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?
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-democ...
- 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.
Hillary was not liked in china or korea.
They never even claim that the evidence they show would lead to the conclusions they assert. What they claim is that there's other information that they can't tell you that would lead to their conclusions, and then they release documents like this so interests who have an interest in supporting their conclusions have something to cite.
They're explicitly asking you to trust them, and offering no evidence.
When climate change scientists who operate within an opaque government agency start telling me that the evidence for climate change is too secret for me to see, I'll become a climate change skeptic, too.
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.
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.
The points you raise are good and worth discussing, but unrelated to what I was talking about.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleea...
> 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.
Having his experts check them for traps after the construction sounds much cheaper than building his own design teams.
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.
I do think someone was "looking the other way", but I don't think it was our spy agencies.
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.
you are supposed to elect people who you trust to make these decisions. we don't have direct democracy.