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Bruce Schneier: Our Election Systems Must Be Secured If We Want To Stop Foreign Hackers (schneier.com)
Okian Warrior writes: Bruce Schneier notes that state actors are hacking our political system computers, intending to influence the results. For example, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the release of DNC emails before the party convention, and WikiLeaks is promising more leaked dirt on Hillary Clinton. He points out, quite rightly, that the U.S. needs to secure its electronic voting machines, and we need to do it in a hurry lest outside interests hack the results. From the article: "Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack. But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified. We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers' spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines' and systems' resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can't guarantee their security online."
For something as important as voting, how about paper only? And another thing, we should really do vote-by-mail nationwide just like Washington state does it.
In Canada we use standardized paper ballots across the nation. They're counted manually in each poll.
Nope. We're not allowed to require voters to produce identification.
"But there's no vote fraud!!!!"
HOW THE HELL CAN YOU EVEN KNOW IF THERE'S FRAUD WHEN YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO VERIFY WHO VOTES?!?!
The lack of positive voter identification means US elections don't meet UN standards for free and fair elections.
> For example, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the release of DNC emails before the party convention
Citation sorely needed. The DNC has suggested it's possible Russia was involved. A small security company called ThreatConnect pointed out that one of the tools used had some Russian language strings, meaning that the attacker used a tool which was written by someone who spoke Russian.
"US intelligence agencies" have announced no conclusions and there is scant evidence that "Russia", the Russian government, was involved.
Vote-by-mail, or any system where there is no voting booth with official overseer, lacks anonymity.
Voters need the right of keeping their vote secret, but that is not enough. If voters can show who they voted for, they can be intimidated or otherwise induced into voting for someone in particular. They can of course say who they voted for, but they cannot be allowed to prove it to someone else.
That is what the voting booth is for. With generalized vote-by-mail, we would see much more vote buying and small-scale intimidation such as “vote for my stepbrother if you want to keep your job”.
I am surprised that so few people make that connection when the issue arises.
>> WikiLeaks is promising more leaked dirt on Hillary Clinton
Does anyone else remember when journalists actually did research like this? (In a free society, digging up "dirt" on politicians is a GOOD thing.) Where is the Watergate reporting crew when we need them?
If they somehow make a third party candidate win...
The whole point of electronic voting is so that its unsecure and the ruling elite can use that unsecurity to ensure they stay in power.
Now that foreign players have entered the fray theres no telling what will happen next. Perhaps the ruling elite in the USA may find themselves unseated in an electronic coup!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The only thing that most electronic voting systems "secure" is funding; lots and LOTS of money. The voting machines are trivially hackable, provide no possible way to do an audit trail, are quirky and failure prone, and HIDEOUSLY expensive.
We need to go back to paper ballots and require positive identification in order to vote. The only thing that the Democrats are trying to accomplish in opposing voter ID requirements is to encourage voter fraud.
it wasn't the russians who compromised your elections, it was one of the political parties, by sabotaging itself, and "the russians" (yet to be clear if it was actually the government) are the ones who exposed it. This is a pretty bizarre spin on the actual facts. If anything failed you, it was the FEC and the journalists whose job was to investigate and expose this, the foreign actors actually helped you out.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
...has said no such thing. James Clapper said. ""I don't think we're quite ready yet to make a call on attribution," Clapper said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. "There are just a few usual suspects out there." Additionally, he said, "We don't know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been.""