I sympathize with your sentiment, but dishonesty in that case is relevant to credibility in this one.

What, besides credibility of the institutions making the allegations, are these allegations' "own merits"?

Agreed that a reflexive "they lie!" position isn't useful, but... trust doesn't seem like a reasonable default either. In the same vein, it would be naive to trust the Chinese NBS to report unflattering economic statistics honestly. Why? Because of past/recent dishonesty.

Whether it's true or not, I don't think the purpose of this announcement is to inform us. It's part of power games with China, laying public groundwork for updating the NATO mission, new departments/funding/laws/etc... That's not a general paranoia. I get this impression from the NATO statement itself.

from P4:

China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance. We will engage China with a view to defending the security interests of the Alliance. We are increasingly confronted by cyber, hybrid, and other asymmetric threats, including disinformation campaigns, and by the malicious use of ever-more sophisticated emerging and disruptive technologies. Rapid advances in the space domain are affecting our security. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the erosion of the arms control architecture also undermine our collective security.

Promising to engage China, followed by nonspecific cyber, WMD & space threats.

Here is where I might be paranoid, cynical or whatnot. Is defense against cyberattacks the actual goal, or is cyberwarfare just another long term raison d'etre?

"What, besides credibility of the institutions making the allegations, are these allegations' "own merits"?"

Because China hacking is fairly widespread and so this is not just about a single institution, it's about many.

There's broad consensus here, it's not just 'Dick Cheney & Co.', it's many governments, many agencies, many businesses, academic institutions and the spying/hacking takes a variety of forms.

Yes, this an 'escalation' of sorts, because making it 'NATO' makes it both firmly an issue of national security for not just the US, but for many 'important' actors.

If anything, I think there's not enough action here.

It's definitely worthwhile to keep a very close eye on misinformation and propaganda ... but I think so far we're on the right path.

It's not about the specific allegations, it's about the posture and priorities of the security state.

A few years ago, we ran out of fear and urgency on the Islamic terror thing and now we need a new top dog bad guy.

So, in your view, is security simply not a problem? Is it all a giant lie to fund the security state?

If not, where do you draw the line between real/legitimate security concerns vs. the fake ones?

That's clearly not their view. Blindly following liars into two wars has led to many avoidable casualties and has arguably made us less safe. The line between real & fake is the line between real & fake. We need to be on guard and insist on checking the intel before being led into another war.

Constant attempts to hack each other between rivals and even allies are not a big deal.

I'm not saying this is fake, our people should be doing their job mitigating this stuff and hacking them in turn, but it being blown up into a Big Deal is part of the propaganda.

> is security simply not a problem?

What problem did US solve by invading Iraq?

There is more than the most recent Iraq war. There is Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin) and the Spanish-American War (USS Maine sabotage). Several others.

It's not disingenous and it's not discrediting _any_ future allegation, but to appropriately raise the threshold before belief.

Everything you said would be true if today's accusations were a pretext for armed conflict, but I don't believe we've reached that level of escalation. Do you?

Accordingly, I don't find comparison to prior wars helpful for discussion. Obviously opinions here may differ...

I do not expect that even if there was truth to the matter that war would be a direct consequence. I agree that citing historical false pretexts for war reduces the surface for debate of the validity of allegations of state-sponsored cybercrime. I should not have contributed in this manner. My apologies.

I think the Iraqi war was more frustrating than those two put together.

You realize that this wasn't the first time the US did this, so I feel we should question these claims as much as possible.

To me, it just goes to show that you cannot take on faith or even the evidence provided by the currently speaking government official (whoever that might be at whatever time).

It's a sad position to take, but we have definitely been misled/lied to by gov't officials.

Why is this particular incident any more legit/not-fake than the totally legit/not-fake WMD evidence?

>>> There is so much doubt in this comment section around the validity of the accusations.

>>> We have a number of countries putting forward the knowledge they have mutually agreed upon. What is shared is known to a high degree of certainty. Any details that are questionable would not have been shared prematurely.

>> "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." — Dick Cheney, before the US and coalition of the willing invaded Iraq.

> I'd ask that we be more thoughtful on this and evaluate separate allegations on their own merits. Why do you think invoking Cheney's statement is relevant to this discussion?

I think the logic is once an organization or its leaders get something wrong, you should never, ever believe anything that organization ever says ever again. Even 20 years later after the leadership and staff has turned over a couple times.

Of course, that's totally unworkable idea when applied consistently, so it's only used, knowingly or unknowingly, to reenforce existing biases.

It's not a question of getting something wrong. The Bush administration carried out a massive disinformation campaign to convince the public that Saddam had WMD - something they knew they had no good evidence for. Large parts of the media and most senior politicians in both major parties (including the current President of the US) went along with this disinformation campaign.

After that experience, I'll believe the US government only when they make all their evidence public, and even then, I'll be exceedingly skeptical.

> After that experience, I'll believe the US government only when they make all their evidence public, and even then, I'll be exceedingly skeptical.

So who do you think carried out these attacks? Do you think that China does not carry out any offensive hacking? Do you think they do, but avoid the US for some reason?

IMHO, these allegations are plausible enough to believe without strong evidence to the contrary. Taking the experience with the Iraqi WMD allegations as your North Star (to the exclusion of all other factors) seems like a heuristic that will be wrong far more often than it's right, and more often wrong than alternative heuristics.

Simply stated, the say-so of the US government does not change my belief either way.

If they claim to have evidence but don't provide it, I assume they don't have evidence, or that the evidence is weaker than they are claiming. If they do provide evidence, I consider the possibility that it has been tampered with, that its provenance is dubious, or that contrary evidence has been concealed.

We're talking about professional liars here. Not everything they say is wrong, but everything they say is suspect.