US President Barack Obama today acknowledged that he "underestimated" the impact Russian hacking could have on the electoral process after a report was released by American intelligence agency on Russian meddling in the presidential vote.
"I think the report (of the intelligence community on election hacking) is very clear," Obama said about the report which alleged that the Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered for hacking and interfering into the US election system.
Number one, the Russians sought to interfere with the election process -- that the cyber hacking that took place by the Russians was part of that campaign, and that they had a clear preference in terms of outcomes, Obama was quoted as saying by ABC News.
"What I've repeatedly said is that you know, our intelligence communities spend a lot of time and effort gathering a lot of strands and a lot of data. There are times where they're very cautious and they say, we think this is what happened, but we're not certain," Obama said.
"This time they've got high confidence. And having seen some of the underlying sources and information that they're basing this on, I stand fully behind the report," Obama said.
Obama refuted the impression that he "underestimated" Putin.
"But I think that I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyber hacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems, to insinuate themselves into our democratic practices in ways that I think are accelerating," he acknowledged.
So part of the reason that he ordered this report was not simply to re-litigate what happened over the last several months but rather to make sure that they understand this is something that Putin has been doing for quite some time in Europe, initially in the former satellite states, where there are a lot of Russian speakers but increasingly in Western democracies.
"There are going to be elections coming up among our NATO allies that we have to pay attention to. I anticipate that this kind of thing can happen again here," Obama warned.
So, in addition to the report assessing what exactly happened, what the US has also done is to make sure that the Department of Homeland Security and US intelligence teams are working with the various folks who run the elections.
"One of the things that I've urged the president-elect to do is to develop a strong working relationship with the intelligence community. I think it's important that Congress, on a bipartisan basis, work with the next administration looking forward to make sure that this kind of influence is minimised," Obama said.
Responding to a question on the President-elect's statement that cyber hacking did not influence election outcome, Obama said Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. And it's not necessarily profitable to sort of try to untangle all the different factors that went into it.
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