And yet as time went on, it looks like their goals evolved. They evolved because they were able to move from in formation gathering to making information public that might simply disrupt the election, make people lose confidence in the system to at the very end if you believe the assessment of Us Intelligence actually entering on behalf of donald trump. The russians specialize, this goes and extremely wrong way. We are in the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and the bolshevik specialized in propaganda and these kinds of operations. It has been around a very long time. When you look at what they have been doing for the last hundred years they have been rising a type that is already there, exploiting vulnerabilities in some cases but giving a nudge in the direction of larger trendss. Lenin embraced all kinds of causes that were not intrinsic to the revolution he was trying to undertake including the National Aspirations of ukrainians and a whole bunch of other nationalities of the former russian empire, ways of coopting them and moving their aspirations for independence in the direction of the bolsheviks, picked up on the ideas of other revolutionaries in czarist russia and basically parted company with them. There all kinds of things. What we saw in the case of the russian outlet simplified trends that were already there that emphasized directions in which they wanted to see things going, they also, this is written in a recent article you or one of your colleagues wrote, a counterintuitive element to this, they want to look good at what they are doing. They love that we are having this panel. Cspan is here but maybe we are live it makes them extraordinarily effective. We are giving them kudos here. They really did a good job in terms of their goals. Not from our perspective clearly because they are working on dinner at the same time. Basically they have loomed large in this in a way they could not have expected and it has been good for business. Vladimir putin wanted to join the kgb in the wake of a whole series of monetary documentaries and films about the derringdo of kgb and undercover operations by soviet intelligence in world war ii. A lot of people getting recruited in the back Office Taking down a tighten of us politics and doing it much more effectively than the chinese or the north koreans, russia is back in business, probably still current operative like Vladimir Putin, incredible pride in a job well done. It does bear saying that while it can be difficult to pinpoint the effects the russian hacking operation had on the election, there is work that be done perhaps by an enterprising graduate student to look at how the release of that information drove traffic online and changed the narrative online. That is measurable and researchable. Right now it is a fair point to say it is hard to put your finger on it but to research this a little bit how fake news distributes, a New York Times article would my ego prevents me from giving any of the results here but i can tell you the fake news stuff gets repeated pretty fast which is why facebook and google and others are looking for mechanisms either technological or of an editorial nature that would say to people who click on a certain article her Facebook Post you should look at these two or three other accounts that suggest what you just clicked on was complete fabrication and one of the reporters with whom i wrote the perfect weapon with, went out and found a guy living in annapolis, great story, basically wrote a lot of this fake news and he said if he could have made more money writing fake news and supported Hillary Clinton would have done that but the market was for donald trump. Next question, we go for quick questions and short answers as we get the final jeopardy. I was an official student many moons ago, still a student of life and i want to follow up on the influence of fake news especially domestically with david sanger. You may clear this is an old playbook on steroids and should be taken seriously. Everyone sitting and standing in this room takes it seriously but it is also fair to say that we are 90 of the eastern intellectual elite in this room and there is a whole group of people who dont take it as seriously as we do. The New York Times several weeks ago had an article about Trump Supporters and their reaction to wrecking hacking and there were three positions was on one spectrum it was it didnt happen. In the middle of the spectrum it happens, didnt influence the election and on the far end of the spectrum was if it influence the election this was a good thing, it got trump elected. Nowhere was a sense that this was a problem so if 35 of the electorate who are Trump Supporters come what may dont see russian hacking is a problem, what is the political will, what is the reality domestically about how we can move forward on this with the money, staff, policy that we all think it deserves . Great question, david . This is a set up because jim was a graduate student trying to keep track of all of us when i was a student, so he seen the problem close up here. It is a very good question and i think it is one of the reasons you saw so many committees in congress and efforts by the Obama Administration to set up investigations that would live beyond the Obama Administration and you are going to see a lot of efforts by the Trump Administration to try to make sure that this either goes away or distractions from it and so forth but fundamentally the hacking investigation fell victim to the same divisions in the country that made it so effective. What you have to do, it will be incumbent on all of us, change the discussion and change the narrative, depoliticize as much as possible. Fell victim to partisan politics and with due respect to some former senior figures in the cia they did not help in this matter and another article in the New York Times and elsewhere, they declared themselves a particular candidate or made a partisan comment, the message overall should have been this was an affront to National Security, no matter what your position on Hillary Clinton, former first lady, former senator, running for Public Office with a legitimate candidate in a legitimate election the matter how dirty the election was. If it can happen to Hillary Clinton it can happen to anybody and a member of linkedin had their personal information taken we should be concerned. Many people in this audience wants to run for Public Office, anybody out there, private citizenship, all the people who voted for trump can have their personal information taken. We know the chinese have been doing this is only a matter of time before this is used for political purposes. We need a national debate, congress is the right place to be having that because of the Intelligence Services and things we know and can have this compartmentalized information. We have to talk about this in a nonpartisan fashion and make it clear how serious this is which is why people are doing Research Like this. Had president obama, starting in july or august gone out every couple days saying this is not about my support for Hillary Clinton but we cant have a foreign power missing in the election and heres what intelligence is showing us. A choice he considered and rejected, to ask the question would that have been a better approach and i can tell you that while most of gone public on it there are many former members of the administration who believe he should have been a lot more vocal about it. It is worth noting senator mccain recently created a specialized subcommittee to focus on cybersecurity. That is a good step. We should expect our representatives in congress to spend more time specializing in cybersecurity oversight not just for the Armed Services committee, the intelligence committee, but for a broader slot of society. That is where we should be heading. Cyber Security Information Services to congress. Good shout out there. You have a question here . Go for it. I am a graduate student at the davis center. We spoke about providing evidence editing the fundamental question of how to provide evidence to prove to the extent possible these event plans are taking place. I got a lot more from your story then i got from Us Intelligence report from early january which to someone who follows russia said nothing new. Everyone knows there are propaganda outlets. We write more prescriptions than they do. Right. I was wondering about your views about limitations on releasing certain information. The fact that a lot of people in this country dont believe this has happened and how to combat it. Somebody with no background in intelligence the National Intelligence council, incredibly difficult for intelligence agencies that was literally the most sanitized summary they could put out there. There was always an anticipation the redacted version of this would be leaked as well. When they are leaked they put people in danger. We do not know what is going on. I dont have any special information but if they do have anything to do with that you can see what the consequences are. Lifeanddeath consequences for people who provide information. What i was going to suggest as a way of compromise is something for the role of Congress Getting back to the question. The Intelligence Community is in a difficult situation. Their priorities National Security but these are our representatives. Lindsey graham came out and said we had been hacked so when members of congress way to reaching out to their constituents also plan important role, presumably people who voted for them have a degree of trust in them. We have a problem with trust in congress but we have to work harder on restoring trust in our public institutions. It is significant that trump said we believe it is the russians. Having been adamant on the other side of that hopefully that will have quite an impact. For many of his supporters suggesting something going on. He was also right to talk about the fact that china and other countries are involved in this. We always have a hesitancy from the deck of view of the Brookings Institution where i work having been hacked and in constant denial about speaking out. We have this whole issue now of cyber hostagetaking, people take down your systems and you have to pay with bit coin to for your systems. We need more transparent and open about policies. Is incumbent on all of us here on this panel to find ways of doing this because we wont get anywhere unless individuals take it seriously not just institutions that have been subject to these attacks. I need everyone to work with me to keep it brief. I have debated a lot of people in the Intelligence Agency about whether they could have offered up more in the way of evidence and i strongly believe they could have because so much here had already been brought out by private companies which they could have come out and ratified and said their analysis was exactly the same as those private firms and probably could have talked a bit about having evidence of firm through implants they had. It is not exactly news to the russians that we are inside their system. Without getting so specific that it endangered there are ways to do this and they are stuck a little bit in an old thing about how to handle this. To amplify what david said about private companies it is worth noting talking about intelligence and cybersecurity it is different than chemical weapons in syria. And active industry, for intelligence operators in the private Sector Community working, that one these issues. Based on private evidence alone i was convinced and happy to stay on air in different forms by july or august. Because of the reuse of certain funding indicators and i think that is the area the Intelligence Community needs to adjust to piggyback on the private sector ends when she did fear with the private sector will say because they cant control them until some companies have an effort to get tension in very local in ways that they dont agree with but that is the wrinkle that requires a rethinking the Intelligence Community side. Ben has documented this in a recent paper called russia cyberoperations, challenges and opportunities for the next Us Administration so check that out. Next question here. Im a student at the Kennedy School with a question with regards to Upcoming European elections. You stress we should expect continued russian interference and i spoke at length about various shortcomings in the us and im curious to hear your views on how you see European Countries learn from what happened in the us and how they are stepping up their defense and how vulnerable you see various countries . We see the germans having public talked about this, they have a vulnerability different from ours. We were made safer here by the fact that our election system is so disparate across the states and there is so much suspicion of having a centralized system run by the federal government that you had a fan to design different ways to hack into the Voting System in each of the different states and sometimes in each different county. It is a lot easier in europe so they have a set of problems that go beyond hours. A lot of European Countries, not all, we have seen this on the other side, the deficiency but overall for some of the countries like germany and france, the United Kingdom for example have more integrated intelligence communities, much smaller intent to be communicating with each other much more quickly. And also there is now what can be done to the United States you can be sure it can be done to other countries but over the much more reverse active measures being taken by countries now to try to focus on the integrity of the system. Their political figures have been forewarned, their accounts of been hacked and those who have not been told that that is the case are pretty certain a high likelihood that that is the case, we will be seeing a lot of European Countries working closely together. There have been a whole host of tough and center set ups with in europe on cyber picking up on the issues raised here now to swap information including nato headquarters and other key subject in the eu itself. An example i talk about is the hack of ukrainian elections. We dont need to be forwardlooking to find Election Hacking in europe. It got very little attention in the United States, was not influenced in the same way, three days before the election the systems were wiped and they were ready to have backups. On election day itself, they were going to ship the results, found they were going to push out the media first. Results will show a fringe candidate winning. They had that happen in the past. The only into the once ukraine fixed the problem to a certain point was prorussia tv, somehow knew what was going to happen before it happened which suggested the confluence between cyberoperation and influence operation. That would worry me going forward, does not just influence operations but transitions to know kidding cyberattacks. I am paul from east fleischer school. My question has to do with sophie and the attack which you talked about, why they are seeing far less interest in the Party Discourse about that attack with russian hacking, why there is why there are certain interests in Foreign Government hacking our country whereas chinese have been doing that as long as we can remember and if you look at scales of the attack in my opinion like an act of war whereas the taking of the dnc as much as we want to think about it is probably not on the same scale as the opium attack, in 2015 when it happened i was working in the town newspaper and i remember how there seemed to be very little interest in their story, the story of the day wasnt about the attack but Something Else so i am curious. Then and david. Act of war from opium . Not act of war. They can to the chinese, they would, my guess is they have. Great moment when general clapper until recently director of National Intelligence is testifying in congress on the attack which could get a lot of coverage but mister trump may have been busy doing other things at the time but it was pretty well covered event. And all these members of congress were saying about the chinese attack on opiums and kept correcting them saying no, it was not an attack, he wouldnt even say china at the time. He would say the incursion on opiums, the espionage and the reason was if he categorized it as an attack he would have to say this behavior we would not do and obviously it is the kind of things that not only do we do but if you look at what the United States is done in china we have done parallel things, we havent done them on this scale and one of the questions raised by the opm attack is did the scale of this, 20 million records, biometric, the details people have, did the scale change the nature of it . One of the issues we have to address in line with the discu