And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.

Probably they still aren’t sharing all the information they have with each other. I had thought that was supposed to be much improved post 9-11.

Or there aren't objective standards for what "low, medium, and high confidence" actually mean, thereby allowing one agency to look at the evidence and say it's of low confidence and another to look at the same data and say it's moderate confidence.

Interestingly, the CIA has published a paper on exactly this subject:

Words of Estimative Probability (PDF) https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/ar...

Moderate and Low are Words of Analytic Confidence [1]. This has more to do with the quality of the sourcing than a numeric probability number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

I read that they did massively increase sharing after 9/11, but there was a reassessment after the Manning leaks. Manning had access to way more information than someone at their level needed for their job, and they concluded this came about from going a bit too far on the post 9/11 sharing and so they dialed it back a bit.

Or they are coming to different conclusions given the same ambiguous/incomplete information. It could simply be disagreement, or just lack of a standard metric here to compare notes easily.

It probably just means the correct aggregate conclusion is “we don’t know, go ask China”.

They improved the ability to share info (fusion centers and whatnot), but the desire to do so remains under the auspices of humans.

I'm sure that the undecidedness is not about the origin but about the geopolitical impact such an official statement would have.

I have not been inside the CIA, but that could just mean they haven't done any research on that or that their research is ongoing.

An institution will not have assessments on everything at any point in time. Two different institutions might have didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they could have done the research at different points in time, the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed experts could have said different things and so on.

Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is not as surprising as it seems.

What the CIA says publicly and what is happening internally are often very different things. The FBI has less of a global political agenda.

Organizations like the CIA don't make factual statements, they make strategic statements. Any connection with reality is purely coincidental.

If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100% confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way of knowing if that's based on facts or political propaganda.

Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing about it.

Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

I don’t know… I think when they all agree it’s also likely that they are wrong. (It indicates some possibility of motivated reasoning.)

> Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

Then you know they are lying.

This is exactly why I can't give this article, or any of those multiple intelligence agency assessments any real credence. I don't have access to any of the data that went into those assessments. What I do have access to doesn't point very strongly at a lab leak origin, despite its plausibility.

It's perfectly reasonable for the government to support one theory based on non-conclusive evidence that they have and reasonable for the public to support another based on the non-conclusive evidence available to them.

It makes it a lot more likely that public support for the non-lab leak theories will change once we get the chance to see the government's new evidence though.

And for the record, the National Intelligence Council and four other unidentified agencies say with "low confidence" that the virus came about through natural transmission.

Doesn’t the FBI also have a large biological analysis team? For bio terror ?

I think if anything COVID has shown us that biological warfare makes as much sense as nuclear: none. In our globally connected world it's mutually assured destruction, and that's without even the need for your enemy to maintain stockpiles of weapons. The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.

It still makes sense for things like anthrax that aren't easily communicable. Or botulinum toxin.

Fair enough, I meant viral biowarfare.

I should point out that some viruses are not easily transmissible either.

Terrorists motivated by religion or ideology sometimes use tactics and weapons that make no sense to rational people. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.

> The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.

Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological.

It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.

The cult used a chemical weapon. They were also developing biological weapons based on botulism and anthrax at the same time but fortunately didn't get a chance to use those.

The same thing they just said about sarin vs. a grenade, you can say about anthrax vs. a grenade.

Only bad viruses. Good viruses will be genetically coded to only harm a particular subgroup.

I was thinking that actually gives the United States a distinct advantage in such (hypothetical) biological warfare, it has the most diverse gene pool on the planet.

That seems unlikely, I would expect most African countries to beat the US easily.

Until they mutate.

It is beneficial to the survival of a virus to infect the largest group that it can. A virus targeted to a small group of people has a large "survival benefit" the moment it can mutate to infect everybody.

In addition, it's really hard to target a biological entity at a specific subgroup of humans. From a biological standpoint, all humans are damn near identical.

You share 50% of your DNA with a banana.

> The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.

Depends on the virus - something with the long incubating periods and frequent lack of symptoms like Covid yes, but something much more quick and deadly (say, Ebola, even though 2-21 days is still potentially slow) could result in quick mass deaths without the opportunity to spread it around.

If you repeat a lie often enough, even the at first reluctant will start to believe it. That's how the propaganda machine typically works.

The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population.

It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high degree of deniability.

If that is so, then the question that remains is, much like in the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most incentive to carry it out?

I'm wary of engaging, but this just makes no sense to me. Perhaps you can explain and actually make explicit some of the implied connections.

Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab. Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?

While I won't discount the possibility that the outbreak could be a nefarious plot to plant a virus.I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes made make it less likely. The most likely would be just an accident where a researcher unknowingly got infected while conducting research in a BSL2 lab where they were testing wild SARS like viruses and inserting FCS to gauge the viruses potential threat level

Science is the collecting and processing of empirical data using peer reviewed methods to reach a conclusion. Which part do you think the FBI is not doing which separates their process from science?

“The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.” -the article

Ironic, since the anthrax from the "anthrax attacks" in 2001 were traced to Fort Detrick.