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Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

> The authors addressed your complaint on the final page of the report.

They responded to it yes but they haven't resolved the issue I raised, which is that I'm not going to trust their conclusions without seeing verifiable evidence that would be accepted by a court and that I don't think anyone else should accept their claims either.

> Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.

According to [0]: "You said that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove."

I'm saying that the burden of proof lies with the party making the claim. How is that fallacious?

[0]: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

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I agree with your sentiment but is it not possible for the authors to reveal this evidence because that would undermine their intelligence capabilities?

It does seem likely that that's the case however a good reason to withhold the evidence doesn't increase the likelihood that I will/should trust the report.

There's no good solution to this, it's unfortunate that they proved themselves untrustworthy in the past.

and i think that's the point. they had trust, and they totally abused that to the point where anything they say that's unverifiable is questionable. this is why these organisations shouldn't lie to their own countries' people; because it will be close to impossible to regain that trust without verifiable sources and transparency that they just can't give

There's no good solution to this

Yes there is, and it is already in place. There has been bipartisan oversight of intelligence from Congress for decades. A subset of the people's representatives with the necessary security clearances make sure that there are no Deep State shenanigans. Yes, it failed in the run up to the Iraq invasion, but it worked for decades before, during the Cold War.

I disagree.

- Partisanship in Congress has resulted in a government so dysfunctional that it's been shut down. We can't trust people who can't even keep the government running to watch over services so accustomed to keeping everyone in the dark.

- The committee may have been effective during the cold war but in recent times, the NSA was engaged in mass surveillance for while this committee was in place and it took an internal whistleblower for it to come to light.

- The head of the NSA lied to Congress. The oversight committee can't oversee if they can't get the truth.

You might be able to argue that this is a solution but you most definitely cannot argue that it's a good solution when it's recently been proven to be ineffective.

The intelligence oversight committees have subpoena powers. They can get at anyone in any of the executive agencies who might be willing to testify and contradict their leadership. The committees also have the power to extract documents from the executive branch. The CIA torture investigation, as fraught as that was, was done by an intelligence oversight committee. CIA even created an airgapped network just for the oversight committee staffers to read CIA documents.

OK, you don't trust it but they're not going to burn their sources and methods in a public report. Do you seriously expect them to voluntarily expose their assets when it could be a death sentence for their human sources? A future executive might make that decision and live with the consequences, but members of the intelligence community aren't going to voluntarily wreck their networks.

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