Your Email Got Hacked, & Someone's Making You Look Like a Robber to the Police
November 24th, 2011 by Zachary Shahan
You find out that your email has just been hacked. Decades worth of emails, thousands, have been pulled. Not only that, the person who hacked you has taken out-of-context quotes and leaked them to the police in order to make you look like a robber.
Some examples:
“I robbed him” is fed to the media and police. Originally, the line was: “We were playing basketball and Jim was going for a dunk. I swept in out of nowhere and I robbed him, packing him hard.”
Cherry-picked line: “I’m going to the bank to… steal some money.” Original line: “I’m going to the bank to cancel my debit card… it’s missing and I want to make sure no one can steal some money from me.”
Unfortunately, no one has any interest in looking at the full context of the emails and the police are on their way to arrest you.
Absurd? Yes, but this is exactly what some of the world’s leading climate scientists are going through and have gone through. Seriously. I wish it weren’t so absurd, but it is.
Specifically, this week, approximately 5,000 stolen emails of climate scientists were released in cherry-picked bits and pieces in an attempt to frame the climate scientists. The media jumped on it and called “crime!” without looking at the context of the emails, despite this happening two years ago (both times, conspicuously, right before a major international climate conference) and at least 7 independent investigations making it clear that the scientists had not done anything wrong, scientifically, and the science of global warming and climate change was as sound as ever (or even more so, given all the extra scientific reviews).
How would you feel being framed in the stories above?
Unfortunately, in the climate science case, it’s not the life of one person being sacrificed (presuming the framed “robber” goes to prison for life). It is the lives of millions, or even billions, who will die or suffer tremendously from the consequences of human-induced global warming.
It is sad that anyone stoops to this level to make non-criminals look like criminals and criminals look like the good guys. But it is what has happened,.. again!
Email hacker via shutterstock
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About the Author
Zachary Shahan is the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular cleantech-focused website in the world, and Planetsave, a world-leading green and science news site. He has been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and he has been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, and wind energy since 2009. Aside from his work on CleanTechnica and Planetsave, he's the founder and director of Solar Love, EV Obsession, and Bikocity. To connect with Zach on some of your favorite social networks, go to ZacharyShahan.com and click on the relevant buttons.
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