And, people would say the same thing about the NSA before Snowden leaked Heartbeat, etc. Lol @ people not trusting the NSA with trillion dollar budgets to spy on Russia , China , USA. Lol @ people sounding the alarm to inherit conflict of interesr. Lol @ people who point out that the CIA has used Russia as a scapegoat by exaggerating fears during the Cold War. Lol Nixon critics. Trust the gov't. Kennedy wasn't assassinated. Lol's all around! Trolololooolololo.

I think that article is super weak FWIW. This is kind of jaw dropping:

But that's how evidence works! Probabilities multiply together! You don't get to be like "sure the chances of these 10 things all happening is low, but the chances of each thing happening individually actually aren't that low! Chessmate!". If the evidence viewed as a whole looks damning, then your conclusion should be that it's damning?

btw, I agree that the government needs to do better and should produce more evidence. But that's a separate issue from my judgement of what is going on here.

^^^Kind sir, not to be nitty, but it's checkmate, not chessmate. I think there's too much uncertainty to do a soul-read here, imho.

Did you recently come to the internet? It's chessmate.

Apparently. It's a meme; got it. I play chess.

So, like you can say, "lol intelligence community is infallible. Chessmate!"

Wait, who said JFK wasn't asassinated?

ChrisV

Thats not a convincing argument. "Look how much "evidence" they piece together it looks super damning in aggregate". Yeah thats how Republicans convinced congress about WMD. We shouldn't break down all the evidence piece by piece?

I'm most interested in the 'actors' involved that handed the docs over to wikileak which they claim they know exactly who. Thats the smoking gun. Lets see who it is.

I was using satire to be less bland. There are literally trillions of reasons to think that their version of events is clouded. If there aren't external threats, there aren't trillions flowing from congress. The director of the NSA lied to congress sparking the Snowden defection. I'm just trying to give the IC the credit they deserve, and I'm witnessing short-term memory problems from the liberals over 30, imho. I wouldn't trust the gov't to make a sandwhich.

Granted, there are several agencies with independent research, but how independent can it possibly be if we're talking about cartel. I mean, to put in context. If a bunch of oil firms said, "lol f the rules.", and they all did their independent research, would we accept a consensus from an oil cartel? Why then would we accept the intelligence cartel? I mean, is it really that insane to say, LOL IC.

And, if the gov't made a sandwhich, it'd be $5M, expanding GDP and creating jobs of course, and be eaten while orbiting the moon, which is not even that strategic (the moon that is).

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2003/10/29...aide-says.html

Its funny you choose now as the time James Clapper is a beacon of unvarnished truth.

You don't even know who this sack of **** is do you? He help start the entire Iraq mess.

Don't forget him lying under oath about the NSA collecting data episode.

I guess when its convenient, your most hated ancient enemy becomes your new best friend.

I never knew who he was in the first place

But I see we're falling back to only being able to look at one piece of evidence at a time and we must ignore the mounds of private and public firms all saying the same thing, because reasons

I mean, you seem to be arguing that if Clapper said the sky was blue, we shouldn't believe him, no matter how many scientists agree with him.

I didn't realize being wrong about one thing, one time, means you can never be right ever again.

The sky is blue. I can see that for myself.

If I have to rely on Clapper to find out anything of importance. Skepticism should be ordered and he has only himself to blame for that

Okay, skepticism is fine. But you're deliberately ignoring the crowds of other people and firms saying the same thing.

Look. I'll examine that report for myself and if it is convincing I'll change my mind about it. I can be proven wrong and don't mind. My positions here have been fair.

The most damaging thing I see so far that I missed yesterday are the actors that specifically uploaded the emails to wikileaks. Thats new info for me and frankly much more damaging than a bunch of Ukranian malware or TOR IP addresses. So we will see next week.

I wouldn't describe the evidence as "damning". I would be pretty close to convicting in a criminal case alleging APT28/Fancy Bear broke into the DNC. APT28 being an arm of the Russian government is not proven beyond reasonable doubt from the evidence I have seen. It is however much more likely than the alternatives and is precisely the thing the government is likely to have additional evidence of that cannot be revealed (eg the identity of the group could be known via a mole). They have been studying these guys for 10+ years.

But I'm not the one describing the evidence as "damning", that was the writer of the article. He was like "looks damning but actually it's not because [explanation that makes no sense]".

lol at people making this argument. Yeah, I'm sure random Russian hackers are spending years on this because they just love the challenge. You know how Russian teenagers are! They can't get enough of that sweet, sweet inside information from foreign political parties.

It's possible that the group doing the hacking is independent, but just barely. It's also possible that your wife is spending the night over at that fireman's house so she can teach him how to bake kick-ass cookies. Keep believing that.

So don't. But concluding that Russia can't be guilty because USA bad is seriously wrong.

Fortunately I'm not saying that.

It seems -EV for the heads of the major intel outfits in DC to march up Capitol Hill and perjure themselves while simultaneously antagonizing their future boss but hey I guess the accused rapist hiding out in an embassy deserves every benefit of the doubt

Got to protect the Trump-Putin-Assange Triangle.

Gotta protect the echo chamber.

Of course when the FBI did not examine the actual servers and collect the data themselves, all they were really doing is saying crowdstrike's report is pretty convincing. Which is not perjury. There is no way anything is close to perjury, even if wrong.

Though I do believe the Russians hacked the DNC and Podesta, though a chance that others did as well. This whole thing is getting blown way out of proportion, really the Chinese hack of actual government information should have been dealt with more severely and yet Obama did nothing in that case.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blo...-russian-didnt

The case against Assange having any clue wtf he's talking about

And what do we know about that particular phishing site? Because it's not "nothing".

This may be hair splitting, but phishing isn't even hacking. A child could do it.

There's lots of evidence to criticise the CIA. You don't have to rely on dubious quotes sourced to 9/11 truthers.