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"I continue to be blown away by Hacker News' collective refusal to believe that NK is likely behind this hack." Skepticism is healthy and encourages discussion
by dmschulman 12y ago
"I continue to be blown away by Hacker News' collective refusal to believe that NK is likely behind this hack."
Skepticism is healthy and encourages discussion. I am not observing a "collective refusal" as you put it, but instead a strong skepticism from the tech community (a community who has a good basis to interpret this story with).
"Do you all also doubt that they were behind the other hacks mentioned by the FBI (e.g. on South Korean banks and media outlets)? Is it 'incredibly dangerous' to accuse them of that as well?"
The discussion is around a specific cybersecurity attack, not North Korea's capabilities, so that's a bit of a straw man argument.
"I understand the post-Iraq mentality of demanding evidence before going to war with a country, but that's not what's going on here."
No rational person is making a case for war over this, but the fact that you mention going to war over this demonstrates why it is incredibly dangerous to make these assumptions about North Korea without looking at all the available evidence.
"Also, given how mouthy North Korea is, nobody finds it telling that other than a single denial on December 7th, they've been quiet?"
Quite the opposite. I think it would fit the profile if North Korea was being mouthy at this point in time. Their silence would suggest this is a delicate situation for them politically and they don't know how to respond to it.
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- sillysaurus3 12y agoSkepticism is healthy and encourages discussion. I am not observing a "collective refusal" as you put it, but instead a strong skepticism from the tech community (a community who has a good basis to interpret this story with). Actually, we don't really have a good basis to interpret the story. The evidence that the US government has used to verify that NK was involved is most likely classified. The most straightforward way to verify the NK government's involvement is a high-level NK spy, or a communications tap on NK's political leadership. If it captured a high-level meeting regarding the "progress of the Sony hack," for example, then that would be pretty strong evidence of NK's involvement. Yet there's no way that any press release could include such info without also compromising their sources. The point of the US government saying "NK is involved" is to say "We have verified NK is involved," not to give hard proof. Such proof may exist, but it may not be possible to divulge without also causing other consequences, as I mentioned above. It's not a trial, and they're under no obligation to present any of their core evidence or reasoning. It's up to us whether we choose to believe them or not. The tech community sometimes overestimates how informed it is. For example, consider how someone would be viewed by the tech community if they claimed that governments were writing BIOS malware, and they made that claim before 2013. So it seems mistaken to believe that the tech community is any better suited to interpret the story than any other community. Various intelligence communities or politics communities might even be better suited than we are at figuring out reasons why the story shouldn't be taken at face value, if any such reasons even exist.