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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Tellingly, the FBI's press release says that the bureau's conclusion is only based "in part" on these clues. This leaves open the possibility that the government has classified evidence that North Korea is behind the attack.

I am surprised that the article doesn't end here. Other press reports have highlighted that there is classified evidence that has not been disclosed, and it seems odd to me that Schneier would play this aspect down in a story involving cyberattacks, North Korea, the FBI and the US intelligence community.

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Because why exactly would anyone believe the US government after they have invoked the "secret evidence" trope for the billionth time?

They will claim this to get out of some clerical error. They will claim this for anything. It's unverifiable, it's unbelievable, it's a wonder any publication with some journalistic integrity left would read anything into it.

Here is attorney general Holder invoking state secrets to cover up what was eventually revealed as a lowly FBI clerk checking the wrong box:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2014/02/holder...

This wasn't even an important case! Think what these people will do when the stakes are higher.

But surely the military industrial complex has the incentive to have the public's best interest at heart when it come to defining cyber warfare doctrine?

On the flip side, other fairly recent claims of classified evidence from US officials have proven to be unfounded -- most notably, the claims of active Iraqi nuke and chemical weapons programs which were the stated basis for George W. Bush's invasion. And other more recent examples, like Clapper's lie to Congress about bulk data collection, seem to indicate that the culture of US intelligence hasn't changed since then in any fundamental respect.

It's your choice whether to take these guys at their word in any particular instance. But some of us don't take their word alone as evidence for much, unless it's backed up by evidence which stands up to independent review.

US officials have lied so many times it's difficult to give credibility to anything they say:

NSA lies to senate about surveillance on U.S. citizens living inside the country: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/mar/11/...

CIA lies about torture and it's effectiveness: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/the-senate-report-...

FBI lies to U.S. courts about surveillance records: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/fbi-chastised-court-ly...

The problem with liars isn't that they lie, it's that sometimes they tell the truth.

I don't think that holds weight. The federal government employs nearly 3 million people, and of course some of them will lie to better serve their interests. You'd reasonably expect this. You see racists making similar arguments about random minorities - a few isolated cases expanded into a gross stereotype.

To blanket dismiss any statement as untrustworthy is unwise and misguided.

Secret evidence can be used to justify whatever whims the gatekeepers of that evidence wish to pursue politically.

If anything should be learned from the Iraq debacle, it's that.

That focus on Iraq is strange. I'm French and when Bush provided so-called "evidence" at the UN, people here were laughing and media were skeptic. From comments on HN, it seems Bush was taken seriously in other circles of the world, which may explain why some US citizen boycotted French products after we said we would create a worldwide axis against war.

> From comments on HN, it seems Bush was taken seriously in other circles of the world,

Not sure if you heard the news, but Bush quickly invaded Iraq. I think it's safe to assume he was taken seriously.

> which may explain why some US citizen boycotted French products after we said we would create a worldwide axis against war.

Some US citizens just like to complain about foreigners to be more patriotic (as if that would help). I would doubt most people could explain anything about french foreign policy.

Exactly! It honestly beats me. The tone around the news in India was that the so-called "evidence" was total bullshit. I, too, was amazed to learn that there were people who believed it.

The net effect was to shout "he's got a gun!" at the critical moment of action - a security council vote, IIRC.

I didn't think Saddam was a serious threat to the west at the time, but the relentless hype did make me think it over one night: what if? And then I saw that anything asymmetrical he could do would quickly result in his destruction. Even if he had all the dirty weapons possible at his disposal, he wouldn't have been able to use them.

And, of course, what came out later makes governmental prognostications now from secret evidence almost impossible to believe. Western governments, in particular US and UK, lost their credibility. Secret evidence is used for political purposes, not for security. The case for covert interception of communications is severely weakened. Probably even our security is damaged.

Hmm... I wonder if there is any sort of equivalency between the Gatekeepers of Evidence and the Guardians of Peace.

As the other commenter said, there was also "classified evidence" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Why would you blindly "just trust them" when there's enough history to show that skepticism is a much healthier attitude.

IIRC, a lot of the evidence in the Saddam case came from a defector from Iraq that spun a story to tell the Americans what they wanted to hear. No one bothered to do enough verification of what they were hearing because it was what they wanted to hear.

I recall something of the sort, yeah.

This doesn't change anything I said, though. Regardless of where it comes from, "hidden facts" from agencies with an agenda that don't necessarily align with citizens are not to be automatically trusted.

North Korean defectors have also done this.

The common narrative is that the US contrived the whole thing to justify an attack. This is how that unfortunate situation gets used to explain all sorts of nefarious conspiracies.

But they really, honestly had reason to believe that Iraq had WMDs (yes there were doubters and skeptics, and of course they get the bulk of the attention after the fact, but many actually believed it).

Aside from defectors and people trying to lie their way to something, add that Saddam himself wanted the world (particularly Iran) to think that the Iraq government had WMDs. Iraq believed that having WMDs was a good defense (a good example since then is North Korea), so they tried to play the middle ground where they could seem to have WMDs hidden away, and could act as if they had that ace in the hole, but they would play along with UN inspectors just enough to try to avoid an attack, adding just enough mystery to the whole thing that there were open doubts. Intelligence is tough when the person you're trying to prove is doing something is also trying to convince you that they're doing something.

The game of chicken didn't turn out well. But the recurring narrative that innocent Iraq was all along say no no no look where you want and the US invented the situation is historical revisionism.

I don't want to get into an argument here but calling it "historical revisionism" is absolutely disrespectful to the rest of the world.

Historical revisionism is polls showing a huge percentage of Americans still think Saddam was involved in 911.

USA had no business invading Iraq (nor practically any other country, for that matter) and using the excuse that "Saddam claimed he had them to look tough" in order to justify so many tragedies (mostly foreign but also American) is egregious.

When someone performs threat assessment they do it based on facts and not on posturing or they'd prosecute every internet troll out there.

ugh. I'm going to stop now because I'm pissed but I'm going to let you know that you're basically apologizing for crimes against humanity with what sounds like kinder garden excuses.

This isn't some lowbrow conspiracy site, and I don't expect the participants to have the sort of superficial, facile understanding of world events that you've so evidently demonstrated. If reality makes you "pissed", you should stick to gentler pastures that conform with your worldview.

I don't think the US should have invaded Iraq for purely pragmatic and financial reasons. That does nothing to change the actual complex, convoluted reality that led to the decisions that were made, and then the long and fruitless, but very intense, search for WMDs after the attack.

You know, we found WMDs after the attack. They were just the wrong ones.

President George W Bush led the US into war in Iraq on the back of assertions that Saddam Hussein had recently-built weapons of mass destruction, supplies that had only increased in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Yet all the chemical weapons found by soldiers were manufactured before 1991, the Times reported. They consisted largely of 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets – not designed for mass destruction, and produced in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

According to the Times, the reports were embarrassing for the Pentagon because, in five of the six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been “designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/iraqs-hidde...

> we found WMDs after the attack

The text you quote confirms chemical weapons but not weapons on mass destruction

They are WMDs by certain standards of international law on the technicality of belonging to a certain class of chemical munitions. The shells they were packaged in were not designed for mass dispersal, however the classification is on the stuff inside the shells.

You should read up on it more.

In his evidence, the former Downing Street communications director rejected suggestions that he had been asked to "beef up" the dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and said its purpose had not been "to make a case for war".

But Major General Michael Laurie, who was the Ministry of Defence’s director general, intelligence collection, from 2002 to 2003, told the inquiry that making a case for war was “exactly its purpose”.

Maj Gen Laurie added that he and his colleagues were told that a previous intelligence dossier “did not make a strong enough case” and for months he was “under pressure to find intelligence that could reinforce the case” for war.

His evidence, which is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the Blair government’s official line on the dossier, will restart the row over whether Downing Street “sexed up” the September 2002 document to persuade the public and MPs that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was necessary.

Maj Gen Laurie’s comments were made in private last year and have only now been published by the inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, along with newly-declassified government memos and other evidence heard behind closed doors.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/85...

edit - also note that this is from The Telegraph. Whatever else they are, they are definitely not conspiracy minded anti-establishment types.

You should read up on it more.

Firstly, what the British government did or didn't do is not really relevant to conversations about the US government.

Secondly, even if the UK government were at all relevant to this conversation, telling someone to "read up" when providing information that doesn't remotely contradict what they're replying to is terribly boorish behavior. Note that I didn't say that the government had compelling evidence -- I said that they read the tea leaves and got the impression that there were WMDs. Yes, this overriding belief will make intelligence that might be a collage of coincidental and second-hand things perhaps seem more consequential than they should have been. But regardless, the overarching belief was that Iraq legitimately had a WMD program and stockpiles, courtesy of the Saddam regime trying to convince everyone that such was exactly the case.

Firstly, what the British government did or didn't do is not really relevant to conversations about the US government.

If you actually think that regarding this subject, then you have not looked into the events leading up to the Iraq war at all, and you definitely should read up on it more.

Regarding the aluminum tubes: the DOE's analysis, which found that they probably weren't used to enrich uranium, was classified. However, the CIA's analysis that it probably was used to enrich uranium wasn't. The two findings were released within a day of each other, back in 2001.

Because the former was classified, when congress decided to go to war, they were not presented with the DOE's findings. Only the CIA's.

If not nefarious, what would you call this? Convenient?

This thread hilariously earned me a glorious slowban. Hacker News literally descends into yet another conspiracy site.

However why don't you contrast your comment with mine. Are you actually countering anything I've said?

No, you actually aren't. But somehow in these sorts of black/white discussions people think they can find one sort-of thing and then say "aha". Hardly.

Yes I am. You claimed there was no nefarious conspiracy. I claimed that hiding information from congress when they're deciding to go to war shows the opposite. I would label anyone doing the same when the consequences are so high (thousands of lives) as such.

Since you seem to disagree, I wanted to know how you classify the hiding and twisting of this, and other pieces, of information.

Also, you need to realize that not everyone viewed the administration in the same light as you apparently did back then. My peer group was split close to 25/25/50 on them being: lying bastards, well intentioned but full of shit, and justified. But we were only in our early 20s. Older people seemed to be more accepting of what they were saying.

I don't know what they were selling you in the US, but that's straight up untrue. UN Inspectors were repeatedly telling the Security Council that Iraq was complying with WMD regulations and that in a matter of months, they'd be able to verify if all claims were true.

As usual, incompetent American intelligence was used instead since it was convenient.

This is a neat turn-around. Historical revisionism. That's good.

I'm starting to realize that quite a few on HN actually have no idea what happened during this period (too young?), and at this point they're just going by what they read on Reddit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...

Iraq's cat and mouse game with the UN, which was a condition of the ceasefire from GW I, had been going on for years. The UN had passed resolution after resolution authorizing force, any of which gave the US -- if they even decided that they wanted its mandate -- the legal right to remove Saddam. Yes, when it was apparent the US had had enough, Iraq started complying, but it was too late for the US administration. Tough, but this notion that it was all cooperation and the US just wanted a fight is pure absurdity, and has absolutely no basis in actual reality.

But it does appear in the black/white simplified story that so many tell.

I actually remember this very clearly. In fact, I questioned my own memory of this when I read your comment (since it was so clearly the opposite of what I remember) until I went back and had a look and it looks like I was right.

For what it's worth, it's entirely possible that we were just exposed to different media narratives at the time. My parents remember it the same way too. The news about the reports from Hans Blix and Mohamed AlBaradei saying Iraq was complying with the requests of inspectors after Resolution 1441. Colin Powell's so-called evidence. These were front-and-center in The Hindu in India and there were editorials about it all the time.

Certainly the idea that the doubters were few is not particularly convincing in the face of that.

EDIT: Ah, you edited your comment to contain more than just the first line after I began replying. FWIW, I don't think it's US-Evil Saddam-Good. It's obvious to me that people were questioning the degree to which US military action was justified.

Quoting Resolution 1441 is a bit disingenuous since from the very day the US decided to attack Iraq there were people saying that it did not justify military action. In fact, I recall that they fell back on using it as justification after it became clear that any resolution asking for war would not pass.

As usual, incompetent American intelligence was used instead since it was convenient.

It was actually the finest in British confectionery, with lashings of custard.

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=niger_pl...

Schneier is a skeptic. And skepticism garners more page views and also street credibility. It's not a bad way for him to get into the news every once in a while.

Moreover, basically what he's saying is there is more than one possible probable actor whereas the FBI discounted the rest. It's not that insightful.

Schneier is a pretty smart guy, but like everyone else has biases (I mean, tendencies). Not saying he's wrong here as I, as most everyone, have no first or second hand knowledge about this incident. Just saying that just because it's Schneier does not give him any more credibility in this than anyone else, unless he knows something about this incident most people don't know.

I'd be really interested to hear from HN about "appeal to authority".

When someone talks about security, and links to Schneier, I give their argumet more credit. If they link to GRC I give them less credit, and sometimes I dismess their comment.

I realise this is a bad thing. Gibson is going to be right occasionally and Schneier is going to be wrong sometimes.

But is this a generally sound policy? Find the experts and "not-experts" and decide how much time to spend investigating what they say accordingly; or should I be evaluatin arguments equally regardless who makes the arguemtn (with exceptions for obvious trolls and wingnuts)?

Schneier himself makes a couple of appeals to authority (Allan Friedman, Jonathan Zittrain) by essentially saying I believe this because so and so told me something (and I think their logic and conclusions are sound). But in neither case provides opposing opinions (as though there might not be).

But, to your question. I think we should question everyone one's assertions. Lots of experts, I mean true domain experts, will opine one way, just to be wrong down the road. So, maybe being an expert gives them an edge over a non expert but it does not make them automatically right.

Appeal to authority (as a fallacy) refers to advancing the opinion of a prominent figure for something on which they themselves are not an authority. Citing Schneier on computer security is not an appeal to authority. Appeal to authority is citing his opinion on the best way to prepare coffee.

I think that's a simplification. You can appeal to a en expert in A about something regarding A and still be considered an appeal to authority fallacy --that is because 'authorities' can make bad judgments, have biases, etc.

Appeal to authority would be something like, "North Korea wasn't behind the attack because Schneier says so." To avoid an appeal to authority, you cite Schneier but make use of his arguments. "According to Schneier, North Korea wasn't behind the attack because if North Korea was behind the attack a different locale would have been used."

The fallacy still applies when the authority gives an opinion on some topic they are knowledgeable about; the fallacy isn't about the relevance of the authority so much as the use of the appeal.

> Appeal to authority (as a fallacy) refers to advancing the opinion of a prominent figure for something on which they themselves are not an authority.

This is incorrect. An appeal to authority is when an argument is claimed to be true because someone of authority has stated it. It is a fallacy when the authority of the person has nothing to do with whether the argument is true or not. For example, if a maths authority makes a maths claim, that doesn't mean their claim is true since their authority in maths doesn't determine the validity of their claim. The truth of their claim is determined by looking at the maths itself.

> Citing Schneier on computer security is not an appeal to authority.

It could be, if you're arguing that it's true because Schneier said it. Obviously something relating to computer security isn't true because Schneier says so.

That said, appeals to authority are somewhat necessary in discourse, since we don't have the time to explore all arguments on their own merits. I believe that claims that Schneier has made in the past are truthful, and therefore conclude that I can place some trust in other claims he makes without fully exploring them, but that trust may be misplaced.

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