CRU Hack One Year Later: Inside job ruled out – Investigation Continues November 16, 2010

Nature has done an admirable one-year anniversary follow up on the CRU hack affair. The article is long, but this piece jumped out at me:

“.. More certain is the conclusion that the hack of the server was a sophisticated attack. Although the police and the university say only that the investigation is continuing, Nature understands that evidence has emerged effectively ruling out a leak from inside the CRU, as some have claimed. And other climate-research organizations are believed to have told police that their systems survived hack attempts at the same time.”

One of the least commented-on mysteries of this affair, is why so little attention has been paid to who the hackers were, and what were their motives. The right wing noise machine has successfully propagated the “gate” suffix in the referencing the event, but in the original “gate” event, Watergate, the investigation focused on the burglars, not the victims. It’s a testimony to what’s happened to our media that the idea of crime and punishment have been turned on their head, and truth tellers become targets of journalists, instead of the criminal perpetrators.