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Facebook Funds 'Defending Digital Democracy' Initiative At Harvard (diginomica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Diginomica:
A fresh initiative aimed at information sharing about election threats and dubbed Defending Digital Democracy has the financial support of Facebook and the academic muscle of Harvard behind it. Will the project succeed where similar initiatives have failed...? On 19 July and backed by a $500,000 initial grant from Facebook, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School launched a new, bipartisan initiative called the Defending Digital Democracy Project. The project will be co-led by Robby Mook, Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign manager, and Matt Rhoades, Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign manager. The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
The group will also assess new technologies (including blockchain) to secure elections, and wants to create an information sharing infrastructure modeled "on similar efforts within the tech industry to share tech intelligence." The article says Facebook's chief security officer "hopes that election officials who are wary of cooperating with the federal government will be more receptive to working with an independent group tied to Harvard and the tech industy," and the group also includes Google's director for Information Security and Privacy.
"Facebook plans to host state and local election officials at its D.C. office later this year to discuss the information sharing organization, and launch the organization in early 2018."
The group will also assess new technologies (including blockchain) to secure elections, and wants to create an information sharing infrastructure modeled "on similar efforts within the tech industry to share tech intelligence." The article says Facebook's chief security officer "hopes that election officials who are wary of cooperating with the federal government will be more receptive to working with an independent group tied to Harvard and the tech industy," and the group also includes Google's director for Information Security and Privacy.
"Facebook plans to host state and local election officials at its D.C. office later this year to discuss the information sharing organization, and launch the organization in early 2018."
Wikileaks not appearing on Slashdot as usual.
Today, July 27th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Imperial project of the CIA.
Achilles is a capability that provides an operator the ability to trojan an OS X disk image (.dmg) installer with one or more desired operator specified executables for a one-time execution.
Aeris is an automated implant written in C that supports a number of POSIX-based systems (Debian, RHEL, Solaris, FreeBSD, CentOS). It supports automated file exfiltration, configurable beacon interval and jitter, standalone and Collide-based HTTPS LP support and SMTP protocol support - all with TLS encrypted communications with mutual authentication. It is compatible with the NOD Cryptographic Specification and provides structured command and control that is similar to that used by several Windows implants.
SeaPea is an OS X Rootkit that provides stealth and tool launching capabilities. It hides files/directories, socket connections and/or processes. It runs on Mac OSX 10.6 and 10.7.
He's going for "President For Life Of Teh Intarwebz! LOL!"
I'd like to think that this doesn't need mentioning because it's obvious to everyone already. But that doesn't appear to be the case.
'Defending Digital Democracy' means pushing some selfserving political narrative in the US rather than actually defending democracy in places companies like Facebook kowtow to like China.
Facebook defending democracy is like Josef Stalin defending freedom.
Yeah, sure.
Technology is the golden fairy dust to fix everything.
No, folks: if there's something democracy needs is *less* opaque stuff. People have to get some trust in the democratic processes, and for that, they have to be *transparent* (to everyone).
That's why I strongly favour paper ballots *and hand counting* (gasp!). Not because they're more secure than electronics (they're not, they just have another set of vulnerabilities), but because you *need* lots of people to do that counting, ideally organized as a "counting party", by volunteers, and where everyone interested can show up. Ideally, it should be strongly encouraged for schoolkids to have that experience at least once. That's transparency at work. And not some stupid machines with people bickering about whether the software on them should be "open source[1]" or not.
As to pre-election manipulative behaviour, where (political) parties not only hire marketing firms but also specialists in military psy-ops... I don't know how one could solve that. IMO those folks should be in jail. They're far more dangerous than those stupid djihadists (not that I wanted those either, mind you).
[1] Open source: Free Software's poor sister, or something.
This is yet another useless make-work scheme for the rich to extract grant money and donations from the gullible. Its only product will be yet another "report" and "recommendations" useable only as emergency ass wipe material.
what losers.
The most ingenious idea I have ever seen for securing ballots follows a few simple steps:
1. Assign a unique serial number to all ballots printed.
2. Use a scantron system to record the choices and serial number.
3. Let the voter either keep the ballot or a carbon copy.
4. As the votes are tallied, the serial numbers and choices are posted online on a government website so that voters can verify their vote.
Motor voter laws are probably the single biggest threat to our process aside from the lack of a solid ID requirement at the precincts. Set aside any views you have on politics and culture for a moment and just consider these facts:
1. In some states, illegal immigrants--by state policy--can get driver's licenses.
2. You can register to vote at the DMV without any form of ID showing you are a US citizen.
If any system dealing with PII, finances, etc. in your life had such a low barrier on security, would you use it? I don't think you would.
Zuckerberg really want people to associate him with democracy, equality and fairness. Seems almost like he has a motive behind all this propaganda machinery.
No, my idea doesn't work, because the Mafia can do the same thing in reverse: gather up all the receipts associated with "paid" votes, then randomly test ten (a $10,000 cost-of-doing-business fee), on penalty of worse-than-death.
I think that would reduce the enforcement cost enough to turn paying for votes into a cash-flow-positive business model.
Bear in mind that delivering on penalty of worse-than-death is not cheap (either in time now, or potential for time later). If all the rabbits are trembling enough, you won't need to do this.
The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
Step 1 to protecting democracy:
Don't riot when someone with different political views comes to your campus. For comparison:
Once the universities begin to act like a) they have a role in our democracy (we are actually a representative republic, but I am not going to split hairs), and b) start working constructively to improve it, then we may have something worthwhile.
Use blockchain technology.
Every vote serialized, every vote is checksumed including the checksum of the vote before.
Make the blockchain public, millions of copies all over the world, impossible to insert fake votes.
You'll still get fake/dead/zombie voters, but at least you can find out how many there are after the fact by spending months to verify.
We need to keep this quiet. Someone please mod down all comments in this thread so that the truth can be concealed. The little people (AKA the filthy plebs) don't need to know about this. Mod this shit down so it gets erased NOW!
Done.
WikiLeaks publishes the Imperial project of CIA (Score:0, Insightful)
No matter what kind of Rube Goldberg system they come up with, it will always be at the mercy of those who implement and run it.
You know what the most secure voting system is? Paper ballots. But they are subject to manipulation just as are electronic voting systems.
The primary "flaw" in voting systems is also their primary strength...the voter is ultimately disconnected from their vote. You don't know who voted for who.
It would be nice if there were a way I could confirm that the vote I cast is actually cast for who I voted. But then someone would be able to force me to vote a particular way...management, union bosses, etc. because they could confirm they way I voted.
I'm afraid it all comes down t the integrity and honesty of the people running the election.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Zuckerberg's Facebook's terms of service outright forbid some citizens from taking part. He can't talk about "digital democracy" with any credibility at all.
There's already a guy scanning political sites for security strengths/weaknesses and publishing the results as "cybersecurity letter grades". How 'bout just writing him a grant?
http://cybertical.com
Make elections independently audit-able.
* Paper trail for each ballot. Placed in a sealed box next to the machine.
* Easy for the VOTER to see who he/she voted for on the paper.
* 2D barcode for a computer to read and validate the votes on the paper.
* Electronic counts to help election results remain fast.
* The voting system needs to be 100% F/LOSS and run on commodity hardware like a raspberry-pi v1. A version with no wifi. Cheap, easily replaceable, portable, light.
A tiny thermal printer ... just like we have at every gas station in the country would work.
Voter identification only happens at ballot time and isn't tied to the vote or paper ballot.
I voted in an election 6 weeks ago. Prior to that election, 2 democrats physically came to my home daily for 2 weeks - morning and afternoon. They offered rides to vote, help filling out absentee/early voting ballots, etc. I know a huge complaint by democrats about requiring a state ID in order to vote is the hardship for some people from actually getting a state ID or the cost of it. Where I live, state IDs are free for the poor - $10 for everyone else. Getting to the DMV to get one would easily be handled by a bus or one of the political parties taking someone to get their ID. After all, they made almost 30 visits to my home in June, so they could certainly make 1 trip to the DMV with me to get an ID.
State IDs should use PKI. The ID has the public key in a 2-D barcode. A reading machine pulls up the ID in the state's DB and shows the data and photo. If the photo on the ID doesn't match what the state's DB shows and doesn't match the person standing there, then it is a fake ID. A website could be used by every location that wants to validate an ID - even a bar or quicky-mart.
Both parties wasted over $50M for a single house seat campaign. Just think of all the people that money could have helped with health care instead. It was obscene to waste THAT much money.
It is an embarrassment that this hasn't been solved for the entire world already.
If they really cared about democracy, they would be more concerned about collecting and securing the wishes and desires of the people and ensuring the person in office stands up to those expectations. Really the person who gets elected seems rather irrelevant in my lifetime. They're all self interested, and there needs to be a secure way to hold them to actually doing what the citizens of their countries need.
Paper ballots. In person. Providing any of a number of government-issued photo IDs. Cast your ballot, dip your finger in the ink.
Roll Credits, cut to commercial.
You're welcome. . .
"...Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign manager, and Matt Rhoades, Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign manager."
Step 1: Ensure no third party candidates can win.
Step 2: Ensure that only candidates on the parties' roadmap can win (feel the burn)
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
This project is already the failure. The US isn't a democracy and was never meant to be. You can't defend what isn't there.
When you see Facebook, Harvard (or any Ivy/near-Ivy), and "bipartisan" in close proximity, it's safe to assume they're not. They're establishment if not outright left-leaning.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What happened was that pro-Hillary goons beat up on Trump supporters at his rallies. People were scared to admit they were voting for Trump. When asked, they said they were voting Clinton. But when election day came, they voted Trump. The fear of speaking up for Trump led many people to think Hillary had it in the bag. No need to go campaign in Michigan or Wisconsin, etc.
Ironically, if the democrat goons had not scared Trump supporters into silence, they would've heard from those supporters, and known that they had to work harder in Michigan/Wisconsin/etc.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user