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36 of 50 States Have Installed Sensors at 'Elections Infrastructure Level' To Monitor Computer Systems Managing Voter Data or Devices (reuters.com)
A majority of U.S. states has adopted technology that allows the federal government to see inside state computer systems managing voter data or voting devices in order to root out hackers. From a report: Two years after Russian hackers breached voter registration databases in Illinois and Arizona, most states have begun using the government-approved equipment, according to three sources with knowledge of the deployment. Voter registration databases are used to verify the identity of voters when they visit polling stations. The rapid adoption of the so-called Albert sensors, a $5,000 piece of hardware developed by the Center for Internet Security www.cisecurity.org, illustrates the broad concern shared by state government officials ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, government cybersecurity experts told Reuters. [...] As of August 7, 36 of 50 states had installed Albert at the "elections infrastructure level," according to a Department of Homeland Security official. The official said that 74 individual sensors across 38 counties and other local government offices have been installed. Only 14 such sensors were installed before the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
You're trying to install a security product inside a vulnerable system to detect compromise. Not good enough. Integrity must be non-repudiated.
Voting infrastructure is harder than voting machines. Paper voting is notoriously vulnerable to corrupt officials; paper audit trails are manipulable and have been used to identify voters and their votes; electronic voting machines can be proven non-tampered, and the votes proven non-tampered. The voting infrastructure, though? That's centralized, and prone to all sorts of attacks--not just computer hacking, but insider threat and social engineering.
Your best protection against infrastructure attacks is same-day registration and same-day party affiliation re-registration.
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This will just become the next attack vector hackers use to compromise the systems.
Like the diebold machines? You say this like it stands for anything.
We're installing all of this insecure technology around a vital process of our governance, whereas paper ballots and paper trails work elsewhere. Florida failed to provide a clearly understandable paper ballot in 2000, but when has this electronic voting been a fix?
It's a gravy train for government-connected firms, that's what it is.
The only electronic voting I want is something that can give me a QR code to print a paper ballot I can sign off on, giving me time to research the entirety of the options and speeding time at the booth.
I believe this and approval voting would go a long way towards actually fixing things.
allows the federal government to see inside state computer systems managing voter data or voting devices in order to root out hackers.
Great but where is the checks to make sure a future govt cannot manipulate it.
Can someone explain how this doesn't introduce a single point of failure? Even a plausible theory?
Nope, no sig
Anything less won't work.
Remember, snapshot and full database rollbacks with query/row match for discrepencies in volatile precincts and counties are key for db comparisons. Random audits.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
For our corrupt government to confirm the effectiveness of the hacking they've been doing to all the computer voting machines since they were rolled out?
Wake up. "Russia hacking our elections" was done at the invitation of our corrupt Congress, to allow them the scapegoat they DIDN'T HAVE around the Diebold controversy.
Just as in the years leading up to the market crash and great depression a century ago, it doesn't matter who votes or who they vote for; what matters is WHO COUNTS THE VOTES.
mnem
Smoke & mirrors... always smoke & mirrors.
Nope, now it's the federal government manipulating the vote... to make sure nobody else tampers with the vote, of course.
America is such a shithole country. Enjoy those freedumbs!!
~44 ex-cia people are running as democrats for office now.
They're just moving the cheating this time.
Great, now when the Republics clean house during the midterms, no one can complain that the election was "hacked". Everyone can finally be happy and content with the results.
Anything less won't work.
Remember, snapshot and full database rollbacks with query/row match for discrepencies in volatile precincts and counties are key for db comparisons. Random audits.
Even then, the issue is counting votes and then securing from alteration the materials upon which the votes are recorded so they can be counted again and again when desired.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Great, now when the Republics clean house during the midterms, no one can complain that the election was "hacked". Everyone can finally be happy and content with the results.
It doesn't matter who wins, half the country will be incensed about the results... Assuming the last election was any indicator of what we are in for come November.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Add same day in person registration. Most states have figured out how to maintain security of physical ballots, and sequester those where registration is in question for verification.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Didn't say there where already issues here, only that having a physical ballot doesn't solve all of the issues with vote count integrity.
You still have to have to get an honest count. This requires a secure means of maintaining the physical ballots so they cannot be altered (or added to or subtracted from) AND you need a way to count them, preferably multiple different ways. I remember the Al Gore Florida recounts, we don't need that mess again.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I really don't care who replaces him in four or eight years. But I am happy he will have gotten 2-3 conservatives on the Supreme Court, and destroyed a good part of the bureaucracy by the time he leaves.
I have enjoyed the left wing hand wringing and wailing. You guys are so entertaining.
All of these attempts at avoiding election fraud don't matter. Because the U.S. is doomed, even with perfectly valid non-manipulated election results.
43% of republicans said they would approve giving the POTUS the power to close down news outlets. The same kind of republicans that throw a fit everytime gun control is mentionned, or continually complain that facebook or twitter "suppresses their right to free speech".
This means these republicans value the 2nd amendment more than the 1st, that they are ok with government suppressing free speech, as long as it's liberal free speech. In other worlds: 43% of republicans are actually anti-democracy and would be ok with a totalitarian regime, as long as it's a conservative totalitarian regime.
The ennemy of the U.S. is not Russia, nor China, muslims, illegal aliens, etc. The ennemy is within. It is these people that are anti-democracy, anti-free-press, would-be violators of the constitution, ennemies of the state, traitors to the nation.
And they are everywhere, in the office where you work, in the mall where you shop, across the street. They are your collegues, your neighbors, your friends, your family.
The fact that this country deliberately elected a known criminal psychopath for POTUS, is not the disease, it's just the symptom. The country has become so unbelievably polarized, so irrationally hateful of "the other side", that I'm afraid one of the next POTUS will be the next Erdogan, the next Mussolini, the next Hitler. And, totally blinded by pure rage and hatred as they are, people won't see it coming.
All of you alive today, who are reading these lines, will know the horrors and bloodshed of civil war within your lifetime. May God have mercy on your souls.
I'm sure these sensors are completely 110% unhackable.
I don't know, but I'm guessing it's something very similar to Security Onion. (Network security should have multiple layers; like an onion. Get it?)
Albert sensors are probably very similar, using a more hardened platform, with similar FOSS tools installed, and with access to government-specific threat intel feeds and analysis.
Paper ballots can't be hacked and are easier to secure. Simple fact you can't secure voting that's hooked up to the internet.
msmash missed an obvious cliche for this post.
Funny, any time one mentions voting fraud, a highly-moderated response will spring up claiming, such fraud is "miniscule" because no study has ever found anything bigger.
But Diebold can be the butt of FUD-spreading without any sort of proof it ever contributed to actual vote-corruption — and without challenges from the same sticklers to the "unproven therefore false" approach...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It doesn't matter what Trumptards like or don't like, you're sucking Putin's dick either way. Trump will be the death of your party for a decade or more, and he'll die in prison a traitor. You don't matter, who succeeds the traitor does.
Nobody cares what you understand or don't, you're retarded red state faggot traitors of no value to the future. We'll probably round you up and have you chemically castrated within a few years. #Like Trump Junior
We have vote-by-mail in Washington. It's awful, because anyone with power over you can tell you to bring your ballot to him and fill it out in front on him so that he knows that you voted for his choices. Our ancestors adopted voting booths for damned good reasons--to stop that sort of voter intimidation.
Ugh. The Al Gore Florida recounts were not a complete failure. The awful punch card system they put in place was awful, but the ability to recount is what mattered (which was affected by the punch cards). The fact that it was a big manual effort that took some time... THAT IS NOT THE IMPORTANT PART!!!!
We need to get one or more systems in place that work very well, and then we can work on optimizing them. Moving to a more broken system (most electronic voting systems in use) just because you can tabulate and retabulate faster is awful. Adding in federal level backdoors isn't going to improve that either... if anything, that's a move in the wrong direction.
It is scary how easily and quickly tamper prone systems have been put into place, and how stubborn they are to fix or remove.
I'll bet if you could get the same hardware at Banggood it would be $5, not $5000
The issue with the Florida recounts in my mind was two fold.
First, the act of counting them, altered the ballots, ever so slightly, when done mechanically. Looking for holes in cards and the problem of missing chads, hanging chads and dimpled chads was insanity. Yes, it was a very stupid system and we should take that as a cautionary tale to not build another system with similar problems.
Second, it was legally pointless to count, recount, manually count and recount these ballots as long as they did. Once the legal process had already run it's course and the election had been legally certified by Florida's secretary of state and presented to congress. It was a done deal, regardless of what the count ended up being or how many times they counted the results after that.
So I would add one additional requirement for ballot handling which goes something like this. "Once the election is certified and all possible legal avenues have been exhausted in the determination of the winners, the ballots will be securely stored for no less than 1 year and no more than 2, unless they are material evidence in an active criminal investigation.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Just sayin'. Failed probes do not constitute a breach. Much more troubling was the lawsuits threatening the secretary of state not to followup on failed voter ID checks.
" because anyone with power over you can tell you to bring your ballot to him and fill it out in front on him so that he knows that you voted for his choices. "
Yeah, that's a common problem up here.....LOL.
Please cite a source to this horrible scourge.
Worst....strawman....EVER!
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Trump and the russians only need to hack a few states to win.
And if those 174252 precincts use one type of voting machine, then one piece of malicious code in that machine wins the election.
The paper audit trail is LOCAL, and contained, paper voting is LOCAL and contained, the voting machine code is one single global instance across all machines of that class in all precincts.
Pennsylvania, and Florida both use voting machines that have no paper audit trail. The staff literally have no idea if the vote the machine reports to the counter is the vote the user cast. They all just trust the machines they know are vulnerable and cross their fingers, which is nuts. The courts should strike down those elections, and they should be using the backup paper ballots system till they can get their auditing shit together. Fake recounts are not recounts.
Two swing states and they're completely unauditable.
Anti hacking software doesn't mean squat. If anything it is another single potential failure mode. Can NSA secure their own infrastructure? No:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-hackers-stole-nsa-data-on-u-s-cyber-defense-1507222108
Can they secure their own infrastructure from the Collaborator in Chief? No:
https://www.newsweek.com/has-putin-just-arrested-two-american-spies-548528
So can they protect the elections from themselves (both their incompetence and their tainted leadership).
As a life long resident of WA State I can state that in my entire life I have never had that happen to me. I've never met anybody that that has happened to and I cannot recall ever having heard of it happening via the press.
The reality is that there's enough people that vote and enough people that could vote if they chose that these sorts of conspiracies are largely pointless. Even in the tightest races we've had, you'd still be looking at having to intimidate dozens of voters into changing their vote in order for it to have an impact on an election.
It's just not something that's feasible and in all likelihood at least one of those intimidated voters would talk either before or after the election.
Second, it was legally pointless to count, recount, manually count and recount these ballots as long as they did. Once the legal process had already run it's course and the election had been legally certified by Florida's secretary of state and presented to congress. It was a done deal, regardless of what the count ended up being or how many times they counted the results after that.
I wouldn't say it was legally pointless.
Even if the election was done with it is still possible to uncover election fraud, so while you can't do anything about the turnout of the election you can still hold someone accountable.
Even if you don't uncover any criminal activity you can still identify irregularities and mistakes so that you can work on preventing them in the future.
Also, I see very little reason to throw away ballots within a year or two.
Storing them is only expensive if you care about the integrity of them. If you are going to throw them away you might just dump them in an unguarded unheated storage facility.
They might not be of interest for legal reasons, but next to the constitution voting ballots may be one of the most important documents we have from a democratic perspective.
As a life long resident of WA State I can state that in my entire life I have never had that happen to me. I've never met anybody that that has happened to and I cannot recall ever having heard of it happening via the press.
Of course you don't hear about it. People in abusive relationships have more pressing issues to talk about than that.
According to the dominant part they will vote as a family.
That the other part would even consider voting for something they didn't agree on isn't really an issue. If they did that would lead to the regular argument and beating.
Vote by mail just means that some people don't get a vote while others get two.
It isn't likely to change the outcome of the election (unless it is called by a few votes.)
It only matters if you about the whole "one person, one vote" thing.
Most places that have vote by mail allows you to change the vote at a voting station so if anyone forces you to vote by mail you can always sneak out during election day and vote for what you really wanted.
“Two years after Russian hackers breached voter registration databases”
Under the pretext of protecting us from “Russian hackers” the US deepstate has hacked voting machines.
So the government is monitoring with "sensors". What data will the government have access to while monitoring the voting machine? What actions can they take? Will the use it for tracking? The governments track record is less than shit, if the sensors are as secure as other government projects we are screwed.