Thursday, June 08, 2017

My Eyes Glaze over: Hacking

As the press degenerates into innuendo, from what I am gathering it seems the NSA or other gov't agencies were spying on everyone.

Ah, but now "The Russians ate my vote" are the rabid way the Hillarycrats are trying to destroy the election, never mind that the way you figure out if someone hacked the machine is the same way you figure out that someone had pre marked paper ballots in the back room: lots and lots of votes for one candidate.

Our Hello Garci? scandal shows how that was done (And it was revealed when someone who had taped the conversation illegally released it to the public... the gov't tried to make copies illegal, but by then the illegal CD kiosks had sold a lot of copies of the conversation).

it is this last item that made the Philippines decide to change to electronic voting: They knew the machines could be hacked, but figured the crooked politicians would take a few years to catch up.

the fact that individual voting machines in individual precincts could be hacked is  not new: Hacking Democracy discussed this a couple of years ago.

The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.

Politico had an article last August about "russia" hacking the Democrats. (revealing a lot of dirty tricks against Bernie).

The authors then took a big stretch to declare the idea that "russia" hacked the voting machines, which of course is a different question.

The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like this, couldn't they tinker with the results in November through the machines we use to vote?

uh, yes. But it is a bit of a stretch. I could argue the huge percentages given to Hillary in a few urban areas could be the result of a hack, but what about the mid west that went for Trumpie boy by a small percentage in many many different precincts? That would be a bit hard to do, especially since vote by mail is hand counted, and many rural areas use paper ballots.

Policy on voting is decided by each state and, in some cases, each county—a system illustrated vividly by the trench warfare of voter ID laws that pockmark the country. In total, more than 8,000 jurisdictions of varying size and authority administer the country’s elections, almost entirely at the hands of an army of middle-age volunteers. Some would say such a system cries out for security standards.
actually, this system could make it easy to steal local elections but not the presidential election.

the politico article thinks this fact "cries out" to be regulated, but I see it as an advantage: feisty grandmoms who are standing in your way.

Hacking a single machine is not hard: PopSci in 2012 had an article about how to do it the old fashioned "hands on" way.

In other words, the story is real, but fake.

Yes, voting can be hacked. And this includes corrupting machines.

But in a country where votes are done many different ways, please tell me how this could be done?

one answer: fake the reports, not the votes.

and although the paranoia story always points to the Republicans, it says a lot that a common joke is about how dear Uncle Harry voted Democratic last election, even though he died ten years ago.

in other words, lots of finger pointing all around.

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