"first hand" as in, 'the govt told me that china bugged supermicro motherboards,' as opposed to, 'I was told the govt briefed tech companies about how china bugged supermicro motherboards.' honestly, describing the testimony I quoted as "third hand", simply because the person doing the briefing for the govt was not the same person to have discovered the breach, is completely ridiculous.
do you agree the article establishes that the U.S. govt repeatedly warned private sector companies that supermicro servers had been bugged by china? maybe the us govt was wrong about that! could be! but it's still a huge story and much more than what was established by the first bloomberg article.
> do you agree the article establishes that the U.S. govt repeatedly warned private sector companies that supermicro servers had been bugged by china?
I agree the article establishes that unnamed sources in government are giving out briefings.
But I don't think that was ever in doubt.
Even when the first article was written, I could easily believe the journalist's claim they were told what they wrote by some sketchy anonymous government source. I just think they didn't demonstrate the truth of their source's claim.
There's always some anonymous "senior government official" ready to tell a journalist that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (but they can't show the evidence as it's classified) or whatever other narrative they're pushing at the time. It's a journalist's responsibility to apply due skepticism.
for whatever reason, you are refusing to grapple with the fact that the second, just-released article, does not rely on the testimony of anonymous government sources, "sketchy" or otherwise, but on multiple, named, private sector sources. the people who are quoted have reputations that are important to them. they are claiming to have participated in concrete events. it's a very different category of testimony than "government sources say."
the difference is, the motivation for the two kinds of communication are completely different. anonymous govt sources talking to the media want the info to be public. govt officials telling a limited circle of people involved in core infrastructure generally do not want the info to be public. if you are trying to broadcast info to the public, your message is much more suspect, because the likelihood of an intent to deceive is higher. if you wanted the message to get out, there are far easier ways that telling a small circle of private sector people. generally govt isn't going around telling dams, nuclear power plants and drinking water plants about bogus chinese hacking threats on purpose. they can easily be wrong. it's a lot less likely they are lying about something like this.
do you agree the article establishes that the U.S. govt repeatedly warned private sector companies that supermicro servers had been bugged by china? maybe the us govt was wrong about that! could be! but it's still a huge story and much more than what was established by the first bloomberg article.