No? It's a massive story. "Huge!" as Trump might say.

It's not quite steal-from-the-rich-and-give-to-the-poor, but the devious computer hackers in Robin Hood guise did force online retailers to melt down at their busiest time of year.

The trick was simple and sinister, breaking the codes of online payment accounts and giving an extra $100,000 of credit to random customers.

The action, as you'd expect, sparked a frenzy of online shopping in North America and Europe that, according to one report, "has forced retailers to shut down all digital transactions".

The report goes on: "The disruption sent global financial markets into a free fall before trading was suspended in most exchanges due to uncertainty about how long and widely the hacking would persist."

And all this happened – or rather, will happen – on November 19, 2018.

No wonder you've heard nothing about it.

The imagined crisis sparked by the also-imaginary Robin Hoodhacker appeared last week in a special intelligence assessment written by US spy agencies.

The report, Global Trends: Paradox of Progress, is the latest in a major series published every four years, usually about the time the US president begins their term in office.

The goal is to illustrate possible dangers in the years ahead and the gloomy conclusions of this latest report won't exactly endear the intelligence agencies to the president-elect.

"Populism will increase on the right and the left, threatening liberalism," the report says.

"The risk of conflict will grow. Warring will be less and less confined to the battlefield, and more aimed at disrupting societies – using cyber weapons from afar or suicide terrorists from within.

"The silent, chronic threats of air pollution, water shortage, and climate change will become more noticeable."

There is no guarantee any of these threats will come to pass, but the conclusions are intended to represent the best judgment of the intelligence analysts from the fragmentary material available.

Giving leaders an edge

Intelligence agencies spend a great deal of time seeking to anticipate future threats that might emerge, and the Americans spend more on intelligence agencies than any country, about $70 billion each year.

For the latest Global Trends report, the authors travelled to about 35 countries, speaking to about 2500 people from all walks of life to produce the 235-page assessment.

The aim of such reports – the essence of the secret intelligence business – is to give political leaders an edge and inform their decision-making. The other side of intelligence is the chance for the secret sabotage of perceived enemies.

Coincidentally, the Global Trends report was publicly released only a few days after intelligence chiefs from the CIA, FBI and NSA also handed over the far-more-sensational intelligence assessment to Trump and Barack Obama, about a targeted campaign ordered by Vladimir Putin to influence the presidential election.

The conclusions were stunning.

"Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency," the spies alleged.

"We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."

Emails, hacked from Democratic Party officials, were said to have been covertly laundered to Wikileaks and other websites in order to create plausible deniability.

When you put the two reports together, with intelligence agencies dreaming up nightmare scenarios in one, while claiming an actual nightmare of foreign interference in a democratic election in another, it's perhaps not such a surprise there are doubts about the true extent of Russia's actions in the US elections.

It's certainly a doubt Trump wants to exploit, now the very legitimacy of his presidency is under unprecedented assault.

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Trump's campaign scornfully said as they dismissed the initial claims that Russia had secretly backed his quest for the White House.

And while Trump now concedes Russian operatives probably did hack the Democratic Party, he has continued to belittle the intelligence agencies, blaming them for the release last week of a sordid dossier of supposed blackmail material alleging he consorted with prostitutes in Moscow and agreed to become a stooge for the Kremlin.

Lessons from Iraq

So, who to believe?

"Iraq was 14 years ago," Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant director at the CIA, tells Fairfax Media. "Time to move on. There must be a statute of limitations."

"A lot was learned from that experience and it is reflected in the new report, especially the details on what we call analytic tradecraft. They try to give a very good sense of how they arrive at conclusions based on sometimes incomplete intelligence."

Intelligence assessments draw on all the strands of collected secrets – signals intercepts plucked from the skies, carefully cultivated agents inside foreign governments or rogue outfits, or information freely available in the public domain.

But what is on rare public display in this whole sorry saga is the challenge to make confident judgments without the full picture. How to navigate the realm of knowns and unknowns, to borrow a phrase.

Before the Russian hacking story, the most contentious intelligence assessments dated back to late in the Bush era, when US spy agencies judged Iran had abandoned efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

Before that, it was the claim of WMD in Iraq and how those entrusted with the job of national security missed the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The report is careful to explain two elements of reaching an intelligence judgment – "how likely it is that something has happened or will happen (using terms such as 'likely' or 'unlikely') and confidence levels in those judgments (low, moderate, and high)".

There is also a difference of agreement between the agencies on the judgment that Putin set out to discredit Clinton, with the CIA and FBI expressing high confidence, the NSA moderate support.

"Not at all unusual," says Lowenthal about the contested assessment. "Depends largely on sources and how one reads them. But this is a nuance. They are agreeing on the basic finding."

But in the Russian hacking report, the conclusions are presented to the public without evidence.

"The release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign in the future," the agencies said. As another CIA veteran Steven Hall wrote in The Washington Post:

"Facts may help resolve the matter, but in revealing the facts, the government may also reveal how we got them. It is truly not an overstatement to say that technical capabilities we have spent years and millions to develop could be rendered useless in one news cycle if disclosure is not handled correctly. Worse – and I do not exaggerate – if it were human sources that provided the information, they could lose their lives."

Trust us, in other words.

But trust is a big ask from agencies that often rely on deception. "One must not be seduced by spies and their agenda," wrote Bob Carr in his diary after a meeting with the CIA during his stint as Australian foreign minister.

Filling in the blanks

People don't generally like uncertainty. Absent a display of firm evidence, the result is all kinds of speculation, filling in the gaps with your personal experience or world view.

If you're a Trump supporter, you might dismiss the Russian hacking story, believing the controversy to be merely sour grapes on the part of Clinton supporters.

Democrats, on the other hand, are seizing on the claims of Russian manipulation and the fact Clinton won the count in the popular vote to cry foul, yet conveniently ignoring the political weaknesses of her campaign.

Russians, meanwhile, are scathing. "One may not only fool others, but oneself as well," commentator Vadim Poegli observed in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, also reflecting the common view of the Russian officialdom. Ironically, there is a strand of thought in Moscow that the CIA was secretly behind the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the intelligence assessment on Russia's activities is that the agencies have been so willing to associate themselves with the claims publicly, instead of hiding in the shadows. They make the point that every activity online leaves a trail.

The classified briefings were presented to Trump by the four most senior US intelligence chiefs: National Intelligence director James Clapper, FBI director James Comey, CIA director John Brennan, and NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers. Their reputations are staked on these claims.

While there have been selective leaks and racy reports about what was said, the essence on the conclusions were also released, appropriately enough in this social media age, on the official Tumblr blog of the intelligence community.

The absence of incontrovertible evidence, of course, encourages doubters. Plenty dismiss the report as biased attempt by partisan, Obama-appointed officials to discredit Trump, while Trump himself has seized on the fact the agencies made no effect to judge the impact Russian hacking had on the outcome of the election.

Claims of the politicisation of intelligence assessments – crafting them to suit the ideological disposition of their authors – go back decades.

In the 1970s, senior CIA officer John Huizenga was damning of the agency's influence on official policy in an interview with historians.

"I think that intelligence has had relatively little impact on the policies that we've made over the years. Relatively none," Huizenga said. "By and large, the intelligence effort did not alter the premises with which political leadership came to office. They brought their baggage and they more or less carried it along."

Perhaps this is why Trump hasn't much bothered to read intelligence briefings since winning the presidency.

And maybe why it is really a forlorn hope that his world view would suddenly change in the months ahead.