The Climate Gate MO: UK Climate Hacking a Template for Russiagate

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

On the eve of a vitally important political event, a sudden release of stolen documents, provided to the press in a “weaponized” format, either with built in distortions, or with cherry picked phrases highlighted to create confusion and doubt.

Press cluelessly parrots set-up lines from unknown hackers.

Reuters:

French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team said it had been the victim of a massive and coordinated hacking operation which led to the leaking of hundreds of its internal documents just hours before the end of the official campaign.

It added that the documents only showed the normal functioning of a presidential campaign but that authentic documents had been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow “doubt and misinformation”.

“Their publication makes internal documents public but has no reason to worry us as far as the legality and conformity of the documents is concerned,” Macron’s “En Marche!” (Onwards!) party said in a statement.

“The seriousness of this event is certain and we shall not tolerate that the vital interests of democracy be put at risk,” it added.

Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian:

A batch of stolen emails was released to the public, with evidence pointing towards Russian hackers. The media ran through the formerly private correspondence with a fine-toothed comb, looking for dirt. Although little if any damning information was found, public trust in the hacking victims was severely eroded. The volume of media coverage created the perception that where there’s smoke, there must be fire, and a general presumption of guilt resulted.

The year was 2009, and the victims were climate scientists working for and communicating with the University of East Anglia. The story was repeated in 2016 with the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.After 1,000 of climate scientists’ private emails were stolen and published online, snippets of text were taken out of context and misrepresented to falsely accuse the scientists of scandal, conspiracy, collusion, falsification, and illegal activities. Climate deniers and biased media outlets whipped up such froth over these misrepresentations that various organizations launched nine separate investigations to identify any possible scientific wrongdoing uncovered by the emails. They found none.

Nevertheless, “Climategate” caused temporary erosion in public trust of climate scientists. Like most such news events, people quickly forgot and the effect soon faded; however, the stolen emails were made public just a month before the Copenhagen international climate summit. The well-timed release of the hacked emails provided a distraction that helped sink the negotiations, which were generally viewed as a failure. A serious international climate agreement was delayed for another six years.

UPDATE: Possible brilliant foil on part of Macron campaign.  Scientists, Journalists, take notes.

Daily Beast:

Literally at the 11th hour, before the blackout would silence it, the Macron campaign issued a statement saying it had been hacked and many of the documents that were dumped on the American 4Chan site and re-posted by Wikileaks were fakes.

The mainstream French media carried the Macron campaign statement, but virtually nothing else. In addition to the normal proscription of campaign “propaganda” on election eve, the government issued a statement saying specifically that anyone disseminating the materials in this dump in France could be liable to prosecution, and calling on the media to shoulder their “responsibility” by steering clear of them.

Meanwhile, Wikileaks jumped on the document dump, but didn’t seem to be familiar with the material in it. Responding to the Macron statement that some of the items were bogus, Wikileaks tweeted, “We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very skeptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us.”

Ah, but there’s the rub. As reported by The Daily Beast, part of the Macron campaign strategy against Fancy Bear (also known as Pawn Storm and Apt28) was to sign on to the phishing pages and plant bogus information.

“You can flood these [phishing] addresses with multiple passwords and log-ins, true ones, false ones, so the people behind them use up a lot of time trying to figure them out,” Mounir Mahjoubi, the head of Macron’s digital team, told The Daily Beast for its earlier article on this subject.

In the end, whoever made the dump may not have known what is real and what is false, which would explain in part the odd timing. After the disruptive revelations of the Democratic National Committee hacks in the United States, the public is conditioned to think that if there’s a document dump like this, it has to be incriminating. By putting it out just before the news blackout, when Macron cannot respond in detail, the dump becomes both the medium and the message.

 

48 thoughts on “The Climate Gate MO: UK Climate Hacking a Template for Russiagate”


  1. It seems to me that House Republicans engage in a similar activity when they use government mechanisms to get more and more e-mail, then selectively edit and release anything they can frame as damning. They did it to Hillary Clinton, they did it to Solyndra.
    The hacking thing seems more pernicious somehow. Maybe because the people do it manage to airbrush themselves and their agenda out of the picture, leaving only the e-mails (and fake versions thereof) to look at.

    Reply

  2. So this appears to be perpertrated by APT28, a hacking group with ties to Russian military intelligence?
    This French runoff, which is under legal blackout from reporting, is going to be a real nailbiter.

    Vlad’s been a busy boy

    Reply

        2. Vierotchka, You are absolutely right. Just like Putin’s internal opposition has been assassinating their own leaders and sympathetic journalists in order to blame the government. It’s a plot inside a plot inside a plot …

          Reply

          1. “It’s a plot inside a plot inside a plot…..”

            Quintessentially Russian


  3. 19 comments so far, more than half of them from The Whore For Putin—Vera The Insane (and Filthy)

    After the obligatory (and mindless, and STUPID) “It has absolutely nothing to do with Putin or Russia.”, Vera gives us EIGHT childish and meaningless gifs. Some things never change, I guess.

    As more info comes out, it appears the Russians indeed DO have EVERYTHING to do with more and more hacks into the underpinnings of western civilization—things like science and politics. Bald assertions that it isn’t happening are laughable.

    Reply

      1. Yep—mindless and stupid. That’s what you resort to when you have no real arguments to put forward. Boooooooring! ZZZZZzzzzzzz…..!!!!!

        Reply

          2. When you have a “vast personal fortune” and are “fully independent and can afford my Kobe beef, my Almas caviar, Dom Perignon White Gold champpagne”, how else would you spend your time?


          4. “I do come here to respond to those ludicrous attacks and insults you idiots level against me, but that doesn’t take much time at all!”

            You more reliably show up whenever there’s any slight against Putin & Russia.


          5. http://imageshack.com/a/img923/287/sa5H88.gif

            These slights are coupled with attacks and insults against me, most of the time, and I come to set things straight – you guys are all so completely deluded and ignorant about Russia about Putin, having drunk the MSM’s Kool-Aid to the last drop and begging for more. Quite pitiful, really, as you guys have sadly forfeited any intelligence you may have had.


          6. Wait a sec – you’re an artist? What exactly do you create?


          16. More deluded bullshit from Vera.

            First, it is quite a stretch to say one “creates” artwork that is as unimaginative and derivative as hers.

            Second, those “ludicrous attacks and insults” that we “level” at Vera are rational arguments about what a mindless, irrational, STUPID and filthy insane pig she really is, and she NEVER responds to them with anything but non-substantive and childish gifs.

            Third, all may recall the time-date analysis that I did of Vera’s comments on Crock threads a while back—-it showed that Vera is busy responding to us during 20+ hours of the day. Of course, if “she” is really a committee of Russian trolls in a basement in Moscow who have bought her name and are using it to whore for Putin, she spends NO time on this other than to cash her checks from the FSB (and DO demand payment in Swiss francs, Vera, rubles are losing value every day).


          20. But you have no problem with the patronage of a particular midget megalomaniac?
            Pity.


      1. ” No, obviously you don’t think!”
        Speak for yourself. The French system is not as vulnerable for subterfuge as the American one and the circumstances were different.
        LePen was the candidate at a disadvantage given the party she represents, her father’s reputation and how long she’s been in the public eye.
        Hillary had Bill Clinton’s baggage and several decades worth of public poisoning by attacks against her and still cleaned Trump’s clock in the vote count.
        But in the USA, it’s the electoral college that matters and it only required swaying ~100,000 strategic votes out of 125 million cast.

        That said, Macron still has to get through the parliamentary elections which are a month away so he has a lot of work ahead of him

        Reply

        1. Macron isn’t running in the parliamentary elections, and the FN won’t win many seats. Oh, and it wasn’t a hack, it was a leak.

          Reply

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