From The Pointman:
Climategate 3, the goon squad and going nuclear
One of the climate establishment's new coping mechanisms in handling what is effectively the third release of the climategate emails, is to put pressure on the people who were sent the decryption key, rather than looking for the identity of the leaker. The leaker goes by the name FOIA and the establishment in this case are the University of East Anglia, usually abbreviated to UEA, which is also rather tellingly interpreted by its own notably laid-back students as the University of Easy Access.
Incidentally, in the aftermath of the long drawn out and seemingly unquenchable PR disaster that climategate keeps turning out to be for UEA, there are rumours of them working hard on repairing their academic credibility. Given the alarums and excursions of the last few years, big donors have been noticeably gun-shy of the place. They're sprucing up their academic credentials by trying to recruit some scholastic heavy hitters like Gergis, Marcott, Shakun and Lewandowsky. Apparently the University of Western Australia are actually very keen to let UEA have the advantage of the latter's full-time services, and as quickly as humanly possible. It's all going extremely well, but I do think them having to break the fait accompli to Lew will be the tricky bit.
In case you don't know, the previous or second release contained another batch of emails in plaintext as well as all of the remainder, but in an encrypted archive. The third release is FOIA supplying the decrypt key for the archive to certain bloggers.
Why concentrate on the key's recipients? There appear to be a number of reasons. The first would be that looking for FOIA would seem to be a fruitless exercise. The official police search for FOIA has been closed down and the statute of limitations applicable to any supposed criminal act in connection with the leak has run out. In the light of even what little whistleblower legislation exists in the UK, it's actually highly debatable whether there's a basis in law to proceed with a criminal charge in any case. At the end of the day, FOIA on trial would have been a disaster for the 'cause' and still would be.
Having not been able to stop the release of the key, the point solution appears to be simply bringing in a legal goon squad to try to intimidate people who were sent the decryption key by FOIA. I've seen one of the goon squad's communications with a blogger and I'd have to say, it's marvelously vague, in the matter of all empty threats. The blogger is ominously warned against doing something which is never quite spelt out. The dire consequences of doing so, also not spelt out, appear somehow, well, mysteriously dire without actually being specific in any way. It's all truly terrifying stuff, yawn.
Much more at the site. This "Goon Squad" has hit a couple other blogs with cease and desist orders -- the next couple months will be really interesting. Time to invest in some popcorn futures...
