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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.
*sarcasm* It'll probably be the same dozen or so guys who have been spamming all the web polls & Digg for Ron Paul. I wonder how they managed to scrape up $5.1 million though? */sarcasm*
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...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 easiest, lowest-risk modern methods for criminally furthering one's agenda are likely to be used by modern criminals to further their agendas.
In other news, results of the study of wetness by the Institute for Applied Water are said to be forthcoming.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you democracy fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an FBI agent (Fox Mulder) for about 20 minutes now while he attempts to extract 17 names from a terrorist in Camp X-Ray to another FBI agent. 20 minutes. At home, on my Inquisition-era rack and vise replica, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this FBI agent, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this name transfer, scapegoating the Democrats will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Fox News is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working with various democratic institutions, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a democracy that has run faster than its fascist counterpart, despite the democracies' faster marketplace of ideas. My banana republic with 8 torture specialists runs faster than this 300-million person democracy at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that democracy is a superior system of government.
Democracy addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a democracy over other faster, cheaper, more stable governments.
Because the more of those "masses" stay home watching TV, the better ROI you get influencing the ones who do get out and vote.
As an example of what's already happening, there have been stories about this the last couple days: apparently someone sent a 'spoofed' email, claiming to be from a Huckabee campaign functionary in Iowa, stating that he was going to ditch Huckabee for Romney. One of many stories.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
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.
"Security researchers at a recent summit" obviously have a very limited knowledge of political campaigns. No campaign manager that actually got to the level of being on a serious contender's camapign would risk a media storm over something like that. I'm sure if "Security researchers at a recent summit" managed campaigns, that might happen...but otherwise there's no way to pull that off without paying someone a lot of money...and if you pay them it goes on your FEC report..and if it goes on your FEC report, your opponents' researchers see it as plain as day.
Not gonna happen.
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
I used to think that education and critical thinking, social activism and voter participation, community involvement (less time shopping and watching the Stupevision), and ridicule and repudiation of weak thinking and corruption, and strong support for good legislators and the laws would prevent imbeciles, thugs, and demagogues from taking power.
But to hell with it! Let's make the Internet an enabler for democracy!
In a few years, the candidate who wins the "LOL" vote will win every election.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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.
In recent years, a major strategy of Republicans has been vote suppression and non-internet dirty tricks. For example, they have distributed flyers in poor African-American neighborhoods stating that the election was on Wednesday (instead of Tuesday) and that it was illegal -- and grounds for arrest and prosecution -- for anyone with an overdue rent bill to vote. These issues have been widely reported.
However, the bigger, not as well reported, scandal is in the findings of the California Secretary of State. She set up teams to do penetration tests of the all-electronic (DRE) voting machines. Although the vendors later howled about the information given the penetration test teams, the information was similar to what the US Defense Department has been giving its penetration test teams for the last quarter century.
The team that tested the Diebold machine found that a minimally-skilled malicious voter could gain administrative access to the machine and erase all votes cast up to that point in the election. The access required a tool, described as being commonly found in an office, small enough to conceal in the palm of the hand, and such that it would create no suspicion in the minds of polling place officials. The description sounds to me like a paper clip.
In the 2004 general election, the board of elections of a Maryland county normally carried by Democratic candidates reported that up to 5% of their machines (all Diebolds) were suspected of having lost some or all of their recorded votes. Could this have been the same attack described by the California penetration test team? If so, where else was it performed? What other voting machine shenanigans occurred in 2004? How did that influence the outcome in 2004?
There was also a group of statisticians who determined that the 2006 Democratic margin in winning control of the House of Representatives was significantly different from the margin calculated from exit polls. The difference was around 3%, but should have been much smaller, according to well-tested statistical concepts. This could have meant several more Democratic seats in the House. Could this have been the result of voting machine tampering similar to what the California test teams demonstrated?
Could the 2008 election be decided, not by the voters, but by the sophistication of voting machine tamperers?
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
Maybe these spamnets are actually going to prove useful at getting information out there not suitable for mainstream media. I frequently get political spam about various events going on in the falun gong struggle in china. I would much rather be getting some spammer's political political opinion than the usual phish/pennystock/mortgage/penis type spam that I see every day.
Are you telling me that voting republican will not ad inches to my penis and make me attractive to women?
Your greatest cynicism is unrealistic. I'm a pollster who spends several hours a week analyzing polling data--believe me, that's a lot more than most "informed" folks--and the biggest issue in this election is unquestionably Iraq War II: Electric Boogaloo. This is a "change" election that will turn on the perceived failures of the Bush administration. The biggest factor is Bush's 30% approval rating and the structural disadvantage it gives Republicans, particularly those who haven't been careful to distance themselves from the war (among the top 3, that's McCain).
God and abortion are important, sure, followed by gays and, more distantly, guns, but these issues are no more prominent now then they have been in the past 20 years. You've also left out three issues that feature even more prominently in the minds of voters: immigration, health care and climate change.
And if you don't think this is an important election, you haven't been paying attention. The next president will manage the disengagement in Iraq (yes, it's inevitable), some sort of health care reform (although a total re-imagining is unlikely), the immigration question, give an up-or-down on a carbon tax/cap and trade scheme, and probably appoint 2 or 3 Supreme Court justices.
In short, your "analysis" is superficial and about 6 years out of date. But I guess I'm the idiot talking politics on Slashdot. So ignore the above--RON PAUL FTW!!!!111
The Democrats couldn't impeach Bush if they tried. They have a slim majority, that's all. It's not nearly enough to impeach or pass veto-proof bills without Republican support.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Those calls are designed to piss you off and make you want to stay home. So you look like a robocall success story. Just ignore the calls if you don't know who's making them. If you really want to know who's calling, listen to the entire thing because this information often comes at the end of the call.
Right before the last election people got flooded with robocalls where a dopey cheerful voice would say something like "Hello, I have some questions to ask you about Democratic candidate blah
Federal law allows political advocacy calls to numbers in the National Do-Not-Call registry, so those people had their lines tied up too. Nationwide, Democrats had narrow losses in seven Congressional districts that had been bombarded by the calls: Thirteen percent of the people who actually showed up to vote in that election refused to pull a lever for either candidate in that race, to "protest". Jennings lost by 373 votes.
I'M a Thompson man.. and I'm filled with fear and loathing..
"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.)
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.
2 Items:
1) "The next president will manage the disengagement in Iraq (yes, it's inevitable)". Nixon was elected in 1968 largely on his promise to get out of Vietnam. He didn't, but still got reelected in '72. The reality is that, when opposition parties are elected in the middle of a war, they get a free pass. They can always say "We didn't start it" and "They left us with a bigger mess than we thought", which gives them the excuse to do dick-all for 4 years and then promise the same thing, only this time REALLY mean it.
2) "some sort of health care reform (although a total re-imagining is unlikely), the immigration question, give an up-or-down on a carbon tax/cap and trade scheme, and probably appoint 2 or 3 Supreme Court justices." Hasn't this been said before every presidential election for the past 20 years? Just because issues are important doesn't mean ther is any real impetus for politicians to solve them. If anything, an issues importance can be counterproductive - it is in the incumbent's interests to do absolutely nothing, because the proponents of the first change made will have their ass handed to tehm. It doesn't matter what the change is - SOMEONE will equate it with starving oldsters and mutilated kittens.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
> Are you telling me that voting republican will not ad inches to my penis and make me attractive to women?
:) GNAA and the goatse posts ain't got nuthin on what this puppy is going to do. If it doesn't max out negative within an hour I'll be very disappointed.
You are confusing cause and effect. The truth is that Alpha Males with large penises tend to be Republicans. Along with the sort of real women who marry such real men. Lesser specimens of manhood, women who can't attract a mate (or don't want one), gays, etc. who know themselves to be unfit, vote for Democrats who promise to take care of the poor pathetic creatures.
Note that Democrat leader types are also often Alpha Males (Bill and Hillary Clinton both come to mind) but such personality types are rare in the rank and file. Regardless of party, you pretty much have to be an Alpha with zero self esteem issues to even want high political office.
And THAT folks is how to troll.
Democrat delenda est