Decoding SwiftHack - the cyber-attack on climate science (SwiftHack/Climategate)

(Digression) What is wrong with America, summed up by Matt Taibbi

2012-04-08T16:23:00Z

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi sums up the current insanity that is the USA:

We have two definitely connected phenomena, often treated as separate and unconnected: a growing lawlessness in the financial sector, and an expanding, repressive, increasingly lunatic police apparatus trained at the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor.

(Some people still think, despite all indications to the contrary, that the US has "a system with strong checks and balances". To that I can only say this: you will wake up -- some day.)

(Digression) The urge to find "underlying motives for distrusting science" -- my opinion

2012-04-03T15:27:34Z

(Cross-posted to Planet3.0, sort of.)

Bart Verheggen writes,

In line with [communication science professor Cees] van Woerkum I think it's important to focus on the underlying motives for [global warming skeptics] distrusting science. We should really try and figure out and discuss why we disagree so strongly about climate change [...] We don't have a similar public debate about the mating behavior of fruitflies after all.

Um, perhaps because there is a well-funded network of that pumps out climate inactivist garbage en masse?

Why won't that be enough of an explanation?

Why are we still looking for an alternative "explanation" that pretends that the misinformation mill doesn't exist?

Seriously, I don't get it. There's rich people. There's money from rich people. There's shills who willingly take money from rich people. There's goons who blindly believe shills who willingly take money from rich people. None of this is particularly hard to understand. What's more, all this is extremely well-documented. So again, why do we insist on ignoring the very clear modus operandi of the inactivist 'institutes', and keep insisting on finding some deeper "underlying" cause?

The Heartland Institute doesn't waste its time trying to figure out people's "underlying motives". It doesn't need to. We should be asking, why doesn't it need to?

SwiftHack 3.0? Skeptical Science web site reportedly hacked

2012-03-24T21:24:05Z

Skeptical Science hacked, private user details publicly posted online
Posted on 25 March 2012 by John Cook
Sometime over the last few days, the Skeptical Science website [q. v.] has been hacked. The hacker has taken much or all of the Skeptical Science database, zipped various excerpts into a single file, uploaded the file onto a Russian website then linked to the zip file from various blogs. [...]
Of great concern is the fact that the hacker has published personal details such as emails and IP addresses of each user.

Not much further detail here, and while Skeptical Science commenter CBDunkerson mentioned the phrase

"This is an anonymous leak per the standard, but I will consider stepping bravely forward if I get caught."

I couldn't find it with a Google search.

If anyone has any further details on the crackers' announcement of the data dump and/or the hyperlink for the dumped material, please e-mail me, so that I can add it to my stash of information possibly related to SwiftHack. I'll use this information only for my own private knowledge, and I'll not publish it. (My e-mail address is on the left sidebar.)

Denialgate: Wrong to gloss over PR lies for being 'dog bites man': Jim Hoggan

2012-03-22T16:32:24Z

Regarding Denialgate, DeSmogBlog's Jim Hoggan says it well:

[...] NPR radio host Larry Mantle put it [i.e. Peter Gleick's exposure of the Heartland Institute's spin campaigning tactics] in context this way: "Isn't this a dog bites man story? [...]"
[...] we have grown so used to politicians and (certain) public relations people [e.g. Heartland] stepping jauntily over this line [of acceptable campaigning tactics] that we have given up holding them accountable.
[...] instead -- too many in the media and online community have chosen to attack Gleick [for using pretexting to expose the truth].

We may no longer be shocked by professional liars' lying lies, but we can -- and we should -- continue to be outraged.

(Coincidentally, Greg Laden takes to task the 'this is dog bites man' stance on an incident unrelated to politics. And he is outraged by it.)

(Digression) Explaining that bogus math is bogus to people who embrace bogus math

2012-03-20T15:52:14Z

Michael Tobis finds that the global warming denialist Steven Goddard did some bogus math again. The problem with denialists, unfortunately, is that no matter how many times people patiently explain to them that their math is bogus, they simply ignore the explanations and keep repeating their bogus claims.

Perhaps -- I thought -- in addition to the longish explanation of what's wrong, we should also provide an illustration of the wrongness of their math in terms that they understand?

So after a bit of fiddling with Goddard's graph, I came up with something. Perhaps now the denialists will start paying attention.

(Digression) The stupidification of American policy discourse?

2012-03-18T19:10:55Z

There are signs that American policy discourse, even among progressives, is becoming sillier and sillier. Or perhaps it's always been this silly and I didn't notice it...

As an example, apparently Joe Romm sees nothing problematic with the idea of learning about famine and inequality through a dystopian pulp novel. For me, if young adults aren't already learning facts about real-world problems through (horrors!) non-fiction sources, then there's a serious problem.

As another example of the silly: what on earth is this pile of ... stuff? Was Auden Schendler saying that, because King Midas wasn't a greedy man, he decided to create the Gordian Knot, which if undone would prevent him from turning his daughter into a golden statue? Nobody knows, but then, apparently nobody cares either, since it ends with the correct message, which is probably Elect Obama™ or something.

That's all.

(Digression) Ars Technica acting like soulless idiots re HBGary -- why?

2012-03-11T23:28:13Z

Why the flying hell is Ars Technica acting like a brainless stooge for America's rich and powerful? Only a brainless stooge can learn about HBGary Federal's attempts to launch black ops campaigns against good, honest people, and still write this:

With arrests, HBGary hack saga finally ends
By Peter Bright | Published 25 minutes ago
A little over a year ago, small security firm HBGary Federal made the news for all the wrong reasons: it had been hacked, its CEO had been made a laughing stock, and its private e-mails were splashed across the Internet. The perpetrators, a group of hackers sympathetic to the Anonymous group, trashed HBGary Federal's servers and name with impunity, confident that tor [q. v.] and private VPNs would keep their identities secret.

Yeah, Anonymous's "Sabu" is now behind bars, therefore -- poof! -- all the black ops campaigns suddenly no longer exist, there's no social injustice, and balance is restored to the universe. Yeah right. What idiots.

Taking another break from blogging

2012-02-26T15:43:08Z

Taking another break from blogging. Enjoy yourselves, guys and gals.

(Updated)

2012-02-24T21:03:15Z

Update 2012-02-25: Deep Climate points out that Vermeer's premise (below) may not be true. Hence I've retracted this blog post.

Brad [18] You are telling us that Peter Gleick traveled forward in time to see the documents he obtained from Heartland, then went back in time to fabricate a memo based on them. You are also telling us that he resigned from the NCSE yet he does not work there and there was no resignation.
~~Please stop with the random misinformation.~~
~~Posted by: Greg Laden | February 21, 2012 4:37 PM~~

~~Indeed. For as Martin Vermeer pointed out:~~

One thing you all seem to be missing, is that it was the content of the strategy memo that allowed Gleick to credibly impersonate a Board member [and thereby obtain the rest of the Denialgate documents].
~~Whoever wrote (or faked) this memo, had independent inside knowledge of what was going on at Heartland, before Gleick obtained any of the other docs.~~

~~The global warming denialists' proposed timeline of events makes no sense whatsoever. This is not hard to understand.~~

Denialgate: fallout has just begun

2012-02-23T16:36:10Z

The fallout from Denialgate seems to have just begun, and it's not just on the Heartland Institute (or the intermediate leaker Peter Gleick, for that matter). From ThinkProgress, Indur Goklany of the US Department of the Interior may also be impacted.

Denialgate: Gleick confesses to being intermediate leaker

2012-02-21T16:52:14Z

Holy cow... there's a new development in Denialgate. John Callender has a summary, and a plausible theory of what actually happened behind the scenes.

Whoa. From climate scientist Peter Gleick, whose writing on water issues I've been following for a while, comes this bombshell: The Origin of the Heartland Documents. [...]
The question I can't stop wondering about is this: Who sent Gleick the original [2012 Climate Strategy] memo [from the Heartland Institute]? [...]
Some people are speculating that Gleick may have faked the strategy document himself. [...]
[But c]onsider this alternate scenario: Maybe the folks at Heartland themselves sent Gleick the strategy document, on purpose, hoping he would publish it. Then they could deny it as fake and discredit him. I confess that this was one of the first things I wondered when the story first broke [...]. But I abandoned the idea because it didn't seem to make sense: The real documents in the larger batch were the sort of thing Heartland would never have released on purpose.
But the timeline according to Gleick makes the "Heartland dirty trick" theory seem more credible. Heartland could have faked the strategy memo, including enough true-ish information to be credible, but not so much detail as to be actually damaging to them. They could have sent it to Gleick, hoping he would publish it, after which they could discredit him for releasing the fake. But they didn't count on his being crafty enough to get the other documents via the social-engineering attack. Confronted by the release of the full batch, they scratch their heads a bit, then settle on attacking the leak of the faked memo, as per the original plan, while blustering and hand-waving as to the other documents.

And Gareth Renowden once more points out Heartland's hypocrisy regarding the document leak.

So were Gleick's actions legal or not? Well, I think I wasn't too far off the mark when I wrote that

In America, an act can be as legal or illegal as you want, as long as the price is right. Actually the phrase "in America" is redundant, because in America, the whole world is America, and besides if someone doesn't like the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], they can always extradite Rajendra Pachauri, or bomb his house, or both.

Finally, there's still no word from HostDime about relay.sinwt.ru.

SwiftHack 2.0 site's Florida connection? relay.sinwt.ru has IP address in Orlando

2012-02-19T17:27:54Z

frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | February 18, 2012 at 1:33 pm | Reply
More SwiftHack weirdness:
Not sure if this is a useful lead, but apparently one of the mail servers for the sinwt.ru domain name is relay.sinwt.ru, whose IP address is 199.168.186.146, which is in Florida.
http://www.robtex.com/dns/sinwt.ru.html#records
-- frank
Rattus Norvegicus | February 18, 2012 at 4:11 pm |
Actually this may be really useful. You should contact the company hosting the mail service for relay.sinwt.ru (big hosting company in FL is ServerIntellect) and see if you can get any information from them (you might also point this out to DOJ and/or Brits investigating this...)

Will do that, once I get around to composing a nicely-worded e-mail. :)

Denialgate: likely real, and from insider, but DeSmogBlog and ThinkProgress PDFs differ at bit level

2012-02-18T07:21:05Z

BigCityLib says this regarding Denialgate:

[...] two days into [the] scandal, [Heartland Institute's] CEO Joe Bast and the other players at HI have had time to write any number of blog posts, and a fund-raising letter [note: link fixed] but still...STILL!...haven't had time to go through the [leaked] documents and determine, as per their repeated claims, that they have been altered or are otherwise inauthentic.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that they are in fact the real deal.

DeSmogBlog commenter "rumleyfips" points out that pulling off a social engineering attack, of the kind that Heartland claimed to have happened, is not easy:

The caller [who allegedly asked Heartland for documents] is interesting. Whoever it was a lot of knowledge was necessary.
After all , the information was sent willingly with no questions asked.
Who to call? Had to be someone used to such requests, with immediate access to the requested documents and no need for supervisory permission.
How to ask. The wording had to be usual to the organization or flags would have gone up.
What to ask for. Asking for something that didn't exist could cause [suspicion].
It would seem that only someone intimate with the upper levels of the organization could have done this. Joe Bast [fits] the profile.

Then again, it's also possible that there was no social engineering involved, and instead the documents were deliberately leaked by someone from inside Heartland.

Lastly, for the sake of completeness: I noted that the DeSmogBlog copy and the ThinkProgress copy of the leaked PDFs differ at the zeros-and-ones level, though their wordings are identical (including the OCR misspellings in 2012 Climate Strategy.pdf). Thus, even if the documents are genuine, it's likely that they're not in the same file format as initially sent out from Heartland.

Denialgate, the Heartland 2010 prospectus, and Operation Angry Badger

2012-02-16T16:56:45Z

Yep, the story's up on DeSmogBlog:

An anonymous donor calling him (or her)self "Heartland Insider" has released the Heartland Institute's [q. v.] budget, fundraising plan, its Climate Strategy for 2012 [disputed] and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.

Gareth Renowden points out Heartland's hypocrisy in their response to the leak. Michael Tobis asks, "Is Turnabout Fair Play?" Brian at Rabett Run discusses a separate but related story. As for me...

I'd like to point out once more a diagram from Heartland's 2010 opus (not leaked). Check out that diagram if you haven't. Yes, really. I mean it.
There's a lot to chatter about regarding their 'strategy' for climate inaction, but I think what's potentially most damning is their suggestion (in (1-15-2012) 2012 Fundraising Plan.pdf, p. 14) to "[r]ecruit and promote superintendents who support [Wisconsin] Act 10". Is Heartland seriously trying to entice public servants into becoming mouthpieces for their rich funders, or did I miss something?
Will US politicians start launching tens of inquiries into Heartland's workings? And will activist groups file scores of lawsuits against Heartland to compel it to release its e-mails?

Claims of "misconduct" based on FOI*.zip get this response from me

2012-02-14T17:37:16Z

frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | February 13, 2012 at 12:01 pm |
Deep Climate, Snapple:
McIntyre [q. v.], and climate inactivists in general, should give a straight answer [to] this question: Did FOI2009.zip or FOIA2011.zip reveal any actual, specific, actionable instances of attempts to falsify data or results, or attempts to suppress good, solid science?
But of course they won't answer the question -- because they know that the true answer is "no".
So instead, they make a lot of irrelevant noises about 'oh noes climatologists said unflattering things about skeptics', etc. etc. etc. Last I checked, saying unflattering things about people one doesn’t like is in no way a scandal, and in no way a firing offence. But you won't find people like McIntyre pointing that out. It's all spin -- spin for the purpose of avoiding the key questions.
-- frank

And (via Prof. Michael Mann) as an aside, for some reason I find the Mother Jones story The Frog of War to be really ... hilarious.

Hack or leak? Diagram of IP addresses known to be involved in SwiftHack 1.0 or 2.0 (except blog IPs)

2012-02-12T20:01:44Z

"I'm FOIA™": commenter "RC" on Planet3.0 blog

2012-02-07T18:52:13Z

RC
February 3, 2012 | 10:33 am
"....I think it was Ross Gelbspan who reported a few years back about how CNN had to abandon mention of global warming and climate change in the context of weather reporting when the advertisers clamped down...."
Mighty big hole in that particular argument, [...]
frankswifthack
February 5, 2012 | 9:19 am
(Aside: does "RC" have any relation to the "RC" (a.k.a. "FOIA") of CRU cyber-attack fame, I wonder?)
-- frank
RC
February 6, 2012 | 6:07 pm
[...] Regarding commenter "frankswifthack"'s question, yes, I'm FOIA™.
frankswifthack
February 7, 2012 | 9:48 am
RC:
Regarding commenter "frankswifthack"'s question, yes, I'm FOIA™.
Interesting claim. Speaking of which, what's your relationship with whoever is running the Russian server sinwt.ru? (You can e-mail me instead of cluttering up this thread, if you prefer.)
-- frank

Hmm. The technological commentary site Ars Technica has a section labelled "Law & Disorder". I think I'm starting to get the sentiment behind this label.

Another dead end -- Greg Laden blog's mysterious 18 Dec comment

2012-01-30T16:32:51Z

I asked blogger Greg Laden about his remark on his blog [cached] saying,

This morning (Dec 18th [2011]) someone tried to post a comment on this blog post [...] with what appears to be a link to a set of computer files containing what may be stolen emails. I did not look though this material at all, but based only on context that is my guess as to what the numerous files seem to be. It is also possible that this is a farce of some kind, or an attempt at distributing a computer virus. [...] The comment seemed to originate from France and there seemed to be links to other countries as well, so I reported the incident to Interpol. I don't expect to hear back from them.

When I asked Laden for more information about the comment, though, I was informed that "the comment was deleted" due to a "database" "screwup".

I hate dead ends...

A glimpse at QinetiQ's attempt to extract CRU e-mails, and issues faced

2012-01-26T16:33:15Z

OK, so climate inactivists such as Andrew Montford and Roger Tattersall are trying to conjure up some vast 'global warmist' conspiracy involving CRU scientists, UK policemen, the UK Information Commissioner's Office, the Muir Russell inquiry, and what not.

That aside, though, the actual information release by the Norfolk constabulary is mildly interesting, in that it gives us a glimpse into the thinking of computer forensics practitioners, and the issues they face in this particular investigation. A quote from the release, apparently from someone at the contractor firm QinetiQ, said this:

In relation to the latest request from the [? Muir Russell] enquiry, I understand that they would require all emails sent and received by [CRU's] Prof Phillip Jones, Prof Keith Briffa and Dr Tim Osborn if possible on a portable hard disk drive by Monday 26th April 2010. [...] In order to provide the enquiry with their request we have estimated that the cost will be £8910.00 ex VAT. We have identified seven machines belonging to the individuals concerned and also the significant number of backups of each of these machines.

And later on:

John quotes about £15 000 to resolve question 1 below [i.e. extraction of all e-mails]. [In a subsequent e-mail, the finalized total cost was stated to be £55,400.00 ex VAT.] This will cover the uncompressing of 3 Terrabytes [sic] of data to 7 Terraytes and sifting through that data. This will have to be a manual search as there are no keywords to allow the machines to run automatic searches.

To put this in context, here's an account of CRU's backup regime by CRU system administrator Mike Salmon, which is part of the Muir Russell inquiry's evidence release:

The entire "C:" partition of a Windows PC, or the "Users" directory of a Mac, or the "/home" directory of a Linux PC would be backed up [to a server in UEA's Central IS], with certain exceptions: some Windows system files and directories were ignored [...] and two directories intended for storing data that did not need backing up (scratch, static). In addition, specific directories could be excluded where the size would overwhelm the server. [...]
Only one researcher elected to manage his own backups. All machines that were backed up to the server may have contained emails if the user used an email client that stored their email on their desktop machine, which has been the common practice in CRU.

This suggests that the entire e-mail archive of each user was backed up at regular intervals. Thus if (say) the backups were done once a month, and the e-mail archive contained messages from 1990 all the way to 2009, then each and every month the backup server in UEA's central IS would receive another copy of the entire 1990--2009 cache, possibly with some additions, deletions, and movements along the way.

So, unless all this material had been suitably indexed beforehand, QinetiQ would have no choice but to go through all the monthly backups, duplicates and all, to ensure they didn't miss even a single e-mail. That's not easy no matter how one slices it.

(Commenter Jace at Montford's blog wrote,

FOIA [i.e. the SwiftHackers] did £55,440 worth of email filtering for free wow

...but that's not really true; the SwiftHackers didn't have a requirement to extract all e-mails, so they could choose which particular backup to use.)

Mindless Link Propagation, 25 Jan 2012

2012-01-25T16:28:19Z

Obama's State of the Union address? What's that? Meanwhile:

thepolicylass
Puppets on a string: US think tank funds NZ sceptics shar.es/f367l
leohickman
Hearing both the BMJ and Lancet are now formally supporting @Request_FOI's attempt to reveal GWPF's funding [...] #eg
gcluley
How to deal with an internet troll bit.ly/xDN6rX

US society "no longer believes in due process": Greenwald; Megaupload (and SwiftHack copies) down

2012-01-21T19:37:04Z

Glenn Greenwald, again, this time weighing in on the closing down of megaupload.com:

(2) The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole. Supporters of both [Republican and Democratic] political parties endorse, or at least tolerate, all manner of government punishment without so much as the pretense of a trial [in a court of law], based solely on government accusation: imprisonment for life, renditions to other countries, even assassinations of their fellow citizens. [...] now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed -- its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business rendered impossible -- based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.
[...] The [US prosecution and grand jury's] Indictment [of Megaupload] is a classic one-side-of-the-story document; even the most mediocre lawyers can paint any picture they want when unchallenged. That's why the government is not supposed to dole out punishments based on accusatory instruments, but only after those accusations are proved in an adversarial proceeding.

I say this again: with all due respect, I think America is doomed. Note that Greenwald isn't talking about how the rich and powerful are ignoring due process; he's talking about how US society as a whole has abandoned the idea of due process. Yes, things are this screwed. I guess the challenge for us non-US folks is to think about stopping the US's craziness from landing on our own soils.

(By a way, a question: What's the point of climate legislation in the US, if the US decides it can ignore its own laws anyway?)

And in case you don't remember it, megaupload.com happened to host both the SwiftHack 1.0 (FOI2009.zip) and SwiftHack 2.0 archives (FOIA2011.zip) before it was shut down. It looks like I'll need to find a few more alternate sites for downloading these files for analysis.

Update 2012-01-23: Snapple points out that the indictment was formally issued by a grand jury, not just by the prosecution. It is however useful to note that an indictment tends to be based only on information presented by the prosecution, with no input from the defence.

Update 2012-01-24: Gavin's Pussycat says,

Hmm, [the prosecution did] not necessarily [throw due process out of the windows]. It [the confiscation of Megaupload's property] doesn't become forfeiture until it becomes permanent. Until then, it's just seizure.

I think he may have a point. Well, we'll see how the prosecution deals with the seized property once it starts dropping some of the charges.

(Digression) SOPA + NDAA conspiracy theory

2012-01-18T19:34:43Z

northbranch
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 4:08 pm
Many people have speculated that SOPA [US's proposed Stop Online Piracy Act] and the NDAA indefinite detention bills [US's National Defense Authorization Act, already law] are prompted by the Occupy [Wall Street] movement and the spectre of much greater unrest in coming years. (E.g., Chris Hedges lawsuit re NDAA [q. v.]). Perhaps, but I'm guessing that such legislation has a fairly long gestation period and is unlikely to pop up so quickly in response to Occupy. To me the more likely villain is Wikileaks; the elite have been fretting about that for a couple of years now. Between NDAA and SOPA, they could smash the next Wikileaks in short order -- kidnap and detain the organizers as terrorists who are "aiding the enemy", and shut down every website that so much as links to an unauthorized document.
That being said, these tools quite possibly will be used against movements like Occupy, if the unrest that Hedges anticipates comes to pass.

Is this true? I don't really know, but even without the conspiracy theory, things aren't looking very nice.

(Digression) With all due respect, Kerry Emanuel, I think America is doomed

2012-01-15T20:17:04Z

This via Climate Progress:

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented "frenzy of hate" after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.
Emails contained "veiled threats against my wife," and other "tangible threats," Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an interview. [...]
Emanuel decided not to alert police. [...]
"[...] I've never ever encountered in direct contact with the public any behavior that I thought was bad or threatening or vile or anything like that. So I don't have any trouble communicating directly with the public. I think it's the distortions that occur sometimes in certain formats that are the root of the problem."

Um, "distortions that occur sometimes in certain formats"? That's a very serious understatement.

An understatement with serious national security implications, one might say.

When there’s nothing short of wholesale corruption of all three branches of the US government, it takes a special kind of political ignorance to think that anti-science hate mail is merely due to "distortions that occur sometimes in certain formats".

And that's why I think -- with all due respect -- that your beloved America is doomed.

(Digression) Deep Climate on 'grassroot' Ethical Oil movement's hidden political connections

2012-01-13T20:29:10Z

Read. Just read.

SwiftHack 2.0: another phantom lawsuit by Roger Tattersall, this time against Greg Laden?

2012-01-10T16:15:15Z

Recall that Roger Tattersall, a.k.a. Tallbloke, a.k.a. "I am Spartacus!", filed a totally phantom lawsuit against policemen who displayed "inappropriate" behaviour by seizing his computers for investigation.

Now it looks like he's at it again: [cached]

I spoke with a stateside lawyer this evening. [...]
He says I have a valid complaint and has taken on the case.
Things are moving forward.
Please try to restrict comments to a critique of my photography -- Thanks.

Or, in other words: 'Greg Laden, you're dead dead dead! My lawyer will munch you for breakfast! Bwahahahaha! OK, commenters, please don't talk about that, talk about something else.'

But that's weird. Why would Tattersall state something and then ask people not to discuss it? Anyway, I do have some questions to ask about this impending lawsuit; I'll just state them here:

What's the name of this "stateside lawyer"?
Which law firm is he under, if any?
Is this lawsuit of yours a phantom lawsuit?
When can we expect a statement from you along the lines of 'no, I never once stated I was going to sue Greg Laden, so you'd better cease and desist in claiming that I did'?
Is this 'lawsuit' just a ploy to get your gullible followers to pour money into your 'legal defence fund'? I'm not saying; I'm just asking.

OK, that's it for now. And folks, please refrain from discussing the above blog post, and instead talk about nice fluffy penguins... ah, scratch that.