Bishop Hill Speechless
Dec 20, 2011 Climate: CRU Steve McIntyre points us to email 3939, which frankly leaves me speechless:
cc: Keith
date: Mon Oct 12 12:07:03 2009
from: Tom Melvin
subject: Keith Email
to: Mike
Mike,
For Keith's Email :
1. Copied the full C:\Eudora directory to my portable.
2. Deleted the 12000 temporay .gif files from C:\Eudora\Embedded.
3. Copied 3.5 gig of attachments (1 year or older) from C:\Eudora\Attach to C:\OldAttach - this will need to be copied back to his PC
4. He is left with a 1.5 gig C:\Eudora directory on my portable which can be copied back to his PC and readily be moved from PC to portable etc.
5. When using my portable (via yellow cable (in office) or various WiFi networks) Keith logs in to VPN.
Tom
PS. I need to take my portable to a conference w/c 26th Oct
Strangely, the identity of "Mike" is not clear from the email in question. This message is dated just one month before Climategate.
Reader Comments (72)
Re Don Pablo
VPN makes sense in an academic environment. Students or visiting academics wanting access would make trying to segment by VLAN more complicated and harder to administer. Leaving the network insecure and using VPNs for trusted users would simplify that, and the reviews showed IT wasn't considered a high priority within CRU. Melvin's not an IT administrator, he is part of Briffa's research team.
I can imagine a scenario where Briffa was at home post-op, trying to connect and not able to get the VPN working. A common event in that sort of situation, especially with DIY IT is a quick fix and a hole in the firewall. Another common scenario is Melvin's laptop never made it back from the conference on the 26th.
It still smells like a leak to me though.
No half as slow as the reduction in global temperatures from your eyewateringly expensive and ineffective "energy" projects.
HIlarious Martin. What a wit you are.
Atomic Hairdryer
I have to agree with all your points. Clearly university IT is something of an ego contest between all sorts of self-appointed "experts" and undergraduate administrators. Swiss cheese security at best. I wouldn't be surprise to find out that the backup email server was being used to broadcast spam and store porn.
VPN is not secure. It is nothing more than tunneling and if you get into the network with a sniffer, you can read it all. I did it while at SGI 15 years ago, so I expect just about anyone to be able to do it today.
You are much better off using secure sockets, but I would guess that even that is easily broken today.
==
Oh, come on SR -- surely you can do better than that!.
Scot,
Not a whit you are.
This is still a cat and mouse GAME. Why?
Is SCIENCE supposed to be a cat and mouse game?
This was done so Briffa could see his e-mails. Some of this was in response to the Yamal stuff at ClimateAudit. Phil Jones's first response to ClimateGate was that this was about Yamal.
What is clear is that CRU staff were copying emails and attachments onto less secure environments, laptops, Home PCs, memory sticks, etc. They were also attempting to delete such material on CRU and UEA servers. Also more people, certainly CRU staff, possibly UEA admin staff and IT staff, were involved in these activities than first thought. All done just to avoid FOI requests or possible FOI requests. That is a criminal offence under FOIA.
A good read on Climate Audit by Steve McIntyre posted Dec 20, 2011 at 8:49 AM
Endora and the Briffa Attachments.
The post by McIntyre and link to earlier post sheds much light on the topic.
That is a criminal offence under FOIA.
The e-mail that is the subject of this thread provides no evidence whatsoever of any malpractice in any shape or form. Those who impute that it does either know little or nothing of how a campus-level, client-server e-mail system works or wish to draw dramatic but invalid conclusions from "evidence" that does not support them. Both, even.
Serious critics of the AGW agenda can reasonably be expected to apply to their political analysis of the phenomenon at least some of the intellectual rigour they rightly demand of the scientists who pursue it.
Sadly, I see little chance of that, one reason perhaps why we remain largely isolated despite encouraging circumstances.
DaveB
This is not circumstantial nor a flight of fancy. We know the circumstances and the background that led up to this email. We know the intent. We know also UEA/CRU broke the law in not dealing properly with FOI requests. What we did not know was the finer detail (how it was being done), the amount of information involved and the extent of this practice "to destroy, conceal or amend" information that was subject to FOI requests. Remember that none of the 'official' inquiries into Climategate investigated those aspects in any detail. CG2 is telling us more than Russell or Oxburgh ever did.
CG2 is telling us more than Russell or Oxburgh ever did.
I agree - and have said so here and elsewhere. For me, the only interesting thing about the whitewash "Inquiries" is that Russell works for ScottishPower and Roxborough is (or was) on the board of Falco Renewables, the UK arm of Italian company Falco. The latter is, or at least was at the time, suspected by many (including the Italian police who IIRC raided its HQ), of Mafia links.
No one in the "sceptic" milieu takes much interest in that or that ScottishPower funded the circulation of Gore's film in Scottish schools. To me, these are political "biggies": the "inquiries" were packed by vested interests - they were in short rigged before they started and inherently corrupt.
It is to the shame of the media that they ignored these facts. But it is IMHO a valid criticism of the "sceptic" blogosphere that it did pretty much the same. (Perhaps we'll get reasoned comment from that Scottish Renewables chap . . . Aye, right.)
OTOH, many do seem to get het up over UEA e-mails of limited relevance, perhaps because they're an easier target. Some are indeed shocking but this is emphatically not one of them. It tells us nothing except that some IT wallah called Tom told someone called Mike how to port an app and the data it had collected to a different machine and how to clean some of the crud from the data while he was at it. We have no idea whether it is even associated with CG2, let alone pertinent. The content suggests it isn't. Being very familiar with Eudora and having been involved a few years ago in installing and managing SME-scale e-mail servers, I've tried to explain why.
Were the e-mail to be produced in court as evidence to support a charge of UEA/CRU conspiracy to evade FoI rules, it would (rightly) be laughed out again in minutes. You can't say "We know they're a shower of bastards and this sounds a bit dodgy to me (though I know SFA about e-mail systems) so it's case proven and woe betide any wimp who thinks different".
It was perfectly in order for 'is Grace to cite the e-mail for comment. What I'm getting hot under the collar about is yet another round of unjustified speculation about its implications. It proves nothing. It is a damp squib, not a "smoking gun". Just for once, "Nothing to see, move along please" is the right response.
DaveB - I second eyesonu's comment. Are you following the thread at CA?
DaveB - I second eyesonu's comment. Are you following the thread at CA?
Sorry to be dumb but I can't find a comment by eyesonu over at CA. (I visit the site regularly but not obsessively.)
Dave B - I meant eyesonu above @ Dec 21, 2011 at 10:15 AM
At CA check Mosher @ Posted Dec 20, 2011 at 7:02 PM and subsequent.
not banned yet:
At CA check Mosher @ Posted Dec 20, 2011 at 7:02 PM and subsequent.
Ah. It's probably an age thing. I'm with you now. Yes, I'd skimmed that thread but hadn't read it with care. In any case, I'm still confused.
As I read it, Steve Mosher's note was talking about the location of the data that constituted the first Climategate leak, not about e-mails within UAE, the point at issue here. If I'm being thick, please say so.
Steve McIntyre notes that
I don't buy that. The e-mail is evidence that Keith's Eudora had filed a shed-load of attachments to e-mails sent to or copied to Keith on a machine somewhere or other. Along comes Tim to sort it out for whatever reason (presumably to move the Eudora install to a portable).So Tim tidies up the Eudora install by deleting the crud that accumulates in the "embedded" folder (trust me, it is all and only crud), by moving the older attachments into an archive (C:\OldAttach) which "will need to be copied back to his PC" and by leaving the newer attachments in the usual directory.
He reports what he has done, that the data are on his portable and that whoever is doing the necessary for Keith better not hang around as Tom is off on a jolly "w/c 26th Oct".
As that's a Monday, if whoever hasn't collected the file by 23 Oct, it's heading for hotter climes. But he's got two weeks to pop over and pick it up.
It's a piece of routine data maintenance that no self-respecting IT chap would normally bother with except that the chap who owns the data is reportedly ill. So Tom graciously does a completely routine housekeeping chore which probably takes him ten minutes tops. No files were deleted and there is nothing sinister to be seen about the "structure of the files" (whatever that means). End of story.
There is evidence that there were oodles of attachments in the folder (wow!) but none that any of them were pertinent, i.e. that they were, as Steve suggests, "the attachments".
If folk want to read more into this than that, well, I can't stop them.
@ DaveB
Read the lead post by McIntyre. He was requesting the attachments relating to Briffa.
Take a view of the overall picture and that would make the email relevant. Unless you have viewed the attachments, how would it be determined as to what was 'pertinent'. What would "information not held" imply? Read it again.
Read into it what you wish.
DaveB
I see what you are saying if this is all client side stuff then it looks like this just relates to an associate of Keith Briffa helping to transer only the email archive of Briffa.
There is no evidence of any access to the other CG emails here. The only crumb of interest I would take from it though is the curiousity that a fellow paleo-dendro author is doing all the leg work here and not an IT dept guy. It does seem like they have an easy going system relating to this kind of access. In my experience most IT depts would be very upset if this kind of thing was going on without them knowing, but that is private sector versus academia I guess.
Almost apropos of nothing when I was looking to see who Tom Melvin was I found this interesting snippet in a Tim Osborn email 5263
No further light is shed on what "loose cannon" means in this case though I'm afraid.
In the above post by me it should read "attachments relating to the Wahl-Briffa emails" rather than "attachments relating to Briffa."
"In my experience most IT depts would be very upset if this kind of thing was going on without them knowing"
Unless of course 'Mike' is in the IT dept and they are keeping him in the loop him here! Still, IT guys usually like to do it all themselves normally ;)
Read into it what you wish.
My point is that there is nothing to read into it. I don't doubt that all kinds of data-related chicanery at the CRU preceded the inquiries conducted by the power supply industry into the Climategate affair and suspect it continues unabated (though in more circumspect manner). I am familiar with much of the background material and thoroughly admire the conduct and tenacity of those who sought and seek to get to the bottom of the affair.
All I am saying here is that the e-mail to which His Grace drew attention does not provide, as many are suggesting, anything by way of evidence of that chicanery. Don't waste time on it. Plenty other CG1 and CG2 e-mails do but this one, in my opinion at least, doesn't. I said so on the basis of relevant technical knowledge and tried to explain why I drew that conclusion. The more the contrary is argued here, the clearer it becomes to me that I'm probably right.
The attachments sent to "Keith" might have included dozens (hundreds, who knows?) of files that ought to have either been made available under FoI, the object of ScottishPower's "Inquiry" into the affair or whatever but in the event have not been.
But a report (whether from IT support or a colleague is not clear) of routine housekeeping performed as a favour on a client-side PC proves nothing.
Er, it is clear, unless they have a guy called Dr. Tom Melvin in IT, who co-authors paleo-dendro papers with Briffa as a sideline ;)
Gattopardo:
Er, it is clear, unless they have a guy called Dr. Tom Melvin in IT, who co-authors paleo-dendro papers with Briffa as a sideline ;)
Point taken. Thanks.