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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.
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
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
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.