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Comment by shard972 | Hacker News Reader

> There is ample evidence of Russian hacking directed at the DNC to produce material to leak.

Considering the Media started with 15 intel agencies all saying this was the case and ended only being 3 agencies in the final report with 1 in particular (The NSA) only claiming "moderate confidence" (60%).

The NSA would seem like they would be the best placed to know who did it, yet they gave it just above a coin toss in probability? I believe the intel agencies were more confident about WMD's in Iraq than this "ample evidence".

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All three agencies assessed with high confidence the attribution of the campaign to Russia. The medium confidence assertion was about whether Russia intended to actually get President Trump elected, of which evidence is not clear or strong.

Please read the actual report rather than the distilled version you got from your choice of media.

    We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an
    influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US
    presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine
    public faith in the US democratic process,
    denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
    and potential presidency. We further assess
    Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear 
    reference for President-elect Trump. We have high
    confidence in these judgments.
    
    - We also assess Putin and the Russian Government
    aspired to help President-elect Trump’s
    election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary
    Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
    All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI
    have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate
    confidence.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

> three agencies assessed with high confidence the attribution of the campaign to Russia. The medium confidence assertion was about whether Russia intended to actually get President Trump elected, of which evidence is not clear or strong

That document was intended to be persuasive, not comprehensive. It blurred together a lot of different things, attributed them all to the same plot by Putin, and used paragraph after paragraph of filler material to "support" the various claims.

Of all the claims making up the "argument" in the document, none of the ones that could possibly be verified by data were verified by data. We were told such data exists, but not shown any evidence of it.

I was deeply embarrassed that our government would release such an amateurish document, and even more embarrassed that the document would be cited as evidence by people who should know better.

You're changing the goalposts. My response was correcting a factual error in the parent poster's statement.

This report isn't meant to provide evidence. It's a summary of a report submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee (chaired by a Republican) that has been scrubbed of secret information, release of which would cut off or kill sources. The fact you think it's amateurish reflects your unfamiliarity with what these documents mean (Which is just fine! We can't all be experts on these things).

If you do not trust the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Intelligence Community chiefs, that is just fine also. This document is a report: nothing more, nothing less. Critical thinking and questioning authority is good.

> The fact you think it's amateurish

The report contained a lot of information in it that suggested it was thrown together by a person unfamiliar with ITSec who was copying and pasting filler material until the report was long enough (had enough pages) to seem substantial, much like the folders full of blank sheets of paper Trump used as a prop for one of his speeches.

> reflects your unfamiliarity with what these documents mean

That's exactly the point. They mean nothing because they assert nothing factual, simply an opinion whose reasoning is left up to the imagination of the reader under the pretense of secrecy.

> Senate Intelligence Committee (chaired by a Republican)

Fearmongering about Russia has crossed party lines, and is concentrated in some of the more powerful members of congress who are on that committee...

Watch a few minutes of Marco Rubio's questioning of Tillerson about Russia, it's as if he's asking a religious litmus test question, not asking about a rational thought process. I found it deeply embarrassing to watch.

> If you do not trust the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Intelligence Community chiefs

Trust should not be part of the equation when we are talking about going to war. It should be abundantly obvious that war is necessary, and we should not have to take anyone's word for anything.

If the report had been upfront about its lack of evidence-based analysis, then it would have been less than a page long. The fact is, intelligence agencies do not worry about all of their analysis being evidence-based, they use heuristics and other models of understanding behavior to formulate their assessment. I'm not arguing that this method is not appropriate to that specific domain.

However, the report was presented as containing the actual evidence that convinced members of the committee that there was Russian involvement.

Most of us are old enough to remember how not long ago an administration presented flawed evidence about Iraq and how that cost the US trillions of dollars and left nearly a million people dead. It was one of the biggest human atrocities in the modern world, and it happened because too many of us trusted the heuristic and hand-waving approach that intelligence agencies use.

That approach is fine when there is a need to make a last-minute decision and no better methods exist, but they should not be used for promoting/propagandizing wars that have not yet started.

If it were not for the rabid partisanship (not just democrat/republican, there are a lot of vehement anti-Russia partisans in both parties) the report would have been laughed at by the press and no president or intelligence committee would dare release such garbage. Unfortunately, like during the buildup to the Iraq war, such discretion and scrutiny is missing from the equation.

It astonishes me how riled some people are by this supposed "influence campaign" by Russia, but nobody cares about the "influence campaign" by corporations for Hillary Clinton to win the election ?

American corporations are allowed to influence elections...where have you been?

American corporations also contributed to the Trump campaign, the RNC, and various PACs.

It's increasingly common for corporations and other interests to contribute to multiple parties.

The joint statement is at [1]. It starts: The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.

The USIC[2] is The United States Intelligence Community (IC)[1] is a federation of 16 separate United States government agencies that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities considered necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and national security of the United States...The IC is headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President of the United States.

The full report is [3]. That is also from the DNI (see above), which represents those 16 agencies.

The key judgements from that are:

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

and

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

So it is 16, not 15. But the media reports I saw said 16 anyway. It's true that the NSA had moderate confidence in one of the judgements, but all agencies had high confidence in the "Russia interfered" judgement.

It is also inaccurate to say "moderate" means 60%. That would correspond to a likelihood of a forecast of "Probable", but confidence is a different scale.

Moderate Confidence actually means: "credibly sourced and plausible information, but not of sufficient quality or corroboration to warrant a higher level of confidence."

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...

[3] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3254241-ICA-2017-01....

There is apparently a protocol for actual intelligence service findings, and this document did not follow that protocol.

It was thus simply created to serve a political/PR purpose. The sloppiness of its construction, its reliance upon boilerplate content lifted from other places, and its confident conclusion unsupported by data are all big differences from the professional style that is typically used in intelligence document

It's impressive to watch you try to come up with more FUD.

I learned from the Iraq war that when leaders tell me I should want war I ought to be skeptical.

If only your comments were skeptical.

> If only your comments were skeptical.

How would you characterize them?

Most of the people who believe that Russia was involved in the hacking or election meddling seem happy to believe it without evidence.

As McCain spouted, cyber attack could reasonably be viewed as an act of war. This is generally the view of the most passionate anti-Russia fearmongers involved in this debate.

I'm simply demanding actual evidence, the way I should have when I stupidly believed George W. Bush and Colin Powell that there was a direct trail leading to Iraq having WMDs.

Consider that during the buildup to the Iraq war, the UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was tarred and feathered by those who wanted to go to war in Iraq. This was a career bureaucrat who saw that the inspection regime was being twisted to make the case for a war that he felt was unwarranted based on the years he'd spent on the ground in Iraq, actually inspecting Iraq's facilities.

Not only was he harassed and mocked, his career was ruined because he dared state what turned out to be very obvious once Saddam was unseated -- that Iraq had absolutely no WMD capability.

We are seeing the same thing with Russia. Simply by expressing skepticism people are being called names like "useful idiot" and all sorts of other politically motivated slurs.

War is just politics that turns violent. What we're seeing in the US is a pretty significant propaganda campaign to foment hatred toward Russia. It's quite obvious that if there were any evidence AT ALL this would be a big deal, but after months of repetition and hand waving by those wishing to foment hatred, after leaks by the intel community, etc., there is still zero evidence.

This doesn't mean that those who claim all that stuff are wrong, it just means that they are making a faith-based decision, which is a kind of decision that I do not think the American people should make when wars and lives are on the line.

The comment I linked before presents what I believe to be the strategic background between US and Russia that is relevant to this conflict.

I think I've presented some reasonable evidence elsewhere - you said so yourself.

It's possible to believe that US policy on Russia (Esp regarding NATO expansion) is unnecessarily aggressive, that US Intel agencies aren't especially competent, that the CIA was completely wrong on Iraq and yet still believe in Russian interference in the US election.

The thing that convinced me was seeing the campaign on social media. Its pretty easy to find clear pro-Russian bot nets on Twitter that used to be super interested in Turkey and then suddenly became pro-Trump.

The same thing is happening for the French and German elections. Have a look yourself.

Do you happen to know of any of the bots' names?

There are obvious and pretty ineffectual ones like outlined at https://twitter.com/benimmo/status/833766530647212032

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/06/how-russia-... takes a much deeper look. Sadly(?) most of the accounts I found when I followed that story have gone, but you can still find some. Here's a search to start with: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Incirlik%20since%3A2016-07-2...

Do you think the bots reflect a level of sophistication or apparent financial backing that makes them clearly the work of a nation state?

I ask the above question seriously, and I think your point about botnets brings up some interesting issues:

- Why must all of the actions attributed to Russia be part of a larger "campaign"

- Which of the actions could have also been conducted by smaller than nation-state entities? For each, what would you estimate the budget of the operation to be?

- For each of the actions, how easy would it be for some actor to do it and intentionally leave a trail that points to Russia? What level of sophistication would be needed to do this? What auditing mechanisms exist that US intelligence might have already used to rule out any such activity?

Based on the above, how much confidence do you have about each of the actions in the campaign being attributable to a Putin-initiated directive vs other possible explanations?

Also, what strategic considerations do you think Putin made before ordering the action concerning the possibility of being caught (as you'd seemingly argue he has been)? What tit-for-tat response would HRC have done if she'd won the US election, and what tit-for-tat response do you see Trump likely to do?

In addition, supposing the campaign was ordered by Putin, what does it reveal about Russia's ability to meddle in US civil society in a consequential way? He's seemingly been very successful in nearly doing away with years of work to marginalize Russia and punish it for its aggressive behavior, which must be an outcome he is quite pleased by.

Since it is unlikely he thought this outcome would occur, why was it worth doing the campaign in the first place, when it clearly incited HRC and McCain (the expected thought leaders on Russia before election day) to react so strongly?

It would be one thing if the expected outcome were Trump winning, but I think it's very, very hard to argue that Putin could have expected this and would have planned a risky strategy with it in mind. On the contrary he must have expected the opposite outcome when he initiated the campaign, and was likely expecting to be dealing with no Trump victory, merely a heated backlash and sanctions from a US regime he wantonly provoked.

If you manage to notice this comment I'm curious about your thoughts.

In response to what you wrote in another thread about these questions: I think they are more propaganda, intentionally or not. They're a continuation of endless, open, 'possible', unfounded allegations, questions, and speculation. There is not even an attempt to establish any credible basis for them; they contribute no knowledge to the discussion; all they do is eat time and attention, and slow and distract people.

It's like a person at a meeting, where people are trying to accomplish something substantive, who just raises endless speculative objections.

> They're a continuation of endless, open, 'possible', unfounded allegations, questions, and speculation.

I'm not entirely sure what this means. My intention was to better understand your mental model, which appears a bit sloppy, or at least more concerned with its conclusion than with its integrity as a rational process.

I guess what I'd say (constructively) is that if it is too much work to articulate your argument as a tree of probabilistic scenarios to each player and strategic moves which themselves have probabilistic outcomes, then I think that might be a clue that your might not actually believe your own argument.

One example I'd offer about how I think we can understand ourselves better by using probabilistic reasoning is this:

We routinely make important decisions based on imperfect understanding of our own motives or preferences. This is why the technique of flipping a coin to make difficult A vs B decisions is so powerful. The decision was difficult precisely because we expect to be equally happy with either outcome. Thus letting the coin toss result make the decision preserves our utility maximization (to the best of our knowledge). At times, if it lands on heads, we may feel regret, which can indicate that we actually preferred the other outcome. The practice is very illustrative of how opaque our own uncertainty can be to us.

So we should assume when considering the decision-making of those who we can't ask directly for details, that there was nearly always a fair bit of uncertainty behind every decision. The more external evidence there is that the person is deeply rational (as world leaders nearly always are) the more confident we can be that the decision was not guided by a deluded sense of outcome probability.

Thus, for actions that involve many steps taking place blind (without an eye on the outcome) we must assume either that the actor is indifferent to the outcome, or that there is some benefit to outcomes other than the most desired one, and that the potential costs are well understood.

We don't need to know everything about the actor's decisions or expected probabilities to reason about his actions, since we can learn a great deal by outlining the things we feel confident about and determining whether the other pieces of our theory seem to fit. This was the intention behind the questions I posed, to help us both scrutinize your view more thoroughly, since if you are right I'd very much like to agree with you.

> Consider that during the buildup to the Iraq war, the UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was tarred and feathered by those who wanted to go to war in Iraq. This was a career bureaucrat who saw that the inspection regime was being twisted to make the case for a war that he felt was unwarranted based on the years he'd spent on the ground in Iraq, actually inspecting Iraq's facilities. Not only was he harassed and mocked, his career was ruined because he dared state what turned out to be very obvious once Saddam was unseated -- that Iraq had absolutely no WMD capability.

Sorry, that just didn't happen.

Blix accused Iraq of stalling the inspections, which was decided as a sign of noncompliance by some US officials.

Blix's career wasn't ruined and he wasn't "harrased or mocked".

Get your facts straight. Please.

The article I link below is one example of the substantial smear campaign waged against Hans Blix during the buildup to the Iraq war. There were many, many other examples of this, led by neoconservatives in the US and Britain:

http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2003/03/31/weapons-hans-bl...

> How would you characterize them?

IMHO: Either an active proponent of or otherwise credulous about Russia's and Trump's propaganda. It takes very little skepticism to see through them.

I have no interest in promoting Trump or Russian propaganda. I have serious disdain for Trump (and for humanitarian abuses committed by Putin (and by the US)), the only thing I would characterize as wise that he's done is to question some of the more dishonest foreign policy ideas the US has been running with for quite some time.

Nowhere in the criticism of the idea that the US might improve relations with Russia is there any assertion of what US national interest actually is, merely a smear campaign against Putin (much like the one against Saddam, etc.)

To me that is what defines propaganda -- ad hominem smears, moralizing, indignation that someone would have a view different than your own. These are actually a characteristic of some of the arguments you've put forth.

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