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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.
first
Because it's too hard to get an ID?
WTF?!?!
Of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, Dems sqauwk for voter ID:
Bernie backers rage over Calif. Democratic Party chair race
...
Ellis, the former director of Emerge America, a women’s political organization, lost the election by a narrow margin of 62 votes out of 3,000 cast. Her loss immediately set off protests from hundreds of her backers, many of whom charged that there were irregularities that included allowing voters to cast proxy ballots without proper ID.
...
Oh noes!!!! "without proper ID"!!!!
"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.
Yes, the vulnerabilities in the voting machines are embarrasing. Yes, it's fun uncovering them. There are many other reasons for counting votes the "traditional" way, secure machines or not. Still: don't let all this geeky stuff detract from the elephant in the room: buying Facebook personal data in bulk and correlating it with past votes, then sending targeted fake news has done much more in the last big polls (at least for Brexit and for the US Presidentials it is *known*) than any "classical hacker" vote fraud could have done.
Hey, you USians even have a word for it, courtesy of one of your three-letter agencies: PsyOPS!
I guess ten minutes until the first crack and that all of them will be broken within a day, two at most.
This would be proof that the elections were completely accurate and no Russian involvement occurred.
BS.
Anyone who wants voting machines the way they are now, in reality wants to commit voting fraud.
The possibilities for attack are too numerous and too easy.
And if the machine at the end of the day just spits out a list of numbers, who can verify/falsify these numbers?
Make the computer a tool to fill out the voting form correctly, use the aggregated number from the machines for the first estimate and then count the ballots manually. It's really no black magic to do it right.
Well clearly Psychops didn't work because the people voted against Trump. The psychops didn't sway the people.
There's two problems here, firstly the electoral college that makes some peoples votes worth more than others. In a democracy that is a weak spot, and its incompatible with "all men are equal" basis of the constitution.
But there's a second problem, and that's the "people must have faith in the voting system even if its fraudulant" thinking. So nobody really wants to look into these crappy voting machines because they're frightened they might undermind the confidence in the vote by finding something!
You see it in the way the Putin story is reported:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-election-exclusive-idUSKBN17L2N3
The above link is Reuters report on the revealed Putin plan plans to get Trump elected.
"A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said."
If you recall Trump switching to a "massive voter fraud" line shortly after this document was prepared. Which in turn led a counter push to shore up confidence in the US voting system.
So nobody really wants to look into the voting machines in case they're helping Putin undermine confidence in the vote. (!)
(IMHO, it doesn't matter that Putin wanted to undermine confidence in the vote, and by hacking these machines you are helping his work. It is necessary to fix the voting machines even if a short term reduction in the confidence of the vote is an outcome. People have to realize they DID NOT VOTE for Trump, he is not their fault, even if they did vote for him, they are not to blame for believing the lies, they have to have faith that they can fix previous mistakes with their vote).
Might matter in other countries but here? It doesn't matter how good the ballot box is when the whole rest of the electoral system is broken.
From non-ranked single votes to gerrmandering; the vote is bascially sham. All of the security is there to put on a show; the actual process barely matters. The system has pre-ordained that the two parties that have won the most in the past will pretty much continue indefinitely.
Its not democracy, its not worth voting, much less working on voting machines; they are the LEAST of the problem.
architecture. My BitTorrent) Second, please moderate out of bed in the people's faces is About 700 users it will be among I burnt out. I Keep uunecessary a BSD box (a PIII
I understand the sentiment, though I disagree with it. "Trump == BAD || Trump == OTHERPARTY" so let's do all we can to delegitimize the election."
But widespread hacking seems to me to be a near impossibility, due to the way the US election system is set up. For those outside the country: We don't have a central counting system. It's district-by-district, state-by-state. With different machines, people, safeguards, watchers, etc. Not impermeable, but pretty darn good.
If the Russians did "hack" the election, it was via propaganda to change the hearts and minds of voters. Which is exactly what our politicians do every day. So even if they were involved, even at the request of a given candidate, I don't quite see the problem. It's just the modus operandi, working as designed to fool the American public into voting for a particular candidate.
False,
They had recounts in all those states. In Detroit it was found there was enough significant voter fraud that they were unable to do the recount. The fraud in Detroit appeared to favor Hillary heavily. Michigan was unable to complete a recount that was demanded and paid for by the Jill Stein and the Green party because of how poorly the heavily democratic counties handled votes and counted some ballots 8 times election night. Parts of Michigan that there wasn't obvious voter fraud went strongly to Trump.
Your entire post is an outright lie.
Story
Also remember, the only outright evidence of election rigging was by the DNC, not Trump or Russia.
You know as well as I do, the hackers doesn't travel to the PC, only the hack does. These are networked systems. When your PC gets hacked, the hacker didn't break into your house! Neither would they need to with these voting machines. You're trying to deceive with that comment I think.
Russia DID hack the electoral roll for Florida, this WAS confirmed by the FBI, and the election system contractor in California was also hacked.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/12/politics/florida-election-hack/index.html
Key states DID NOT accept the FBI's help in securing their networks, we do not know if their systems were hacked. And since these systems are dumb ass networked, (even the COUNTING machines!) you do not need to be physically present and hack each machine one by one.
Story from LA times. When you go to get ID or a driver's license you are registered to vote automatically, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown (D). Hmm, how about that.
Wow, its like they wrote a story 2 years ago to refute your sentence exactly. How did they know 2 years ago you would say that?
I think you have a short memory, Russia was confirmed to have hacked two election databases, and so FBI offered help to states to secure their voter machine networks (which some took up and others did not).:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russians-hacked-two-u-s-voter-databases-say-officials-n639551
"Hackers based in Russia were behind two recent attempts to breach state voter registration databases, fueling concerns the Russian government may be trying to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News. ....The breaches included the theft of data from as many as 200,000 voter records in Illinois, officials say."
"The incidents led the FBI to send a "flash alert" earlier this month to election officials nationwide, asking them to be on the lookout for any similar cyber intrusions.
[See FBI Issues Warning After Two State Election Systems Are Hacked]"
"One official tells NBC News that the attacks have been attributed to Russian intelligence agencies...
"This is the closest we've come to tying a recent hack to the Russian government," the official said."
CNN is fake news.
The electoral roll for Florida is publically available to ANYONE for like $300.
The FBI has yet to release ANY evidence of Russian hacking. They released a 17 page PDF with "evidence" which was basically an explanation of how Phising attacks work and a hacker name of HoneyBear or something like that. No evidence of who Honey Bear is, what he did, or even if he did a phishing attack. Their PDF showed no evidence of anything.
Is it just me, or is every Hillary supporter posting here on this story just posting easily disproven lies? I thought only Trump supporters fell for "fake news".
Incidentally, this is one of the really cool things about DEFCON, and one of the reasons why I like to go. It really is a -hacking- conference, in the original sense of the word. There's all sorts of things you can get hands-on with, take apart, scan, mess with, etc. No releases, no NDAs, no "but don't really do anything that could break it." In the last two years I saw everything from cars to home appliances to ICS/SCADA systems and more. This is exactly the kind of thing that DEFCON is known for, and I look forward to messing with them myself (as well as watching what others do and find).
What's even more interesting is that from what I've seen, it's increasingly the companies and the government themselves bringing this stuff, because they're realizing the value of unleashing the curiousity and skill of the hacker mindset on some of these things, never-mind the PR value (Two years ago Tesla brought a Model S to the main ballroom, and let people hack away at it, while advertising their bug bounty program, for instance).
I NEVER cared for ANY electronic voting machines. It is way too easy to change electronics. All these hack attempts do is give whomever is the opposition in DC, a 30 second sound bite on TV, as to why they lost an election. To remove that, go back to paper ballots. To add to that, after you vote, you should dip your finger in that non removable ink also.
Yes, maybe voting machines were hacked. It's been demonstrated several times that it's possible, and the closed-source proprietary hardware and software doesn't help anyone (except the companies who sell them), but if you look into how the electronic machines are set up, it's not the voting machines that are the big problem, it's the privately owned servers they report their information to on it's way to the various Secretaries of State.
Have any of the official US agencies had a go at hacking these voting machines or is security left entirely to the manufacturer?
It isn't about citizens proving anything.
It is about preventing those without the right to vote from voting and altering elections.
Should we just trust everyone who shows up to vote? Really?
A govt photo ID is the cheapest way I know to do that which still actually works well enough.
In the USA, probably 95% of all adults have a drivers license. Where I live, you can get a govt photo ID for free if you are low income and don't have a DL.
I don't have a better idea than that. Do you?
The problem with politics is the process only allows for dishonest candidates.
They are there to outsource and sell off all our resources.
99% of candidates are corrupt and will never represent citizens.
Check out how many are Business types and Chamber of Commerce members (Way too many)
The corrupt political system makes it almost impossible for anyone honest to get on the ballot.
Challenge: I have better access to my Video, Music, Pics and Text than anyone on Earth.
The objective was to damage or disable voting machines in areas not likely to vote for a Russian operative.
That mission succeeded wildly.
Only states with non-networked voting machines using printed ballots and optical scanners were able to avoid it.
Only had to work in key counties.
And it succeeded.
But we're not supposed to admit that.
I guess we're already at the stage where the narrative is considered defacto truth in this propoganda campaign being levied by the corporate media. What is it, an attempt to delegitimize the last election as a form of damage control?
If exposing the insecurities of voting machines, and more checks and balances are introduced into the voting process comes as a result, then at least something good will come of this.
They had both candidates in their pockets and either didn't care who won (controlling both) or that Comey's actions were unexpected and caused a PR crisis that shifted public favor towards Trump.
Either way, people both nationally and internationally would have lost out whichever candidate won. America had a weak election with weak primary candidates, collusion to keep out secondary candidates (although realistically Sanders, if he'd kept the independent ticket, was the only 'Perot' level candidate that might've tipped the scales away. And no I didn't/don't support him, but he had the third strongest groups of rabid fans. If he hadn't told them 'support Clinton instead of letting Trump ruin america!' we probably would have had a dramatically different election take place, if only because the electoral college votes might not have been enough for either Clinton or Trump to outright win the election, falling back to and causing scrutiny of the 'non-electoral win' laws.
The only confirmed hacking attempts were performed by DHS against Indiana's and Idaho's election systems.
Indiana joins Idaho in claiming DHS tried to hack their election systems