Just thinking. You got an rejection to your FOI request and CRU argued that reason you were denied was as follows:
CRU had confidentiality agreements in place and they might harm international relations and their ability to get data.

But now you know that Jones et al met with the FOI office and explained to them that CA was an evil place full of nasty people. Hmm. Sounds like the basis for some further legal action

This is my first try at posting on your site and down at a level even I can understand.

FOI theory;
This theory has already surfaced in Australia but sorry! I don’t buy it Charles.
If it was a prepared file to cover the anticipated FOI request and then left lying around as superfluous after the FOI mob were conned into rejecting the request, why is Jone’s mail which is more or less crowing over how the FOI request was rejected, included in a FOI file that should have been well wrapped up before the FOI request was rejected.
And FOIA file. Note the “A”. Is there a “B” and maybe even a “C” file still to come as suggested by the original releaser.

The “Hacker” was obviously quite familiar with the UK FOI process as well. It was not in any way a random hack.
He also appears to be very familiar with all of CRU’s internal coding practices and e-mail programs.

For ten years of e-mails from a group that relies extensively on e-mail to move their numerical data around for which e-mail is ideally suited, that 1000 odd number of mails expanded to perhaps some 3 or 4 thousand with all the replies is just a drop in the bucket over ten years.
That’s only 400 or so mails a year from the entire “in ” group and in the numerically and statistically based climate business and personnel spread over a couple of continents that does not compute.
My guess is that there are a lot more e-mails out there as promised by the hacker.

Jones figures prominently in most or nearly all of those mails and may be the target of the whole hack.
Mann may be a secondary target but as his reputation is already somewhat on the knife edge he will go down with Jones if that is the object of the hack.

The e-mails on their own are almost enough to destroy Jones and even CRU but he will get a lot of sympathy as a target so another strategy was added to reinforce the perceptions arising from the e-mails.
Reams of Code are also included in the hacked files.
Why go to this trouble?
The reaction of a number of financial industry coders on their blog thread, Market Ticker Forums, coders on whose code billions of dollars may be at stake, were to say the least, appalled, caustic, sarcastic and just plain totally disgusted at the standard of the so called coding by the CRU crew as exhibited in the “hacked” file.
Other coders who have looked at the files are expressing surprise at the deliberate coding for biases that are built into the code and notated in the code by the CRU coders.

Jones is head of the climate outfit CRU that creates this coding and the results that come from this appalling quality code is promulgated as the highest standards of global temperature data analysis.
Lousy, biased and just plain appalling standards of coding under the Jones stewardship of CRU and one of the two major players in the global surface station data analysis and in the analysis of climate temperature proxies will be laid sooner or later, as head of the CRU, at Jones feet.
That aspect has a good chance of getting the professional climate researchers upset particularly when they realise that the basic assumptions and data that their work is based on may have been corrupted by bad initial data coding originating in the CRU and also from CRU origin data in the IPCC. data base.
Their research work may turn out to be near useless!
Another nail in Jone’s stewardship of the CRU.

Timing is amazingly coincidental; Just long enough before Copenhagen to allow it all to sink into the public perceptions that CRU was a disaster and just in time to place Jones, head of CRU and Mann and a few others in the spotlight as being responsible for this whole debacle and all this just before Jones, Mann, Briffa and etc would have been hailed by the big boys of the Global Warming ideology and the environmental remoras of Copenhagen as the most significant climatologists of the century.
Coincidental or has somebody cold bloodingly calculated this hack release timing?

No personal details as that would have backfired badly in a personal revenge attack. In a random hack there would have been a large number of personal details in those e-mails and in a personal, emotionally driven attack those personal details would have been highlighted.
Did not happen!

To me, more and more it is looking like a long term professional revenge attack where the hacker is emotionally well controlled and is going about this in a very systematic manner along the lines; “revenge is best served cold”.
The alternative is a principled CRU insider who is going to a lot of very carefully controlled trouble to get this right.

The data and coding in the file / files yet to come may have been collected, combed and sorted over quite a period and may also have been cached on a secure outside server for release when required.
Not so hard if the hacker is working out of house on occasions and if an IT professional inside CRU he may well have had access to all the pass words.
A hack attack would be a good cover . A multiple hack attack would provide ideal cover as the “hacker” rushed to the rescue and stopped the hack in it’s tracks. Not hard when you know the timing and form of the attack.

And did those Russians ever see the color of their money and for what and how much!
Russians still want to be amongst the biggest players on the global scene and in climate research also, so eliminating CRU which holds different views on the future global climate temperature trends to the Russians by providing a platform for a disgruntled employee with a secure sever network and a little help along the way would likely materially assist their own ambitions and without any risk to them at all.

All guess work but the implications of this, particularly the code release, when the professionals get their teeth into it, may be very profound.

Obviously such a string might have pulled other threads as well but it might provide a hint as to the origins of this file.

Thanx Chris! Now I gotta clean my keyboard….
LMFAROTFP!

If this is what they would be required to release then it would certainly be something they would want to fight. Plenty of ammo there.

What I think the skeptics should be focusing on right now is that once again their statements are being proven right. Skeptics predicted cooling. Skeptics have been claiming biased science and manipulated data by the alarmists. Skeptics have been saying they are shut out of the review process and publicly scorned for their views.

I’ve been involved in research projects and mingling with competitors promoting their differing theories and methods – but I never pondered hitting them! I may have been intrigued or amused by their ideas but this anger being expressed is what alarms me.

The use of a turkish computer would seem to imply that this upload and hack was not solely a whistleblower act, but one that involved more sophisticated knowledge. If SM or JeffID want to share the IPs associated with the comments on their sites, I’ll be happy to post the IP address that was used to compromise RC.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/comment-page-3/#comments

If there is an investigation, Gavin would be compromising it at the least, and at the extreme interfering with it by asking and posting this information. I personally do not believe that he was hacked. He is just trying to get the IP address from either JeffID or Steve. Sorry, I’m not buying it.