“AN Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.
I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something…”
Read more here: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/
And some context follows from ianl8888…
“THE person who is dumping Climategate email tranches onto the net is known by the acronym FOIA (he chose this). The CG1 tranche appeared in November 2009, just before the Copenhagen Festival of Light; the CG2 tranche appeared in November 2011, just before the Durban Festival.
Tallbloke (whose machines were confiscated by the Norfolk police for a 90 day period) runs a climate blog. FOIA posted a comment with a download link on Tallbloke’s blog. The download link was for the CG2 (Climategate 2) email tranche. To my knowledge, 2 other blogs were also recipients of a comment + CG2 download link.
Norfolk police had a warrant to “search and seize” Tallboy’s machines. In the end, they took 2 laptops and a router for the 90 day period of the Warrant. The intention, according to the Police comment, is to clone the discs and then examine for service logs etc to try and trace FOIA (what on earth they thought his router would tell them is beyond me; perhaps it was charged with trafficking in stolen goods)
The problems with this are many and obvious, but the essential point of trying to trace FOIA this way has no hope because Tallboke’s blog runs off WordPress (common to blogs) so any real FOIA trace can only be found in WordPress’ server logs in the US. The FOIA comment + download link had as an email return a Russian server (as did the CG1 dump)
WordPress (US) had been requested by the US DoJ (Dept of Justice) to “freeze” all server logs covering the period when the CG2 comment + link was dropped. Again, these logs will only return the address of the Russian server – which has been known since Nov 2009.
Tallbloke (who has a daytime job at the University of Leeds) is not accused of, or charged with, anything. But the greenie gutter press (eg The Guardian) have smearily reported this as if he was. As one consequence of gutter press reporting, Tallbloke’s job is on the line.
Other concerns are that the police may “find” things on the discs, or when the discs are finally returned, Tallboy may “find” things on them.
Make of it what you will. This post is to put facts out there in an effort to avoid the usual arm-waving smears. My real comfort here is that such ham-fisted policing after 2 years, means that FOIA is still as far away from them as ever. But the concept of police search & seizure because someone else unknown to you drops a comment on your website is not a storm in a teacup. This could easily happen to Jennifer here.
Cohenite has made some comments elsewhere on what he sees as the legal situation here in Australia. Current, analagous situations are the Age dustup in Melbourne over leaked information from the ALP headquarters; and Wikileaks. My prediction here is that people will cherry-pick their “moral” stance according to their bias … eg. Assange is a hero, but Tallbloke deserves everything that happens to him.”
Thanks Ian.
And in my opinion this is a big deal, not so much that they have hassled Tallbloke, but what it signifies in particular that the US and British police can’t find my hero ‘FOIA’.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Watts maybe overplaying this, Bishop Hill seems to think its a storm in a teacup.
It will only be a storm in a tea cup if they definitely didn’t copy the hard drives of his various confiscated computers.
If he did something unlawful they should charge him, if not they shouldn’t be snooping into his private life, searching for information. Just think how any of us would feel after such an invasion of our privacy.
Why now and not 2 years ago?
I’VE MOVED AN EDITED VERSION OF THE FOLLOWING COMMENT TO THE TOP OF THIS THREAD… TO THE MAIN BLOG POST. JEN. 10AM QUEENSLAND TIME. DEC 17.
The person who is dumping Climategate email tranches onto the net is known by the acronym FOIA (he chose this). The CG1 tranche appeared in Nov 2009, just before the Copenhagen Festival of Light; the CG2 tranche appeared in Nov 2011, just before the Durban Festival
Tallboy (whose machines were confiscated by the Norfolk police for a 90 day period) runs a climate blog. FOIA posted a comment with a download link on Tallboy’s blog. The download link was for the CG2 (Climategate 2) email tranche. To my knowledge, 2 other blogs were also recipients of a comment + CG2 download link.
Norfolk police had a warrant to “search and seize” Tallboy’s machines. In the end, they took 2 laptops and a router for the 90 day period of the Warrant. The intention, according to the Police comment, is to clone the discs and then examine for service logs etc to try and trace FOIA (what on earth they thought his router would tell them is beyond me; perhaps it was charged with trafficking in stolen goods)
The problems with this are many and obvious, but the essential point of trying to trace FOIA this way has no hope because Tallboy’s blog runs off WordPress (common to blogs) so any real FOIA trace can only be found in WordPress’ server logs in the US. The FOIA comment + download link had as an email return a Russian server (as did the CG1 dump)
WordPress (US) had been requested by the US DoJ (Dept of Justice) to “freeze” all server logs covering the period when the CG2 comment + link was dropped. Again, these logs will only return the address of the Russian server – which has been known since Nov 2009
Tallboy (who has a daytime job at the University of Leeds) is not accused of, or charged with, anything. But the greenie gutter press (eg The Guardian) have smearily reported this as if he was. As one consequence of gutter press reporting, Tallboy’s job is on the line
Other concerns are that the police may “find” things on the discs, or when the discs are finally returned, Tallboy may “find” things on them
Make of it what you will. This post is to put facts out there in an effort to avoid the usual arm-waving smears. My real comfort here is that such ham-fisted policing after 2 years, means that FOIA is still as far away from them as ever. But the concept of police search & seizure because someone else unknown to you drops a comment on your website is not a storm in a teacup. This could easily happen to Jennifer here
Cohenite has made some comments elsewhere on what he sees as the legal situation here in Aus. Current, analagous situations are the Age dustup in Melbourne over leaked information from the ALP headquarters; and Wikileaks. My prediction here is that people will cherry-pick their “moral” stance according to their bias … eg. Assange is a hero, but Tallboy deserves everything that happens to him
This is a bit O/T but Anthony Watts has been appointed an expert reviewer for the IPCC AR5 report. Steve McIntyre was a reviewer for the previous AR 4 report./
Of course this may be a good thing or perhaps not, who knows. Probably better to be inside the tent than outside I suppose.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/16/the-ipcc-gives-me-a-shock/#more-53168
In the above post, I had the name Tallboy WRONG ! It is Tallbloke – apologies
Perhaps the only relevant (?) information missing above is an exchange with the police that Tallbloke reported after the event:
He says he refused to give the police his WordPress password on the grounds that the warrant was to search his premises, not his mind
Irrespective, this password is easily found with forensic IT
Interesting info from Christy and Spencer on the third of a century satellite measurement of temp, 1978 to 2011.
If you include volcanic adjustment the temp increase over that 33 period has been minimal and the deeper atmosphere has not increased as much as the science predicted it would.
Up to the 1997/98 super el nino the rise in temp was minimal as well.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
Ian with the 8’s
Don’t tell Pleecemin Plod how to find passwords – He’ll have nothing to do for 90 days and it will spoil all the fun.
Christy and Spencer deserve special recognition for their honest work on this.
Probably missed out on a lot of govt grants by being factual and non-alarmist.
@Ian Thomson
1) Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking of them as “PLOD”. They are most definitely not. The ant-terrorist police IT squad was engaged by the Norfolk Police in December 2009 in an attempt to find FOIA (we know that because Norfolk was invoiced by that squad and the invoice was extracted and publicised through, you guessed it, an FOI request !) – and that squad is most definitely not PLOD. I can tell them nothing about IT that they are not already 2 centuries ahead of me in. In early 2010, this squad impounded several UAE servers to try and trace FOIA
2) For those interested in what WordPress logs may be used for:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/what-the-fed-or-norfolk-constabulary-could-get-from-wp/
from Lucia’s Blackboard
She has done a very interesting job – and she is not telling PLOD anything that they do not already know. Rather she is educating people like me, who are ignorant of the detail but wish to know
Ianl8888; on CA I left this 2 comments which were in partial response to your comment which has disappeared and mine are now in moderation for some reason; in case you have not seen them:
“In Australia, as far as I know, the law is, as decided in a 2002 High Court case, that, at least in respect of defamation cases which can be of a criminal nature, an article posted on the internet is considered as published at the point where it is downloaded and read.
That being the case Australian law would apply to any such download as the CRU emails.
If England has equivalent laws then a US warrant would be superflous.”
“Not at all ianl8888; the 2002 case was a defamation case; that case will create precedence for other sorts of cases both civil and criminal, subject to intervening legislation.
The point is, anyone down-loading the emails in Australia will most likely be subject to Australian law, including any whistle-blower legislation; that may be qualified by international treaty obligations and direct and indirect pressure supplied by any interested foreign government.
Holding that final thought for a minute the question is, what foreign government is pro-AGW, is frustrated by hostile houses of parliament but would still be sympathetic to private entreaties to ‘do something about the emails’?”
@cohenite
Thank you for the reply
>the 2002 case was a defamation case; that case will create precedence for other sorts of cases both civil and criminal, subject to intervening legislation<
In other words, whatever Courts may choose to decide, whenever. Or a Parliament decides to censor, whenever. No surprises there, of course
My puzzle was over how the CG1 and 2 CRU emails could be considered defamatory ? FOIA didn't just make them up, they're real
Are you suggesting that downloading them is somehow defamatory ? Or that this may break some as yet undefined law ?
For some reason of whimsy, SMc at CA has a predilection for disappearing pointed posts. He is truly excellent at analysing long context email trails from CG1/2, however, as well as exposing statistical shenanigans
As noted earlier, the US DoJ had required WordPress.com to freeze its' server logs for the period of interest (the DoJ Letter has been published on CA, amongst other sites). My *guess* is that this was requested by the UK authorities under Blair's anti-terrorism Treaty. It seems that CG1 caught them unawares because this wasn't done back then
To understand what is at stake here, there are some Google assignments. First you must learn about the Rio treaty which you can learn about by googling “Sustainable Development”
Once you are through with that you might want to google that phrase in conjunction with your local state/province/county/parish/ whatever.
Then google “Education for Sustainable Development” to learn what prompts public school teachers to send their children to private schools.
Then google “”Agenda 21” “sustainable development”
Now look and see if you have an “Agenda 21” organization in your local area.
Finally, look up “Precautionary Principal” “Sustainable Development” and you will learn a very interesting fact and what all of this climate change and IPCC and UNFCCC business is all about.
So … if the IPCC assessment reaches consensus that it is PLAUSIBLE that CO2 emissions COULD be a threat to the environment, that is all the UN needs in order to take action against CO2. They do not need to establish that CO2 *is* causing any harmful change to the environment. They do not need to establish cause and effect and they do not need to worry about scientific uncertainty. Under the “precautionary principal” they can take action.
So … people are wasting their time trying to argue the science. It doesn’t matter. You can prove that it isn’t warming at all, it doesn’t matter. Until the IPCC says that it is not likely that CO2 emissions will cause any adverse impact on the environment, the UN is free to waste our money and the UNFCCC is free to issue ridiculous policy recommendations and countries who have “internationalized” their environmental policies in lock-step with the UNFCCC are in many cases required by law to adopt those policy recommendations.
George Orwell would be proud.
You could absolutely prove tomorrow that the Earth is absolutely NOT warming and it wouldn’t make one iota of difference because CO2 *could* make it warm, maybe, if we pumped enough of it into the atmosphere and that’s all they need.
Learn more about Agenda 21. Learn what they have in store for you. Learn about Education for Sustainable Development and get your kids to a private school before it is too late.
These people believe that education is unsustainable. Highly education people make more money and buy more things and lead a more unsustainable lifestyle so education is unsustainable. The dumbing down we have been seeing in the schools is intentional. Too many people knowing too much are difficult to manage. Stupid people will generally do as they are told.
Seriously, don’t take my word for it. Look it up yourself.