My Hacker Theory in a nutshell (4) #39
This is the seventeenth installment of "My Hacker Theory in a nutshell (4)," part #39 of my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. See Part 1 for more information about this 5-part series. Although a reference date may be the same, e.g. "[18Feb14]," when clicked it will open at the correct place in the source.
[Above: I am scheduled to be interviewed via Zoom by Guy Powell on Friday 2 May. It will be taped and played later. Guy will provide me with a graphic to replace the one above, with the date and time the interview will be aired. ]
[Index #1] [Previous: My Hacker Theory (3) #38] [Next: My Hacker Theory (5) #40].
■ Evidence that the hacker was Arizona laboratory physicist Timothy W. Linick (1946-89), aided by German hacker, Karl Koch (1965-89).
• The beginning of my Hacker Theory In the early 1990s I was the System Administrator of a wide area network of 7 Western Australian rural hospitals' UNIX computer systems[22Feb14; 05Jul14; 24Oct16; 23Jan17].
Clifford Stoll As part of my job interest in computer security, I read Clifford Stoll's 
1989 book, "The Cuckoo's Egg" [Right]. Stoll is a former astronomer in Berkeley University's W.M. Keck Observatory, who in 1986 was redeployed to help manage a large computer network at Berkeley University's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL)(not Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)[22Feb14]. Stoll recounted how lax was the computer security at universities in the 1980s[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. He described how easy it was then to hack into university networked computer systems[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. Any of LBL's scientists could log into LBL's computer, and then, over ARPANET (a precursor to the Internet) connect to a distant computer[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. Once connected, they could log into the distant computer by entering an account name and password[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. The only thing protecting the networked computer was the password, since account names were easy then to figure out[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. And Stoll was amazed that on many of high-security sites the hacker could easily guess passwords, since many system administrators had never bothered to change the passwords from their factory defaults, even on military bases, a hacker was able to log in as "guest" with no password[TCW]! No physical security was needed at LBL and laboratory doors were seldom locked[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. In 1986 Stoll detected, and eventually caught, a hacker Markus Hess (1960-), who dialied into LBL's computer from Germany, and `piggybacked' from there to hack into government, business and military computers [22Feb14; 03Jun14]. Hess was a member of the same Chaos Computer Club that Karl Koch was a member of[03Jun14]. Both Hess and Koch sold their hacked information to the KGB[03Jun14]. But it was more than a decade later, in January 2005, that I discovered the Shroud[30Jun07].
David Sox's "The Shroud Unmasked" In June 2007 I read in shroudie turned sceptic David Sox (1936-2016)'s 1988 book, "The Shroud Unmasked," the account provided by an eyewitness, Prof. Harry Gove (1922-2009), of very first radiocarbon dating of the Shroud at Arizona laboratory[22Feb14]. That the "calculations were produced on the [AMS] computer, and displayed on the screen"[23Jan17].
[Above: Page 147 of David Sox's 1988 book, "The Shroud Unmasked," with "The calculations were produced on the computer ..." outlined in red and "Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist, said ..." (which I did not notice at the time) outlined in blue.]
All this was under computer control and the calculations produced by the computer were displayed" Later in 2007[10Dec07] I read Gove's own eyewitness account, which evidently is the original, since he gives the date "1350 AD", and Sox was not there:
"The first sample run was OX1. Then followed one of the controls. Each run consisted of a 10 second measurement of the carbon-13 current and a 50 second measurement of the carbon-14 counts. This is repeated nine more times and an average carbon-14/carbon-13 ratio calculated. All this was under computer control and the calculations produced by the computer were displayed on a cathode ray screen. The age of the control sample could have been calculated on a small pocket calculator but was not-everyone was waiting for the next sample-the Shroud of Turin! At 9:50 am 6 May 1988, Arizona time, the first of the ten measurements appeared on the screen. We all waited breathlessly. The ratio was compared with the OX sample and the radiocarbon time scale calibration was applied by Doug Donahue. His face became instantly drawn and pale. At the end of that one minute we knew the age of the Turin Shroud! The next nine numbers confirmed the first. It had taken me eleven years to arrange for a measurement that took only ten minutes to accomplish! Based on these 10 one minute runs, with the calibration correction applied, the year the flax had been harvested that formed its linen threads was 1350 AD-the shroud was only 640 years old! It was certainly not Christ's burial cloth but dated from the time its historic record began" (my emphasis)[22Febr14; 10Mar17].So I realised in 2007 that it was not the actual radiocarbon dating of the Shroud that those in Arizona's laboratory were seeing, but what the AMS computer was displaying. That between the actual carbon dating by the AMS system and those watching the computer screen, was a computer program[24Oct16]! That an explanation of why the first-century Shroud had a 1260-1390 radiocarbon date, is that a hacker had installed a program in the three laboratories' AMS computers which substituted the Shroud's actual radiocarbon date with bogus dates, which when combined and averaged made it appear the Shroud dated shortly before its first undisputed appearance at Lirey, France in ~1355[24Oct16]!
However, I had only started this blog on 30 June 2007], and had a lot to learn about the Shroud, so didn't begin to post that the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud may have been hacked until 2014.
The following are the main items of evidence from all my "hacker" posts, grouped together, to save space, that the three radiocarbon dating laboratories, Arizona, Oxford and Zurich, were indeed duped by a computer hacker, Timothy Linick, aided by German hacker, Karl Koch.
■ Evidence that Timothy Linick was the leaker of Arizona's "1350" date[24Jun14; 30Dec15].
• Linick was quoted in Sox's 1988 book, "If we show the material to be medieval that would definitely mean that it is not authentic."
"The night before the test Damon told Gove he would not be surprised to see the analysis yield a date around the fifth-century, because after that time the crucifixion was banned and a forger would not have known of the details depicted so accurately on the Shroud. Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist, said: `If we show the material to be medieval that would definitely mean that it is not authentic. If we date it back 2000 years, of course, that still leaves room for argument. It would be the right age - but is it the real thing?'" (my emphasis)[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 19Jan16; 06Aug18].• Linick had signed a confidentiality agreement This was despite Linick having signed a confidentiality agreement, "not to communicate the results to anyone":
“The next morning at about 8 am (6 May 1988) I arrived at the Arizona AMS facility ... I would be the only one present outside the Arizona AMS group. Doug immediately asked me to sign the following statement: `We the undersigned, understand that radiocarbon age results for the Shroud of Turin obtained from the University of Arizona AMS facility are confidential. We agree not to communicate the results to anyone- spouse, children, friends, press, etc., until that time when results are generally available to the public.' It had been signed by D J Donahue, Brad Gore, L J Toolin, P E Damon, Timothy Jull and Art Hatheway, all connected with the Arizona AMS facility, before I signed. My signature was followed by T W Linick and P J Sercel, also from the Arizona facility" (my emphasis)[GH96, 262; 31Mar14;19Jan16; 22Nov16; 23Jun18; 06Aug18]When Linick's quote in Sox's book (above) was discovered by Arizona laboratory leaders, Linick might have argued that he didn't communicate the results to Sox. But, apart from it breaching the spirit of his signed confidentiality agreement by communicating with Sox, as we shall see, Linick did communicate Arizona's first run "1350" result to Sox.
Kenneth Rose leaked that the Shroud had carbon dated "mediaeval" On 3 July 1988, columnist Kenneth Rose (1924-2014), in the London Sunday Telegraph, reported on the ongoing radiocarbon dating of the Shroud that, "In spite of the intense secrecy surrounding the investigation I hear 
[Left: Kenneth Rose, was the first to leak on 3 July 1988 that the carbon dating of the Shroud would be "mediaeval."]
signs that the linen cloth has been proved to be mediaeval"[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 15Aug17; 06Aug18]. The story was picked up by news media around the world[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 06Aug18]. Suspicion fell on Oxford laboratory having leaked the results, but Oxford's Prof. Edward Hall (1924-2001) and Robert Hedges (1944-) in a letter to The Times of 9 July, pointed out that Oxford had not then begun its dating of the Shroud[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 15Aug17; 06Aug18]. However, it was not Linick but Zurich's Willy Wolfli (1930-2014) who leaked to Sox that Zurich's first dating run supposedly revealed that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "a good bit distant from the dawn of christianity [sic]" (i.e. medieval), according to Fr Peter Rinaldi (1910-93):
"On June 20 last [1988], David Sox stopped overnight in Turin on his way to some art convention in Tuscany somewhere. He insisted he had to see me. He almost broke down in tears as he embraced me and said: `It is all over, Peter. And I am. terribly sorry for you.' He went on to tell me he had been in Zurich a month or so before with TV (BBC) operator Cameron for the network's TIME WATCH program. It was then Wolfli told them he had made a first test on the Shroud sample shortly after his return from Turin's sample operation on April 21st, and that the result had been negative, in fact; a good bit distant from the dawn of christianity [sic]. Both he and Cameron had been told to keep it secret, and I, in turn, was asked to do the same by David. I kept my word until I heard he spilled it all out on a BBC program sometime later, as you well know"[RP88]I have ordered part 2 of Rose's diary, "Who Loses, Who Wins: The Journals of Kenneth Rose: Volume Two 1979-2014," to see if it has anything on his leaking that the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud revealed that it was supposedly "mediaeval." Previously the book was too expensive but now it is only US$2.88!
• Richard Luckett leaked Arizona's "1350" date On 26 August 1988 the London Evening Standard ran a front-page story, "Shroud of Turin Really is a Fake," with an accompanying article by Cambridge librarian Richard Luckett (1945-2020), stating that a probable date of about 
[Right: Richard Luckett, who had been the Pepys Librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge from 1982 to 2012[05Mar15], so that was his position in August 1988 when he leaked, on behalf of Sox, who received it from Linick, Arizona's "1350" first run date of the Shroud to the London Evening Standard.]
1350 looks likely" and remarking that "laboratories are rather leaky institutions"[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 15Aug17; 15Aug17; 06Aug18; 25Aug24]. This generated another world-wide media frenzy, yet none of the laboratories, nor the British Museum, knew Luckett, or how he had obtained his information[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 08Dec22]. It was again assumed that the Oxford laboratory, which had completed its dating on 6 August, had leaked the "1350" date to Luckett, but not only was Oxford's mean date "several decades less than 1350 AD," in an Associated Press story of 9 September 1988, Luckett was quoted as saying: "I had an absolutely marvellous leak from one of the laboratories and it wasn't Oxford"[05Mar15; 30Dec15; 22Nov16; 15Aug17].
• David Sox was the leaker of Arizona's "1350" date to Luckett [24Jun14; 19Jan16; 22Nov16; 15Aug17; 06Aug18; 03Aug19].
[Left (enlarge): David Sox (left) on his 80th birthday, 24 April 2016, with his partner of 45 years, Allan Offermann [15Aug17].]
- Sox quoted Linick in his 1988 book (see above) which proved that they were in communication with each other. But how would Sox, in England, know that Linick, in Arizona, existed? Linick was not an Arizona laboratory leader who might be more widely known, but merely an ordinary `back room' scientist, who outside of radiocarbon dating circles, would have been unknown[05Mar15; 31Mar15; 30Dec15; 22Feb14]. And before 1988 Sox had only published two obscure Shroud books: "File on the Shroud" (1978) and "The Image on the Shroud" (1981), so Linick would have been unlikely to have heard of Sox. Unless they had a go-between who knew them both (see next).
- Anthony Linick was the go-between Timothy Linick and David Sox On 2 January 2016 I discovered that Timothy Linick had a half-brother Anthony Linick (1938-) who had written a biography of his (not Timothy's) stepfather, the composer and conductor (Ingolf Dahl (1912–70), titled, "The Lives of Ingolf Dahl" (2008)[30Dec15; 30Dec15; That same day, 2 January 2016, I messaged Anthony through his website "A Walkers Journal":
"Your late half-brother Timothy W. Linick, who was a member of the team at Arizona Radiocarbon dating laboratory which radiocarbon dated the Shroud of Turin in 1988, was quoted by the Rev. David Sox as follows:Anthony replied on 3rd January, mentioning that "a few hours after receiving" my message he "also heard from Mr. Farey [Shroud sceptic Hugh Farey (1956-)] on the same topic"[30Dec15][22Feb16; Anthony's reply continued:`... before the test ... Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist, said: `If we show the material [of the Shroud of Turin] to be medieval that would definitely mean that it is not authentic. If we date it back 2000 years, of course, that still leaves room for argument. It would be the right age - but is it the real thing?''[SH88, 147; 30Dec15; 15Aug17].Sox was in England at that time and he would be unlikely to know your brother even existed, so presumably Timothy had contacted Sox and volunteered that information. This was despite all those participating in Arizona laboratory's dating of the Shroud ... having signed an undertaking `not to communicate the results to anyone' ... It was later discovered that Sox was the secondary source of the leaks to the media that the Shroud's radiocarbon dating was `medieval' including the `1350' date ... So it seems inescapable that your late half-brother Timothy W. Linick was the original source of the leaks to David Sox in England, who in turn leaked it indirectly to the English media, that Arizona laboratory's first run date of the Shroud of Turin was `1350' ... If so, were there any repercussions of this on your brother's career? I would appreciate ... any further information you have on your half-brother's dating of the Shroud of Turin at Arizona laboratory in 1988"[JS16; 15Aug17].
"Of course I have encountered materials on the controversies surrounding the Turin Shroud, including theories of conspiracy – including those on the death of my half-brother, Timothy Linick, in 1989. ... I never visited any member of this family after their move to Arizona nor did I have any direct contact with my half-brother while he was there. I knew, of course, that he was a specialist in carbon dating but I don't remember when I learned that he was part of the team charged with dating the shroud. When my step-mother, Del (Delphine) [Timothy Linick's mother] called to share the news of his passing she said only that he took his own life and that he had been suffering from depression ... she never alluded to any mysteries or controversies involving Tim's death or work" (my emphasis)As can be seen, Anthony completely ignored the main part of my message, about Timothy having been quoted in Sox's book in breach of his confidentiality agreement, and being the leaker of Arizona's "1350" date to Sox[15Aug17. Nevertheless, I found this helpful in that, even though I did not mention hacking or suicide (so Farey must have mentioned those, to "poison the well" against me, which is his modus operandi - see 13Aug14), in that Anthony was aware of "theories of conspiracy – including those on the death of my half-brother, Timothy Linick, in 1989 ..." Anthony's "I don't remember when I learned that he was part of the team charged with dating the shroud" is evasive. It had to have been between 10 October 1987 when it was announced that Arizona laboratory was going to be one of the three laboratories to date the Shroud[22Oct17; 08Dec22], and 6 May 1988 when Arizona laboratory did begin dating the Shroud[23Jun18; 08Dec22].
On 22 February 2016, I discovered in Anthony Linick's Wikipedia entry, that he had worked as a teacher at the American School in London for 20 years from 1982 to 2002[22Feb16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19; ALW]. And Sox, whose quote of Timothy Linick I had sent to Anthony in my email of 2 January (see above) had been a teacher at the American School in London for 19 years from 1974 to 1993[05Mar15; 30Dec15; HS16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19: So Sox and Anthony Linick had worked together as teachers at the ASL for ~11 years, from 1982 to 1993, which included 1988[22Feb16; 07Mar16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19]! I emailed Anthony on 23 February, and asked him, "So did you know David Sox? And that he was deeply involved in seeking to discredit the Shroud of Turin? Including being the secondary source of leaks to the media of Arizona's first "AD 1350" date[22Feb16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19]. I concluded my email to Anthony with: "It seems an amazing coincidence that your half-brother Timothy was in contact with David Sox, who presumably you worked with? Did you put Timothy in touch with Sox or vice-versa?"[22Feb16; 03Aug19].
In his reply email the next day, 24 February, Anthony claimed that he only had "a suspicion" that the "David Sox" whom I and "others [plural] mentioned" was the same David Sox "who worked at the American School in London." That he "had wondered if this was the same chap who worked at the American School in London." He "did meet him once or twice and, indeed, my first long-term assignment at ASL was in the middle school, where he was a faculty member"[22Feb16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19]. This is most implausible: 1) "David Sox" is an unusual name. 2) In my first message of 2 January to Anthony Linick, I wrote that in "1988 ... Sox was in England." 3) In my experience as a relief (substitute, supply) teacher for 6 years from 2009-15 at over a dozen different high schools, it would be highly unlikely (to put it mildly) that two teachers could work in the same school for 13 years and indeed in the same middle school faculty, and only "meet ... once or twice"[22Feb16; 15Aug17; 03Aug19]. See in 03Aug19 an extract from the Fall 2011 issue of Accents, the magazine of the American School in London, which records that "David Sox (1974-93)" was in the same room of an English pub with "Anthony Linick (1984-2002) [sic]" at a reunion of "ASL faculty and staff, past and present" only ~5 years before his 2016 reply email to me that he had only met Sox "once or twice" in 13 years!To be continued in the eighteenth installment of this post.
Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]
Bibliography
ALW. "Anthony Linick," Wikipedia, 13 April 2025.
GH96. Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK.
HS16. "Harold David Sox, 1936 - 2016, Obituary, Legacy Remembers, August 29, 2016..
JS16. Jones, S.E., Message, "A Walkers Journal Contact: Timothy W. Linick," January 2, 2016, 6:19 am.
RP88. Rinaldi, P., 1988, "Letter dated August 12, 1988, from Fr Peter Rinaldi to Rev. Kim Dreisbach."
SH88. Sox, H.D., 1988, `The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time,' Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK.
TCW. "The Cuckoo's Egg (book)," Wikipedia, 25 March 2025.
Posted 7 April 2025. Updated 25 April 2025.