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The outing of the researcher who exposed the Heartland Institute's efforts to discredit climate change has thrown the scientific community into tumult, with fierce debates raging on Tuesday over whether to brand his actions heroic, or misguided.

Peter Gleick, a water scientist and president of the Pacific Institute, admitted in a blogpost on Monday night to using a false name to dupe the thinktank into sending him confidential board materials, which he then forwarded to campaigners and journalists.

He apologised for the deception – which he described as "a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics" – but added in the blog post published at the Huffington Post: "My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts – often anonymous, well-funded and co-ordinated – to attack climate science."

Gleick's admission – nearly a week after Heartland's financial plans and donors list was put online – set off a fierce online debate about whether his actions made him a hero or a villain, and whether he had helped or set back the cause of climate change.

Heartland Institute Climate Science Politics Hacking Climate Change Ethics

Like many out there, I was saddened to hear about the role of Peter Gleick, a co-signatory on a recent op-ed about climate science, in the leak of the Heartland Institute e-mails.

I've worried for the past two years that an incident like this might happen. The segment of the climate science community that is active in outreach is subject to incredibly angry and personal attacks, starting but certainly not ending with the hacking of e-mails at the University of East Anglia. I'm certainly not that famous or public a figure, and even I often get e-mail and comments here on Maribo that make me wonder if I should have police protection. Perhaps it was inevitable that someone in the climate science community would, in a fit of frustration, respond to critics in-kind with similarly dirty tactics. We are human, after all. You can certainly understand why someone who's been unfairly attacked for years would be driven to fight fire with fire.

Heartland Institute Climate Science Politics Hacking Climate Change

Here’s a short followup on the sad saga of Peter Gleick, the water and climate analyst who admitted using a false identity to obtain files that provided a detailed picture of the finances and plans of the anti-regulatory Heartland Institute.

Heartland Institute Climate Science Politics Hacking Climate Change

climate denialism is about preventing teachers from teaching science and focusing on “teach the controversy” and promoting doubt and uncertainty—not doing good science which would show that global warming isn’t real.

Creationism Climate Science Heartland Institute Hacking Public Relations Funding

"Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed.

“There’s no device known to mankind that will prevent people from being idiots”...

Tactics such as spear-phishing -- sending a limited number of rigged e-mails to a select group of recipients -- rely on human weaknesses like trust, laziness or even hubris.

Security Hacking Technology

SONY chairman and president Howard Stringer on Tuesday apologised to shareholders and customers over a massive data leak, which helped push its its share price to a two-year low this month.

'In April, we faced a serious challenge in the form of a cyber attack launched against the PlayStation Network, Qriocity and the network systems of Sony Online Entertainment,' Mr Stringer said at a meeting in Tokyo attended by about 5,900 shareholders.

'We are sorry for any concern and inconvenience that the incidents may have caused our shareholders, customers and stakeholders,' he said. The company is expecting its third-straight annual loss this year.

Data Security Sony Hacking

The recent high-profile hacking of Google's Gmail service and Sony's Playstation gaming network is threatening to slow the take-off of the next big thing in the computing space - the cloud.

Hacking Cloud Computing Fragmentation

Privacy Hacking Academic Research

The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.

Censorship Hacking