News: 'Climate Change Emails a Foreign Intelligence Hack'

The lead story on the Independent today: Former chief scientific advisor to the Blair government David King says that the climate change emails leak bears all the hallmarks of a foreign intelligence agency operation:

Quite simply, it's the sophistication of the operation. I know there's a possibility that they had a very good hacker working for these people, but it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people," he said.

More than 1,000 emails, and some 2,000 documents, were stolen from a university back-up server where remote access is difficult. This represents a small fraction of the total number of emails for the period from 1996 to 2009, suggesting they had been selected for the most incriminating phrases relating to possible scientific misconduct and breaches of the Freedom of Information Act. The leak of the emails in the weeks running up to the climate change conference in Copenhagen appeared to be carefully timed to destabilise the meeting.

He does not draw concrete conclusions about who might be responsible, but responding to the fact that the emails appeared on a Russian company's server he speculates:

"If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency," he said.

"If it was a maverick group then I suppose it could be the Americans, but I am hazarding a guess as much as anyone else. The only thing is, I've worked within government and I've seen this in operation," Sir David added. "It was a sophisticated and expensive operation. In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system which is a very likely source of finance. Right now, the American lobbyists are a very likely source of finance for this, so the finger must point to them," he said.