Why would you believe anything an intelligence agency says? Half their job is spreading fear and obfuscating the truth.

And that mistruth appears in delightfully insidious ways, like seemingly well-meaning comments opening up about "half" the job being lying when the point is to shift the Overton window away from the actual numbers, whatever they might be.

(obviously not serious, but it's fun to probe what we can actually reason about when every message might be adversarial)