Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?

[Tenney here:  I doubt they were behind it, but if well-compensated they may have lent a hand.]

by Will Stewart and Martin Delgado, The Daily Mail on Sunday, December 6, 2009


Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents.
The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures.

Its data are relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.

Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.

The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.

A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.  We hereby release a random selection [Tenney here -- if you believe that was a random selection, I have a bridge to sell to you.] of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’

Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby.

Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, 2009, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March 1996.

Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.
The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information.’

Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.

The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.

Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.

Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.

In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials.

The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect.’

A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.

'There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’

And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’

The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.

East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there.

It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.

Tomsk – 2,190 miles east of Moscow – was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era.

Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners.

It was built in the 1950s by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps. 

Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB.

The city’s academic quarter – some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal – includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University.
He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy.

Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming.

Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming.’

Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry.

However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.

These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit.

The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.

A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office – which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit – will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.

The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.

Norfolk police sources said they were working with ‘other agencies’ on the inquiry. But they were unable to say if these included the British security services MI5 and MI6.

This newspaper has established, however, that Scotland Yard computer experts from its Central e-Crime unit are helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.

A Norfolk Police spokeswoman said last night: ‘Norfolk Constabulary can confirm that it is investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia (UEA).’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html#ixzz0Yvm3OSX3