First, let's be perfectly clear--any information system can be hacked if enough time and resources are available to attack it.

Given that fact, the only attainable objectives when securing an information system are (1) to make the time and resources required to break the system greater than than the value gained by breaking the system, and (2) to make any breach visible to the system's owners. In the context of electoral processes in general, the potential "value" of the attack could be to demonstrate the capability to disrupt an election in order to extract ransom from an unprepared government. Alternatively, the motive could be political rather than monetary, and the value in this case would be to undermine faith in the electoral process, to deny a government the ability to declare a valid outcome, or to change the outcome without anyone in the target country being aware of the hack.

Protecting the validity of election outcomes is, of course, fundamental to the viability of a republic such as the United States. Famous rulings by the Supreme Court in the 1960s established that equal protection of the law, guaranteed to each citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, applied to the individual's right to vote.  In Baker v. Carr, the Court ruled that the Tennessee legislature had to redistrict on the basis of population, with the intention of ensuring that each individual's vote counted equally. Attacks on electoral systems that favor one party over another, besides being prima facie illegal, threaten this principle of equal protection of the law. Protecting electoral processes that provide a valid outcome wherein each registered voter can be certain their vote was not tampered with or discarded is therefore essential to protecting the right to vote.
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Proper information security protects the confidentiality, integrity and availability (C-I-A) of the information in an information system. Safeguarding confidentiality means we keep secret things secret, allowing only authorized people to see data that has been restricted from public view in some way. Protecting the integrity of information means keeping the data safe from changes caused by any unauthorized person or process. Ensuring availability means that all authorized users can access the systems and information they need at designated times and places without interruption. In a well-designed system, information security professionals use a layered approach of physical and procedural safeguards in conjunction with dedicated hardware and software resources to detect and defend against attacks.

This traditional layered approach is the best defense against attacks aimed at the confidentiality and availability dimensions of an electoral information system. While voting machines, by definition, must be accessible to the public, the physical security of these machines should include inspection and certification that each machine functions properly and has not been tampered with prior to election day. From the point of certification, election officials must ensure  proper chain of custody and protection from unauthorized access to the machines until the polls open. During the election, proper access control ensures only registered voters touch the machines and only for the purpose of casting their individual vote. Other nodes in the electoral system should be protected with the same physical security measures used to protect sensitive data centers--access only by authorized people with appropriate credentials for specific, official purposes. Information must be encrypted at rest and in transit, with hardware and software firewalls along with appropriately hardened network infrastructure protecting access to the transmissions and storage locations for the encrypted data. Technology staff access should be segmented, monitored, and guarded by appropriately complex multi-factor authentication and authorization protocols.

Traditional defenses remain important for the integrity of information in information systems. So-called ransomware attacks modify data in an information system by encrypting it, compromising the integrity of the data in a way that denies availability of the system to authorized users until some sum of money is paid to the attackers. To protect against this type of attack, systems must not only prevent unauthorized access, but also must ensure that authorized inputs to systems and software are validated to screen out malicious code that could alter system data.
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For electoral systems, protecting the integrity of information requires even more. Voters must have confidence that their vote is recorded accurately, and that the ballot is not altered after it is recorded. The best way to ensure votes are recorded accurately is through some kind of audit mechanism. Then, use of blockchain technology provides a nearly foolproof way of ensuring ballots are not altered once recorded. As a final step, election officials should empower designated third-party services to audit and certify the blockchain implementation.

In recent years, blockchain technology has surged onto the scene as a leading method for ensuring the integrity of transactional systems of all types, including electoral systems. West Virginia, Utah, and Colorado have all successfully implemented Voatz, a blockchain solution, for their absentee voting solution in recent elections. Understanding the mechanics of blockchain technology will clarify the potential of this new way to preserve voter confidence.

The "blocks" in a blockchain are basically payloads of encrypted information tagged with complex hash values. A hash value is a digital fingerprint for an electronic file--the unique result of running the file through a one-way algorithm. There are many different algorithms to produce hash values. Once a file has been hashed, any change to the file--no matter how small--will produce a radically different hash value. Therefore, when an encrypted file is sent with its hash value, the receiving station can confirm that the original file has not been changed by running the received file through the same hash function and comparing the hash value produced at the destination with the hash value that accompanied the file. 

Inside each block are other hash values. There are individual hash values for some number of encrypted transactions, some metadata, a function called a "nonce" that is the trigger for closing out the block, and the completed hash for the entire contents of the preceding block. As each transaction is hashed and added to the block, all of the participating nodes in the blockchain system calculate the current hash of the entire contents of the block at that instant. When one of these calculated hash values reaches the trigger point designated by the nonce, the hash of that entire block is transmitted to the entire network. When the majority of participating nodes confirm that the block hash satisfies the requirement for completing the block, the block is added as the next block in the chain.

Even blockchain solutions must be audited. When the network of participating nodes is sufficiently centralized, as we might expect it to be in a state voting system, it is technically possible to insert one or more counterfeit blocks into the chain if a majority of the nodes concur. So, for instance, in my home state of Utah, with 29 counties and a finite, relatively small number of precincts, it is possible for some number of pre-built counterfeit blocks to be seeded by compromised nodes in a manner that would preempt legitimate blocks if a sufficient number of nodes were involved in the conspiracy. The only way to ensure that the election results are valid is an end-to-end audit that can tie specific election results to specific ballot transaction id's. 

Given recent efforts by rogue state actors to create doubt about electoral processes using social media, the ability to perform an end-to-end audit of the voting process in a way that allows officials to certify election results in a credible manner is increasingly important to maintaining voter confidence. Systems to enable this type of audit by establishing a transaction id for each ballot were challenged several years ago on the basis that they violated voters' right to privacy. But a 2012 ruling in federal district court (Citizens Center v. Gessler) held that there is no constitutional right to a secret ballot. Given the need for an audit mechanism to protect the systems that guarantee our right to vote, it seems appropriate to me that the individual voter's right to privacy should be subordinate to legitimate mechanisms for providing a credible audit. It also seems to me that, beyond what is absolutely necessary to create a credible audit mechanism, the secrecy of the individual's voter data should be protected to the greatest extent possible.

​In the context of election security, traditional information security combined with blockchain technology and  appropriate auditing protocols can provide credible assurance that votes are accurately counted and protected from tampering. Given the demonstrated threat, it is important for all Americans to insist that the state officials responsible for the administration of elections take aggressive actions to implement comprehensive election security and auditing solutions.

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One of the major premises of Accountability Citizenship is that, over the past 50 years or so, technology has changed what it takes to be a good citizen of the democratic republic that we call the United States of America. Technology unleashed the crushing flood of information in which we are all immersed. Technology enabled the increasingly accurate personalization of this flood of information to surround each of us with a bubble tailor-made to convince us that we know, as individuals, what is right and best and true (and to make it very easy to buy things related to our basic needs and world view). Technology allows us to choose channels and form groups that reinforce our individual world view while, in many cases, objectifying and demonizing those who have a different world view. Technology has, in many ways, made it more difficult to form consensus, to build solutions that reflect compromise, and even to recognize that compromise is necessary.
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Being a good citizen requires that we try to understand the world we inhabit, that we share our understanding with others in a manner respectful of those with a different understanding, and that we work together to implement effective solutions to the many challenges that confront us. Technology has caused or intensified many of the challenges we face. But technology is also absolutely necessary to building and implementing effective solutions to those challenges. Technology can enable systems that allow us to inform our (and our fellow citizens') understanding of major challenges facing our society, to consolidate and summarize individual perspectives on possible responses to those challenges, and to protect the integrity and availability of the information associated with challenges, solutions, and citizen inputs.

In the first edition of Accountability Citizenship, I introduced the idea of using technology on the web site of every Member of Congress to create something I called Congress 2.0. The basic idea was to convert the web site of every Member of Congress from the one-way information bulletin boards that they are today into secure, comprehensive, two-way platforms for anonymously collecting and displaying the sentiments and priorities of every registered voter in every congressional district. Along with the survey tool, a Congress 2.0 web site would incorporate a dynamic scorecard mechanism that would display the performance of the Member of Congress representing that district as measured by the priorities of registered voters in the district and performance metrics common to all Members of Congress (like attendance and percentage of missed votes). 

There were a few illustrations in the first book to give readers the general idea of what the tool would do. Unfortunately, no Member of Congress accepted my challenge to incorporate such technology into their web site. My own congressional delegation offered nonsensical reasons why they "cannot" (really, should be "will not") add this technology to their taxpayer-funded web sites.

​Over the course of the past six years, as I have pursued degrees in computer science and information systems, my understanding of the technology has increased to the point where I built a “mockup” of the Congress 2.0 web site, or, as I call it, the Voter Transparency Tool (VTT). The technology to build and secure the VTT has also improved dramatically. In this blog, I include a few screenshots to show how the voter logs in, records their input, and checks the current VTT survey results for their district and state. For those interested in testing the working mockup, you will be able to access that on the accountabilitycitizenship.org web site in the near future.

The login functionality is just the same as we are all used to for logging in to our online bank accounts. Your voter registration number serves as both your user id and account number. When you log in for the first time, you create a password long enough to provide reasonable security. For additional security, multi-factor authentication is mandatory. That means you have to use your fingerprint or respond to a system-generated message on another device you own or another secure web site in order to gain access to the survey and see statewide results for your state. The initial login page is shown here:

Once the voter logs in, they are redirected to the survey page.  The survey shown in the mockup includes a question about abortion, a question about budget discipline, a question about the re-districting process for elected officials, and a space for voters to nominate issues they want to see included in future revisions of the Voter Transparency Tool survey. While much of the data could be the same in all congressional districts in a state, it is important to build the tool from the level of the congressional district to enable registered voters in each district to nominate the issues they feel are most important. So in each state, the VTT for the two senators will be identical, but there could be different survey questions in the VTT for each Member of the House of Representative's congressional district. Here is what the mockup survey page looks like:

When the voter completes their responses to the survey questions, and clicks on the submit button, they are taken to the results page. The results page provides a receipt of the individual input recorded for that particular voter, and it also provides a graphical summary view of the counts of registered voters in each county in the state who have voted on the same issues. In the mockup itself, voters will be able to click on the summary data for each county to see an expanded view of the numbers of voters who have recorded survey votes in favor of the issue and opposed to the issue, as well as a tally of those who have not voted.  Here is a partial screen shot of the graphical summary:

The Voter Transparency Tool would accomplish a number of beneficial effects in our country. First, it would make voter participation fun and would give people a reason to register. No one would want to be the person who could not log in to the VTT; most people would be curious about what issues their fellow citizens nominated as the most important, as well as how people in various counties voted on specific issues. The tool would also display a dynamic scorecard (not shown here) on the senators and the representative associated with each district. Members of Congress would have an incentive to manage their score, and that would require much more extensive engagement with their constituents than is currently the case.

There is no doubt that a major increase in the quantity and quality of available information has radically changed the requirements for effective citizenship in the United States over the past fifty years. In my view, we as a society have failed to provide the education and the information management tools to enable healthy citizenship in this new environment. Our failure has created a vacuum that has been filled by special interests. Those interests are now manipulating the information stream to further their own agendas; this has the second-order effects of discouraging participation, increasing polarization, and degrading our ability to identify and solve the most pressing challenges we face.  The Voter Transparency Tool is one way we can leverage information technology to enable efficient management and accountability for our republic.

     The 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet projects the plot of Shakespeare's Tempest into outer space, and makes that brilliant plot accessible to all of us. A young Leslie Nielsen leads a rescue expedition to a distant planet only to find the sole survivors of the previous mission unwilling to accept their help and unable to explain the deaths of the rest of their party. Walter Pidgeon plays the scientist father engrossed in the study of the Krell--the extinct super-race that once inhabited the forbidden planet. We learn this super-race had invented technology that magnified their mental capacity, enabling them to reach unimaginable technological achievements. Eventually, we learn that the same technology that propelled them to great achievement ultimately destroyed the Krell. Only the dying words of one of Nielsen's crew gives the critical insight: Krell technology not only magnified their positive mental capability, but also their negative, violent emotions as well. 

     Hopefully, you have a sense of deja vu when you consider the amazing advances we have experienced in the information age. Without a doubt, information technology has greatly accelerated the technological achievement of the human race. In just the last 50 years, we have gone from putting the first humans on the moon to mass marketing cell phones that give almost all of us more computing power than the Apollo 11 space ship. Starting around 20 years ago, we began producing more bytes of information every few days than was produced in the entire history of human kind previously. Advances in medicine, artificial intelligence, transportation and communications propel our human species at a dizzying pace. Yet, for all of the power of our technology, we seem helpless to stop the destructive side of our technology. No where is this more true than in the realm of social media, where we seem to have lost our ability to treat each other civilly, to disagree without letting our differences fuel hatred and division, and to tell the difference between truth and deception.
 
     I will resist the temptation to call for some mechanism to curb the evil effects of our technology. The lesson is all too clear. From Shakespeare to Forbidden Planet, the solution to the challenges of power are not to be found in magic or in the next technological leap forward.  The basic challenge is to balance the allure of an ever-more-powerful independent individualism with the irresistible force of our nature as social animals. 

     They say the largest organism on the planet is either the pando "forest of one tree" in Utah or the Armillaria ostoyae fungus in Oregon. The forest seems to consist of over 47,000 individual aspen trees, but in fact shares one massive underground root system. Similarly, the so-called humongous fungus in Oregon is connected mostly under the surface of the ground--its visible manifestations appear to be discrete individual clusters of mushrooms that bloom in the autumn. In both cases, the appearance of individuals is an illusion, and we can confirm the connection that exists beneath the surface. In both cases, however, the health of the organism as a whole depends on protecting the health of the connective tissue.

     In the case of our species, I think it is perfectly reasonable to note that the sense we have of our individual existence is largely an illusion--the "roots" that connect us are our thoughts, and we have never been more connected as a species than we are today. The challenge lies in the fact that thoughts and the media through which we share them are not physical, and can just as easily spread poison as nutrition. It is up to each of us to tend to the portion of the root system that we touch: to be respectful, kind, honest, and to demand the same from those around us. Ultimately, we are indeed affected by and connected to our fellow creatures. It is less important to be right or to win as an individual than it is to support the growth of the community you inhabit.

The Battle of Yorktown ended with the surrender of the besieged British Army on October 19, 1781 to a combined American and French force. It was the last major battle of the American Revolution. Though there would be two  years of negotiations before the Treaty of Paris would officially end the war, the victory at Yorktown marked the decisive defeat of the last major British force outside of New York City and removed any realistic opportunity for a British victory in the war.

Like much of our revolutionary experience, the story of Yorktown is full of fascinating details, plots and sub-plots. There's Washington's masterful concentration of the Continental Army in Virginia. He brought together elements of the army across significant distances while deceiving the British into thinking he was planning an attack on New York, and even managed a short visit to his home at Mount Vernon on the way to the fight. There's the timely arrival of the French fleet, which not only delivered key reinforcing troops, but also defeated a British fleet and blockaded the besieged garrison from the sea. There's even some Spanish gold finding its way into the pockets of American soldiers to keep them moving towards their final battle. But the real magic of our revolutionary story lies in the broader tapestry: who we were then, who we are now, and the unifying political philosophy that provides the connective tissue between past and present.

My son was about twelve when his elementary school curriculum turned to a comprehensive block on the American Revolution. Over spring break that year, he and I went on a special father-son trip: we flew to Boston and spent a day touring the battlefields at Lexington and Concord, where the Revolution began in April of 1775, then drove to Philadelphia and spent several hours touring Independence Hall, then drove to Yorktown and spent some time on the Yorktown battlefield and at Colonial Williamsburg. If you asked my son, he would probably have told you the best part of the trip was the two days riding roller coasters at the Busch Gardens near Yorktown.

But my agenda was simply to impart to him a visceral understanding of the physical geography of three key locations from the American Revolution, the time and distance relationships between those locations in the revolutionary era, and the relationships between the battles and the major political documents that shaped our country. I wanted him to know that, even though we could drive the 308-ish miles from Concord to Philadelphia in about 6 hours today, it would have taken a week or more for news of the fighting there to reach Philadelphia in 1775. Likewise, it would have taken a similar time for news of the victory at Yorktown to reach Philadelphia in 1781. I wanted him to understand that the fighting at Lexington and Concord started the war a full fifteen months before the Continental Congress published the Declaration of Independence. I wanted him to know that the significance of the military victory at Yorktown was magnified by the fact that the colonies had just ratified the Articles of Confederation seven months earlier, in March of 1781. I wanted him to understand that the United States Constitution was not drafted and signed until September of 1787, a full six years after Yorktown and four years after the end of the Revolutionary War. I wanted him to understand that, because it took so long for information to travel a few hundred miles in those days, the world was a much bigger place then, at least in terms of the kind of human contact that makes governments necessary.

​Think about it. In the Revolutionary War / Articles of Confederation / Constitutional Convention era (1776-1787) it took 7-10 days to travel the 308 miles from Lexington and Concord to Philadelphia, depending on whether you rode a horse or rode in a carriage. Let’s take the low end of that range: 7 days is 168 hours.  So the speed of information was roughly 2 mph. There were about 3 million colonists and slaves living under the 13 colonial governments, which controlled at most an area of about 200,000 square miles, for a population density of roughly 15 people per square mile. Without any technology for communication beyond the printing press, you could pretty much only communicate with the people within earshot. Compared to the world we inhabit today, it took a long time to communicate with any significant percentage of the population.   

Today, information travels at the speed of light: roughly 671 million mph. Our country is much bigger, but so is our population, with an average density of something like 82 people per square mile, 5-ish times what it was in the revolutionary era.  But modern communications and transportation technology makes a huge difference. Quite literally, we can communicate with all 310 million of our fellow citizens nearly instantaneously via television and the Internet. There are a lot more of us, and there is a much higher concentration of interactions per unit of time--the kind of interactions that make government necessary. 

​When the founders did get around to writing the Constitution, they listed six purposes for that Constitution: to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. After their experiment with the Articles of Confederation, they incorporated a national executive in the Constitution even though they were all wary of the notion of executive power. It is worth considering how well the government we have today achieves the purposes set forth in the Constitution, and how the evolution of that government over the past 232 years reflects the changes in communications technology, transportation technology, and population.

This month marks the two-hundred-thirty-second anniversary of the signing of our United States Constitution. The Constitution was drafted and signed in Philadelphia, in the same building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. George Washington was one of the delegates to the convention that produced the Constitution, and he was elected President of  the convention, which convened on May 25th, 1787 and adjourned on September 17th of that year.

Here is the excerpt from the first edition of Accountability Citizenship in which I discuss the United States Constitution:

Our republic is founded on a Constitution. That Constitution was developed after a group of dissatisfied colonists--subjects of the British Empire--declared their independence from Great Britain and fought a war to win their independence at great risk to themselves and to their families. The colonists were dissatisfied because they believed the British government was abusing its power, treating them unjustly, and not responding to their needs. The first effort to structure a unified government for the new United States was based on something known as the Articles of Confederation, and it was a failure. Generally, historians agree the Articles of Confederation did not provide the central government with sufficient powers to administer the basic functions of a viable government. The Constitution was developed in 1787 to address the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution is not perfect, either--it has been amended twenty-seven times. The first ten amendments were adopted in 1791 and are collectively known as the Bill of Rights. (Accountability Citizenship, xlibris, 2013, pp. 46-7)

Google's icon for the past several days has linked to a video commemorating the Apollo 11 mission that put the first people on the moon on July 20th, 1969.  Mike Collins, the crew member who remained in orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface, narrates this terrific summary of an amazing accomplishment. I remember my mom and dad getting my sister and I out of bed to come watch the landing live. There is nothing we cannot do when we work together! Click to watch the video.

I am a bit of a Star Trek nerd. I've watched every episode of the original series, the "Next Generation" series, and all of the movies. I like the franchise because, like all good fiction, it weaves some powerful messages about common aspects of the human condition into its very uncommon settings. If you pay attention, there are some good lessons to be found in the adventures of the starship Enterprise and its crew. One of my favorite episodes of all is "The Day of the Dove", which aired the first week in November, 1968.

For those of you who didn't live that time, let me provide a bit of historical context.  The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union (Russia) was at its height, with both sides armed to the teeth with enough nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons to destroy the world many times over.  Proxy "hot wars" were being fought in places like Africa and South America. The Vietnam War was at its height.  At home, the Civil Rights Act was just a few years old, and the conflict between the federal government's enforcement of the new law and some state and local efforts to resist it was one source of violence in American cities.  Just a year earlier, during the "long hot summer of 1967" racial violence had led to so much violence in Detroit that the government deployed the 82d Airborne Division and the National Guard to help restore order.  There was also conflict between those who were protesting against the war in Vietnam and those who insisted we had to support our military. In a span of just over two months 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis (April 4) and Bobby Kennedy (the Democratic nominee for the 1968 presidential election) was assassinated in Los Angeles (June 6). The episode of Star Trek I am referencing in this blog aired 4 days before the 1968 presidential election.

If I were to summarize the lesson of "The Day of the Dove", I would say it is simply that hate and violence warp our ability to accurately perceive facts and reality, and that cycles of violence are "vicious cycles" where negative behaviors can reinforce each other and perpetuate--even magnify--the cycle. I'm attaching a link to the youtube trailer for this episode.  I wish everyone in our country would take 45 minutes and watch the whole episode (you can download it from Amazon and probably other places as well).  I wish everyone would familiarize themselves with the history of this turbulent time in America.  Spoiler alert: the crew of the Enterprise join forces with their arch-enemies, the Klingons, to defeat a hate monster.  They do it by recognizing that hate blinds us, and that we can overcome it if we work to find common ground. 

​We have a lot of common ground in America.  Things are nowhere near as bad today as they were in November, 1968.  But we have to make an effort to celebrate the goodness in our country and what we have in common, even as we work through our disagreements over how to make it even better.  We have to focus on facts rather than on blind loyalty to this faction or that faction. Beware of any group that tries to prevent you from seeking common ground and understanding with others. Any others. Even the Klingons.

Live long and prosper!

At West Point, they spent a lot of time teaching us about duty.  One of the ways they did that was by having us memorize something called Worth's Battalion Orders, which goes like this: 

"But an officer on duty knows no one. To be partial is to dishonor both himself and the object of his ill-advised favor. What will be thought of him who exacts of his friends that which disgraces him? Look at him who winks at and overlooks offenses in one, which he causes to be punished in another, and contrast him with the inflexible Soldier who does his duty faithfully, notwithstanding it occasionally wars with his private feelings. The conduct of one will be venerated and emulated; the other detested as a satire upon Soldiership and Honor.”
–Brevet Major William Jenkins Worth

Robert Mueller nailed it.  Well done, sir.

Respect and Gratitude. 

In this blog, I make five points in bold text that are my conclusions from the report, with extracted quotations from the report that support my five points.  Then I provide the link to the report so you can, if you wish, read enough of it to come to your own conclusions.  Here's the survey (five easy questions!).

I think all Americans should read the redacted Mueller report, or at least the executive summaries, or at least my excerpts from the executive summaries. I am sorry for those of you who feel I am calling you "bad people" if you do not or will not read the report. I believe it is important for our republic for citizens to care enough to inform themselves when 45 percent of Americans believe we should impeach the President. It's go time.  If you have ever said "thank you for your service" to a veteran, or opined piously on the sacrifice of our fallen on Memorial Day, then I would tell you this is the part of the story where you get to do your part, to put a little something on the altar of our republic. I don't want to tell you what to think. I share with you my conclusions, and the excerpts that support them, below. There is a link to the National Public Radio (NPR) site where you can get the redacted report for yourself.  Inform yourself.

Point 1.  Mueller states he was guided by DOJ policy that you can’t charge a sitting president:

Volume II, p. 1 “We determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has  issued an opinion finding that ‘the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions’ in violation of ‘the constitutional separation of powers.’ Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations, see 28 U.S.C. Section 515; 28 C.F.R. Section 600.7 (a), this office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction.”

Point 2:  Russia interfered in the election effectively to help Trump and hurt Clinton. Senior Trump campaign members knew about the Russian efforts.  Mueller could not or would not establish that there was an agreement in place regarding cooperation between the campaign and Russia.  There is evidence to that effect, but Mueller concluded it was insufficient (perhaps because of Point 1, he felt Congress should make that call with decision whether or not to impeach?—Congress should hear from Mueller on this point):

Volume 1, pp 1-2 “As set forth in detail in this report, the Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents. The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Point 3: Mueller never says there was no collusion.  He says collusion is not a legal term so he applies the higher legal standard associated with conspiracy (“coordination”) and his “understanding” that proof of an agreement is needed to establish that coordination occurred:

Volume 1, pp. 1-2: “In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’ “

“…collusion is not a specific offense… found in the United States Code…. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign ‘coordinated’… with Russian election interference activities…. We understood coordination to require an agreement… between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests. We applied the term in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Point 4: Mueller is pretty clearly punting this (appropriately in my view) to the Congress for decision.
“A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

Point 5: The President knows he is guilty.  He understands Point 4. That is why he is refusing to comply with subpoenas and trying to block further congressional investigation.

Volume II, p. 78: “On May 17, 2017, Acting Attorney General Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller, III as Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the Russia investigation and matters that arose from the investigation. The President learned of the Special Counsel’s appointment from Sessions, who was with the President, Hunt, and McGahn conducting interviews for a new FBI Director. Sessions stepped out of the Oval Office to take a call from Rosenstein, who told him about the Special Counsel appointment, and Sessions then returned to inform the President of the news. According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh, my God. This is terrible  This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f*ck*d.’”

Here is a link to the Mueller Report provided by NPR (National Public Radio):    https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=5955997-Muellerreport