Friday
Nov182011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Norfolk sleeps
Nov 18, 2011 Climate: CRU With the second anniversary of Climategate on hand, a week or two ago I asked Norfolk police for an update on the status of their investgation.
Apparently they have no further comment to make at this time.
Update on Nov 18, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
Leo Hickman tweets that he has phoned them again and he may have persuaded them to say something.
Reader Comments (40)
They are waiting for it to become a cold case.
I bet they solved it early on, but were sat on as it's an embarrassing inside job.
More likely they found "no crime committed" (i.e. a leak) but were told simply to never close the case, to give the illusion that a master hacker is still being sought.
They're waiting to get the lawnmower fixed. The long grass it was kicked into is too deep, and they can't find it anymore.
parody on/
Maybe the Norfolk Police are too busy for UEA CRU investigation work right now because they might be helping Cuccinelli's investigation into UVa/Mann and assisting USA police with the PSU scandal investigation? Norfolk Police are probably showing professional courtesy to their hearty American cousins.
parody off/
John
I think this is one of those rare issues where there is agreement between alarmist conspiracy theorists and sceptical pragmatists. There really should be a get together and really push as one for an answer here!
Ah, old father time!
It is said that time can play tricks on a memory, especially useful when the objective is to “hide the define”.
It took me a year to send in my response to their original letter of enquiry. I had hopes that this would be the final piece in the jigsaw that would allow them to finally solve this heinous crime.
Apparently not. The problem appears to be intractable.
How can they get anywhere when the U.E.A. admin is snowed under by multiple F.O.I.A.! Its the sceptics fault for wasting their time! Sarc off......
steveta_uk I bet they solved it early on, but were sat on as it's an embarrassing inside job.
If computer information is released by someone with authorised access to the system, then no crime has been committed. (It may be a disciplinary matter with their employer but that's a different thing.) I imagine they quite quickly concluded that no law had been broken.
Even more significant is the absence of anything from Norfolk Plod on investigation of death threats. The coppers treat such threats seriously.
No investigation = no such threats were made = fabrication by UEA spin doctors.
Leo Hickman tweets that he has been fobbed off with similar responses too.
I've FOI'd for their expenditure by month so we can assess the level of activity.
Isn't asking the Norfolk police on the state of the Climategate investigations analogous to asking Mr. Putin about the state of the inquiry on the death of Alexander Litvinenko?
Perhaps the result of the investigation would be more explosive to the climate community than the data released, let's imagine there was more than one climategate file waiting to be released and the investigation would have to submit these into the public record as evidence.
If Norfolk's finest plus the National Domestic Extremism Team can't resolve what must be one of the least complex computer "crimes" if crime it was then how can we expect any computer "crime" to be resolved?
Surely the inability of our law enforcers to resolve what is a very minor incident should be raising security concerns at the highest level?
I'm waiting for the investigation to get to UCOS, it will make a cracking episode of New Tricks.
It strikes me that no reference is made to:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/07/comprhensive-network-analysis-shows-climategate-likely-to-be-a-leak/
It strikes me that no reference is made to:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/07/comprhensive-network-analysis-shows-climategate-likely-to-be-a-leak/
Bish,
Thanks for asking the anniversary question. I meant to ask again but forgot.
'Apparently they have no further comment to make at this time.'
Was that their answer - or have they yet to answer?
[BH adds - that was their answer (or words to that effect)]
Bishop Hill I've FOI'd for their expenditure by month so we can assess the level of activity.
Maybe it's like the Nimrod project at Macaroni's in the 80's - any project that had overspent its budget simply used the Nimrod number as an inexhaustable (and unscrutinised) resource.
Nov 18, 2011 at 9:43 AM |
I think people give Norfolk Police too much credit if they think there is a deliberate cover up / collusion with UEA in the investigation.
More likely it is the same response the Metropolitan Police had to the recent riots / looting in London. Stand aside and don't get involved in anything which is likely to be tricky or create work.
Don't you think they will have found that it was an inside job and then asked UEA if they wanted to press charges? After all the spin, disinformation and hubris coming from UEA, and Acton in particular, it would be far too much of a climbdown for UEA and their friendly journalist buddies to have the real perpetrators identified publicly. Much easier to let prevail the instant story they concocted that it was external hacking by sinister agents (as whipped up by David King), especially those nasty climate sceptics, than to allow the truth to emerge.
It seems to me that we need a friendly MP to ask the question in the house.
Norfolk plod's IT investigations unit is out to lunch.
And the streets of Norwich, it's a jungle out there man.
ScientistForTruth Don't you think they will have found that it was an inside job and then asked UEA if they wanted to press charges?
As I said previously, if it were someone within UEA who had authorised access to the system, then an unauthorised release of information held on a system would not have been illegal.
One thing is clear, whoever released the info had a higher level of IT competence than was typical in UEA.
Is it true that there are no statue of limitations in UK that apply to these type of (possible) crimes (breaking into someone's computer system etc.)? If so, good for Norfolk police, for instance in Finland maximum penalty for breaking in a computer system is a year in prison. Such crimes expire in two years time.
Call me suspicious if you will, [but call me :) ] - has anyone had the sense to interview 'Mr Conscience' - Mike Hulme? I only enquire because whistle-blowers always have a real or imagined moral imperative. And he had all the access.
Unless of course you think another chat with Briffa is in order [because sometimes whistle-blowers have an 'angry imperative']
just wonderin'
You recently discussed David Adam's article in Nature that misrepresented "Hide the decline". In that article, written a year ago, Adam says that
It seems that this 'evidence' has still not 'emerged' a year later. One wonders who was the source of this claim.
Paul, that comment has puzzled me as well.
Either David Adam's knows something, which begs the questions: "How?" and "Have Norfolk police been informed that there is a leak in an ongoing inquiry?", or alternatively David Adam's doesn't know, in which case he is, at best, a fantasist or, at worst, a liar.
He should reveal his sources or be reported to Norfolk police as being party to leaks from an ongoing criminal investigation. In light of the NOTW phone hacking scandal you would think the police would want to be on top of this kind of thing.
Martin, that's the point. They have to sit on the open investigation forever rather than admit that no crime took place, because if it was known who released the data, UEA would be severely embarrassed.
We may never know for sure, but look out for the leaked email from Phil Jones which says -
"......and I've used Mike's dustbin trick to 'hide the evidence'"
Yes, this investigation is almost as quiet as the one into Geoff Huhne's alleged speeding offence!!
The investigation is proceeding at the same rate as Essex Police's about Chris Huhne's driving.
The Himalayan glaciers will be long gone before a resolution is achieved...
If either UEA or Norfolk's finest had any evidence that it was an illegal "hack" then we would have heard about it in spades via an Outside Organisation coordinated publicity event of the year.
Maybe they are saving it for Durban?
Well, obviously their Crime Solution Models (CSM's) don't have any short-term skill, but become more useful over long time scales.
Andrew
I wonder if they interviewed ZED, who claims to know what really happened.
We probably have another 28 years to find out then why it was not in the public interest to reveal the results of that investigation.
An interesting call by Paul Dacre (the Daily Mail editor), in the capacity of the chairman of an independent inquiry, for the halving of the 30 year time limit, in the light of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, announced at around the time of the commencement of the Norfolk investigation..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/29/30-year-rule
There is a saying here:
'NFN = Normal For Norfolk'
this may yet apply to UEA - CRU as well...
Apart from the David Adam claim (to which even Revkin gave little credence), one of the "poor Phil" journal spreads around this time last year quoted him as saying 'we don't know if there will be more emails released' (or words to that effect).
Considering how incredibly slow Norfolk's finest were on the uptake (e.g. not even interviewing WUWT's ctm until late February last year), I wonder if they're waiting for an additional release so that they can "more credibly" spin the pin to an external source?!
Ironies inside ironies here. Fear holds back revelation of this hero's name, yet that player holds trumps.
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I still say that Climategate might have just been IT incompetence
The files first appeared via a web domain tomsc.ru but I was struck by how that is only a typographic error away from toms.cru.
Now suppose someone was trying to move some files off the main computers onto an other CRU computer - let's hypothetically say to move them away from prying eyes - and they just happened to juxtapose sc.ru for s.cru ...