06/01/2017 Newsnight

The US eLection was influenced by Vladimiri Putin -

the claim by US intelligence chiefs as they release their full report.

There's no sign that Donald Trump will accept that.

This world expert in cyber crime tells us this CIA

report is the most import one in the agency's history.

We'll hear the reaction to that from the former

A gunman opens fire inside Fort Lauderdale airport in Florida.

We'll bring you the latest on the casualties.

They call it the Michael Fish moment: the Bank of England heaps

scorn on the economists who missed failed to see coming

How does a weatherman get blamed for what some

In the last hour US intelligence chiefs have

released their report on what they believe to be

Russian interference in the American Presidential Election.

It is as conclusive as it is damning - pointing the finger

directly at Vladimir Putin - and saying he ordered

an "influence campaign" aimed at undermining public faith

It states their understanding that the Russian Government

developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump

over Hillary Clinton - and backed what private cyberspace

companies have long concluded, that a Russian group known as Fancy

Bear was behind the leaked emails of top Democrats.

The report emerged shortly after a meeting between Trump

Donald Trump called the meeting "constructive" and appeared to admit

foreign spies could be behind the hacking.

But he refused once more to believe the outcome of the election had

This is where it all started so publicly, the Democratic National

Convention in July, a chance for a presidential candidate to shine in

front of adoring party conference, but Hillary Clinton's Coronation was

mired by scandal, the chair of the DNC had to resign on the eve of the

party convention after a league of internal e-mails showed officials

favouring Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Forward six months, the

leaks get worse and Donald Trump wins the election, and Barack Obama

announces expulsions of Russian diplomats after what America

believed is a cyber attack from Russia. It is not exactly in the

interest of Donald Trump to acknowledge that he may be benefited

from state-sponsored hacking, made all the more awkward after those

comments back in July. Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are

able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. The last 24 hours has

shown the capricious nature of the debate, first Syriza tweets saying

he was a big of intelligence agencies, -- a series of tweets. And

then a follow-up, asking why they had not investigated Democratic

computers. He has now conceded the leaks might have come from foreign

enemies but insists there was no effect on the outcome of the

election. Perhaps he's right, we might never know for sure, but this

is no longer about the part Russia may be played in America's domestic

affairs, it's about the Laois and ship the President of the United

States will have with the agencies tasked with keeping America safe --

the relationship. If Trump doesn't trust his own spies, the Kremlin's

work is done. I'm joined now by Thomas Rid,

Professor of Security Studies at Kings College -

he's been looking through It is unflinching. In the way it

points the finger directly at Russia and Russian hackers, and that the

Russian government and at Vladimir Putin. It is important to keep this

in a his topical context, a lot of the threat intelligence and digital

forensic amenity have studied Russian hacking campaigns for many

years, two decades, and the one thing that is crucial, they make

mistakes. Again and again, and when they make mistakes we can look at

these mistakes and learn from them and link attacks to each other. And

to the perpetrator. You have read the report you don't think it is

oversold, this understanding of Russian influence? The US

intelligence committee have been tracking Russian operations, not

just in computers, network operations, but Russian influence

operation for many decades they have coverage through human sources as

well as technical sources and we can tell from their very strong

intelligence language in the report that their sources including their

human sources seem to be very strong. This is a significant

observation. Standing back you could say that President Obama ordered the

report a month ago and it comes as Donald Trump is about to be

inaugurated and it seems to favour Hillary Clinton by appointing the

figure at Vladimir Putin's support for the knot on, so why would you

not be sceptical? -- support for Donald Trump. Let's keep this in

perspective, President Obama was very reluctant in the campaign to

use the intelligence community and to point fingers at what was going

on, because he, like many others, thought that Clinton would win,

anyway, so it wouldn't matter in the end, but clearly that did not

happen. You have traced the way... You were looking at e-mails to John

Podesta and how the spam filter failed. And how the e-mails

essentially leaked, but what makes you link John Podesta at one end to

Vladimir Putin at the other? In that particular case, the Russian

operators made the mistake and left part of the infrastructure that they

used in order to breach thousands of targets, hundreds of thousands of

targets and only one of them was John Podesta. Because they made that

mistake with a link shortening a cat, and this is only one mistake of

many, we can piece together highly detailed full resolution picture of

their targeting over many months and it looks exactly like the targets

set of a military intelligence agency would look like. A military

intelligence agency means Vladimir Putin himself? The operation was

most likely started as a bottom-up initiative and then Vladimir Putin

signed off on it at some point in the middle of last year which is

also part of the intelligence estimate. How do you think Donald

Trump himself has handled the leaks? We know from history, and this is a

very long history, Cold War history, the Russian intelligence community

have honed their skills in driving wedges into the political systems of

their adversary 's to multiply divisions, and first they wanted to

divide Clinton and Bernie Sanders which they set seeded in doing, and

now it seems they are daring Trump to deepen the division between his

Administration and his own foreign policy and intelligence

establishment. So by tweeting at these are unhinged statements, he is

indeed doing exactly what the Russians and probably Vladimir Putin

want him to do. Thomas, thanks for joining us.

Former Director of the CIA James Woolsey joins me now.

He quit the Trump transition team this week - as - he explained -

he didn't want to fly under false colours as a senior

Thank you very much for joining us. Have you read the report before it

was released? Do you agree with what it says? I had not read it before it

was released, and it seems to me that it sounds like a Saudi done

report. -- soundly done report. It makes several ports, several points,

the Russian effort is wide reaching, the Russians call it disinformation,

otherwise known as lying, and they target institutions in the West, any

institutions in countries they are concerned about or interested in,

they have been doing this since the 1940s, maybe the 1930s. And they

have done it of course until very recently without using cyber but

using other devices, forged documents, doctored photographs,

except you. Hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands of people,

according to defectors who had gone into this in some detail. That is

apparently confirmed by the report. And I think it is good and sound for

Americans and the rest of us to understand that the Russians operate

this way and they have operated this way for many years and they are not

going to change under Vladimir Putin. It also seems, the report

seems to say, that whatever the Russians did, it does not seem to

have influenced the outcome of the election, that is not just something

Trump is saying, that is something the report says. And something Jim

Clark has said, as well. They would have needed to do that, they would

have needed to have got them into the voting machine and the counting

process, which we have got to upgrade in the United States. Can I

just come in, you have said this is good and sound, and we know Donald

Trump has refused to believe that it had any effect on the election

outcome, what do you read into that? No one else I know has charged that

it has had an effect on the outcome. I don't believe the intelligence

organisations or the FBI or anything I've read, suggests there was any

effect. It is something which one needs to fix because if it is not

fixed and the voting machines are not perfect, there could be an

effect Sunday, but I don't know of any authoritative statement which

says it affected the counting and the models, the counting of the

ballots. What is your message to Democrats tonight who hear this

report which points the finger at Vladimir Putin leading a campaign of

influence over the election and must be feeling outraged? Well, I would

think that all Americans, Democrats and Republicans, ought, if not to be

outrage, to be somewhere between outraged and highly concerned, that

the Russians, by continuing to do what they have done for many

decades, and doing it with advanced technology, could have an effect the

next time, a real effect, not just a theoretical one, be out, of

elections. Britain's elections, our elections, other elections. We need

to get in control of our own systems and counter what the Russians are

doing. Can I journey suggest that some might here that is rather

naive, we understand there are reports of senior Russian official

celebrating a Trump victory and we know that Trump himself seems to be

very friendly with Russia and he has refused to point the finger at the

state himself or stop what more evidence do we need that this is

Russian influence working on American politics? If the Russians

had real elections and there was one between Vladimir Putin and

Gorbachev, there would be celebrations in the United States

and Britain, that Gorbachev had won, even if we had not gotten involved

in doing the kind of things that the Russians do, with respect to

interfering with voting and so forth. One of the things we are

seeing here, Americans comes slowly as a nation, taking effect, posing

and fighting something which are challenging and we are still at the

beginning stages of this was Churchill said the Americans always

do the right thing, but unfortunately only after they have

exhausted all the other possibilities. You have to realise

we are exhausting possibilities now, give us time, and I think we will

organise things in such a way that we protect our ballot and help

others protect theirs. Take us inside the mindset which you know so

well of senior intelligence chiefs, the CIA, who have heard their

commander-in-chief reject the explanation that they have offered,

what kind of relationship lies in store for Donald Trump and the CIA

now? They are big boys and girls and they take a lot of criticism, it is

very popular in the United States politically, if anything comes up

that remotely deals with intelligence, to find some reason to

criticise the CIA... Publicly? Often, often. I have seen that

coming at me when I was director of Central intelligence, demanding that

I do impossible things, such as fire people who were already retired.

LAUGHTER We are not always at our best in the

initial stages of something, it took three years to get into World War I

and two and a half years to get into World War II while Britain held

Germany at bay, and sometimes we don't respond as quickly as we

should. Thanks for joining us. A gunman opened fire

in the baggage claim area at the Fort Lauderdale airport

in Florida, killing five people and wounding at least eight before

being taken into custody. The attack sent panicked passengers

running out of the terminal One man, believed to be

the shooter, is now in custody. Our correspondent

Barbara Plett Ussher There was a lot of confusion around

what was taken onto the plane, whether the shooter was a passenger,

whether he had carried a gun, what more can you tell us? Police have

not clarify the question, whether he came into the baggage claim area

from outside or whether he arrived as a passenger but the county

commissioner has said that he had been told that he came on a plane,

that he had checked his gun in the luggage and that he picked it up on

the baggage carousel and took it to the bathroom, where he loaded it and

came out shooting. It is legal to check a gun, to put it into checked

luggage, in the United States, under certain precautions and those

precautions were taken. The County Commissioner initially said that he

had come on my flight from Canada, that is something Air Canada and the

Canadian embassy have looked into and they have said, there was no

evidence that he had any connection to Canada and since then, reports

that he flew in from Anchorage, which is also the place where he was

last known to have lived, Anchorage, Alaska. Has there been much reaction

from political figures in America this evening so far? You have that

statements of condolence from the president, and something similar

from the President-elect, who takes the opportunity to comment on public

events through his Twitter account. He did that as well. One thing that

people will be asking, how could this happen so easily in an airport,

where you are supposed to have tight security. He seems to have brought

his gun in with him but the fact is that it took place in an arrivals

area, in domestic flights, in the United States, these areas are not

terribly secure, people can walk in, picked up family members, drivers

can pick people up at the baggage claim. It is possible there may be

some discussion about whether these areas need to be further secured

just like the areas where you go into departures for aeroplanes.

Thank you very much. There is a certain irony that

even when economists are attempting to take the blame,

they end up using poor old weather forecaster Michael Fish

as their whipping boy, and headline synonym

for a forecast gone wrong. The Bank of England admitted that

economists were facing after their dire predictions

of a post-Brexit downturn proved unfounded in

the first six months. The Bank of England's

chief economist Andy Haldane said his team were now

facing having to predict how despite unknowable outcomes

of the Brexit negotiations. So can economists tell us anything

more than Paul the Octopus, Earlier on today a woman rang the

BBC and said that she heard there was a hurricane on the way, if you

are watching, don't worry, there isn't. VOICEOVER: As economics had

its own Michael Fish moment, that is what the chief economist at the Bank

of England said this week. Very similar to the sort of reports

central banks, naming no names, issued precrisis," there's no

hurricane coming, it might be very windy in the sub-prime sector...".

It was a huge shock to economists, in 2009, 49 countries had

year-on-year falls, in economic activity, but as late as September

2008, no major forecasters foresaw that. We failed to appreciate the

damage that a relatively sub-prime bass malt sub-prime mortgage market

in the United States, loans to fairly poor people who cannot afford

the houses they are trying to buy, would do to our financial sector

because we did not realise just how interdependent the whole sector had

become. There were views that the financial sector was able to manage

risk much more effectively, than all this all sort of -- with all this

computerisation and self reporting and it turned out not to be true.

The financial crisis was not the only bad weather that the economists

missed, ever since then, the British economy has consistently

underperformed what the economic consensus has suggested. There is a

storm that they predicted that never came, the "Brexit" referendum did

not lead to an immediate contraction. Those two misses were

not the result of complex mass mistakes but relatively simple

judgment call that went wrong, on how the economy would respond to two

historically unprecedented events. Economists have struggled with

forecasting recently because the economy is very weak, after a very

unusual event, the financial crisis, we do not have many of those to go

by. Most economists are still glum about Brexit but lots got the timing

of any trouble wrong, all the evidence suggests that the

withdrawing of the suggestion that we withdraw from the European Union

will be bad for long-term growth in the UK. But what went wrong,

perhaps, was suggesting that those effects would be brought forward,

and lead to more savings and less demand in the economy in the very

short run. It's worth remembering that as bad as things have been in

spotting crises coming, economic policy has got better at responding

to crises, we may not have very good forecasts yet but we have much

better umbrellas. You can see that most clearly in what happened after

the financial crisis. The lessons that had been taken from the great

depression were put into action with all policy leaders in many countries

around the world being put to the purpose of preventing another great

depression from taking place. That is how economics contribute, we

learn from our mistakes in the past, we learn from economic history, and

we make the best use of the evidence available. Most of the strong winds

will be down over Spain and across into France. Since the financial

crisis, economics has been a victim of the unprecedented financial and

political climate. STUDIO: Joining me now is Guardian

columnist, Simon Jenkins, and Vicky Pryce from the Centre

for Economics and Business Research. I'm going to leave the umbrella

aside for one moment and look at just the rain, is it useless, trying

to predict what is going to happen, if they cannot see a financial crash

which turns into the worst one for 80 years and then they go on to make

further mistakes five years later, what is the point? The first thing

to say is that it is not true that nobody was forecasting at the time

that things were likely to turn really nasty, the fact that it was

not put strongly through the media and people were not necessarily

listening is something that we should not forget. People were not

particularly, they were not indicating it strongly. The

overwhelming view was that we could probably carry on because we had

settled macro. People said we had settled it out, we no longer have

boom and bust, Gordon Brown was saying that particularly, and we are

really safe and many think that would happen. What people forgot,

just as we have been hearing, interconnectivity across various

countries particularly one of the national sectors and globalisation

has been an important part, making it quite difficult for an individual

country to isolate itself and forecast exact to what is going to

happen. INAUDIBLE I thought the whole point of

economics was you can predict these things, otherwise don't make

predictions, you assume that when you can... Is that for you what the

study of economics is, predictions? No, it is about studying human

behaviour, it went all wrong, when it went the up the backside of

mathematics, using models that were fallacious, they got two huge things

wrong, crash and now "Brexit", and I say people employed by the

government to get these things right, they don't pretend, they say,

we think this is going to happen, they say might, possibly might, but

the fact is, they are making predictions. They were massively on

one side and wrong. What is suspicious about it, they are people

hired by the government and the suspicion is that this is not an

independent profession, as we would like to think it is, it is them

saying what governments wants them to hear. We should say, on "Brexit"

so far they have proven wrong, we are in early stages... You can

always say that, it is like saying there will be a war one day, you

want to know when, the point about expertise is that they should tell

you when. -- the point about experts is. There should be an enquiry, if

this was a professional mistake in engineering or medicine there would

be a public enquiry. Economists... This is a Michael Fish moment...

This is what is going on right now, the experts have been ridiculed by

some members of Parliament. As you know. And yet, if you had heard what

Simon was saying, this was all coming from people who work for the

government and therefore, they are not independent, it has been the

overwhelming majority of economists, independent economists, working for

banks and think tanks, and have nothing to do with politics, who

were all believing that leaving the EU would be bad news for the UK, not

all agreeing that the shorter in fact would be bad but that the

medium and long-term impact would be resulting in lower growth in the UK

economy. They said something quite specific, there would be an

immediate crash. They are not pretending they didn't, they are

trying to say that it was a weather forecast which went wrong. These

things really do matter. It is not a weather forecast that went wrong, is

something had been that there would be the triggering of Article 50

immediately, basically what people had been told to expect if there was

a vote. Therefore, the impact would be quite substantial, and there was

a huge impact on the markets. A full in the pound and a crash in shares.

-- fall in the pound. I remember, waking up in the morning. What about

this Tom this victim of unprecedented times, do you allow

some leeway? This -- this, this phrase victim of unprecedented

times. They come up with phrases and then they say, this might happen. In

terms of forecast you would have thought they might say, on one hand,

on the other hand, but there was a universe analogy of this, they were

saying, and I have to say, I cannot believe that it was... -- there was

a universe yellow tea of this. If we never asks economists, then is it

still a useful tool, does it still give us something? They look at what

has been happening in the past, history, what does it tell us, does

it give us an understanding of how people behave, that is the most

important thing, so... You could say the same thing with politics and

clearly it does not. You can run your models in a good

way when things are normal, and we have good predicting records but

what is much more difficult to do is if there is a shock, political

shock, the economy will go into all sorts of... Spasms. Of this sword,

yes. This is the dodgy dossier, they're ready should be an enquiry

into it. -- spasms, of a sort, yes. If you havent met Alexa

you probably will soon. Standing, quietly like a wallflower

in the corner of a room. Or perhaps, in the early days

of courtship, centre stage She's a sleek robot,

the brainchild of Amazon, and she responds only when you start

each of your questions She can turn your music up,

turn your heating down, and answer questions on just

about anything she understands. But are you quite ready

to welcome her into your home? David Grossman reports on the advent

of the automated house guest. VOICEOVER: It is only because we

have always done it this way that we consider typing the natural way of

communicating with computers but it is not, it is far more natural to

speak to them. Alexa, tell hive to put the heating on. All right, what

temperature would you like. Alexa 20 degrees. Sure, your heating is now

set to 20 degrees. Voice control technology is seen as the next

frontier in personal computer in, it might not be that we are sitting

around typing on keyboards as much in the future or using input devices

but we use our voices to control a lot of the stuff we need to get done

on computers. In a sense, the future has arrived, but as ever, concerns

about privacy and security abound. So, in my Christmas stocking I

received the Echo, and I was reluctant to turn it on. I have not

used the product yet, because I do not know what will happen to the

data, and it is Big Brother to think that Alexa or anyone is collecting

information about my household activities that can be used for

personalising my shopping experience, to be sure, but also

means that someone has knowledge of what is going on in my home. The

Internet of things, the big data movement, it is one which I think

consumers should give more thought to, do we really want to have

unknown third parties with access to personal information? For a start,

unless you disable the microphone, it is always on, always listening

and always recording what is being said in a room. However, Amazon say

that nothing leaves the premises, nothing is sent to the clout, for

processing, unless you use the wake word, " "Alexa"... Law is still

emerging in this area, police in Arkansas full-back recording from a

device may be able to shed light on a murder. Amazon have declined to

hand them over. -- cloud. United States, the courts could Sabine

almost any thing of a soul, people should not be comfortable with the

thought that Amazon can protect me from having the government access my

information. -- in the United States, the courts can

subpoena almost any thing of a sort. You need butter to make the

pancakes, milk, and egg. It is eight trade-off, we allow in the

microphones for the convenience. Are you my friend? Of course we can be

friends, you seem very nice. But, however amiable R friend sounds,

it is not clear who is side she is on. -- amiable our new friend

sounds. They want to control everything that we listen to and

what we buy, and that is extremely valuable information. Alexa, are you

the beginning of the end of Western Seville is Asian? No, you're... --

are you the beginning of the end of Western Seville is Asian. --

civilisation.