he denied having anything to do with the hacking of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
"I am not the person who took the data and emails from the CRU," he said.
"I just happen to run a science blog which was the recipient of a comment containing a link to the second tranche of 'Climategate' emails.
"The three investigations in Britain were a joke. The Parliamentary Select Committee was told not to investigate the science because the other inquiries would. The Oxburgh inquiry was headed by a man who is part of the inner circle, as revealed in the emails. The Russell Inquiry thought the best person to ask which evidence they should consider was the person being investigated – Professor Phil Jones."...
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bloggers-computer-seized-in-climategate-police-raid-6277726.html
"The Norfork police really need a solicitor to explain what they are doing is pointless -- and probably illegal because they do not have material cause to do these searches." --Don Pablo de la Sierra
What? You've never heard of Post-Normal Jurisprudence?
Time to issue a code yellow derail alert.
BBD,
you either (deliberately?) answered the wrong question or misunderstood me.
I wasn't talking physics, but about these comments you made earlier in the thread.
"Jack Savage
Then someone made an unauthorised copy and made it public without permission. It's still misappropriation if not exactly theft ;-)"
"Either way, plod is after the perpetrator of those acts, not sceptics in general. Some people are getting over-excited."
Unless I am being more than usually dense you have answered a completely different question.
I ask this of anyone who says leaking information is theft. Do you regard leaking of information about your political/religeous/scientific/sporting "opponents" as theft in every case - yes or no will do.
In my opinion the answer has to be yes, if not then you work on dual standards.
From that Independent piece...
"The three investigations in Britain were a joke. The Parliamentary Select Committee was told not to investigate the science because the other inquiries would. The Oxburgh inquiry was headed by a man who is part of the inner circle, as revealed in the emails. The Russell Inquiry thought the best person to ask which evidence they should consider was the person being investigated – Professor Phil Jones."
Why Steve Connor included this I do not know, but actually it is a pretty good précis now in the public domain. Just a small positive from the episode.
"The three investigations in Britain were a joke."
If I might just re-jig that sentence a tad, imho it should go something like........................ the three investigations made Britain look [to the eyes of the world] like an international joke! - yes much better.
Jiminy:
Why Steve Connor included this? I can think of two reasons.
1) Tallbloke said it
2) Connor is a good journalist.
Connor finishes with UEA's reaction, exactly the same as the Guardian. But what precedes it in the two cases is as chalk and cheese. The Independent, living up to its name, provides the most potent statements from both sides and lets the reader make up their mind. The Guardian, living up to its name (but what is it seeking to guard us all from?), has this very strange paragraph precending the UEA quote:
If I was a global warming zealot and I loved the Guardian and its recent attempts to 'help out the police' by working out who FOIA is (as if the whistleblower isn't clean as a whistle legally anyway) ... I would be inclined to deduce, reading between the lines, that there had some friendly contact between the Guardian and the police (not that this has ever happened before, of course) since the paper talked to Roger, leading to plod seizing his computers.
The great thing about a free press, though, is that you find out who is really interested in the truth when the chips are down. Steve Connor has come up trumps here. And what a great summary of the Climategate inquiries. Congratulations Roger. More than a small positive.
Wot, like this?
"15 Dec: ScienceBlogs: Greg Laden: Computers of Criminal Cyber-Thieves Seized"
Does Tallbloke have a legal defence fund to help teach Laden about libel?
jorgekafkaza
What? You've never heard of Post-Normal Jurisprudence?
Touché.
I had an interesting conversation with a lawyer friend about this, and while what happened to Tallbloke can and does happen in the US, the case would quickly be thrown out of court. However, the authorities still do it to intimate people -- which may be the real motivation.
As for the law, in the US at least, he believes that there is no grounds for legal issues with regard to copyright (mainly because of "reasonable use" ) and theft because what was stolen? There remain issues of hacking. That is breaking into an "electronic device" (i. e. a computer server). While he does know the US law, he was not certain about UK law on the subject, but he assumes that it is about the same. In that case you really need forensic evidence that a person improperly broke into a system. This would include logs on the server as well as information stored on the computer used to do the break in. Perhaps it is this they are looking for.
However, if it turns out that the person who "distributed" the climategate emails actually had permission to access the server, then he saw no cause for legal action -- even if it turns out Tallbloke's computer are loaded with those emails because they could have been downloaded from many public sources.
The police would have to have solid evidence found on his computers that showed he broke into the servers for there to be a case.
So far, after all this time, I have not seen one word that the Norfork police found any forensic evidence that a break-in actually occurred. Perhaps they should be asked if they have. Not what they found, but if they found evidence of it. That might make an interesting FOIA. Of course, they will try to hide it behind "case in progress" rhetoric, but if they do that, it will only say that they don't have a clue (pun intended).
If one could identify all those who applaud Julian Assange's Wikileaks and all those who deplore the release of the Climategate emails I bet one would find a lot of the same people.