HN was particularly skilled at seeing through the FUD around the FBI iPhone crack, and this forum has also held a healthy skepticism for the way in which the FBI was able to break Tor and find DPR of Silk Road. I don't think it's an outrageous claim to say that in general, a sizable portion of this website (though perhaps still a minority) believes that the FBI has historically held-back information to the point of it being dishonest-- particularly with regards to statements they make around technology. Is that fair to say?

In the interest of full disclosure, I tend to lean more conservative than most people, especially relative to HN. So maybe I have my partisan goggles on here, but why are so many people buying into the idea that there is solid evidence that Russia is actually behind these leaks?

Details are incredibly hard to come by. Try doing a Google search and look for yourself. You'll find dozens of articles that rehash the joint DHS and FBI statement (dare I link to submarine.html?), and after a couple pages you'll find their statement itself, but none of these articles or statements contain actual details for why they believe what they believe around these more recent hacks, which, to me, is indicative of a huge problem in and of itself with our media-- not (necessarily) bias like the Trump camp is saying, but simply a lack of basic technical intuition to question a basic premise. It happened with the iPhone, it happened (to a lesser degree) with Silk Road, and I think it's happening here, too.

Pew research from 2014 said there was a little bit under 4MM people working in the tech sector in the US. For comparison, a quick Google suggests suggests there are roughly 1.25MM lawyers in this country. And yet, when a controversial court decision is made and journalists are expected to write on it, the press generally is able to grok the arguments made and summarize it in some form. If a presser is held, they are capable of asking relevant questions and challenging things. I don't think that's the case when it comes to anything related to computers, and I think that's indicative that our liberal arts colleges are failing to stay up-to-date. They are creating well-rounded individuals that are prepared for life in the 1990's. If you go to J-School, you get a short but sweet background in political science and maybe some philosophy and maybe even logic... But as far as I'm aware, if you don't graduate with a degree in CS, everything that you understand about computers is done on your own time, and that's not hyperbole.

Anyway, as I understand it, the DHS and FBI believed that the DNC leaks came from Russia entirely because some tools were left behind on a couple vulnerable machines, and these tools were used before by Russian state actors. I think I read somewhere that there was an IP embedded within these tools that had been used by Russia before... So the narrative is basically that these professional state-backed hackers did not try to mask their identity whatsoever, and left a card saying, "Russia wuz h3r3, lel!". And to be clear, maybe that's 100% what happened. I don't know! But the point I'm trying to make is that I don't think anyone can say that they "know" who was behind these hacks with any kind of confidence.

And I can understand why that would be good enough for journalists who don't know better. And with the media reporting this so widely, I can understand how this would permeate into the general population. But I think a lot of Hillary supporters around here are subduing their skepticism to avoid cognitive dissonance, and I think that sucks.