Also, Wikileaks doesn't just release whatever material they are given. Sometimes they redact information that would be embarrassing to Russia first.

Sure, but the lesson you aren't learning is that there are often NON-obvious self-serving motives, perverse incentives, clear sources of pressure to exaggerate or modify information, etc etc, and in fact those are the only really interesting situations. And this becomes an even more compounded error since as you rightly state, "the US government" isnt some monolithic thing and is in fact a coalition of competing interests.

I mean your last paragraph is sort of the standard bulwark against conspiracy theories, but to take just a recent example, the Wells Fargo thing went on for years. Its not a principle without exceptions, and since we have no way of even guessing at the denominator, we dont even know if its a casually useful rule of thumb. People always remark when some politician gets caught ****ing around, "How could they be so arrogant as to think they would get away with that, being in the public eye?" without recognizing that its probably the case that they in fact do almost always get away with it.

Complete with a threat to go after the journalists for reporting the story.

Wikileaks doesn't even offer a defense for leaving the email out.

I'm not looking at any evidence, since I'm not really into the whole "Reddit User 13923904 - Internet Detective" phenomenon. I've just read the news reports (from reputable sources, such as The Guardian). What makes Twitter account pwnallthethings a superior mode of gathering information?

I'm specifically saying that the evidence that bobman linked to in rebuttal to Fly's claim that it's still uncertain who was behind the Podesta attack isn't very good. Fly was, I took it, being appropriately cautious, since, in fact, we don't know yet. Seems likely the perpetrator was Russian, but I don't yet see anything that looks like hard proof.

That's not something I'm arguing.

It summarizes and links to a security firm's report on the hackers that hit Podesta's account, so it provides more detail and depth. I'm certainly more confident that Russia was involved after reading that report.

I thought Fly was saying that he didn't know of any connection at all. But there was a connection between Russia and Podesta, as your Guardian link notes.

Maybe I'm just bad at the Internet, but I read (what I thought was) the whole thread and didn't see links to the security firm's report. Can someone just link it directly? One thing I found particularly eye-roll-inducing in the summary was the attempt to reconstruct what Podesta would have seen. Surely we can just ask Podesta what he actually saw. Has he made a statement on the matter?

Well, there's enough evidence of a connection to tell a plausible story. I took Fly to be saying, essentially, he'll wait until there's really solid evidence. Of course, he too can speak for himself.

Here's a good example of carrying this kind of circumstantial reasoning too far: http://www.teenvogue.com/story/offic...social_twitter

Here's a link to the report.

http://https://twitter.com/pwnallthe...21553643294720

Worth a read.

lol, nice, that's nice. Hadn't seen that, thanks.

fixed link

chances this convinces tien are zero

Oops!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...1e8_story.html

If this new upcoming report is just the FBI report with 40 more pages of fluff, this will be absolutely hilarious.

Considering the intelligence community didn't even look at the physical evidence themselves:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/05/politi...c-crowdstrike/

do you know what "after" means?

No they just threaten them.

That's not what that says wth

I thought maybe tien's location was ironic, didn't realize he meant it seriously

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alimwatkins...yg#.mbwvjg1m95

Let's see what new bombshells come up next week in that CIA report. Doesn't look like there will be any.

Um, guys, Tien is probably correct, according to reports:

If this "intelligence official" is FBI, he may not know what he's talking about regarding other agencies.

Of course, Tien thinks this means... something. I don't know what because he's never outlined a theory of what he thinks is going on, just that IT'S A CONSPIRACY. What it means to me is that the intelligence community are very confident in their assessment and probably have other means to link Fancy Bear etc with the hacking. This is all from July last year:

Of course if the NSA said "we used our classified program XKEYSCORE to trace the data back to Fancy Bear" Tien would probably just say they're lying.

I hadn't seen that either. Neither of the sources are reputable by my standard. To be fair, the CIA, and NSA have conspired in the past against the people, and lied about it. And, they get monies to fight the CW.

ChrisV

"Probably" is not good enough. The Crowdstrike data report has been challenged enough for me not to believe them (the only company to have access to that data) at face value:

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/...ts-not-enough/

It would be absolutely hilarious if some 15 year old Russian kid was behind all this.

However, I will agree:

If the NSA has detected fill transfers from the Kremlin to Wikileaks, or an audio of Putin ordering the attacks, or something along those lines, I'll concede the argument. If not, then nothingburger this thing and file it in things to forget by February 2017.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ling-findings/

So tien won't be happy unless he sees the classified version, because he feels entitled to it for some reason.

He's on that far Left 'America's just the worst' plan.

No, ironically he's on the alt-right plan. politics make strange bedfollows you now.