Consider the
declassified summary of the Intelligence Community’s assessment of “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.”
The DNC breaches feature prominently in that summary but, more to the point, the primary rationale readers are given for why they should believe that the Russian government meddled in the U.S. election is because the FBI, CIA, and NSA believe that to be the case.
We are given very little actual detail about what happened or how the incidents were traced to Russia specifically, while we are treated to numerous statements along the lines of: “
We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” or
“We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”
Of course, there are many reasons the Intelligence Community might have decided not to reveal any actual evidence for these claims. But in the absence of that evidence, whether or not you believe their conclusions rests entirely on your confidence in the judgment and investigative abilities of the FBI, CIA, and NSA. And
if the evidence that they’ve used to level major accusations at a foreign government comes not from agencies of the U.S. government or direct law enforcement investigations, but rather from private sector firms like CrowdStrike, then the “high confidence” of the government counts for very little. The DNC breach is not the only incident attributed to Russia in the Intelligence assessment summary and it’s likely that some of the others were directly investigated by the government. But even so, this conflation of government- and industry-gathered evidence without clear distinctions makes it harder to take the agencies’ assessments at face value.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_t...nc_hack_because_it_relied_on_crowdstrike.html
SLATE Magazine