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 communit

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). 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.