What we know about the CRU attacker

[cite as: F. Bi. 2009. What we know about the CRU attacker. Intl. J. Inact., 2:99]

Kevin Grandia issues a challenge:

Who stole all this private data from [the Climatic Research Unit of] the University [of East Anglia] in the first place?

[...] Terry Hurlbut at the Examiner has a time line of the stolen data going public which is a good start. I am sure one of our intrepid readers will get to the bottom of this. Tell you what. I’ll race you.

Well, right now what we know is that the attacker

• is familiar with climate conspiracy theories;
• knows about how to upload a huge file to an incoming/ folder on a Russian server, tomcity.ru; and
• initially tried to get the information uploaded to realclimate.org.

Clearly not your usual “i r 31337 h4×0r u haz b33n pwn3d!!!!!!”, but other than that, there’s not a lot to go on in this case (at least for us). Perhaps the only useful lead is the initial attempt to upload to RealClimate; I’ve asked the RC folks if they can furnish any further details on it.

Update 2009-11-22: I forgot to mention one other thing we know:

• TrueSceptic reports over at Greenfyre’s blog that the e-mails in the .zip archive all have a modification time of 1 Jan 2009 00:00. Why the attacker felt compelled to doctor the file modification times is anyone’s guess.

We are going to be suppressed by the mainstream media

cite as: F. Bi. 2009. We are going to be suppressed by the mainstream media. Intl. J. Inact., 2:33–34

The poll to predict the take-home message of the upcoming ‘”2009 International Conference on Climate Change” is still running! Right now, the hottest predictions are “Fire James Hansen!” followed closely by “Japanese now dispute global warming!”

However, here’s a press release from the Heartland Institute web site which suggests that the conference’s centre of attention may turn out to be…

Nominations for ‘conference’ take-home message are now open!

cite as: F. Bi. 2009. Nominations for ‘conference’ take-home message are now open! Intl. J. Inact., 2:28–29

Yes, it’s less than 2 weeks before the Heartland Institute’s “2009 International Conference on Climate Change”, during which a few talking heads will prattle on and on about how this ‘global warming crisis’ thing is really a huge hoax perpetrated by crypto-Marxists to implement totalitarian rule or something, and 1,000+ people who can’t care less about the whole global warming ‘debate’ will be there just to enjoy the free catered food while pretending to listen to the speakers. DeSmogBlog has informed us that they’ll be going. :)

Now, if last year’s any guide, the ‘conference’ proper will be pretty boring, and the fun stuff will come in the form of media stunts and what not that occur outside of the presentations. Indeed, during last year’s gathering the right-wing blogosphere made a lot of noise over weatherman John Coleman’s appearance on the media, and the take-home message of the ‘conference’ practically became this:

JOHN COLEMAN IS GOING TO SUE AL GORE!!!!!!

So I guess we can expect there to be a similar take-home message for this year’s ‘conference’. But what will it be? Here are a few possibilities I came up with after, well, storming my brain a bit: