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That's a serious non-denial denial. "Not a state party" covers a multitude of sins, especially when you're talking about a country where, _in practice but not officially_ the state exerts vast control over all manner of enterprises.

I wouldn't describe the landscape of extractive-government in Russia as "state control" over enterprise: it's not that the public offices themselves are overstepping their bounds, it's that the holders of those public offices are corrupt and/or compromised.

Yes, this is splitting-hairs, but the Russian Federation isn't anything like North Korea - nor remotely Communist.

Oh, yeah, I should probably have been clearer; I don't mean to imply that it's similar to the situation in the USSR.

Given the state of surveillance technology today, it's pretty hard for me to believe that any large hacking organization manages to fly under the radar of their governments for very long. You need infrastructure, equipment, and financial capabilities to pull off what these groups manage.

These groups are either working explicitly with governments, or their leadership has been approached by domestic police forces and are strong-armed into focusing their attention on specific organizations.

Oh, the CIA, you say? Yeah, let's believe what the CIA says. They can definitely be trusted at their word and they never have done anything questionable. /s

The CIA cannot lie to US legislators without committing a federal crime. They can choose not to disclose information to the public and “neither confirm nor deny” but they can’t knowingly tell a lie.

They can and they have. Let's not pretend we live in fantasy land.

>> The CIA cannot lie to US legislators without committing a federal crime. They can choose not to disclose information to the public and “neither confirm nor deny” but they can’t knowingly tell a lie.

> They can and they have. Let's not pretend we live in fantasy land.

He didn't say they're incapable of lying to Congress, just that it's illegal for them to lie Congress. By the GP's statement, if they lied then they also broke the law.

So we just need to find one case they did to falsify this claim. And to do so we need whistle blowers. There are serious problems with intelligence agencies in democracies.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di...

Not this claim, but a recent example of the CIA lying to Congress with impunity.

Whistleblowers not actually required: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylBrECV7Wc

They can "not understand the question." https://apnews.com/33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad

What about the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence?

> "The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions," Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the panel, said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-report-affirms-u-s-intel...

What about them? Of course they're going to back their spooks.

So we are not supposed to trust our our national intelligence agencies, or the FBI, or the House, or the Senate after the latter three have published extensive and thorough reports laying out the evidence. Whose word exactly are we supposed to take on this? Donald Trump's? Because he seems to be the only other party in the government on the other side of this issue. Where's his report?

Have you read any of these "reports"? They contain no "evidence" that could be presented in a court. Did you see Mueller's disastrous Congressional testimony in support of his report? It was clear that he hadn't read it either.

Trump lies like he breathes, but that doesn't mean we have to believe obvious fantasy that obviously supports the continued stupid wars of the military-industrial complex. In general, the most likely possibility is that both the president and the TLAs are lying.

Yes I have. Have you? You can't really say the reports contain no evidence that could be presented in a court when they are redacted and the raw evidence has been sealed. Mueller's testimony was that the report speaks for itself and it does. How is that "disastrous"?

You seem to contradict yourself ITT. Above, you said ...extensive and thorough reports laying out the evidence. Now you say the evidence is redacted and sealed.

No, your qualification was no evidence that could be presented in a court (which I'm not even sure I disagree with since I'm not an expert on what can and cannot be presented in court). There's plenty of underacted evidence in the document.

They (CIA, NSA, US deep state in general) are in the business of lying. The WMDs that Saddam had? The Gulf of Tonkin incident?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

> US deep state

I agree with you but I think using terms like this can hurt credibility.

They keep making up more of these three letter institutes (CIA, NSA, DoD, ...), I cannot keep up. I mean those that have unaccounted budgets.

They do? You just listed most of them lol.

As I understand it the DoD is just the department these agencies fall under (unless it's the DHS). The actual agencies you've just about covered, surely? CIA, NSA, ICE being the most problematic, then FBI and, what else?

I mean yea they suck but I don't think it's necessarily a hydra.

Right and Assange went on TV and lied about Wikileaks publishing credit cards, which they had done. So....

Govt lies, but that's okay because a civilian also did it. /s

The point is, saying one group lied, therefore this is a lie is bad logic because it is so easy to turn the tables around on that line of thinking.

Lying is just one of many of the things they do.

The CIA is entrusted with protecting US interests, much like every other intelligence service in the world. They do a range of things, much of them boring. It's government.

They have outlets to disseminate disinformation just like Russia does. We're just arguing about where and how it's happening.

> protecting US interests,

I think this is increasingly protecting the interest of the super rich (those with vested interests in large corps). Not "the people".

I'm not claiming other govts are better. Just saying they've shown they cannot be trusted.

they protect their bureaucracy first, American people second.

> They (CIA, NSA, US deep state in general) are in the business of lying. The WMDs that Saddam had?

Yeah, I remember that: even with the bold and explicit lies put forward by the White House and political leadership at DoD, particularly, and some other agencies, the actual releases from the intelligence agencies were quite guarded and reserved.

The intelligence community is in the business of lying to it's targets, sure, but also of protecting it's credibility to decision makers, both within the executive branch and outside of it, including even the American public. The political leadership, OTOH, is often more shortsighted.

>but also of protecting it's credibility to decision makers

The CIA spied on the Senate, the director lied to them about it, and nothing happened.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di...

There's nothing in the Pentagon Papers to suggest that the CIA lied to the government (or to the American people). The liars were various presidents, their various cabinets filled with brain-trusters, and other politicians who either ignored factual information from the CIA or twisted it to fit their ideas of "containment" and "domino theory" and all that nonsense.

The CIA would be no good to anyone if they were in the business of lying.

Gulf of Tonkin was an NSA op.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.ht...

> The SIGINT also shows, according to Hanyok, that a second attack, on August 4, 1964, by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. ships, did not occur despite claims to the contrary by the Johnson administration. President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara treated Agency SIGINT reports as vital evidence of a second attack and used this claim to support retaliatory air strikes and to buttress the administration's request for a Congressional resolution that would give the White House freedom of action in Vietnam.

This is exactly what I said.

> Hanyok further argues that Agency officials had "mishandled" SIGINT concerning the events of August 4 and provided top level officials with "skewed" intelligence supporting claims of an August 4 attack. "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred." Key pieces of evidence are missing from the Agency's archives, such as the original decrypted Vietnamese text of a document that played an important role in the White House's case. Hanyok has not found a "smoking gun" to demonstrate a cover-up but believes that the evidence suggests "an active effort to make SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin." Senior officials at the Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House were none the wiser about the gaps in the intelligence. Hanyok's conclusions have sparked controversy among old Agency hands but his research confirms the insight of journalist I.F. Stone, who questioned the second attack only weeks after the events. Hanyok's article is part of a larger study on the National Security Agency and the Vietnam War, "Spartans in Darkness," which is the subject of a pending FOIA request by the National Security Archive.

To figure out who the liars are we need to know who engaged in a cover-up. Who manipulated, withheld information, or lied. You already know my opinion: I don't think it was the NSA.

For example "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred" suggests that the NSA's information was, in fact, good. It just was ignored, manipulated, omitted, etc.

This is exactly what I said.

I don't find that you mention NSA ITT before my comment. Parent comment did mention them, and your response was the off-topic (for Tonkin, anyway) "CIA doesn't lie!"

Neither supposed "attack" occurred! NSA reports were used to claim that they did occur! You don't think NSA has and is currently withholding information? Why don't you read what you pasted above? "Key pieces of evidence are missing"? If only the TLAs had the technology to preserve the information they gather... this is not credible.

Even if NSA reports had said "there was definitely no Vietnamese attack", those reports were used by the executive branch to ramp up the war. The authors of those reports, and every superior of those authors up the chain to the president, would have had a duty to contradict the false claims. Of course this is fantasy. NSA doesn't oppose war, and its reports reflect this.

I don't think the intelligence agencies willfully produce false intelligence. They might be wrong but, as a matter of policy, they don't lie.

I think the lying occurs higher up in the command structure where some intelligence is omitted from consideration because it doesn't fit the narrative the higher-ups are pursuing. I suppose there's a question here about who, exactly, is involved in this process of filtering out inconvenient information. Are those people part of the intelligence agency or not? This is a tricky question but, even if they are part of the intelligence agency, the pressure to omit comes from the executive branch. The NSA/CIA/etc aren't pursuing a pro-War policy...the executive branch is.

For example, imagine someone in the CIA is asked to provide a report about the likelihood of Iraq having radioactive material that could be weaponized. This person performs diligent research and produces, to the best of their abilities, a factual report. The executive branch presents this report as a "slam dunk" which shows that Iraq has radioactive material. Who lied?

Toward the end of your post, you blur the distinction between "lying" and "having a duty to contradict false claims". I'm only talking about lying although I agree that people do have an imperfect duty to contradict false claims.

At least the DNI, and usually the D/CIA as well (these positions used to be the same one, and were only separated after we invaded), attends all presidential meetings that touch national security. I'll admit, any meeting with Cheney could spontaneously whip up a war from the ether, but even in his odious presence I think we have to hold these officials responsible for using their words.

In every press conference announcing some fresh horrific stupid war, there are spooks present and they do receive direct questions. It would be better for humanity if they didn't lie when answering.

Claims that CIA aren't pro-war and must be corrupted by evil presidents are pure fantasy. CIA have fought wars, by themselves, without telling the president. [0]

[EDIT:] If you've reached the point that you're imagining that honest secret reports are overruled by the public statements and actions of dishonest elected officials, could you accept that the whole idea of government secrecy is mistaken? Why not have these conversations in the open? Surely we'd make better decisions?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

The CIA has a mandate to carry out clandestine operations in foreign nations, which includes arming local militias.

Personally I'm pro-regime change, especially in Cold War Latin America, but that doesn't change anything.

Please, we need to stop these endless wars. Why is it people are voting for TRUMP of all people because they want our troops pulled out of Iraq (17 years), Afghanistan (19 years), and Syria (6 years). How is antiwar/anti-occupation a TRUMP thing and not a liberal/progressive tentpole issue?

Why does the military industrial complex together with intelligence agencies fabricate lies to keep us embroiled forever in these evil endless wars? Every time we try and pull out there's a new BS story from these groups that everyone laps up: "Bounties on US soldiers! War is good! War is peace! War forever!"

Americans are really bad at remembering what just happened. Every war we've fought in the last 150 years, except perhaps WWII (i.e., there were lies but we probably did have to fight), we entered based on complete lies. Yet, we keep starting wars. I think our forgetfulness is not some contingent detail, but a core driver of the American war machine, which grinds up brown people to create money for armaments manufacturers and their puppets in government and news media. We forget because we must. If we remembered, the machine would grind to a halt.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4579950/user-clip-brennan-bla...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di...

No, sir. They don't lie. At least not wittingly.. There are cases where they may inadvertently.. perhaps lie, but not wittingly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwiUVUJmGjs&t=402

I gave a cigarette to the kid from CrowdStrike outside an airport on the way to a Con. He worked directly on the breached computers at the DNC.

I would not consider him CIA material, let's say. :)

Was he FBI material? Private investigator material? Don't be coy about his level!

As always with cases like this we need to review the actual situation, not just distil it down to a hyper-simplistic minimal summary and then base a conclusion on that.

It's not just a case of believing what the CIA say, they and other independent cyber security teams who have also investigated this, have also presented evidence to back up their investigations to show why they think this. There are also other cases of known proven Russian hacking. Assange has provided nothing. So let's not pretend this is a symmetric case of word versus word.

How about an investigation into CIA hacking?

It's not just a matter of hacking though, I'm sure states do this sort of thing, it's the fact that this hacked information was used in a very targeted way to influence the US electoral system with specific political aims.

Is CIA in the business of lying and propaganda? Yes. But things need to be taken in context. The CIA is under the executive branch, and therefore at the mercy of the political whims of the president.

Saddam's non-existent WMDs? Reported by the CIA under an presidential administration that was clutching for any reason to go to war with Iraq.

Gulf of Tonkin? Again, the CIA reporting on something that buttressed the case for war. Again, aligned with the then-presdential administration's desire to escalate things in Vietnam.

The DNC hack is reported by the CIA to be Russia. The current presidential administration has full-throated in their bias toward Russia and against any supposed pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 election. And the CIA still says a highly-damaging (to the Democrats' electoral chances) email dump was orchestrated by Russia.

One of these things isn't like the other.

However CIA also pushes their own agenda like Timber Sycamore, a secret operation lobbied by CIA director David Petraeus, to overthrow President Assad of Syria, that led to a war that created a humanitarian disaster.

President Obama signed off the operation, however it was a CIA creation & execution, with the help of Arab intelligence.

CIA does way more than lying and propaganda. They create wars too.

> "CIA does way more than lying and propaganda. They create wars too."

No one is saying they don't create wars. Look into the School of Americas for all the death and destruction the CIA caused in Latin and South America. The CIA was also first on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. But that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about a CIA report on a subject of importance to the president. The CIA isn't going to release that report without sign-off from the top brass, all of whom serve at the pleasure of the president.

The Syrian Civil War had started before that. The CIA was picking sides for the US, just like every other geopolitically relevant country.

The CIA trying to overthrow Assad is good though, the humanitarian disaster is his fault, and Putin's.

None of it is "propaganda".

I’ve scoured the internet for the crowdstrike documents that offer any kind of proof to their claim. Can you point me to it? The HN crowd I’m sure is capable and qualified of looking at the technical merits of it.

On the off chance that this isn't concern trolling: https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

p. 38 and beyond. Also check out the table of contents; it will point you to other technical specifics.

Yeah because the FSB can't use a cutout to send data to Wikileaks /s

accepted by who, the same media pundits who were discrediting intelligence agency press releases 10 years ago?

Senate Republicans? Trump's own intel chiefs?

I guess they're all part of the deep state cabal too?

I think we’re in a situation where we have to choose whether to trust the CIA or Snowden. Whose account do you believe?

Sounds like "plausible deniability" where you can not guarantee that the email you just got from vladmir at gmail is not from the Russian government.

What I like from that exchange is that the question is framed "can you say" and answered, "we can say." Technically it's affirming the capacity to perform an action (of "saying") rather than affirming a statement of truth.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/the-download-on-the-dnc-...

He won't elaborate on the DNC hack because he says he has no original reporting. Does that mean no one on the forums or in the subculture talks about it?

He said:

"Based on what I’ve learned over the past decade studying Russian language, culture and hacking communities, my sense is that if the Russians were responsible and wanted to hide that fact — they’d have left a trail leading back to some other country’s door."

And note, the founders of phishing in the early 90s were mostly teenage kids, maybe 14-16. It doesn't take a state actor to 'spear phish'.

This seems reasonable to me. The hack could have been done by “Russians” but not state sponsored. Or at least the Russian state wasn’t involved from the start.

Crowdstrike admitted there was no actual evidence. Unfortunatley, if all you watch is mainstream corporate-backed news, you're getting a lot of propaganda without realizing it.

It's like religion, you think your news source is right while all the other ones are wrong (Fox news watchers don't think theirs is propaganda, while MSNBC/CNN viewers clearly see Fox News as propaganda. But MSNBC/CNN does as much propaganda as Fox News).

Anyways, if you're interested in non-corporate news, where if you watch it over many months, thing start to become obvious to the point where you can't unsee it anymore, I recommend Jimmy Dore. He's a comedien. Kind of like a modern day court jester who can tell the truth. Of course, make your own decisions, he may be totally wrong as well, but I've found it to be an insightful source.

Here is one on Crowdstrike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoTGlQ4JMA

So your strategy is to dismiss "mainstream corporate-backed news" and instead watch comedians on Youtube? Hard to take that seriously.

My comment links to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NBC News, the WSJ quoting Republican leadership, and CrowdStrike's own account. They're all collaborating on some elaborate lie and Jimmy Dore has dug up the truth? Give me a break.

I don't know if you're mostly joking; if so, I'll admit it's over my head.

I'm not joking at all. I realize it sounds crazy and conspiratorial, but like I said, if you watch sources like Jimmy Dore over a period of months, it starts to become obvious.

Jimmy Dore isn't the only one, there are lots of other great commentators such as Kyle Kulinski, Rising With The Hill's Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (this one may be more your style, Krystal is left-leaning and comes from MSNBC and Saagar is right-leaning. They don't agree with everything but they cut through the BS pretty well).

I would just say be open-minded and simply start watching one of these sources, it's good to be skeptical. You probably won't agree with them much in the beginning, but when you start seeing how things play out over months, it starts to make a lot more sense, then eventually it becomes obvious.

Note: I am not a conspiracy person AT ALL! Having been captivated by Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World over 20 years ago, I'm actually a big skeptic. Huge James Randi fan, etc. So, don't think that I'm some conspiracy hack, quite the opposite.

I've watched the Krystal and Saagar show a few times. It's pretty good, if a little too predictable.

I don't own a TV or watch cable news; I get most of my news from feeds like AP or Reuters, then try to decide for myself what I think before reading some commentary/analysis.

It's a little worrying to hear things like "[...], if you watch sources like Jimmy Dore over a period of months, it starts to become obvious." This is exactly how conspiracy theories and other quackery work. People get fed up with the mainstream and seek out alternative narratives about how the world _really_ works, then over time cede so much factual ground that their frame of reference becomes broken. This is exactly how people get into flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc.

A slightly better "alternative" might be a news org like The Intercept or a writer like Matt Taibbi. Both are highly ideological but fairly constrained by the facts.

OK, I see you're not just a corporate news junkie. Agree with your assessment of the Intercept / Matt Taibbi.

> So your strategy is to dismiss "mainstream corporate-backed news" and instead watch comedians on Youtube? Hard to take that seriously.

Another symptom of the illness that ails us. It's the job of comedians to make us laugh, not to tell the truth. If a lie is funny enough, some comedians will tell it for that reason alone.

>> Kind of like a modern day court jester who can tell the truth

Responding to the GP: I think that's a misunderstanding of the myth of court jesters. It wasn't that they were the only ones that could tell the truth, it was that they were the only ones that could hint at uncomfortable truths to the king if they wrapped it up in enough humor. Other people could tell the truth amongst themselves, but they had to flatter the king because of his power.

His argument here seems to be that "if Russia hacked the DNC the NSA would have captured and stored all the packets and that would be evidence"? With all respect to the guy, he seems out of his technical depth here.

You're saying that William Binney is out of his technical depth here? The former NSA intelligence official who is the expert in intelligence analysis, and traffic analysis? Did you even watch the video?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...

No, I'm saying the comedian guy is.

Ok but the claim is from Binney, not jimmy dore.

>Anyways, if you're interested in non-corporate news, where if you watch it over many months, thing start to become obvious to the point where you can't unsee it anymore, I recommend Jimmy Dore.

Why take it from a comedian? There is a much more reliable source that knows all[0], sees all and reads a lot.

More details[1].

#WWG1WGA

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/20/904237192/journalist-enters-t...

QAnon and these right-wing conspiracy stuff is the opposite of what I'm recommending. Any reasonable and logical person can quickly determine the fallacy of QAnon if you start looking into it.

All I'm saying is, start watching the commentators I'm suggesting over a period of time, and you will see they are not conspiracy theorists.