8 ms·

>An intelligence agency won't declassify how they determined who it was. Yeah, just like a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. We can't tell how we got this in

>An intelligence agency won't declassify how they determined who it was. Yeah, just like a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. We can't tell how we got this information, but we know for sure. Then few years later it turns out there is no WMD found. Ooops. Sorry. Give me a reason to trust them again?

grandalf 10y ago
> Give me a reason to trust them again? There is not a good reason to do so. The trust has been broken and we should consider them corrupt if not overtly adversarial to the democratic process. No officials took responsibility for the excesses revealed by Snowden, or promised any sort of remediation. Such smugness in the abuse of power is a very scary thing.
BoringCode 10y ago
You clearly don't understand the intelligence process if this is your critique. First, the people making the DNC hack report are not the same as the analysts who worked on Iraq. The IC is not a monolith. Second, the Bush White House saw the intelligence they wanted to see. Third, burning sources and methods is a very real concern in intelligence gathering. That reality can't be ignored no matter how much you want information to be free and open. You don't have to trust the IC. In fact you probably shouldn't take what they say at face value. But there are very good reasons for why they operate the way they do.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > But there are very good reasons for why they operate the way they do. Indeed there are, and no reasonable person would say that having intelligence agencies is a bad thing. The issue in this case is that the US intelligence agencies have been leveraged politically to help convince the public to support various policies, when in fact there has not been credible evidence. A lot of people put their lives on the line to end the cold war, and now we have a faction of US politicians who are trying very hard to galvanize the same historic antagonism. We should be judicious and skeptical, and not let them use the common technique of fake urgency to drive a big decision without adequate forethought.
  - BoringCode 10y ago
    I'm addressing the poor thesis that "the IC has been (deliberately) wrong before, therefore they can't be trusted without an undefined amount of evidence." The points you raise are good and worth discussing, but unrelated to what I was talking about.
- ballsohardy 10y ago
  >Second, the Bush White House saw the intelligence they wanted to see. And the Obama administration is not doing the exact same thing here? I'm sorry but a py2exe agent dropped from phishing, some random IP addresses, and some publicly known persistence techniques do not an APT make. This is horse shit
  - BoringCode 10y ago
    As addressed elsewhere, the linked document is not supposed to be a proof for Russian involvement. The latter part of my comment was meant to provide some context as to why that type of information hasn't been publicly released. If the IC reveals sources and methods, Russia or similar actors will change their behaviors in order to avoid detection/attribution.
dominotw 10y ago
>Give me a reason to trust them again? you are supposed to elect people who you trust to make these decisions. we don't have direct democracy.
okreallywtf 10y ago
Why trust them in the first place, look at the evidence and if you disagree with a conclusion, be able to say why. This is the whole problem we're dealing with right now - people just decide they do or do not trust something. Don't agree with a fact check? Just call it bogus and move on, even though it might be a 50 point case they make why bother finding a flaw in their reasoning and using that to refute their conclusion when you can just be a cynic and shrug it off. Don't agree with climate change? Just pick the 1 totally debunked study that supports your case and ignore the 1000 that don't that haven't been debunked. So I ask, in the analyses that have come out (not just this one), what do you disagree with? As far back as June crowdstrike released a report [1], I assume you went through it in detail and can point to flaws in its reasoning as well? [1] https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
- grandalf 10y ago
  The basic flaws I'd mention are: - Multiple state actors (or well-funded non-state actors) likely compromised the emails. - A state actor could also have faked the "trail" that points to Russia. - The rest of the evidence is circumstantial. Sure, if we pretend we live in a pre-stuxnet, script kiddie sort of world, this was likely a high level state sponsored attack, but it seems preposterous that a state actor would be so sloppy: If you were Putin wishing to try to use spearfishing to get access to specific accounts, you would not source that work to groups that were known to work with your government. You'd set up a fake Nigerian operation so that if found it would look like the email address had been randomly chosen from a list of many used by some Nigerian person to try to scam a few thousand dollars. This is not akin to thinking three or four moves ahead, it's simply thinking one move ahead.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    This is my issue with it. I know I can pull this off without getting caught, hell half the people here can, why can't a Russian super hacker team?
  - dv_dt 10y ago
allemagne 10y ago
It's certainly possible that intelligence agencies are mistaken or deliberately lying. We can't possibly know if that's the best interpretation of the evidence they may or may not have. They have been correct in the past as well. The best and only thing the average citizen can really do is try to put people in office who can intelligently parse classified information and evidence from intelligence agencies.
lsadam0 10y ago
Cheney literally made up an intelligence agency to tell him what he wanted, after the CIA said there was no evidence of WMD. If you blame the CIA for that, you very mistaken.
- mherdeg 10y ago
  Do you mean the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans ?
Tech1 10y ago
I'm an ex Army bomb technician, let me help you. You know WMDs were found in Iraq right? ..Unless we're not calling stockpiled chemical weapons WMDs anymore. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleea...
- dv_dt 10y ago
  This does not increase my confidence or trust in abstract assurances from intelligence agencies. > In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    I understand why that might superficially decrease you trust in the claims, but consider the perspective of the totalitarian trying to spin up a chemical weapons program. Wouldn't leveraging existing expertise and contractors be a good way to get the weapons you wanted? Why wouldn't a dictator hire outsiders to build weapons? Having his experts check them for traps after the construction sounds much cheaper than building his own design teams.
    - makomk 10y ago
      We knew that Iraq had WMDs because a number of western countries sold them some a few decades ago to drop on Iran on our behalf. That's not a secret, and if I recall correctly they were tightly secured and probably degraded to the point of ineffectiveness by that point. The claim that justified invasion was that they had new chemical weapons programs, and that seems to be categorically untrue and without evidence.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        It's not that simple. Saddam was trying to make it look to his neighbors (especially Iran) that he had WMDs. Recall that this is very shortly after the end of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war. He wanted to be very convincing, so as to make his neighbors unwilling to oppose him. At the same time, he was telling the US, "Who, me? I don't have any WMDs." Which made him look like a two-faced liar. The "evidence" that he wanted his neighbors to see convinced Washington.

grandalf 10y ago

> Give me a reason to trust them again? There is not a good reason to do so. The trust has been broken and we should consider them corrupt if not overtly adversarial to the democratic process. No officials took responsibility for the excesses revealed by Snowden, or promised any sort of remediation. Such smugness in the abuse of power is a very scary thing.

BoringCode 10y ago

You clearly don't understand the intelligence process if this is your critique. First, the people making the DNC hack report are not the same as the analysts who worked on Iraq. The IC is not a monolith. Second, the Bush White House saw the intelligence they wanted to see. Third, burning sources and methods is a very real concern in intelligence gathering. That reality can't be ignored no matter how much you want information to be free and open. You don't have to trust the IC. In fact you probably shouldn't take what they say at face value. But there are very good reasons for why they operate the way they do.

grandalf 10y ago
> But there are very good reasons for why they operate the way they do. Indeed there are, and no reasonable person would say that having intelligence agencies is a bad thing. The issue in this case is that the US intelligence agencies have been leveraged politically to help convince the public to support various policies, when in fact there has not been credible evidence. A lot of people put their lives on the line to end the cold war, and now we have a faction of US politicians who are trying very hard to galvanize the same historic antagonism. We should be judicious and skeptical, and not let them use the common technique of fake urgency to drive a big decision without adequate forethought.
- BoringCode 10y ago
  I'm addressing the poor thesis that "the IC has been (deliberately) wrong before, therefore they can't be trusted without an undefined amount of evidence." The points you raise are good and worth discussing, but unrelated to what I was talking about.
ballsohardy 10y ago
>Second, the Bush White House saw the intelligence they wanted to see. And the Obama administration is not doing the exact same thing here? I'm sorry but a py2exe agent dropped from phishing, some random IP addresses, and some publicly known persistence techniques do not an APT make. This is horse shit
- BoringCode 10y ago
  As addressed elsewhere, the linked document is not supposed to be a proof for Russian involvement. The latter part of my comment was meant to provide some context as to why that type of information hasn't been publicly released. If the IC reveals sources and methods, Russia or similar actors will change their behaviors in order to avoid detection/attribution.

dominotw 10y ago

>Give me a reason to trust them again? you are supposed to elect people who you trust to make these decisions. we don't have direct democracy.

okreallywtf 10y ago

Why trust them in the first place, look at the evidence and if you disagree with a conclusion, be able to say why. This is the whole problem we're dealing with right now - people just decide they do or do not trust something. Don't agree with a fact check? Just call it bogus and move on, even though it might be a 50 point case they make why bother finding a flaw in their reasoning and using that to refute their conclusion when you can just be a cynic and shrug it off. Don't agree with climate change? Just pick the 1 totally debunked study that supports your case and ignore the 1000 that don't that haven't been debunked. So I ask, in the analyses that have come out (not just this one), what do you disagree with? As far back as June crowdstrike released a report [1], I assume you went through it in detail and can point to flaws in its reasoning as well? [1] https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...

grandalf 10y ago
The basic flaws I'd mention are: - Multiple state actors (or well-funded non-state actors) likely compromised the emails. - A state actor could also have faked the "trail" that points to Russia. - The rest of the evidence is circumstantial. Sure, if we pretend we live in a pre-stuxnet, script kiddie sort of world, this was likely a high level state sponsored attack, but it seems preposterous that a state actor would be so sloppy: If you were Putin wishing to try to use spearfishing to get access to specific accounts, you would not source that work to groups that were known to work with your government. You'd set up a fake Nigerian operation so that if found it would look like the email address had been randomly chosen from a list of many used by some Nigerian person to try to scam a few thousand dollars. This is not akin to thinking three or four moves ahead, it's simply thinking one move ahead.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  This is my issue with it. I know I can pull this off without getting caught, hell half the people here can, why can't a Russian super hacker team?
- dv_dt 10y ago

allemagne 10y ago

It's certainly possible that intelligence agencies are mistaken or deliberately lying. We can't possibly know if that's the best interpretation of the evidence they may or may not have. They have been correct in the past as well. The best and only thing the average citizen can really do is try to put people in office who can intelligently parse classified information and evidence from intelligence agencies.

lsadam0 10y ago

Cheney literally made up an intelligence agency to tell him what he wanted, after the CIA said there was no evidence of WMD. If you blame the CIA for that, you very mistaken.

mherdeg 10y ago
Do you mean the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans ?

Tech1 10y ago

I'm an ex Army bomb technician, let me help you. You know WMDs were found in Iraq right? ..Unless we're not calling stockpiled chemical weapons WMDs anymore. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleea...

dv_dt 10y ago
This does not increase my confidence or trust in abstract assurances from intelligence agencies. > In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  I understand why that might superficially decrease you trust in the claims, but consider the perspective of the totalitarian trying to spin up a chemical weapons program. Wouldn't leveraging existing expertise and contractors be a good way to get the weapons you wanted? Why wouldn't a dictator hire outsiders to build weapons? Having his experts check them for traps after the construction sounds much cheaper than building his own design teams.
  - makomk 10y ago
    We knew that Iraq had WMDs because a number of western countries sold them some a few decades ago to drop on Iran on our behalf. That's not a secret, and if I recall correctly they were tightly secured and probably degraded to the point of ineffectiveness by that point. The claim that justified invasion was that they had new chemical weapons programs, and that seems to be categorically untrue and without evidence.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      It's not that simple. Saddam was trying to make it look to his neighbors (especially Iran) that he had WMDs. Recall that this is very shortly after the end of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war. He wanted to be very convincing, so as to make his neighbors unwilling to oppose him. At the same time, he was telling the US, "Who, me? I don't have any WMDs." Which made him look like a two-faced liar. The "evidence" that he wanted his neighbors to see convinced Washington.