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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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