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It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" i

It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies). As a partial aside, the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us. This, in turn, limits how much we can actually care: As an (likely fictitious) example: > "Russia is hacking our critical infrastructure" doesn't have quite the same ring as >, "On 12/28/2018 Russia initiated an act of cyber warfare and remotely destroyed electrical switching equipment responsible fo rthe power outage and downtime in Middleton Ohio from 0100 GMT to 2119 GMT on the following day. The residents of this area have been notified via mail and SMS . . . ."

pmoriarty 5y ago
"It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies)." These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the threats they're tasked with defending. So the more afraid they can make politicians, the more funding they'll get. What makes their claims even less credible is that they're basically professional liars. They're trained in deception and have a long, sordid history of deceiving the public: often quite consciously and deliberately. "the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us" Even if they did tell us we could never know if they were telling the truth, as the public has absolutely no access to their internal records. They tell us what they want us to believe.
- no-dr-onboard 5y ago
  > "we could never know if they were telling the truth" Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could. At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be able to testify to the press (or to others) that something strange did happen. Having worked on outages related to that kind of stuff, I myself could testify that when people in my field see strange things on public-sector systems it somehow makes it's way around the community ;). The point here is that it would/will lend credence to the claims that those scary men in black suits make. But of course, believe what you want. That's always going to be your prerogative.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Ok, we could know about some large-scale events where there were lots of witnesses that something happened, maybe even mostly what happened, but I don't see how we could know who was ultimately responsible or why. Secret agencies can pin blame on anyone or any country they like, and there's ultimately no way to tell.. especially when double agents, false flag operations, and provocateurs are taken in to account. The intelligence field is the proverbial hall of mirrors, and that a spy agency said something or was in any way involved is my cue to give up any hope of ever figuring out what was really going on.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies)." These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the threats they're tasked with defending. So the more afraid they can make politicians, the more funding they'll get. What makes their claims even less credible is that they're basically professional liars. They're trained in deception and have a long, sordid history of deceiving the public: often quite consciously and deliberately. "the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us" Even if they did tell us we could never know if they were telling the truth, as the public has absolutely no access to their internal records. They tell us what they want us to believe.

no-dr-onboard 5y ago
> "we could never know if they were telling the truth" Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could. At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be able to testify to the press (or to others) that something strange did happen. Having worked on outages related to that kind of stuff, I myself could testify that when people in my field see strange things on public-sector systems it somehow makes it's way around the community ;). The point here is that it would/will lend credence to the claims that those scary men in black suits make. But of course, believe what you want. That's always going to be your prerogative.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Ok, we could know about some large-scale events where there were lots of witnesses that something happened, maybe even mostly what happened, but I don't see how we could know who was ultimately responsible or why. Secret agencies can pin blame on anyone or any country they like, and there's ultimately no way to tell.. especially when double agents, false flag operations, and provocateurs are taken in to account. The intelligence field is the proverbial hall of mirrors, and that a spy agency said something or was in any way involved is my cue to give up any hope of ever figuring out what was really going on.