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Did Russians Really Penetrate Florida's Election Systems? Maybe (nbcnews.com)
Anonymous readers share a report: Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, has reaped the political whirlwind in the 10 days since he proclaimed that Russian hackers had "penetrated" some of his state's county voting systems. The governor of Florida, Rick Scott, a Republican who is running against Nelson for his U.S. Senate seat this fall, has blasted his claim as irresponsible. The top Florida elections official, also a Republican, said he had seen no indication it's true. And The Washington Post weighed in Friday with a 2,717-word fact check that all but accused Nelson -- without evidence -- of making it up. However, three people familiar with the intelligence tell NBC News that there is a classified basis for Nelson's assertion, which he made at a public event after being given information from the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The extent and seriousness of the threat remains unclear, shrouded for reasons of national security.
[...] Through a spokesman, Nelson declined to comment. At a, Aug. 7 campaign event in Florida's capital, Nelson said Intelligence Committee leaders asked that he "let supervisors of elections in Florida know that Russians are inside our records." He added that Russian hackers "have already penetrated certain counties in the state and they now have free rein to move about." "Either Bill Nelson knows of crucial information the federal government is withholding from Florida election officials, or he is simply making things up," said Scott, who is seeking to take Nelson's Senate seat, which the senator has held since 2001. But Scott, who as governor has a security clearance, has not actually disputed Nelson's assertion. His spokesman said the governor had not personally called anyone at the Department of Homeland Security to seek a classified briefing to get to the bottom of the matter.
[...] Through a spokesman, Nelson declined to comment. At a, Aug. 7 campaign event in Florida's capital, Nelson said Intelligence Committee leaders asked that he "let supervisors of elections in Florida know that Russians are inside our records." He added that Russian hackers "have already penetrated certain counties in the state and they now have free rein to move about." "Either Bill Nelson knows of crucial information the federal government is withholding from Florida election officials, or he is simply making things up," said Scott, who is seeking to take Nelson's Senate seat, which the senator has held since 2001. But Scott, who as governor has a security clearance, has not actually disputed Nelson's assertion. His spokesman said the governor had not personally called anyone at the Department of Homeland Security to seek a classified briefing to get to the bottom of the matter.
Maybe.
OK, yes. Many times.
all I got was HPV :(
Anonymous sources said that there's a basis that can't be disclosed or discussed or refuted. Sounds legit.
I spied the government today
They seemed inclined to make us pay
After one hundred broken treaties and accords
They could not blame us for our pain
And if 1000 die tonight
No one could say just who was right
Statistics tend to lie, but they don't mean too much
And I wouldn't trust those that use 'em as a crutch
This is a public system. Information about its being compromised should be public. If it's all just smoke coming from the oh-so-trustworthy "intelligence community" not only is this a false claim it is likely a deliberate lie.
Not maybe..
This site sucks now. Bring back CmdrTaco and the old OpenSource Tech Slashdot days. Endless political drivel now.
It's the only way to be sure.
Weird that Russians are suddenly the boogie man again after Romney was lambasted for asserting the Russians were a threat.
And there are paid writers on this site blasting with political bullshit.
This isn't reddit - people here just want tech and will move from this site to any other blogging site pretty quickly.
(I will, if someone recommends a good one)
Blue team people (including the news media) will repeat it if it's useful to advance blue team political goals. Red team people will disbelieve it and ridicule it if it's harmful to red team political goals. What really happened is not relevant to the response; this is America.
let whomever hack the system.
Agreed. Endless political drivel everywhere.
Embrace trolling, tell everyone to suck your DAMN balls, make apk references, use crude references to shit, piss and assholes, let the mods fiddle while /. Comments embrace shit posting
Yes.
I think we can give the Russian's this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Who would think a politician running for a election would make up stuff?. Are they not all liars to a certain extent? The difference is a good liar can make most believe them, a bad liar nobody believes.
They openly bragged about it in the Washington Post:
How they funnelled $500 million in campaign money to Yeltsin. The fat alcoholic dancing bear that NOBODY liked. Via the IMF. Versus the opponent's $3 million. Using propaganda like "If Zyuganov comes back, the gulag comes back". And whenever he wanted to go to bed in his hotel, "somebody" had cancelled his hotel room. (Very ... mature. --.--)
Yeltsin later appointed a somebody as the new head of government... What was his name again? ... Aah, yes... VLADIMIR PUTIN!
So if the USA thinks that Putin manipulated their elections, then ... I'll just leave you alone with that thought. :)
The "Russians are in our systems" is a nice misdirect that hides what's really going on.
There's no evidence any votes were changed in the last election, but by making unsubstantiated claims and going from hackers to Russian hackers to state-sponsored Russian hackers they can gin up enough fear and outrage to justify censorship aimed at affecting the midterms.
For example, Facebook recently banned [conservative blogger and political candidate] Avi Yemini for ‘Hate Speech’, won't tell him why he was banned, and denied his appeal. (You can view the banned page here.)
Lots and lots and lots of conservative viewpoints are being purged online in the runup to the midterm elections, and really scary things are coming up in the news every day.
Two terms that frequently come up in discussion are "midterm meddling" and "street fight". The first refers to all the suppression of conservative viewpoints, the second refers to the mob-mentality of striking back at people who don't toe the Liberal line.
(For example, the judge in the Manafort case has received threats, and because the jury hasn't reached a verdict yet the MSM filed a motion to reveal the identities and home addresses of the jury members. Yikes!)
We live in a scary time, reminiscent of the run-up to nazi Germany.
Dissenting opinion is being suppressed, sometimes violently.
Okian faggot you're a traitor just like Donald the Drumpftard, only slightly less successful at lying. It's unfortunate that we can't hang you for treason next to him and his bitch traitor sons, feckless cunt traitor daughter.
You forgot the #MAGA. You have great prospects for Trump's voter fraud commission, they too are to stupid to understand that once an entity can get access to the voter system and change votes things equating to poll taxes prevent nothing except making it harder for people for whom the struggle is real to vote, which of course is your goal since only rich lives matter.
Beavis: Heh heh ... he said penetrate.
And PraegerU, a conservative non-profit group that produces educational videos on conservative issues, was just banned by Facebook.
Meanwhile, leftist hate-speech is suspiciously ignored, until it's pointed out by the media:
In several instances, Facebook ignored repeated requests by users to delete hateful content that violated its guidelines. At least a dozen people, as well as the Anti-Defamation League in 2012, lodged protests with Facebook to no avail about a page called Jewish Ritual Murder. However, after ProPublica asked Facebook about the page, it was taken down.
Yep. "Jewish ritual murder" isn't hate speech, but a pro-gun-ownership political candidate is.
Scary times indeed.
that the "wrong" sort don't vote. Also, don't forget to station police in riot gear in front of all black^X high risk neighborhoods.
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It's not as if the electoral system in Florida hasn't ALREADY been hacked by the current administration. But now Gov. Nosferatu has a scapegoat.
mnem
If you presented American Politics as a reality TV show, nobody would watch it.
since the 90s. At a certain point we have to accept that it's on purpose...
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No the Russians didn't penetrate Florida's election systems, it's yet more neocon waffle
Ahh. I see you dont like argueing endlessly about the left vs right thing. Therefore you are an enemy of both. Congratulations! You are a Communist living in you Moms basement who hates black people and worskhips Aldolf Hitler. You combine the percieved evils of both parties into one super duper villianous enemy of goodness.
This has been brought up for decades.
But say there is an issue with registration fraud, voter fraud, polling station security, vote counting systems, etc and suddenly you get some very suspicious push back.
Say you want ID to make sure people aren't running around to different polling stations and pretending to be people they aren't... and you get accused of racism.
Why? Because black people can't get ID cards apparently.
Say you want to secure polling station security, and you'll get the assertion that polling stations where operate under very lax oversight are beyond repute... even though stories of bags full of pre-filled out voter cards exist everywhere.
You say that vote counting systems that often use something like Microsoft Access to tabulate the votes of an entire state are perhaps not the best options... and that the digital security of the records has issues... that the underlying digital voting systems themselves in some states are open to abuse... prove it with an 11 year old busting the system... well, no action.
Frankly, at this point, anyone arguing against this thing can't be doing it in good faith anymore. The overwhelming evidence is that we need reform.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
More imagined than real. Russiaphobia is a construct of the Deep State working in consort with the Leftist media.
Everything has been politicized. There is little escaping it these days unfortunately. It's ruining everything.
Everything connected to the internet will gets "attacked", and a lot of those IPs will be from Russia. More neocon / neoliberal fear mongering. If you want to push it in a useful direction, use it to push back against electronic voting machines. They've been a dubious addition because of the possibility of them being rigged by whatever party is in power.
Except that facebook is a private entity. Just like Free Republic and TreeHouse and lots of other sites.
But someone...ahem...want to control facebook...and say what they can allow on their site and what they can't.
But try that with FreeRepublic or others...and...
Remember: this is the unethical disgusting pig that used his position in congress to force NASA to give him a ride to space on a Space Shuttle as a "Payload Specialist" (a non-astronaut with special skills needed to operate a particular payload who gets trained for a flight to tend that payload on orbit). For NASA back then it was: Fly the jerk to space or lose vital funding. After his flight on the shuttle, he subsequently swaggered around pretending to be a "Right Stuff" style astronaut (with the implication of being a steely-eyed test pilot) and got himself elected to the US Senate where he has pushed his personal agenda for NASA among other things. Oh, the commander on his shuttle flight was an astronaut named Charlie Bolden --- who Nelson demanded Obama make into his NASA administrator and who went on to say NASA's most important mission was "Muslim outreach" while spending 8 years having NASA advertise a "mission to Mars" on its website but having no actual Mars plans and allocating no funds to even plan a Mars mission.
Bill Nelson is a supremely unethical, scheming, pompous, dishonest jerk.
This site sucks now. Bring back CmdrTaco and the old OpenSource Tech Slashdot days. Endless political drivel now.
CmdrTaco an OpenSource Tech wouldn't have stopped this political drivel.
Every open forum is exposed to the putinbots. If no-one else is willing to have a political discussion they will just take both sides to lure people into it.
It's also not at all uncommon for the media to just parrot whatever the government says uncritically. that's how we ended up in Iraq.
That's not really a meaningful comparison.
Buying into GOP lies about Iraq got millions killed.
Buying into possible Democratic "lies" about election insecurity gets better election security.
I'm fine with the later. Why aren't you?
I mean, half the god damn country bought into lies about in-person voter impersonation. But voting system security is a step too far? Really??
And PraegerU, a conservative non-profit group that produces educational videos on conservative issues
Its a sad fact that "conservative issues" is now just code for antisemitic propaganda. Conservatism having been reduced to nothing more than white straight evangelical pride is wrecking us. Be better.
The nihilism of people like you is the real problem here.
We can't fix a problem if we don't talk about it. People like those at blackboxvoting.org have been warning about election insecurity for nearly 2 decades now and its been talked about here on slashdot for just as long. But now that the general populace is waking to the problem, guys like you are pretending its just politics. Whether you are doing it out of cynicism, ignorance or malevolence, you are the problem. Fuck off.
...the concept of "conservatives" or "liberals" or whatever.
Look up the "Adam Ruins Everything" episode on how cannabis became illegal.
It was literally done to terrorize blacks, latinos and hippies, and for no other reason.
Right now, any political view that does not fit the line of the rulers, is just called "Russian", and crushed. Like yelling "It's coming straight at us!" as an excuse, right before shooting an animal, in that old South Park episode.
There are som insanely dumb and evil viewpoints out there. Like conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, socialism, communism, "representative" democracy (as opposed to real democracy), etc.
But I would defend their right to have any view anytime! Because as soon as we start banning viewpoints, we stop being a free country.
It is how we treat what we consider the worst in our society, that shows our true morals and the true rights of our society.
(Even child-rapist mass-murdering CEO-politicians can be fixed. We just have to not slack off, and *try harder*.)
However, three people familiar with the intelligence tell NBC News that there is a classified basis for Nelson's assertion, which he made at a public event after being given information from the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
So this information was classified and Bill Nelson leaked it. Isn't that some sort of federal crime?
Dennis Prager is a Jew who has spoken out against anti-Semitism. In your alternate reality, how does that make him anti-Semitic?
Alternative Right.
Germans initially supported Hitler because he promised to end the rampant Communist violence in Germany.
If Leftists do not want another Hitler, they should avoid becoming violent Communists, a variety of Leftist (the same people who sent whole families to the guillotine).
Alternative Right.
Black Lives Matter, the Obama presidency, and the Hart-Celler act seem to have done that.
Alternative Right.
Which ones, and what percentage of the accounts banned were these?
Sounds like a pretext, not a diagnosis/analysis.
Alternative Right.
Clearly not because it was adored by the counterculture, correlates highly to morally disgusting behavior, and that most stoners are totally useless.
Nope, couldn't be.
Alternative Right.
Minorities and single women vote Leftist, as do people in cities.
Those who could survive a night in the forest alone do not.
Alternative Right.
After WW2, everything went Leftist.
Seventy years later, all of it is failing
Our choice is to either be in denial, or to fight it.
There really is no middle ground any longer.
Alternative Right.
/.'s readership has aged. What's news for nerds and stuff that matters is different when you're 40 instead of 20. Also, there's just plain less tech out there, at least of the sort that makes good fodder for a site like this. There's been a lot of device convergence. e.g. instead of lots of cool gadgets we've all got phones and a laptop. We're also starting to hit physical limits of silicone so fewer big leaps in tech.
/.er isn't going to understand a 50 page paper on how particle physics effects CPU die size and how such and such wavelength of lazer applied in such and such situation may someday lead to shaving off half a micron. There's nothing wrong with that, most folks (myself included) won't get that. But it means the domain of problems that are fun to blather about on a forum is smaller.
There is still cool stuff going on in tech of course, but it's all really, really high level. The average
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from lower income people. It's a defacto poll tax. There's been several studies on it. Anywhere it's been implemented suddenly there are DMV closures and extra fees for the Id. Also extra hoops to jump through for when women get married.
The amount of voter fraud isn't just statistically insignificant it's laughably so. No matter what anyone tells you nobody's busing in illegals to vote for Hilary (that sounds like trolling when I write it, but it was a real conspiracy theory that had to be addressed and debunked on national news).
Yes, there is somebody trying to steal elections. But they're doing it with voter suppression, not fraud. This is also why you will see armed police in body armor outside polling offices in poor, often black, neighborhoods. They're not there to keep the peace.
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they're a political threat. That's the problem with the world, it's complicated. You can't just say "Russia is not a threat". That's not the entire story. But folks want a one word answer for everything. They want to go back to simpler times the never really existed...
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No, the Russians didn't hack the election. such uttereances are part of a neocon plot to distract the American voter from who really rules America. ref ref
Who let a trumptard make a topic >. Yes. Yes they did. We may need to make prisons for the criminally dumb. Or at least strip them of the right to vote. THis stuff isn't a joke. Everything about our was of life and basic human decency is at risk when you pander to this level of insanity. It has to stop.
This site sucks now. Bring back CmdrTaco
, Jon Katz,
and the old OpenSource Tech Slashdot days. Endless political drivel now.
There was a lot of drivel back then too!
Let's keep the discourse useful. That usually means congenial and informative. Your message was neither.
Alternative Right.
Alternative Right.
Nope. Click-bait title, Move along.