As Brad says
Hopefully, what happened in Vegas does not stay in Vegas
We are not so optimistic. We have a long history of getting excited about voting irregularities and risks, followed by officials and the general public moving on. As Obama said in 2012 “We have got to fix this”. He created a solid commission that made a significant report, yet by then the country had moved on. This time, starting before the election, we have Secretaries of the State and Homeland Security telling us there is nothing to see here. Misinformed at best, self serving propaganda at worst. From the BradCast <read>
“That room was just crowded from morning to night,” Jefferson says, describing the room at DefCon. “And the amazing thing is that all of those successful hacks, these were by people who, most of them, had never seen a voting machine before, and certainly not the system sitting in front of them, and they had not met each other before. They didn’t come with a full set of tools that were tailored toward attacking these machines. They just started with a piece of hardware in front of them and their own laptops and ingenuity, attacking the various systems. And it was amazing how quickly they did it!”
Jefferson tells me, after all of these years, he is now seeing a major difference among the public, as well as election and elected officials (a number of whom were also in attendance), regarding the decades-long concerns by experts about electronic voting, tabulation and registration systems.
“I am seeing a kind of sea change here. For the first time, I am sensing that election officials, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI, and the intelligence community, and Congress, and the press, are suddenly, after the 2016 election experience, receptive to our message that these systems are extremely vulnerable and it’s a serious national security issue. As you know, in a democracy, the legitimacy of government depends on free and fair and secure elections. And people are beginning to realize that we haven’t had those for a long time.”
“I am seeing a kind of sea change here. For the first time, I am sensing that election officials, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI, and the intelligence community, and Congress, and the press, are suddenly, after the 2016 election experience, receptive to our message that these systems are extremely vulnerable and it’s a serious national security issue. As you know, in a democracy, the legitimacy of government depends on free and fair and secure elections. And people are beginning to realize that we haven’t had those for a long time.”
He explains how hacking methods attributed by many to Russians following the 2016 elections “are the same methods that anyone on Earth could use — insiders, criminal syndicates, nation-states other than Russia, as well, or our own political partisans. The fear, of course, is that these hacking attempts will be totally undetectable. But even if they are detectable, it’s difficult often to determine who did it, whether it’s an insider, or a domestic partisan, or some foreign organization.”
He also confirms what I’ve been trying to point out since the 2016 election, that despite officials continuously claiming that no voting results were changed by anyone, be it Russia or anybody else, “they cannot know that. They simply can’t know. Certainly in those states where there are no paper ballots, such as in Georgia, for example, it’s impossible for them to know. And even in states where there are, if they don’t go back and either recount the paper ballots, or at least recount a random sample of them, no, they can’t know either.”
“Election officials have fooled themselves into believing the claims of their [private voting machine] vendors that the systems are secure from all kinds of attack. And it’s just never been true,” Jefferson argues.
Not much different than what we have all been saying for many years. Let us hope with Brad that this time many will hear and act!
I highly recommend listening to the podcast which has much more than than Brad’s post. The election discussion starts about 40% into the podcast.
