Great comment! There are so many important details which need to be kept in view to have a full picture of what’s gone on in this field. Mann and friends have long since resorted to simply making up their own ‘cover’ stories and hoping no one in the major media or science academies, etc. pays attention to all the discrepancies and misinformation.

I’ve saved the article; such items as the one you link from the Wayback machine should be saved/stored by as many ppl here as possible, and more bloggers reading this could blog about them in case they disappear even from Wayback (someone commented that if a website starts to block the robot.txt used by the Wayback machine then even previously archived articles will vanish as Wayback’s policy is to take that as a refusal to be archived at all, even retroactively).

On the early morning (sometime before 9:30 AM UK time (*)) of the November 20, Phil Jones gave an “exclusive” (phone?) interview to Ian Wishart of TGIF-magazine. AFAIK, this was actually the first Team response preceeding Gavin’s post by half a day. There are a number of things we can learn from this interview:
-technical: Jones immediately recalled splicing the instrumental temperatures to the end of the reconstructions but could not recall what he was hiding. He stated:

“They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores,and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”.

“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”

IMO this is important as the comment seems to indicate (at least to me) that he did not see anything wrong in combining the intrumental and proxy data the way he did in the WMO graph.
-As observed elsewhere, although Gavin had informed CRU (Jones) about the dossier already on Nov 17th, he had failed to notify Jones on what was actually in there!

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
“Have you alerted police?”
“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been
taken.”
Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.
“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me.They didn’t do that.”

- Jones found out about “release” on the morning of November 20th. It is easy to speculate (it would be nice to get a confirmation of this) that Jones had just arrived to office to find out that his emails were all over Internet, and then only minutes later Ian Wishart phones him. Anyway, it seems that during the evening/night 19th/20th (UK time) nobody bothered to inform Jones what was going on. Poor Phil!

“I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.”

-apparently IT department had changed all the passwords during the night, and Jones was unable to access his email. What did he do in this situation? He went to read ClimateAudit!

In fact,we were changing all our passwords overnight and I can’t get to my email, as I’ve just changed my password. I’ve gone into the Climate Audit website because I can’t get into my own email.

I wish my post later in the afternoon (UK time) helped him to recall the exact context for “hiding the decline”

(*) Based on the time stamp on this post assuming it’s in NZ time.

the archiving program called ZIP is not common in europe and not preferred by anybody who regularly transmits files or archives data.

The UEA has used ZIP in subsequent FOI releases.

There is one possible clue in the “FOI2009.zip” file that I do not think anyone has picked up on (other than the British authorities). I don’t recall reading elsewhere about the 5 hour GMT offset. The Guardian.co.uk
(Climate emails: were they really hacked or just sitting in cyberspace?) reports:

“Digital forensic examination of the archive of emails and documents suggests that it was first created around 30 September, and subsequently added to during October and finally in November – when one of Osborn’s sets of program code was added – just ahead of the full-blown leak.

Significantly, that analysis suggests that the archive was created on a machine running five hours behind GMT, which would put it on the east coast of North America.”

Earlier in this thread several people looked at the header information in the FOI2009.zip file, but as far as I can see, none ran the unix “zipinfo -v” command on the file which produces, in part:

=================================================
Archive: FOI2009.zip 64936854 bytes 4662 files

End-of-central-directory record:
——————————-

Actual offset of end-of-central-dir record: 64936832 (03DEDB80h)
Expected offset of end-of-central-dir record: 64936832 (03DEDB80h)
(based on the length of the central directory and its expected offset)

This zipfile constitutes the sole disk of a single-part archive; its
central directory contains 4662 entries. The central directory is 502808
(0007AC18h) bytes long, and its (expected) offset in bytes from the
beginning of the zipfile is 64434024 (03D72F68h).

There is no zipfile comment.

Central directory entry #1:
—————————

FOIA/

offset of local header from start of archive: 0 (00000000h) bytes
file system or operating system of origin: Unix
version of encoding software: 2.3
minimum file system compatibility required: MS-DOS, OS/2 or NT FAT
minimum software version required to extract: 1.0
compression method: none (stored)
file security status: not encrypted
extended local header: no
file last modified on (DOS date/time): 2009 Jan 1 00:00:00
file last modified on (UT extra field modtime): 2008 Dec 31 21:00:00 local
file last modified on (UT extra field modtime): 2009 Jan 1 05:00:00 UTC
32-bit CRC value (hex): 00000000
…
===================================================

The important part is the:

file last modified on (DOS date/time): 2009 Jan 1 00:00:00
file last modified on (UT extra field modtime): 2008 Dec 31 21:00:00 local
file last modified on (UT extra field modtime): 2009 Jan 1 05:00:00 UTC

Even though the last modified time was overwritten or forced to “2009 Jan 1 00:00:00” when zip was run, zip also added in the UTC time offset which is stored elsewhere in the unix system and that shows a 5 hour offset which is constant throughout the FOI files. (The second line which shows a 8 hour offset ‘2008 Dec 31 21:00:00 local’ is the offset where the zipinfo command was run [my computer - and I am in that time zone].

Now, while it is possible that the person doing the zip was savvy enough to know this and intentionally set a bogus time zone on the unix machine prior to zipping to intentionally cover his/her tracks, it is also possible that the FOI file was actually zipped on a unix machine in the EST time zone.