The hack that changed the world
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2021
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2009, someone broke into the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK and stole emails. The material was distributed online - mainly on blogs linked to climate change sceptics. It was used to make the case that scientists were surreptitiously twisting the facts to exaggerate climate change. That was not the case. But before that became clear, events would take on a life of their own, sparking a global media storm. BBC Security correspondent Gordon Corera goes on the trail of this ‘cyber cold case’ to try and discover who was behind ‘Climategate’.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | OK, nice and quiet, please drone going up. |
| 0:03.8 | It's summer and the students are away, but the campus of the University of East Anglia |
| 0:11.5 | just outside of Norwich in East England is busy with a film crew. |
| 0:15.3 | OK, standby then and action Jason. |
| 0:19.4 | They're working on a drama called The Trick, which looks at what became known as Climategate. |
| 0:27.5 | Back in 2009, someone hacked the emails of climate change researchers based here and selectively |
| 0:34.0 | leaked them online. |
| 0:38.2 | It was just before COP 15, a major climate change summit and skeptics used the emails to claim |
| 0:44.6 | evidence for global warming had been faked. |
| 0:47.5 | It was a charge eventually disproved, but not before real damage was done. |
| 0:53.4 | This is the hack that changed the world on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:57.2 | I'm Gordon Carrera, security correspondent for the BBC, a job I was doing in 2009. |
| 1:03.6 | Back then I didn't see climategate as a story for me. |
| 1:07.9 | I'm here now because the drama is written by Owen Shears, who came to me when he started |
| 1:12.2 | work on it. |
| 1:15.8 | Oh, hello. |
| 1:18.8 | In one of the classrooms, he tells me what first drew him to the story. |
| 1:22.9 | It was his belief that the world is still living with the fallout. |
| 1:26.5 | It's the scale of the crime and the extent to which we're all victims of it suddenly |
| 1:31.8 | hit me. |
| 1:33.7 | The worst scientific scandal of a generation. |
| 1:38.0 | Emails show climate change scientists massaged figures. |
... |
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