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The New York Times is reporting the FBI's director is publicly stating that the bureau has no doubt the North Koreans are behind the Sony hacking attack:
James B. Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on Wednesday that no one should doubt that the North Korean government was behind the destructive attack on Sony’s computer network last fall.
Mr. Comey said he had “high confidence” in the F.B.I.’s quick determination that North Korea was behind the attack. He said skeptics in the Internet security world who have suggested other theories for who was responsible did not have all the information he does.
The F.B.I. director said national security concerns limited just how far law enforcement officials could go in revealing evidence that points to North Korea. But at a conference on cybersecurity in New York, Mr. Comey offered some of the evidence the F.B.I. had found.
One of the telltale pieces of evidence, he said, were a few I.P., or Internet Protocol, addresses that could be traced directly to North Korea. Mr. Comey said members of the group claiming responsibility for the hacking — Guardians of Peace — did a good job concealing their identities but slipped up in some cases.
"They used proxy servers to disguise” the trail of evidence, Mr. Comey said. “But sometimes they got sloppy.”
Should we believe him? After all, he is the FBI director, not exactly a source of truthful information.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Friday January 09 2015, @07:15AM
I think if you're broadly willing to consider the FBI as manufacturing evidence, the problems in your hypothetical universe probably ought not to focus on some random hacking
I would remind you of the (apparently widely accepted) US law enforcement technique of Parallel Construction [reuters.com], which is pretty much manufacturing evidence for cases where they "know" someone to be guilty, and concealing the actual investigation.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday January 09 2015, @03:13PM
It's not inventing evidence, it's dodging constitutional guards against improper evidence collection.
Those are not the same, and while both ideas form around the core notion that the government is doing something wrong, you actually have to prove the claim that you made.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 09 2015, @04:44PM
Who says the *hackers* didn't alter the evidence? I mean come on, you've got some disgruntled employee or Anon/Lulzsec type, or one of the millions of other people with plenty of motivation to want to take Sony down. Then you see North Korea making this speech to the UN screaming about Sony's new movie. Easier to change the evidence than conceal it -- if you try to just be careful and hide the evidence, you might miss something and they'll keep looking until they find it. If on the other hand you inject evidence pointing towards someone who they already suspect and who they already consider the enemy, then they're going to find that evidence and stop looking. If they wanted to frame someone for this hack, North Korea would certainly be the obvious and ideal choice.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Saturday January 10 2015, @09:59AM
It's not inventing evidence,
From the linked article
In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.
I'd agree that the objectivepoint of the fabrications in these examples is to introduce additional evidence, and conceal the source of other information, into the formal chain they submit to a court due to the context they're using it in.
However inventing an informant is pretty clearly fabrication in my book, regardless of where the subsequent chain goes. Once you go down this line I'm not seeing a big step to inventing a log.
(and as an aside, I'm not the GP)