
50M Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach - tsneed290
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
======
olivermarks
My problem with this 'outing' of CA is that Facebook explicitly commercially
exists to harvest user data for Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fidelity
etc etc so they can profile us. A million dollars is chump change in the crazy
US election game. This all seems overly selective - it's ok for some people to
profile but not for others. I'm not in favor of any of it to be clear but
there is a definite political bias going on here. Let's not forget FB itself
has a formal political unit that exists to push propaganda in foreign
elections, 'stifling opposition and stoking extremism'

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-
th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-
team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down)

~~~
ChicagoDave
I could see a constitutional amendment barring psycho-graphic profiling from
election advertising and intent. Not sure how it could be enforced because
this is very technical.

Even so, there is a significant difference between Coke trying to sell me a
flavored soft drink and a firm tweaking my emotions to get me to abstain from
voting with false information or to vote against my best interests with false
information.

There are definitely people who are susceptible to psycho-graphic warfare and
we need to protect them in order to protect our democracy.

~~~
chibg10
I don't think "false information" is the kicker here. Taking a cursory glance
at Breitbart and Fox News, there isn't that much that is patently false.
Furthermore, my observations of how propaganda works in general is that it
doesn't usually rely information that is technically false. It relies on
selective distribution of information, editorial spin, and other more subtle
methods.

This makes "enforcement" basically impossible because you can't have a news
outlet without editorial decisions. A better way to go about it would be to
try incentivize media outlets to make a good faith effort at "both sides"
journalism, but members of both political sides have been attacking the media
for doing just that since the 2016 election season.

~~~
threeseed
> Taking a cursory glance at Breitbart and Fox News, there isn't that much
> that is patently false.

Don't you think it would be better for you to take more than a cursory glance
before commenting ?

Breitbart has had significant issues with fake news over its lifetime. Far
more egregious and consistent than other any other news organisation not that
I would necessarily call it one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News#Notable_stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News#Notable_stories)

~~~
drak0n1c
In addition to Fox and Breitbart, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, CNN, and even
the New York Times have had to retract dozens of viral political articles over
the last two years. The retractions were only seen by a fraction of the people
who saw the original headlines. This is an inevitable result of journalism
increasingly relying on rumor and catering to partisan audiences.

Where is this line that should be drawn, and who should draw it? Breitbart may
have a higher frequency of “oops someone gave me bad info, or my
reporter/editor made an unsubstantiated inference” events, but their audience
is much smaller than the large outlets.

------
gfodor
I remember when the Obama campaign hired data scientists and used targeted
social networking tools to pursuade voters who were on the fence and it was
heralded as brilliant and the future of politics.

I worked for a company crawling Facebook data by creating viral apps the year
the original API came out. By now I am sure this is done by many companies.

Why is any of this news? My understanding is that companies harvesting social
networking data via viral apps and then reselling it to perform targeted voter
advertising is literally a 10 year old concept. Were any laws broken here?
Were there any techniques used here that were novel or done by one political
party and not the other? Why are we talking about this one firm and not the
many others that surely exist that are trying to do the same thing for <insert
political candidate of choice>

~~~
thomzi12
Did you not read the article? Millions of users took a personality test that
had nothing to do with politics, and that data was sold to the Trump campaign
for targeting.

When did Obama’s campaign ever do that?

~~~
hanspeter
270.000 users.

~~~
SolarUpNote
... and all of their ‘friends’, totaling over 50 million

~~~
hanspeter
Nope. It was not technical possible to share your friends' data in 2014.

------
heckanoobs
I used to make fb apps, any app gets full access to fb's user graph as long as
they request the relevant permissions.

Users don't comprehend what permissions they are giving to apps they run. A
quiz site getting full access is not surprising.

Once an app has any amount of access the only thing stopping them from
harvesting their own clone of your data is an agreement in the ToS that you
won't store PII for more than x hours.

These rules are like the bare minimum to stop good actors. If you're a bad
actor fb does not do a single thing to protect users from you. As evident in
this report fb is also not above blaming the users for the hostile environment
fb created and placed them in.

There must be countless copies of harvested fb data out there. My employer at
the time once realized we were accidentally storing some PII permanently in a
derived field. If good actors can't even keep above the law what do you think
the ecosystem looks like in the shadows?

IMO we aren't having the right conversation with fb over how they mistreat our
PII and we should loosen the definition of that term when companies like the
one in the article can infer our political preferences from the innocuous bits
of our lives we tag on facebook.

We should be asking why even an authorized API that can't stop you from
copying the data doesn't count as a systemetized data breach.

~~~
traek
> We should be asking why even an authorized API that can't stop you from
> copying the data doesn't count as a systemetized data breach.

Is your argument that no company should offer any developer APIs at all? It's
impossible to stop apps from storing data that they have access to, given
malicious intent.

This is like saying that the existence of the Google Calendar API is a
"systemetized data breach" because an app could copy data from it once
authorized by a user.

~~~
blablabla123
It's one thing to use the friend graph to show in your app who else uses it.
That's pretty legit. The other use case is to store it to some database and
keep it there.

FB provides since ~10 years widgets for showing who else is liking xy. I know
these Social Widgets are not so customizable and thus not pretty enough to
match some custom design but at least they provide some safety nets.

Maybe Facebook could just provide more Social Widgets/CSS customizability
instead of letting people write their own "Facebook Extensions".

------
patja
I was curious how the figure leaped from the 270k cited in the Facebook press
release to this 50M figure.

It sounds like they never had full access to the Facebook profiles beyond the
270k who installed the app, but just harvested the friend lists of those 270k.
This doesn't give the app developer full access to the friends' profile data,
but I guess once you have the network of friend connections you can use other
public data sources to fill in or infer the gaps. And of course some of those
50M will have FB profiles that are fully public open books ready for anyone to
harvest.

I will say as someone who has developed Facebook apps, the whole ecosystem is
pretty much on the honor system for protecting user data. There are some
seemingly random and capricious (and often erroneous) abuse detection
algorithms, but once an app has access to user data who knows what they do
with it and whether it was kept secure -- surely Facebook has no idea unless
they perform invasive manual physical audits.

~~~
tobilg
You could get access to the full friends‘ user profile data in Graph API
earlier than v2.0. If you had 500 friends, and granted friends_* OAuth
permissions to an app, the app had access to 501 user profiles.

~~~
616c
You know where you read this?

~~~
Xorlev
At $dayjob-1 we relied on this to pull in your Facebook friends as contacts.
Eventually FB limited the scope of this to friends who also had the app.

~~~
tobilg
This was post-v2.0 afaik.

------
loxias
Minor point of confusion -- this article refers multiple times to a "data
breach". ( _"...one of the largest-ever breaches of Facebook data...", "At the
time of the data breach...", "...first reported the breach..."_)

As far as I can tell, there is no data breach, right? It sounds like CA got
facebook data through an app they wrote, thisisyourdigitallife, which did some
shady things.

Also, _" The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for
Cambridge Analytica could still be found online"_.

The link is: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-
ana...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-
trump-campaign.html)

Anyone know what they're talking about? I haven't heard of any 50-million-
profile data dump, and I really like collecting corpora...

~~~
frankzinger
It wasn't a breach as _we_ know it.

Basically FB gave the data away. Apps have access to the data but they're not
allowed to give/sell it to third parties. In this case the rules were ignored.
Probably many other companies with API access have also ignored the rules. In
this case FB didn't make much of an effort at all to prevent it from happening
so it's reasonable to assume the practice is rampant. There's likely many
copies of large parts of FB data out there (left on laptops on trains or on
unprotected FTP/HTTP servers, etc.).

It's a 'breach' from the users' perspective.

------
ENOTTY
One thing other commenters haven't mentioned is that Facebook asked the other
parties to delete the data and promise never to use it again and the other
parties even certified that they had done so, but the whistleblower is
alleging they lied to Facebook.

Maybe that's legally actionable.

------
urlwolf
OK, this feels like it will bring about the end. Of something. Facebook?
Massive use of data for political campaigns? Anything?

If we keep consuming news like this, and do nothing, it's going to scalate
massively. Same way as when Snowden told people they were spyed on and they
collectively shrugged and continued with their lives as if nothing had
happened.

We, people in tech, have a massive moral burden to educate 'normals' on the
meaning of news like this!

~~~
John_KZ
The problem is that regular people no longer have a place to communicate. It
used to be that the workplace, church, neighborhood or union meetings were the
place to socialize and discuss these issues and take collective action. Now we
have nowhere to turn to. Modern nomadic culture alongside temporary jobs, low
trust and personalized news all make sure that we cannot take collective
action on anything.

We need to find a new way to communicate before this cancer becomes so
widespread that the last bastillions are lost.

~~~
krapp
> It used to be that the workplace, church, neighborhood or union meetings
> were the place to socialize and discuss these issues and take collective
> action

People still socialize and discuss issues in the real world. Having a Facebook
group for a church or neighborhood doesn't preclude anyone from going to
church or physically interacting with their neighbors. People also still take
collective action in the real world - Antifa, BLM and the Tea Party are three
modern examples, but there are countless others which simply don't get media
attention.

And, all else aside, social media is still perfectly adequate for enabling
communication between most people.

I'm sorry, but your comment seems more rooted in hyperbole than reality.

------
734786710934
This wasn't a data breach, it was a misuse of data by a third party.

~~~
cryptoz
Every single definition I find classifies this as a data breach.

> A data breach is a security incident in which sensitive, protected or
> confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an
> individual unauthorized to do so.

~~~
DangerousPie
But they were authorized to access the data, weren't they? The problem wasn't
that they accessed it, it was that they used it for things they weren't
allowed to.

~~~
rhizome
Everybody with an FB app key is "authorized to access [the] data," but the API
TOU says you can't _save_ anything.

I'm imagining the crux of the CA issue is that they saved stuff.

------
mcintyre1994
I think I finally understand what the point of Facebook apps is and why
they've always felt in some way dodgy. It's been clear for years that Facebook
apps can get your user data, and that of your friends, and that Facebook
designed them that way and were aware of that. The Guardian article even
mentions that one of the apps used by GSR to gather data for Cambridge
Analytica triggered Facebook security protocols trying to pull too much data.

What I didn't understand is why Facebook would grant this - maybe at some
point they needed viral apps on the platform and giving user data away
encouraged people to make them - but why did it still work a few years ago?
But this article made it click: all you can really do to monetise or use
millions of profiles of Facebook users is target them with ads, and Facebook
is the only place you can target those ads effectively given Facebook user
data, and the more data you have the more effective those ads are, the more
you pay Facebook.

Facebook don't sell user data, they've long said that - and it's true. They
sell the ability to target advertising to their users, and you can do that a
whole lot better if you have their user data. So they don't sell it, they give
an API for their users to freely give it away, knowing that once you've done
all your analysis on it you'll conclude that you should spend money paying
Facebook to actually deliver your messages to those users.

------
fjsolwmv
> Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR
> and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan
> “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the
> proper channels” but “did not subsequently abide by our rules” because he
> passed the information on to third parties.

This is exactly how Facebook was designed. You get a stupid quiz or photo
frame in exchange for a copy of your friends list. It's always worked that
way, and it's why Facebook OAuth was more popular than Google+ and other Oauth
since 5+ years ago -- because app devs can make more money from Facebook OAuth
since it comes with a copy of your friends list, so they prefer to integrate
Facebook.

~~~
yeldarb
As of ~4 years ago when graph api 2.0 was released that’s not true.

The /friends endpoint only returns friends of the user who have also already
installed your application.

~~~
chatmasta
As of April 2016 wasn't it limited to 50 "close friends"? IIRC it was also
possible to abuse iOS webview and the FB library by modifying some private
methods and injecting some JS to get the info of more than 50 friends. I don't
remember the details, but I saw it in the wild in a high growth top 10 iOS app
(reverse engineered to see how they were getting so many users so quickly).

------
gaius
Facebook: "no-one herds our sheep but us, mmmkay?"

------
auntienomen
So... If I were in Cambridge Analytica's position, employed to influence the
US election, one of the first things I'd do is match this data with any data I
could find on voting patterns. Which reminds me, didn't some of the Russian
APTs hack into state voter databases?

~~~
oh_sigh
You don't need to hack into voter databases - most people register for the
party they vote for and that is public information(along with their home
address, phone number, and whether they voted in past elections).

~~~
beager
You may not even need to cross-reference it, Facebook asks you what your
political affiliation is and displays it on your profile (or did, at one
point)

------
shiftfocustime
I think it is much more important to focus on an investigation to make clear
to the public how this data was used. That i think will lead into a much more
interesting story. No one seems to want to go there and i don't understand
why. Maybe because a lot of its clients are political parties/political
individuals around the world and they do not want to be ousted for using
"public opinion manipulation technology" on a wide scale.

~~~
mistermann
Any investigation would be about as thorough as the Russian bots
"investigation".

------
dawhizkid
Think about all those apps where you connect your bank account via your online
banking creds that have full access to everything you buy.

~~~
phonypho
Do people do that?

~~~
swebs
Yes, I know Mint does it and most credit unions offer FinanceWorks. Intuit
gets the data from both.

------
ceejayoz
I wonder how many of the "see what you'll look like when you're 80" and "find
out how you'll die" quiz apps are doing this behind the scenes.

~~~
thisisit
If I am reading the paper which started all of this correctly, you don't even
need the quiz apps if you have the correct permissions:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802](http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802)

~~~
ceejayoz
The quiz apps are how you get the permissions.

Require the user to "connect with Facebook" to see their result. Give them the
result, but quietly siphon off every bit of data you can with the access
token.

------
megous
Whistleblower's account suspended.

[https://twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/975335430043389952](https://twitter.com/chrisinsilico/status/975335430043389952)

------
andy_ppp
This kind of work combining propaganda and disinformation with AI models and
feedback into them to get a progressive change of belief is fascinating. I
think of this as the first of many wars democracy will fight against AI and we
are currently loosing.

This comment is from the “Duped” article that has a different headline and
more detail.

------
trhway
For example, "Weev" got 3 years for downloading ATT user data. I wonder
whether Bannon&Co would get anything ... So far it doesn't look like FB makes
any push for CFAA case here. I wonder what would FB do if instead of Bannon it
were a nobody like the above mentioned "weev".

------
myth_buster
50M doesn't strike much in FB scale, that's until...

    
    
      At the time, more than 50 million profiles represented around a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters.

~~~
myth_buster
Sorry for the crappy formatting, can't edit now, so here's pprint version:

    
    
      At the time, more than 50 million profiles represented around 
      a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly 
      a quarter of potential US voters.

------
svbill
Nothing new about Campaign Data companies. In fact knew of a South San
Francisco company called 'Campaign Data' in the '90s that ran a SAS on
DECUnix. They collected voter registrar data from counties for targeted voting
campaigns. Usually for passing more restrictive laws or raising taxes. Like
raise property taxes for schools; send flyers to renters with kids and send
nothing to homeowners with no kids. It was always in a way, unfair and evil.

------
allthenews
Let's be realistic here. This headline is nothing but partisanship. The only
reason this is exaggerated as a "data breech" is because of the connection to
the Trump campaign.

The real scandal is that such data is so easily harvested and freely
available.

I'd be interested in seeing how much of facebook's data repository was used in
targeted political ads by all parties. Including Russian agitators who have
been shown playing both sides.

~~~
IAmEveryone
There are at least 25 scandals surrounding the Trump administration currently
that are each worse than the two pseudo-scandals surrounding HRC that
Conservatives managed to drum up, I. e. E-Mails and “Benghazi”. And ts not
like FOX and the entire US Congress have less power than the Guardian.

So, no: “They are all the same” isn’t just cynical and useless. It’s also
wrong.

~~~
allthenews
So, in your opinion, this justifies the false headline of the article, and is
reason to turn a blind eye to the same potential data abuse when committed by
the other party?

>They are all the same” isn’t just cynical and useless. It’s also wrong.

Please do not put words in my mouth. All I am asking for is journalistic
integrity. Media in the U.S. has proven repeatedly to be partisan, which, to a
rational person, makes it very difficult to separate fact from propaganda.
This article is a case in my point.

Unethical politicking is not an excuse for spread of misinformation.

------
aetherspawn
I hadn’t thought of it like this before, but from a political POV everyone’s
vote, whether they are a dole bludger or a quantum physiscist, are worth the
same. So really, to win an election .. take that as you will. Identifying
these people is a very profitable area.

Interesting side note .. in Australia we assign school funding based on the
highest education received or wage class of the parent (classes A, B ... E or
such).

------
inetknght
1) Facebook collects and builds a profile about you 2) Facebook allows third
parties to target advertisements based on the profile 3) Advertisements are
tracked 4) Browsing habits and advertisement tracking reconstructs who was
targeted

------
muddi900
ITT: people who did not read the link Astrotrufing and conservative martyrs
bleeding all over the site.

------
dreta
Why bother protecting any data, if you can put a footnote in your ToS.

------
whiddershins
I don’t understand the use of the word “breach” in this headline.

------
hux_
Can't wait for Sheryl Sandberg to write a new book now on garden soil or
something.

~~~
matt4077
Any reason to attack the one woman among the Facebook leadership and not, say,
Mark Zuckerberg?

~~~
avoidit
Because the others among the Facebook leadership are not going around writing
and promoting books?

Also, do you genuinely not find it disconcerting that Facebook leadership go
to great lengths to avoid discussing the privacy implications of their
service? And the only person in that group who puts herself "out there", so to
speak, is instead writing "success literature"?

~~~
IAmEveryone
Is there some specific evilness to writing books? Because I don’t see how her
writing books is reason to single her out for criticism.

> Also, do you genuinely not find it disconcerting that Facebook leadership go
> to great lengths to avoid discussing the privacy implications of their
> service? And the only person in that group who puts herself "out there", so
> to speak, is instead writing "success literature"?

So you’re angry because they don’t talk about privacy. And you’re especially
angry at her because ...she doesn’t talk about privacy?

That argument also doesn’t make much sense when comparing her to Zuckerberg
explicitly, who’s at least as “out there” as she is. Didn’t he go on a “50
states listening tour” last year?

------
matchagaucho
This is hardly news... Facebook ads cannot target specific _users_ , they only
target audience _segments_.

It's actually far easier to create ads targeted at segments with likely
political beliefs, and Marketers have access to aggregate numbers of niche
segments today.

There's no need to scrape people's profiles or get down to the individual
level.

~~~
matchagaucho
EDIT: As more is revealed about Cambridge Analytica, this clearly is "news"
that requires more investigation.

My original comment was more in response to user vs segment level targeting.

------
MechEStudent
China has more. They have enough that this is a drop in the bucket. While they
might be as blatant and ineffective as Russia by interfering with an election,
they want a low profile and to maximize capture of revenue, so they are more
about making money than trying to put feces on the face of the American
political process.

You people should pick your battles. It would help if you knew the battlefield
first.

~~~
mistermann
How about this idea: what if the Russian bots aren't actually Russian? How has
no one considered this possibility?

~~~
threeseed
Yes they have considered it. And they have identified they are Russian.

You really think governments wouldn't have checked this ?

~~~
mistermann
I thought the public might be a bit more skeptical.

How did they identify with certainty that they are Russian? Is there any way
for someone without top secret clearance to verify this?

~~~
stevenwoo
How - the special counsel Mueller has subpoena authority. First link from
indictments in list form. The one I saw on TV was that guy with Hillary in a
cage in parades - he was paid by Russians to make it. I also remember reading
about the pro and anti gun rallies at that Texas state park - the Russians
made the Facebook page for _both_ sides in that little incident.
[https://mashable.com/2018/02/16/indictment-russian-trolls-
in...](https://mashable.com/2018/02/16/indictment-russian-trolls-interference-
election/#SD5UuJloE5ql)

Presumably Mueller used that subpoena on Facebook and internet providers and
the Russians didn't try to hide very hard and used mostly Russian ip
addresses.

There's also the fact Facebook admitted it sold ads and post promotion to
Russian agencies and told Congress the reach of those ads and posts. Recently
Facebook revealed to all users in North America whether or not they had
interacted with those ads/posts. Several news organizations have independently
found the data from other sources including actual interviews with the people
working in Russia.

One technique the Russians used was to impersonate Americans of some extreme
view to stow discord and inflame the other side of some debate.
[https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-russians-
impersonate...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-russians-impersonated-
real-american-muslims-to-stir-chaos-on-facebook-and-instagram)

There was also several different Facebook campaigns where they got Africans
with pidgin English to pretend to be Americans and try to inflame white
nationalists and latent racists fears.

~~~
mistermann
I've heard all sorts of the juicy details, it makes a great story there's no
doubt. What I'm looking for is some substantial, verifiable evidence to
overcome my suspicions at how perfect of a story it is, as well as some of the
inconsistencies.

For example:

> Presumably Mueller used that subpoena on Facebook and internet providers and
> _the Russians didn 't try to hide very hard and used mostly Russian ip
> addresses_.

So on one hand, article after article tells us how sophisticated these hackers
are, yet these very same hackers didn't hide their ip addresses, and also
openly posted links on twitter that were supportive of Russia. Doesn't
something about that seem a little off to you? If it does, you'll be the first
person I've encountered who think it does, everyone else is completely
confident that this is an open and shut case. Yet, none of these same people
can point to any specific evidence that could convince me. Sure, everyone has
some articles full of juicy stories, usually containing confident statements
from high ranking government officials assuring us crimes have been committed
and they have proof, but I've never been able to find a person who could point
me directly to any proof.

1/3 of the way through
[https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download](https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download),
rather than having my mind changed, my skepticism is stronger than before.

This feels a bit like some things we've experienced in the past, where the
"facts" about an enemy, that we're are _assured_ are 100% completely true and
verified, _trust us_ turn out to not be true several years down the road. But
by then, we've already spent trillions of dollars and waged a war killing
thousands of innocent people.

I'd rather not go down that path again, so I'm sorry if I can't join in the
party vilifying the evil Russians, because based on the information I have so
far, it seems like classic misdirection with the primary beneficiary once
again being military budgets, and everyone is just a bit too enthusiastic to
believe anything they're told.

EDIT: There is no shortage of internet downvotes for people like me who aren't
willing to go along with this story, but there is a severe shortage of people
who will put me in my place with actual content. You can probably imagine the
effect this might have on the certainty _I_ feel in the correctness of my
stance. Unlike others, I'm open to having my mind change, but for some reason
no one can muster any effort beyond a condescending and intellectually lazy
"let me google that for you".

~~~
stevenwoo
They have some of the Russians who worked for the RIA interviewed for
newspapers and admitting what they did, which kind of blew my mind. I guess
one could claim those were faked, like the moon landing conspiracy theorists.

From your own example which I presume is about the Iraq war, there is nothing
that an ordinary citizen can do to prove that powers in the US, UK, and
Kuwaiti governments (and Iraqi agents working in favor of an attack on Iraq)
falsified the evidence they presented to the public for a compelling argument
for invading Iraq without relying on sources that cannot be verified by an
ordinary citizen without access to the journalists/non proliferation
experts/government agents responsible and nothing an ordinary citizen can do
to prove US claims that Iraq had an active WMD program and mistreated Kuwaiti
babies as claimed at the time (by what we know now was a state actor who lied
for Kuwait) in congressional testimony after the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. Even
the New York Times and that one reporter famously lied flat out about Iraqi
weapons programs and abuses in the build up to the war. But there were plenty
of people who were investigating the claims of Iraqi WMD who said there was
nothing there and that led to a lot of people protesting against the war. I
don't see any investigators for the FBI or NSA coming out and being a whistle
blower and saying this Russian thing is faked, on the contrary, the only
whistle blower who came out so far, actually showed the internal NSA documents
that said the USA elections was under cyberattack by Russia. The most
reputable guy who came out for the Iraq WMD was possibly Colin Powell. Less
well know is that he was also the first US Army investigator who looked into
the My Lai massacre and he found that nothing was done wrong, so he was kind
of used to this type of thing by then. It took a second Army investigator to
reveal what happened there.

Or more contemporaneously there is nothing a citizen can do to prove that the
recent Russian spy who was released to the UK and attacked was poisoned with a
Russian only sourced nerve agent. And if it was the Russian nerve agent (that
the Russians offically proclaimed to have destroyed all stockpiles of),
there's no way for a citizen to prove it was Russian government behind it or
that some other power was responsible for usage of it. I didn't vote either
way on your comment, it just seems like an impossible standard.

~~~
mistermann
I honestly don't think wanting to see verifiable evidence before forming a
decisive opinion on something is anything near an impossible standard,
especially since as you've noted, our governments and newspapers are known to
lie to citizens. Anyone who's done any reading on the topic outside of the
mainstream knows what you see on TV in the west is a slanted version of the
truth at best. And yet, look how _absolutely certain_ people are about their
beliefs, but when asked to provide some of the hard-factual content they read
to form this rock solid opinion, almost no one has anything other than a
downvote. To me, this looks like some sort of a classic mania, and it's quite
concerning.

