It isn’t a good time to be a blogger in search of the truth.
Police have raided the home of a blogger in Norfolk, the home of the man behind Tallbloke’s Talkshop. They removed two laptops and an adsl (broadband) router.
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| Ok, it was only 6, not 600 raiding Tallbloke’s home! |
Some might argue that his only crime was that of being a sceptic about Climate Change, but he is also ‘blogger zero’ when it comes to the recent tranche of ‘Climategate’ emails being released to the world.
The original emails were lifted in 2009 from a server at the University of East Anglia, and 1,000 of them were released which showed those involved in supposed climate research colluding together to silence others, and to fiddle with the figures until the required results were achieved. It is from this first set that the much coined phrase “Hide the decline” was derived, as hiding the decline in global warming was an essential part of ensuring the scare story remained, well, scary.
Then last month a further 5,000 emails were released. That’s two years after the original 1,000. Even more horror was revealed, with conspiracy to silence papers that were being published with counter results to the science they wanted us to believe was ‘settled’, and attempts to get people fired so they could completely control the peer review process and squeeze out anything that wasn’t ‘on message’ to what they dubbed ‘the cause’ were just a small part of the confusion the emails revealed. They were even being told by Government representatives exactly what was required. Unbelievable!
The method of bursting the new set of emails into the public domain was simple. The files were uploaded onto an anonymous Russian server. Then links from somebody calling themself “FOIA2011” were left in the comments sections of various climate sceptic blogs around the world.
‘Tallbloke’ was the first to break the news, we speculate because of the time the ‘FOIA2011’ links were left. It was the middle of the night for the bloggers based in America and Canada.
So, this makes ‘Tallbloke’ “blogger zero” for what we assume is the latest part of an investigation into finding out who grabbed the emails in the first place and who is distributing them.
‘Tallbloke’ hosts his blog via WordPress.com and was notified by them some hours before, that they had given access to his data to the US authorities in response to a notice from the Department of Justice (the notice also wanted the same access to data relevant to the ‘Climate Audit’ blog and the ‘No consensus / Air Vent’ blog, both also hosted at WordPress). Then in came the 6 policemen (3 locals and 3 up from the Met in London) with a search warrant and they seized his laptops and router (why take the router?), effectively putting him offline.
Now, of course it is possible that ‘Tallbloke’ is actually ‘FOIA2011’, but I very much doubt it. I wonder if that’s what the police believe. ‘Tallbloke’ has said that he understands he’ll get his property back just as soon as they’ve cloned his hard drives. Hmmm. I wonder how many long months that will take!
You will probably notice that mainstream news media, especially the BBC, will keep very quiet about this to ensure ordinary people don’t get to find out what’s going on.
One has to wonder why they are taking this action this time around. There seems to be an added urgency to solving this one.
Some are speculating that it is the as yet unrevealed contents of the third set of emails that are the most damning and causing the most panic. These have only been released into the blogging world as a highly encrypted zip file. Without the key, it could take a million years to break into the file.
The key is in the head of whoever ‘FOIA2011’ is. Should ‘FOIA2011’ meet with an ‘accident’, decide to ‘commit suicide’, or just go off the grid before he can reveal the key to anybody else, then of course, the secret of that third tranche of Climategate emails remains lost forever.
Now that wouldn’t be good for the freedom of information and the pursuit of truth, would it?
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