When the University of East Anglia's servers were hacked and emails stolen, the victims — the climate scientists whose largely innocuous messages got misrepresented all over the blogosphere — were subjected to multiple independent investigations (and cleared). The hackers? Not so much. Nobody really knew who did it or apparently cared. But evidently they're cracking down now, because police in England just seized the computers of Roger Tattersall, a denialist blogger connected with the second hacked email release.
Nobody's been arrested, and it doesn't look like the cops think Tattersall is responsible. Rather, he's one of at least five bloggers who received comments from a user named "FOIA," who provided links to a Russian server housing the stolen mail. But the Department of Justice, via WordPress, requested that Tattersall hand over "all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession" relating to his blog. (Other bloggers got the same request.)
You have to appreciate the irony here — skeptics hound climate scientists to hand over all their scientific data, then steal their emails. Authorities ask Tattersall to collect all his information, then seize his computers. One hopes they won't be picking through his files, pulling out incriminating-looking sentences to publicize out of context. Except one can't help kind of hoping they will.
