“AN Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.
I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something…”
Read more here: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/
And some context follows from ianl8888…
“THE person who is dumping Climategate email tranches onto the net is known by the acronym FOIA (he chose this). The CG1 tranche appeared in November 2009, just before the Copenhagen Festival of Light; the CG2 tranche appeared in November 2011, just before the Durban Festival.
Tallbloke (whose machines were confiscated by the Norfolk police for a 90 day period) runs a climate blog. FOIA posted a comment with a download link on Tallbloke’s blog. The download link was for the CG2 (Climategate 2) email tranche. To my knowledge, 2 other blogs were also recipients of a comment + CG2 download link.
Norfolk police had a warrant to “search and seize” Tallboy’s machines. In the end, they took 2 laptops and a router for the 90 day period of the Warrant. The intention, according to the Police comment, is to clone the discs and then examine for service logs etc to try and trace FOIA (what on earth they thought his router would tell them is beyond me; perhaps it was charged with trafficking in stolen goods)
The problems with this are many and obvious, but the essential point of trying to trace FOIA this way has no hope because Tallboke’s blog runs off WordPress (common to blogs) so any real FOIA trace can only be found in WordPress’ server logs in the US. The FOIA comment + download link had as an email return a Russian server (as did the CG1 dump)
WordPress (US) had been requested by the US DoJ (Dept of Justice) to “freeze” all server logs covering the period when the CG2 comment + link was dropped. Again, these logs will only return the address of the Russian server – which has been known since Nov 2009.
Tallbloke (who has a daytime job at the University of Leeds) is not accused of, or charged with, anything. But the greenie gutter press (eg The Guardian) have smearily reported this as if he was. As one consequence of gutter press reporting, Tallbloke’s job is on the line.
Other concerns are that the police may “find” things on the discs, or when the discs are finally returned, Tallboy may “find” things on them.
Make of it what you will. This post is to put facts out there in an effort to avoid the usual arm-waving smears. My real comfort here is that such ham-fisted policing after 2 years, means that FOIA is still as far away from them as ever. But the concept of police search & seizure because someone else unknown to you drops a comment on your website is not a storm in a teacup. This could easily happen to Jennifer here.
Cohenite has made some comments elsewhere on what he sees as the legal situation here in Australia. Current, analagous situations are the Age dustup in Melbourne over leaked information from the ALP headquarters; and Wikileaks. My prediction here is that people will cherry-pick their “moral” stance according to their bias … eg. Assange is a hero, but Tallbloke deserves everything that happens to him.”
Thanks Ian.
And in my opinion this is a big deal, not so much that they have hassled Tallbloke, but what it signifies in particular that the US and British police can’t find my hero ‘FOIA’.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.