Russian "interference" in U.S. elections?

Much is being made about Russian “interference” in the 2016 presidential election, and about possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to interfere to win the election for Trump. However, the suspicions are lacking in evidence.

However, we do have a classified report from the Director of National Intelligence, the declassified version of which is linked below. It Seems to have at least tacit support from other agencies, and it can be expected to be the basis for other investigations on the subject.

Despite the use of the word “Hacking” in the URL of the report, the only hacking discussed in the report is of the private Clinton server containing and sharing classified documents. It repeatedly says, “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.” In other words, there was no known hacking of vote counts.

However, the report is also loose about what constitutes a “Russian actor”. The hackers using the handle “Guccifer.2.0″ are presumed to be working for the Russian government, which Putin denies. However, that they might be independent is entirely plausible. Russia harbors a swarm of hackers, mostly bent on selling drugs or stealing page rank. It seems doubtful that all of them would work for the Russian government. Of course, the government would soon have what they found.

In the report it says that “Guccifer.2.0 is identified as Romanian. That was the original Guccifer (without a version number). The report may be confused about all the Guccifers.

Links:

1. U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Background and Report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution,” Jan. 6, 2017, available at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3254239-Russia-Hacking-report.html