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Hacking the Presidential Election
An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers at a recent summit predicted US voters will be targeted by web-based dirty tricks campaigns as the 2008 election gets nearer. Spam, botnets and phishing all provide good opportunities to mislead voters and attack rivals with little risk of being caught, they say."
How about ALREADY HAVE. Long before the internet, dirty tricks campaigns were typical political fare. Just ask John McCain how he lost South Carolina.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...in the next election, we'll be lied to, we'll be tricked, and crooks try to get into our pockets and rip off the gullible.
Where the heck is the difference to earlier elections?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I just received a fake call from "George W" that was effectively meant as a smear campaign against "the Republicans". "The Republicans" are no better; they've been calling my house multiple times daily with a fake caller ID # to sling mud at "the Democrats". Political Joe jobs and other nasty things don't only happen on the Internet.
(Of course, online, any idiot could do this, whereas calling people requires a bit more coordination and resources).
But honestly, we should be asking ourselves if we want people who stoop to such measures to make the policy for our country in the first place. I don't think I'm voting for any of them.
Because the more of those "masses" stay home watching TV, the better ROI you get influencing the ones who do get out and vote.
I think you have a point there. I wouldn't be surprised that this dirty disclaimer trick will be used when Ron Paul becomes popular in the main-stream.
"Don't vote for the communist hacker terrorist!"
Disclaimer: Not an American and no Ron Paul fanatic, just an observer.
Erm, maybe with the phishing and similar then the difference is that you're getting ripped off, tricked and exploited by persons unknown as opposed to highly paid criminals...sorry, 'politicians' ;)
The Dems' "excuse" is that they're politicians and spineless pussies.
But yes, the GOP has made dirty tricks an art.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It's not just that you can't determine for certain who is behind such campaigns - it's that the dirty players can frame anybody they choose. My prediction is, since everyone is so hypersensitive to "open foot, insert mouth" moments these days (thanks, Daily Show!*), we'll see at least one moderately successful Internet e-mail campaign that (1) purports to be from a candidate, and (2) includes a comment that can be construed as offensive and probably racist, but (3) is actually from some other group who hopes to make that candidate take a fall.
These people are asking for the greatest powers we can give, including life & death, and much of the course of the whole world's future. You'd think that if they were to actually get caught cheating their way in, that the trust and respect would be destroyed, and they'd be disqualified.
But even when they are caught, voters let them off the hook. There are many examples, but someone tell me how John Sununu remained in office, and is now campaigning to likely keep his New Hampshire Senate seat, even though he was narrowly elected in 2002 with the help of active phone jamming his opponent's Election Day "get out the vote" system? He stopped voters from voting to win. The guy actually operating the operation went to jail and gave evidence he'd coordinated with the Republican National Committee, and his phone logs show he worked with the White House during the operation. Sununu isn't just some "random senator": he's on the Senate Commerce Committee, which controls the FCC and telecom.
Of course these politicians will do anything for power. But when they're caught, what's our excuse for ignoring their criminal careers when we vote for them?
--
make install -not war
Actually, I do have a fair bit to say on the topic of politics. In my university days I took a lot of directly related course such as demographics, history, computer science, and mathematics. I've continued to read on the topics since then, adding a lot of political science and some other fields, and I've even published a bit in related areas of computer security. Getting away from the writing and reading, I've participated in American politics for many years, even been a campaign volunteer, and more recently I've been able to observe a completely different political system up close, providing additional insight into the ugliness of politics around the world. (In some ways Florida in 2000 is a serious contender for the biggest election crime ever.)
/. "editors" sincerely want to encourage substantive dialog and discussion, but they have created a framework where such non-trivial comments are most likely to be targeted for destruction. The harder you work to write well to contribute to /., the more likely it is that you are wasting your time.
/. is becoming an increasingly minor anachronism while the rest of the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly. It's called coasting to oblivion.
/. these days. I'm not joking, even recursively. [Or am I?] I really appreciate humor, but I'm sadly humor impaired when it comes to producing jokes. Is the death of humor on /. due to the punitive moderation of +funny, or have the authentically interesting and humorous people simply been driven away by negative moderation? The ghosts of /. want to know why!
/., I see no reason to care.
/.
However, the more carefully I present interesting or useful information, the more likely it becomes that my post will simply disappear into the black hole of negative mods. Why don't I feel motivated? Just because the more clearly I write the more certainly I will offend some cowardly anonymous moderator who will simply shoot my comment in the head with a truly meaningless "overrated" mod.
In engineering terms this is called negative dynamic stability. I suppose that the
That does not work very well. No wonder
Amusingly enough, the thing I miss these years is the humor. Almost none left on
Now I predict that if I have made my comment clearly enough, a bunch of anonymous negative mods will be piled upon it, presumably destroying my karma and causing me to effectively disappear as a contributor to any future discussions. But you know what? Given the quality of the typical discussion on
Oh yeah. On the actual topic, it isn't the hacking, it's the gerrymandering. The largest bloc of voters are the ones who don't vote--because they have correctly understood that their votes have been gerrymandered away from them. Why should they vote when they can't affect the election? It's about as useless as writing a thoughtful but provocative post on
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No, dipshit. They're spineless pussies because they haven't earnestly pursued impeaching The Decider and stopping his many abuses.
I had high hopes in Nov '06 when the election results were announced. The best we can say is that at least Bush doesn't have a rubber stamp anymore, and that the minimum wage was finally raised. That's about it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
"I've watched this congress gain a Democrat majority, yet continue reauthorizing the war, continue the patriot act, reauthorize wiretapping..."
Indeed. A vote for either of these two parties is a wasted vote. They'll argue bitterly over BS issues like flag burning and school prayer, but in the end they'll agree to pass laws which prolong the wars, destroy civil liberties, keep the borders open to illegal immigration and drive our country further into debt.
Now that you've realized there is no difference between the two major parties, it's time to start voting for someone else. Vote Green, vote Libertarian, Constitution, Progressive, Communist, or whatever. Anyone but Republicans or Democrats.
All of these problems are nothing compared to the 800 lb gorilla that is the 2 party system.
The Democrats and Republicans have voted into place a system that pays for the Democrat and Republican parties. Oh sure, it doesn't say Democrat or Republican, it just says they have to get such and such a percentage to qualify, have to be nationwide, etc. All things that the Dems and Reps were at the time they inacted them. This is little different from Soviet Russia except instead of one party, we've got two.
The rules in place for running the House and Senate are even more blatant. It's all based on simple majority, which you can do with two parties. If a third party were ever to steal seats from both parties and neither of the two had a majority, they would have to rewrite all the rules for committees, offices, etc.
I will never donate any tax funds to pay for the elections of Democrats and Republicans and I urge everyone else not to either.
First of all. . ,
,
Having looked through your recent posting history, it doesn't appear that you are particularly clear in your writing style. Perhaps a larger sample of your posts would disabuse me of this notion, but as it stands, you seem to write in a manner I would call, "reactive", (acting as though you are in the middle of a conversation when you are not), which leads to the use of mildly cryptic statements and terms designed only for those 'in the know' as opposed to making statements designed to convey insight to the largest number of readers. This comes off as sounding holier than thou, which is of course going to predispose people to having a certain bias against you. But like I said, I may be wrong in this view based on what little I've seen of your comment history.
Secondly. .
You are far too worried about digital karma. Long ago, I realized a basic truth about Slashdot. If you post honestly and with integrity, you will be modded up more often than down. You can afford then to burn karma by making comments which are important to you but which are not popular with the status quo. --I think the most karma I've burned during a sitting at Slashdot was something like 12 points. --I had something to say which was modded to -1, and I simply kept cutting and pasting it to the bottom of the thread, adding a sentence at the beginning which described my reasons for repeating myself. Rinse and repeat, and a few hours later you've lost a dozen karma points until finally everybody gets tired of hammering you and leaves the post up. --I wouldn't recommend this tactic often, but the few times I've done it were times when the message was, I felt, really important and unique. But the point is this, I managed to say what I wanted, and never lost my overall positive karma trend or any of the posting privileges I enjoy.
Three. . . The system works in both directions. When I get mod points, while I usually use them to mod people up who I think have contributed something worthwhile, I will also sometimes spend them to turn the volume down on somebody I think is posting like an idiot. --And that includes clearly worded treatises which attempt to mislead people into destructive thinking patterns. I like the "-1 Overrated" mod for this purpose when I see posts which have been modded as "insightful" for something which is patently stupid, or which has been properly shown as such by other posters.
Four. . , I keep my Slashdot filters wide open. I want to see everything posted. What if there's somebody who has uttered some painful truth and has been modded into the dust bin who could use a positive mod point or a supportive comment?
Slashdot remains a very useful forum for all manner of discussion. There is certainly a somewhat juvenile video-game-player quality to it at times, but so what? That's a huge demograph, and it's a valid one. I've learned a lot here, both by reading other posters and through having my own comments put through the crucible, cut apart and examined, (as it turns out, I am wrong sometimes. Gee whiz!) Slashdot is not going to turn to sour raisins and blow away any time soon just because you don't happen to like it when you are modded down by people who disagree with you.
The fact of the matter is that this world is at war. There are two ends to the spectrum of human experience; the self-serving experience and the other-serving experience. All battles resolve to working out where one exists on this basic balance. Self-serving people tend to cleave to ignorance, and other-serving people tend to want to grow in knowledge. Slashdot is a powerful stage upon which this battle is played out. The mod system is just another element of this war, and I have seen that it tends for the most part, to favor the good guys as it cuts down on several basic attacks which the dark side employs, (Bullying and 'post flooding' being the main ones. --The cyber equivalents of, well, Bullying and "La La La I Can't Hear You". The dark side is a petulant child.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If any polls (exit, telephone, mail, internet, take your pick) were good enough to give us absolute results, there's no reason for us to actually go cast a ballot. Exit polls are not infallible and are subject to selection bias (say, college kids picking attractive people around their age to poll rather than a broader cross section of people), sample bias (polling during the day which gets a lot of retired people and stay at home parents while ignoring people who vote later because they have to start crunching numbers in order to prepare for the immediate prediction of winners as soon as the polls close), people have a tendency to tell the questioner what they think the questioner wants to hear rather than how they actually voted to avoid confrontation(for example, you're black and are polled by a black pollster and are asked whether you voted for the black candidate or his opponent), are subject to people outright lying to skew the polls (I've never been polled, but as a 30 year old white male registered republican from a town that votes 80/20 republican, if enough of us said we were voting for the democrat/green/whatever, they would see a trend in the exit poll that would disagree with our actual vote (still voted republican, I just poisoned their data)), exit poll data and predictions being leaked before polls close can skew the vote (oh, my guy has already lost so I'll just go home or my guy is so far ahead that he doesn't need my vote so I'll just go home), etc.
Now, pollsters know that the above type stuff will happen, so they need to normalize their data. The thing about that is, no normalization is perfect and you'll always end up with some margin of error. Even then, if your data is poisoned enough (intentionally or not) and/or skewed enough due to sample/selection bias, your real error may exceed your margin of error. The 2000 election came down to a couple thousand votes out of millions cast in Florida. It was statistically within the margin of error of the exit polls and thus the exit polls were pretty meaningless at attempting to predict the winner. Trying to use national exit polling data to predict the overall popular vote winner is useless and only serves as a point of FUD to undermine our government to begin with since the popular vote has never mattered, in any way, for the Presidency.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Thank you for this well-written and thoughtful post.
I wonder if your pollster background gives you an unrealistic perspective. You seem to believe that The People decide the outcome of elections. Besides the reality that voters are sheep, have no historical memory and are laughably gullible, it isn't clear that all voters will be actually able to vote, nor that all votes will count, nor that key election systems won't be hacked.
And besides all that, the winner of our last two presidential elections actually lost the popular vote.
I skimmed the fucking article, I'll save everyone some time: It basically says that the right-wing is the party of dirty tricks, they steal elections, they hack, they hate Latinos, they're a danger to democracy, etc. They even pick on poor moderate (liberal) Republicans. But Democrats and children hit hardest by all of this.
In between all this valuable political insight that you'll never hear anywhere else were all of two technology nuggets of obviousness: Don't believe what spammers and prank callers say, and make sure you type in the right web address.