It’s not as exciting as the whole ‘hackage’ story… but… the global surface temperatures after March have disappeared from some links atHadly. Here’s a screenshot of the temperatures for one of the data sets:
Are they being revised? Has Hadley discovered some major data quality issue? Presumably we’ll soon learn.
Maybe a data quality issue is “expected” in light of recent data leakage.
They are running on an emergency web-server today. Trying to sort out the hacking I guess.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
“This website is currently being served from the CRU Emergency Webserver.
Some pages may be out of date.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.”
Ahhh– So the rell back to March could be related to the hacking. Interesting theory!
If you read through the mails you will find places where CRU and GISS discuss the releasing of their data, differences, jones is critical of Giss.
Giss and CRU are not indpendent. You will even see mails where they recruit support from Cru to give the appearence of “independence”
Could it be they are pulling a backup from a point they feel is before their system was compromised? Perhaps they think the mole started working for them in April?
They would be bringing parts of their system up to date as they have time to check them out.
Just a guess.
Well then again the FOI request hit CRU in May. And if you started putting things in your emails that you particularly regretted in May, restoring to late March early April would make those bad bad emails go away.
Then all you’d have to do is have an accident with the backups that would otherwise bring you up to November. This has to be done soon before a judge gets involved or it is BIG TROUBLE !
Last, blame the failure of the recent backups and loss of bad bad emails, on the cracker making you go into emergency mode and play the victim. Poor CRU!
It would only work if you also send out a hit team to off the cracker and bag the rest of the emails. So cracker, pay attention. More than just billions may be on the line :).
Bob Koss (Comment#23929) November 20th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
It’s possible that the person compiling the FOI folder stuck it on the web server. That would explain
a) the appearence of this as a FOI folder
b) the installation of an emergency server.
John.
As steveMc details he had an FOI appeal decided on Nov 13th.
The last email was from Nov 12th.
Steven,
I read that on CA and think Steve has got it right. So that speaks to the motivation of the whistleblower. Perhaps the last straw?
CRU got a FOI request on May 5th from David Holland. Trying to figure out how to handle that one may have got a few people at CRU in hot water via their emails. The backup came from before April 17th.
Maybe the folks at CRU are worried not only about what the hacker took out, but are asking themselves whether he/she put stuff in as well.
In other words, one could consider the whole CRU database as compromised, until they re-run their models to generate the same results as before.
Hopefully they took backups somewhere along the way.
I don’t think this is a cracker. The work environment inside CRU must have been hell. If you read the emails, you can guess the staff abuse.
Perhaps at some point party loyalty was not strong enough and the FOI requests became too compelling.
As for the CRU database being compromised, the Harry_Read_Me file indicates that data retention was not enough of a priority for many years and much data was lost or destroyed. Perhaps the result of abrupt staff turnover?
By the way, the type of programming being done over at CRU went out with punched cards and it would have been bad practice even then. I pity the poor IT guys that kept this beast alive.
Everything points to this being a whistleblower and probably an insider. Deep CRU.
John G. Bell,
I don’t think the person at CRU was a cracker. They may have attempted to crack at RC.
My pet theory is disgruntled graduate student, post doc or IT worker who felt ill treated and who methodically collected information from the inside. Once they had it, they probably did try to upload to RC, but, having poor cracking skills, failed. Afterwards, the posted at WUWT and Jeff Ids.
Oddly, if I had been them, I would have picked this site or CA not WUWT. The reason: I don’t moderate and Steve only moderates by “Zamboni”. (That said, maybe they tried and my spamfilter kicked out the .ru web address. I think I actually do have certain countries hard coded into SpamKarma!)