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.
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.
>>> 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.