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DEFCON Conference To Target Voting Machines (politico.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Hackers will target American voting machines -- as a public service, to prove how vulnerable they are. When over 25,000 of them descend on Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas at the end of July for DEFCON, the world's largest hacking conference, organizers are planning to have waiting what they call "a village" of different opportunities to test how easily voting machines can be manipulated. Some will let people go after the network software remotely, some will be broken apart to let people dig into the hardware, and some will be set up to see how a prepared hacker could fiddle with individual machines on site in a polling place through a combination of physical and virtual attacks. With all the attention on Russia's apparent attempts to meddle in American elections --
former President Barack Obama and aides have made many accusations toward Moscow, but insisted that there's no evidence of actual vote tampering --
voting machines were an obvious next target, said DEFCON founder Jeff Moss.
"Russians" didn't hack the voting machines (I don't know for sure, mind you, but it's pretty implausible). *If* they did anything (and this is far more plausible), then it was messing with the voter's brains, aka "social engineering", aka FUD, aka PsyOps.
Is there anyone credible that has actually been arguing the Russians physically hacked the elections? The media and Democrats have all been arguing that it wasn't physical hacking but social engineering. It's the (minority of) Republicans that keep keep trying to push for the standard definition of hacking, since, you know, there's no evidence for that (because Russia didn't do that). Plenty of well-respected Republicans are on the side of the Democrats, that there seems to be some pretty decent evidence pointing to successful Russian influence in the election, and given the hubbub around the Trump campaign's ties and communication with Russia raises some serious concerns.
To be fair though, Russia has most likely been trying to influence our elections (and the elections of countless other state) since the 50s, just as we have theirs (and others). This is just the first time that their efforts seem to, at least visually, have had an impact. That, plus the fact that our president is a political neophyte who thinks running a country is no different than running a company-not realizing that you can't do backroom deals, ask for loyalty pledges,or try to ask people to drop/deny investigations-means that controversies that would have died and faded away with another politician at the head have instead flourished. To make matters worse, Trump has surrounded himself with people that, while they might be good (or at least lucky) with business, also have no idea how to run a country, and continue to allow Trump to run the country like a business. This is manifested by the inability of the administration to put out a coherent message on anything, and that the few people that might actually have a decent idea of what they are doing are constantly undercut by Trump himself who comes out a few hours later and completely destroys the narrative they had been putting out.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The problem is not suppressing the black vote it is allowing NONCITIZENS to vote.This is only because the Dems need that illegal voting bloc to win a national election. They had it this past election and STILL did not win. 30 + million illegals in the US. It is not a hardship to prove who you are and your citizen status. The only people arguing against voter ID is the Dems wanting the illegals vote. This has nothing to do with the black vote. That is used so the race card can be played.
Add to this, closing DMV offices in areas where minorities live. Add to that Kafka-esque requirements for how you document who you are before they give you an ID in the first place. Send people away with no idea for bureaucratic reasons for a couple of times.
The obvious question is how big a problem is voter impersonation fraud. And when pressed, officials are only able to come up with a *very* small number of cases.
How the hell can you know if there is any voter impersonation fraud when there's no requirement for a voter to actually identify himself?
It's the vote- counting systems that need to be secured more than the actual voting machines. Some of those voting machines are not networked; they merely put data onto a data-transfer stick/card/chip, which is carried to another machine that supposedly accumulates the data as individual sticks are plugged into it. Obviously such vote-counting machines can be prime targets for remote hackers --change the accumulated data, change the outcome of the voting process.