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from the putin-his-nose-where-it-doesn't-belong dept.
A new declassified report released by US intelligence officials says Russian President Vladimir Putin "ordered" a campaign to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
The 25-page public version of the report was released on Friday after the officials briefed President-elect Donald Trump and top lawmakers on Capitol Hill on a longer, classified version.
The report said Russian efforts to meddle in vote represent the most recent expression of Moscow's long-standing desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.
[...] After his briefing, Trump stopped short of embracing the intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in the presidential campaign, saying only that any hacking attempts had "absolutely no effect" on the outcome of the election.
Having hours earlier dismissed the hacking controversy as a "political witch hunt," Trump later issued a statement whose main aim appeared to be to deflect questions about the legitimacy of his November 8 victory over Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.
Full text of report available in many places, including at scribd.
Ironically, Wikileaks, an organization usually in favor of information sharing, was upset about dissemination of this report.
In a Friday tweet, WikiLeaks slammed the CIA for leaking information to NBC.
"The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET//COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it," the tweet read.
An NBC report last night touted "an exclusive, inside look" at the report connecting the Russian government to breaches of the Democratic National Convention and other groups and individuals during election season sourced to two intelligence community sources.
WikiLeaks and Assange have championed the dissemination of sensitive or classified in the past, publishing United States diplomatic cables and military information, emails from the 2014 Sony hack and internal documents from multiple other governments and political parties.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/313002-wikileaks-opposed-to-cia-leaking-report-info-to-nbc
Previously on SoylentNews: Reactions to Russian Hacking Activity
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Saturday January 07 2017, @09:02PM
The DNC had a poor candidate and their heads were pretty far up their asses. On the other hand, that's how I'd describe the republicans too. As a result, two shit parties, two shit candidates to choose from... the election was very close. No matter which side won you could easily and rightfully blame the party that lost for torpedoing their own chances. IF H had won the election we could very easily have said "Trump didn't need help losing the election, he and the RNC, did that all by them selves." because they were BOTH lousy candidates with lousy campaigns for 'broken' out-of-touch parties. Neither Trump nor Hillary had broad support of the people... other than a small core nobody was excited about either of them.
That doesn't change the fact that the Russian's were 'campaigning' for Trump; and given how close the election was, the impact of a Russian campaign could well have tilted the balance.
The closeness of the election, and lousy candidates may have enabled them to the tilt the balance... or perhaps it would have gone Trump anyway. Who knows. But we should be looking to mitigate any such interference in the future, you should agree to that no matter what party you support.