> has failed to consider these fairly obvious principles
No, but I think that those spreading these kinds of reports are intentionally masking the way that they are meant to be used in intelligence circles. This happened during the buildup to the Iraq war also.
My point is that the reports make those leaps intentionally in order to support higher order analysis. They are not meant to be taken as a distillation of all of the available intel.
> you can never be convinced of Russia's involvement
Not at all. But your use of the word "involvement" is a great example of insinuation. What does "involvement" mean in this case? I'll take a stab at it:
- Russia is a geopolitical adversary to the US (check)
- Russia and the US are engaged in a proxy war on several fronts and have been for decades (check)
- Russia and the US both undertake various mischief campaigns against each other and have since the cold war (check)
- Russia and the US both have at least two distinct offensive and defensive capabilities... one being cyber "warfare" and another being cyber "mischief". (check and check)
I agree on all of the above. I think many of the people who are up in arms about the Russia story did not believe the above until quite recently, yet it has been the case for a long time.
The appropriate analysis is to consider whether Russia actually thought it would impact the outcome of the US election, or if it intended to merely create mischief and chaos/mistrust. Clearly the latter is true per the history between the two nations and is consistent with the ongoing mischief campaign.
A deliberate effort to hack election machines, trigger power failures in hospitals, or any variety of more severe attacks crosses the line from "cyber mischief" into "cyber warfare".
What we're seeing is the anti-Russia hawks seizing upon the mischief and trying to make it seem like a cause for war. Don't forget that many have been vehemently trying to get the US to use force against Russia for quite some time.
Thus, the key evidence that is needed to escalate Russia's "involvement" from routine mischief and turn it into something akin to "warfare" is the hard evidence of intent to harm infrastructure.
While spear phishing voting machine companies may signal intent to conduct a Stuxnet style attack on US electronic voting machines, is spear phishing really a nation-state level attack approach?
Clearly, unless "The Russians" had far better predictive models than American statisticians, it would have been utterly foolish to undertake an attack that would personally tick off the sure-thing presidential candidate.
So I think that proof entails both a clear delineation of what sort of behavior/mischief is actually abnormal or asymmetric, and the notion of what constitutes proof of intent to escalate.