The JournoList

58 Replies to “The JournoList”

1. “More to the point, there’s an extremely compelling public interest angle to all this. If highly-placed executives of any industry – say, the oil industry, perhaps? – were meeting regularly in a public place and loudly, nay, vitriolically discussing how much they hated a particular public figure, or readily identifiable group, or even a widely-held ideology, then that would absolutely be news, and would be reported on.”
   I vaguely recall almost exactly this sort of thing happening in the early to mid 90s with Texaco. I don’t recall the details, but I think there were some executives recorded using the expression “jelly beans” as an inside codeword for black people. The gist of the exposé was how this pertained to alleged discriminatory hiring/promotion practices or something like that. At any rate, the argument that “that was a private conversation” would have certainly fallen on deaf ears in that case.

2. BTW, My comments re: anti-trust are directed at all the MONEY that is involved….When competing media are in collusion, at any level, they get to ring the cash register.. create any story, like AGW, and give it legs…Three sources, no problem.

3. Daniel Ream at 12:52 AM, as a techi guy that keeps computers running, I’d be interested in your opinion about the “leak” versus “hack” theory with respect to Climategate?

4. Not only is Sarah Spitz stupid (“I thought it was private”) and really, really creepy, but she has friends who support her.
   Like Dennis Romero
   http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/politics/kcrw-producer-attacked/

5. Brick Collusion makes it the people’s business. If these guys were frat buds, that is fine but they are not. This Wright affair is an attempt to influence an election through dereliction of responsibility. If your business is public information do your whacko thoughts deserve silence?
   If that makes you queasy, think of it as a request to various ombudsmen for clarifications.

6. @Louise I don’t work in information security per se, so this is a bit like asking your corner garage mechanic whether Dale Earnhardt’s death was a result of mechanical failure or bad driving – his opinion may be marginally more informed than yours, but not by much.
   That said, I’m in the “internal leak” camp. The various things in the leaked package would not, generally, be kept all in the same place on a university’s campus computer network. To find all that information, an external hacker would either have had to sift through terabytes of data looking for embarassing stuff particularly, or else grab everything and then search through it offline after the fact.
   I think it much more likely that someone with access to the data but not actually part of the CRU team – such as an internal sysadmin or a grad student – realized what was going on and decided to take action. They had to have known exactly where to find all the data they needed and which was the most damaging, and no vested interest in maintaining the deception.
   Bear in mind that most universities have absolutely atrocious internal computer security, so it could well have been a “hack” from someone outside the CRU team but with access to the university’s computer network, like a talented student. I think the labelling of the data package (“FOIA”) and the way in which it was sorted augurs for an internal leak over an outside hack – the person who did this wasn’t just familiar with the raw data, they were familiar with the internal workings of the team itself.

7. “If someone sought pleasure in watching someone die of a heart attack, they have bigger problems than we suspected.”
   Exactly.

8. After having read all the above comments, I feel cleansed about some of the tame things I’ve written on various listservs.
   Some of that stuff apparently was downright nasty, evil communication that doesn’t belong in polite society.
   But maybe it was just “politics”. Don’t we know that the left always tries to politicize everything? That seems to be their way of getting ahead, they don’t actually ever do anything of substance.