In the american president ial 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 in the Us Democratic system. 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 and his top spies this afternoon. Donald trump called the meeting constructive and appeared to admit foreign spies could be behind some of the hacking. But he refused once more to believe the outcome of the election had in any way been affected. This is where it all started so publicly, the Democratic National convention injuly, a chance for a president ial candidate to shine in front of an adoring party conference. But hillary coronation was mired by scandal. The chair of the dnc had to resign on the eve of the Party Convention after a leak of internal e mails showed officials actively favouring clinton over Bernie Sanders. Wind forward six months, the leaks get worse and donald trump wins the november election, and barack obama takes to the stage to announce expulsions of Russian Diplomats after what america believed is a cyberattack from russia. This is a major headache for trump. It is not exactly in the interest of donald trump to acknowledge that he perhaps benefited from state sponsored hacking. Its made all the more awkward after those comments back injuly. Russia, if you are listening, i hope you are able to find the 30,000 e mails that are missing. The last 2a hours has shown the capricious nature of the debate, first a series of tweets saying he was a big fan of intelligence agencies. And then a follow up, asking why they had not investigated Democratic Committee computers. This Afternoon Trump was briefed by top spies, outlining the evidence they have for russias involvement in the hacking. He has now conceded the leaks might have come from foreign enemies but insists there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. Perhaps hes right, we might never know for sure, but this is no longer about the part russia may be playing in americas domestic affairs, its about the relationship the president of the United States will have with the agencies tasked with keeping america safe. If trump no longer trusts his own spies, the kremlins work is done. Im joined now by thomas rid, professor of Security Studies at Kings College hes been looking through the cia assessment. It is unflinching. In the way it points the finger directly at russia and russian hackers, and at the russian government and at Vladimir Putin. It is important to keep this in a historical context, a lot us in the Threat Intelligence and Digital Forensic community 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 breaches and attacks to each other and to the perpetrator. You have read the report, and you dont think it has oversold this understanding of russian influence . The Us Intelligence committee have been tracking russian operations, not just in computers, network operations, but Russian Influence Operations 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 pointing the figure at Vladimir Putins support for trump, so why would you not be sceptical . Lets keep this in perspective, president obama was very reluctant during the campaign of course he campaigned for clinton, but he was reluctant 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 wouldnt matter in the end, but clearly that did not happen. You have traced the way the servers were hacked. You were looking at e mails Tojohn Podesta and how the spam filter failed. And how the e mails were essentially leaked. What makes you Linkjohn 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 wasjohn podesta. Because they made that mistake with a link shortening account, and this is only one mistake of many, we can piece together a 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. Its easy to understand what russia wants to gain from this. 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 adversaries, to multiply divisions. First they wanted to divide clinton and Bernie Sanders which they succeeded 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 out these unhinged statements, he is indeed doing exactly what the russians and probably Vladimir Putin want him to do. Thomas, Thanks Forjoining us. The former director of the cia James Woolseyjoins me now. He quit the Trump Transition Team this week as he explained he didnt want to fly under false colours as a Senior Security advisor to trump. Thank you very much forjoining us. Have you read the report before it was released . Do you agree broadly with what it says . I had not read it before it was released, i still have to read it, and it seems to me that it sounds like a soundly done report. It makes several points, that the russian effort is wide reaching, that is certainly true. 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, etc. Hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands of people work on this, according to defectors who have 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 notjust something trump is saying, that is something the report says. And something jim clapper has said, as well. They would have needed to do that, they would have needed to have got into the Voting Machine and the counting process, which we have got to upgrade in the United States. Can ijust 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 dont believe the Intelligence Organisations or the fbi or anything ive 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 some day, but i dont 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 outraged, to be somewhere between outraged and highly concerned, that the russians, by continuing to do what they have done for many a theoretical one, be out, of elections. Britains elections, our elections, other elections. We need to get in control of our own systems and counter what the russians are doing. Can i gently suggest that some might say 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 come slowly as a nation, taking effective efforts at imposing and fighting something which were challenging. And we are still at the beginning stages of this. 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 . 0ften, 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 2. 5 years to get into world war ii while britain held germany at bay, and sometimes we dont respond as quickly as we should. Thanks forjoining 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 and onto the tarmac seeking safety. One man, believed to be the shooter, is now in custody. 0ur CorrespondentBarbara Plett ussher has been monitoring events. 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. 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. Come from a flight from canada. Has there been much reaction from politicalfigures in america this evening so far . You have 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 a forecasting crisis, after their dire predictions of a post brexit downturn proved unfounded in the first six months. The Bank Of Englands chief economist andy haldane said his team were now facing having to predict how the economy will perform, despite unknowable outcomes of the brexit negotiations. So can economists tell us anything more than paul the octopus, mr whippy the whippet, or indeed meg the mystic . Heres chris cook. Earlier on today a woman rang the bbc and said that she heard there was a hurricane on the way, if you are watching, dont worry, there isnt. Voiceover has 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, theres no hurricane coming, it might be very windy in the sub prime sector. The financial crisis 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 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 sort of 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 judgement 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 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. Would be brought forward, and lead to more savings and less demand in the economy in the very short run. Its 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. Joining me now is guardian columnist, simonjenkins, and vicky pryce from the centre for economics and business research. Im going to leave the umbrella aside for one moment and look atjust 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 Financial 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. I thought the whole point of economics was you can predict these things, otherwise dont make predictions, we 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, the crash and now brexit, and when i say they, i mean people employed by the government to get these things right, they dont 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, these are hard guns 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. 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. Short term impact. They said something quite specific, there would be an immediate crash. They are not pretending they didnt, 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 fall in the pound and a crash in shares. I remember, waking up in the morning. What about this phrase, a victim of unprecedented times, do you allow some leeway . They come up with phrases and then they say, this might happen. In the case of forecast you would have thought they might say, on one hand, on the other hand, but there was a universality of this, they were saying, and i have to say, i cannot believe that it was. 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, operate, to inform policy in particular, 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. Spasms, of sorts, yes. This is the dodgy dossier, theyre 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 like a new family pet at christmas. Shes a sleek robot, the brainchild of amazon, and she responds only when you start each of your questions with her name. 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. What are always a way that we consider typing the way of computing communicating. Consider typing the way of computing communicating. It is not, it is far more natural to speak to them. Alexei, tell to turn the heating on. All right, what temperature would you like . 20 degrees. All right. Voice control technology is the next frontier in personal computing. It may not be that we are sitting around typing on keyboards as much in the future that we are using our voices to control a lot of the stuff we need to get done on our computers. In a sense, computed the future has arrived that concerns about security arise. The imac in my Christmas Stocking i received the echo and i was reluctant. In my Christmas Stocking. I still havent used it. Why . I dont know what will happen to the detat. It is data. It is big brother to think that she is collecting data. Personalising my shopping list, to be sure but also somebody has knowledge of what is going on in my home. The internet of things, the Big Data Movement is one that i think consumers should give more thought to. Do we really want to have unknown third parties have access to personal information . Pro start, unless you disable the microphones, it is always listing for a start. It is always recording what is being said in a room. However, amazon on say nothing leaves the premises. Nothing is set up leaves the premises. Nothing is set up to the cloud for processing unless, that is, you use the wake word. Alexa. The law is still emerging. Police in arkansas sort sort recordings could seek advice on a murder. The police could subpoena anything. It people should be co mforta ble anything. It people should be comfortable that amazon on would protect them from having the government access their information. The objective is to become indispensable in our daily lives. Alexa, ask Ingredient List how to make pancakes. You need a cup and a half of flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, egg and butter to make pancakes. It is a tradeoff. We allow the microphones in for convenience. Are you my friend . Jelena of course we can be friends, you seem very nice. But however ami erbil she sounds,