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Comment by criticaltinker | Hacker News Reader

Given a heavily redacted government document, how can a member of the general public verify its authenticity?

I’m not necessarily questioning the document alluded to in OP, or the conclusions it suggests. Just wondering if there’s some existing crypto signature, watermark, data hash, etc that could be relied upon to independently verify claims in any such government document.

In the age of disinformation and advanced three letter agencies it seems increasingly difficult to establish provenance and trust. I haven’t found any links to the declassified document despite this story being published verbatim by every major news outlet.

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Disclaimer: used to work in military intelligence, do not currently work in any capacity with intelligence community.

It's reasonable for someone to be skeptical of any information presented to them and especially when that information is from government agencies dealing in intelligence and psyops, given that they are not auditable by the general public except through FOIA requests and declassification. Even yourself at the best of times is a questionable source of trust.

However, I do think that the assumption that any sort of release of records being inauthentic isn't particularly practical, either. Declassification is a regular and regulated process. More often than not the information is not particularly of interest, especially in the now, given that classification is dependent on threat to national security (granted, how properly things are categorized as far as classification goes is something worthy of scrutiny itself). It's plausible that document declassification and releases could be used as a vehicle for propaganda but in this case it does require quite a few processes to fail. That's not to say that it doesn't (because it demonstrably has), just that it's fairly unlikely.

Verifying the information presented can be sometimes difficult or impossible so the trust to the document might only extend so far as you trust the person writing it or the government in general. There aren't really perfect ways for verification that it's from the source they purport. You must assume that the FBI or another agency's servers aren't compromised and that SSL isn't compromised. You might be able to get a copy from the national archives or the FBI, though.

The document is available here:

https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related...

and direct link to download pdf:

https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related...

I take the cynical view that intelligence agencies are simply untrustworthy.

Why trust arms of the government that manipulate, spy, and deceive as their raison d'être? How can you ever be sure they’re actually authentic?

If the world is imperfect enough to have wars, it is imperfect enough to have actors unwilling to formally wage a war against a nation with superior military but willing to inflict harm on it and its citizens for whatever reason (that nation’s invasive foreign policy and/or religious beliefs) through covertly planned surprise attacks. Spying and deceit may be seen as necessary evils to prevent or follow up on those attacks to prevent reoccurrence.

In an ideal world where no one competes for resources and no group wants to inflict harm on another group there would be no wars and no need for intelligence agencies.

It is a legitimate worry that, if approaching such a peaceful world would cause outflow of funding from people in those agencies, they may want to resist that by inventing artificial threats. Whether it is already a pressing concern is another question (I personally think there’s some way to go still).

Was there ever a time people would trust a piece of paper in isolation? Let us look at the example of Solidarność (the first independent trade union that managed to survive in the Warsaw pact; 30% of society being members). Unlike Stasi, Polish equivalent didn't believe in fancy tech. When regime falling was imminent, they simply burned the documents, leaving no hope to glue shreds back together. Except the documents that proved that the leadership of Solidarność, including Lech Wałęsa (Nobel peace prize winner, first post-communist president) were actually moles on regular secret informant payroll.

Nobody doubts the veracity of those documents... But the question "do you believe they actually were moles?" is an infallible predictor of who did a person vote for in the last couple decades.

> Was there ever a time people would trust a piece of paper in isolation?

Pretty much all of history. We love it when facts supporting our beliefs are isolated in a single source. We also love it when a source is ambiguous enough to let us draw our own conclusions.

The lie of omission has a long track record of being effective. It has the benefit of being useful to the source and/or the receiver. There's redundancy in falsehood selectors. Either the source will lie or we, on the receiving end, will lie. The truth often doesn't stand a chance; somebody is gonna find a way to isolate.

Trust is not a behavior that is reliably rational. One could argue that it always has an element of emotional attachment to the familiar.

>Except the documents that proved that the leadership of Solidarność, including Lech Wałęsa (Nobel peace prize winner, first post-communist president) were actually moles on regular secret informant payroll.

To be clear, documents show that he was secret informant in years 1970-1976, while he only became leader of Solidarność in 1980.

Somehow this just fits their current narrative. If it's true or not this information was obviously released to push a narrative.

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