Talk:Climatic Research Unit email controversy/RFC/CRU Hacking Dispute
There is disagreement over whether the claim by CRU that they were hacked, and an inconclusive statement by the police that they are investigating a "security breach" is grounds for writing the article as though it were a categorical fact that a hack occurred, despite some (also inconclusive) evidence to the contrary. Drolz (talk) 12:19, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
- The neutrality of this summary is disputed. See FAQ question 5.
Discussion by involved editors (long)
editThis long discussion has been collapsed in order to avoid deterring uninvolved parties from contributing
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On the other hand, the files could be leaked from inside without leaving a meaningful record at all. People are always telling me that "my email was hacked, blah, blah," and "my account was hacked, blah, blah," and it ALWAYS turns out to be a situation of them copying or moving files to a place that they forget about (ie. they lost the files,) or somebody in their very own household or office messing around with their computer, or employees messing with the server. Not ONCE in 15 years have I ever seen a case of someone "hacking" into a server or machine past a firewall and copying or deleting files. It's just not that common. The CRU is clearly using the term "hack" in the broadest sense to attempt to distract attention from the content of the files, and the crimes they themselves are implicated in committing. And crimes were committed here, if none other than blatantly attempting to conceal information in violation of multiple FOI requests. And now, I leave you with my IP address. 97.125.18.72 (talk) 09:58, 10 December 2009 (UTC) And, by the way, I highly resent anybody referring to "hacking" or "cracking" as "ambiguous terms."97.125.18.72 (talk) 10:06, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Tony, I didn't mention ANY technical details, for the sake of brevity. First of all, tunneling doesn't hide anything, it merely allows code to be encapsulated in order to run through machines with a different architecture, and open proxies don't prevent the need for logging into a server to obtain its contents. Doesn't it strike you as at all curious that nobody has mentioned any of this in their conversations with the media? Finally, I'm highly sought after in this state across several counties, and being self-employed, there isn't anybody to fire me. If someone thinks I'm not doing a good enough job they don't rehire me. It's not a problem for me. Sphilbrick, I agree, this shouldn't be about attacking the messenger. My point here is that it would be fairly easy for someone with full access to the CRU's servers to plug a thumb drive into any workstation and copy the FOI2009.zip file onto that, which seems to be what happened. After the files got into the wild, I have no doubt that Prof. Jones cried, "I've been hacked!" but an internal investigation probably very quickly determined that the files had been copied by one of the 4,000 or so other faculty and students who had access to that particular server. Time will tell. In the end, this isn't a story about "illegal hacking," though many people seem to be attempting to make it into just such a story. This isn't a case of Valerie Plame being outed as a CIA agent before the general public, where the exposure was the whole story. This is a story about professional integrity in academia, or lack thereof, and its implications in international relations and government. As a "hacking story," this story just isn't notable enough to stand alone. 97.125.18.72 (talk) 18:32, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Your comments are off-topic, and only serve to make you look petty. I'm trying to help make Wikipedia a more even-handed source for information here, and you are merely trying to create a distraction. Although I'm not surprised to see any individual take sides on this issue, it's sad to see Wikipedia as an institution taking sides. The heading of this section indicates that an editor requested comments, and I submitted some information from my experience dealing with customers for many years who claim to have been "hacked," and you are contributing nothing useful to this conversation. 97.125.30.93 (talk) 23:56, 10 December 2009 (UTC) The alleged death threats are not notable. Many death threats occur against public figures every day and only very rarely are notable enough to merit mention in Wikipedia, much less prominent place in the article. A related point: mention of alleged criminal events, for which investigations have only started, should be prefaced by "alleged" or similar wording. There are very good reasons newspapers use the term "alleged" if somebody has not in fact been convicted of a crime, some of them argued above. In the case of the alleged death threats and alleged hacking, nobody has even been arrested, for crying out loud, much less convicted. But Wikilawyers citing "alleged" as a "weasel word" apparently think its preferable to convict groups of people (such as climate skeptics, tarring them by alleged association with alleged criminal events) in Wikipedia before anybody has even been arrested, much less convicted, in a court of law. Flegelpuss (talk) 03:38, 11 December 2009 (UTC) Favor mentioning hacking: Some quick searches on Google News (articles only) indicate that most news articles are treating the hacking as a given on near-given. Our language and weight should reflect that. I can't find any evidence that many reliable sources are seriously questioning the notion that the information was hacked. MarkNau (talk) 23:17, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
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It is improper to describe this incident as a "hacking" when there has been no official confirmation that the UEA servers were hacked. The UEA and Real Climate are essentially the same organization. It is possible that a whisteblower could have had access to servers of both the UEA and Real Climate. Both organizations stand to be embarrassed should this prove to be whistleblower. Their opinion at this point in time is far from independent or objective. If this publication is serious about being seen as an unbiased information provider then it must not rely on the opinion of these two organizations. Call it hacking when it has been so confirmed. Until then, it is a security breach.SierraOneOneSeven (talk) 07:56, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
Comments by uninvolved editors
edit- Involved editors: in order to keep this section uncluttered, any comments you make here may be moved to the other section.
Comment by 67.70.42.202
editExtremely long discussion by 67.70.42.202 proposing to rename this article to Climategate and model it on Watergate scandal
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Article title is not appropriate The article title "Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident" is inappropriate for the information that nearly any person is likely to be seeking. Currently, this page is the top ranked page for 'Climategate' on a Google search. If it is possible, someone should look at the referral logs from search engines and determine if 'Climategate' is used significantly more often than other search terms arriving at this page. Certainly, if you have logs showing that people arrive here on the heels of a search for 'Climategate' ten times more often than any other, then you should at least create a 'Climategate' page describing Climategate as such rather than the particular partisan beast that you have in place. It is not clear that, as the title implies, a 'Black Hat' hacker was responsible for leaking this information. As someone involved in computers for decades, I find it highly doubtful that either a 'black hat' or a 'white hat' would have taken the care to remove personal messages from those Emails or have taken the time to assemble more than a decade worth of Email and documents from disparate sources. It seems much more likely that this was done at least with the aid of an insider who may have thought of themselves as a 'whistle blower'. Whatever the case, *how* the material was obtained is not its most salient feature (at least now) and it should not even be up front, let alone a part of the title. As it currently stands, the page title and opening paragraphs essentially read as:
Even if the above is true, it is not what all the fuss is about. Opening text is not appropriate As does the title, the opening paragraph is prejudicial in the extreme. It looks as though it might have been written as an apologia by the people under investigation. Here it is, as of this writing, along with my comments: As it stands:
Article content is extremely biased Analysis:
I hope that people can see the problem with the above. The opening line puts a 'spin' on this incident that does not exist elsewhere. It may have been a well-meaning attempt to counteract the 'bad vibe' of 'Climategate', but it is a bad idea. Besides, the 'Climategate' ship has sailed. That is what it is called. That is what people will be using to search for it. To the extent that 'Climategate' is prejudicial, the damage is done. Giving it a long-winded and misleading euphemism just confusing things unnecessarily.
This is currently the subject of an investigation. Precisely what happened has yet to be determined. To the extent that we can speculate what happened, the implied 'Black Hat' hacking would be a poor choice below:
That it may have been maliciously hacked by criminals is not definite enough to be categorically stated as a fact. It is not even likely enough to mention as a possibility. By the time you get to that, you would just be cluttering up the article with idle speculation. Even if we *did* know for sure that it was some mean spirited act of vandalism, that is not what is getting it the moniker of 'Climategate' and millions of pages on the Internet. Whether or not the people who took the data are black-hearted, ugly and vile-smelling is for the talk page or somewhere way down in the article.
Is it really relevant that all the people involved in disseminating this are not known at this time? This smacks of trying to paint the people involved as bandits. The 'anonymously' is prejudicial in this context, adds nothing important to the article and should be taken out. Although what was stolen should be mentioned, in this context it seems that it is being used as an intensifier to show what a dreadful crime it was. It seems to imply that somebody destroyed 13 years of somebody else's work.
Some of this may be of interest, but in the context of the opening paragraph, especially in the context of the balance of the material, it simply looks like a CYA press release from the University attempting to misdirect attention from the serious allegations of professional malfeasance and possibly criminal behavior. It does not belong in the opening paragraph. From the University's point of view and that of local police and that of the FBI this might be their only interest in this event. However, that seems unlikely given the severity of the allegations being directed at the enterprise that is discussed in the Email and indicated by the computer source code involved. Certainly, the public debate has not focused on details of how the information was obtained. The treatment of this article is not consistent with Wikipedia's otherwise excellent editorial work elsewhere. It is also not consistent with what is being discussed elsewhere. For instance, if a Google search for 'Climategate' is done, as of this writing, except for Wikipedia at the top, the first page of articles all call this event 'Climategate' (and they don't bother trying to name it anything else or euphemize it) and they focus on the substance of what makes this important. What makes this important is not that someone disseminated information from somebody's system without permission or that they are (or are not) 'bad', in violation of the law, motivated by pure evil or whatever. What makes this important is the substance of the Emails and documents and what they may indicate in terms of professional malfeasance, misuse of public funds, abuse of processes such as peer review and interaction with editors, criminal violations of the FOI laws and possibly enormous damages to the public trust in their institutions, in their area of study and science as perceived by the public generally. If it is indeed true that data was deliberately manipulated to create a scare that is causing policy makers to tax billions or trillions of dollars unnecessarily then this would be an enormous crime and extremely newsworthy on that score. This is really Not about some 'hacking' incident. It is about the information that was exposed. There is a precedent on Wikipedia for a better treatment I was wondering how this might be approached and it occurred to me that I should look at the entry for 'Watergate'. That page is called 'Watergate' and has the title 'Watergate scandal'. Presumably that article has been around long enough to represent the way such things are expected to be done on Wikipedia. I took the first couple of paragraphs for the Watergate entry and morphed the Climategate information to fit that mold. It seems to me much more fitting to take that approach. I would hope that someone with more wit would do a better job than I have, but even what I have done is vastly preferable to the current opening. The Watergate entry The 'template text' used from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate:
A sample new Climategate entry The 'target text' that would belong at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climategate
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.70.42.202 (talk • contribs) My first attempt at participating in a talk. My prior contributions to Wikipedia focus on non-controversial WWII order of battle topics. This is an important issue that divides along the lines of the anthropogenic global warming debate. Those who consider the science settled focus on the "crime". Those, like me, who consider the science open focus on the content. The current article leans toward focusing on the crime. To the extent that it looks at the data, it picks easy targets and makes superficial rebuttals. So, IMHO, it demonstrates a strong bias. I would be in favor of a title along the lines of the "CRU Data Controversy". My recommendation is to expand the focus on the data in this article and to move the discussion on whether it was hacked, leaked, or discovered to another article: the CRU Hack Controversy. The pros and cons of a hack verses a leak verses an advertant release are certainly worth of its own article. Rmonical (talk) 21:59, 20 December 2009 (UTC) |