Obama warns on hacking threat to world's elections
Russians could have a hand in European polls, says the US president
Washington — President Barack Obama, following the intelligence report describing Russian hacking of the 2016 US election campaign, has said he was surprised by the extent to which false information had been able to influence the democratic process. The president, going into his final weeks in the Oval Office, spoke in an interview aired on Sunday on ABC. "I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyberhacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems," Obama said. Obama said the ability of foreign countries to affect the US political debate partly reflected the cynicism many people had towards mainstream news. The type of interference that US intelligence agencies linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin had been going on for some time, and could happen again during elections in Europe in 2017, Obama said. "What is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled," he said....
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