ANONYMOUS, Thom Hartmann, Karl Rove's ORCA

  

Earlier in the week I published a piece about ANONYMOUS' claim of hacking Karl Rove's ORCA.  The piece included a situation summary of the "HACKTIVIST" group's claim that was written by an associate: Benjamin T. Moore.  As I was developing a follow-up piece, I was alerted of an even more descriptive piece from Mr. Moore.   I am posting Mr. Moore's piece, with permission,  from The Whirling Wind.com.

Any information related to the ANONYMUOS claims will involve a bit of reading.  Your reading is the output of much work by the writer in putting together a cogent treatise about ORCA, hacking into the system, and how, if true, the actions may have impacted our lives.  Therefore, the following is not a short read. As is always the case with The Progressive Influence, read a bit and comeback for additional reading.  This piece is one such piece!

Benjamin  T. Moore

How Anonymous Saved America and the World

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Benjamin Moore 2

by Benjamin T. Moore, Jr.

How Anonymous Saved America and the World

Those of us who’ve been paying attention to our electoral process have noticed some very disturbing trends and subsequent anomalies. I am probably giving some indication of my age, but I grew up in the era of real voting booths, curtains, tabs and levers.

One of the most important levers you will ever pull.

I remember as a child holding my mother’s hand in a voting booth and watching her flip the little tabs and then pull the lever which opened the curtains and registered her vote. My personal belief is that all parents should take their children to vote with them. It is good training and exposes them at an early age to the most important of our civic responsibilities.

I am not a technophobe. I fully appreciate progress and the role technology plays. Our population is growing, more and more people are voting and we still expect to know the outcomes of our elections on election night. The notion that we could count these votes by hand and still have timely results has become an unreachable proposition.

Enter Computers

Using computers to record and count the votes makes receiving timely results easy. If properly deployed, you could know the final count from any precinct the moment the last person in line votes. Computers are machines, they’re non-partisan and they’re extremely efficient crunching numbers.. or are they?

Computer Scientist Ed Felton uncovering a computer flaw in a New Jersey voting computer.

The facts are, computers have vulnerabilities too. For one, they will do whatever they’re programmed to do. If the person programming them is partisan, computers can be programmed to return partisan results. Computers can also be hacked. They can be given a virus which rewrites their code. I can look at another human being and tell if something is wrong with them. They may appear feverish, sluggish, their speech may be slurred, their eyes may be red. There are thousands of subtle signs we pick up allowing us to know that one of our fellow human beings is just not right. Computers? Not so much.

A computer can be programmed to switch votes to any candidate a programmer, hacker or virus writer chooses and the persons casting their votes would be none the wiser. In many jurisdictions which have now gone to all electronic voting, they have also passed laws mandating the destruction of the paper trail. Those places that use paper ballots where you darken in a circle beside your choice, feed them into an optical scanner, many of those jurisdictions have passed laws mandating the immediate destruction of the paper ballots. The question is why?

Hacking Democracy

This has always been the hard reality of democracy.

In the words of Joseph Stalin, “those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” The way things work today is, you cast your vote either using a “touch screen” computer system or a paper ballot you’ve filled out and fed through an optical scanner. At the end of voting those electronic votes are sent over the Internet to a central computer where the votes from all the precincts are tabulated and the election results are published.

Anonymous Claims To Have Killed Karl Rove's ORCA

Cross posted from Motley New Dot Net and linked to Occupy For Accountability Dot Org

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

{NOTE: Of course, we at the TPI have no way of knowing the extent to which the following is 100% accurate.  We will never know. If ANONYMOUS actually published the letter below and hacked into Karl Rove's servers, the following could be the full extent of what we will ever read. If Rove's organization knows the hacked  ORCA as true, he will never admit the attack, and damned certain will never admit to the ORCA nor being hacked.  There is one point that follows which is undeniable. Rove certainly freaked out on election night and a seasoned operative like Rove has to know elections swing as was the case in Ohio. The prospect  really does make me wonder. And, there-in lie my reasoning for publishing the following.  Whether we believe the story or not, we have to admit it is intriguing reading. Below, Benjamin T, Moore provides a non-technical explanation of how ANONYMOUS may have (if true) dealt with Rove's ORCA}

Anonymous Claims to Have Hacked into Karl Rove, ORCA Thus Stopping His Vote-Switching 

As expected, any Romney supporter (with heavy financing), was shocked at the final outcome from November 6th, the night President Obama retained his seat. We have all heard the whining, crying, finger-pointing, foul, and so on and so on. But there were a couple of items which stood out more than others.

We all know that Karl Rove flipped out on FOX News when they announced Obama won Ohio. The video is below if you haven’t seen it. Basically, Rove just could NOT understand what was happening, which is what I expected. Although he did have a very shocked “the sun just rose in the west” look on his face, and that is what surprised me. Even more shocking was hearing many top supporters and chiefs cry that Romney was supposed to win with a landslide. That is NOT what the polls had been showing the entire time.

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Karl Rove Questions Ohio Call for Obama Victory

Linked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2V59zUdLwXg

These cyber “protectors of what’s right” – who refers to themselves as “The Protectors” – said that they had been following the digital structure of Rove’s operation and of ORCA, a Republican get out the vote software application. After finding open “doors” in the systems, they created a “password protected firewall” called “The Great Oz,” and installed it on servers that Rove planned to use on election night to re-route and change election results “from three states.”

“ORCA Killer” was launched at 10am EST followed by “The Great Oz” at 8pm EST on November 6th. Both sides watched as ORCA crashed and failed throughout Election Day. Rove even mentions computer problems while on FOX News that night. Rove’s computer techs tried 105 times to penetrate “The Great Oz” using different means and passwords.

Is this what happened to Kerry back in 2004 in Ohio when he ran against Bush? A server went down for approximately 90 minutes. When it crashed, Kerry was clearly in the lead. When it finally booted back up, Bush had taken the lead. How? Read on for a theory.

The Ohio Computer Crash in 2004

On the night of 2-3 November, 2004, the computer designated to count Ohio votes was cut out of the loop. Its web address was diverted to a private company in Chattanooga, TN, named SMARTech.

The web redirection on Election Night of 2004 went a step beyond this: Not only did the official website of the Ohio Department of State look just right, but it had the right address: http://election.sos.state.oh.us . Any citizen or press service looking for real time election results from the state of Ohio would have been directed here. In every sense, this SMARTech site became the official vote tabulation for the state of Ohio.

SMARTech leases computer servers to the Republican National Committee, and the 12-digit ISP address to which the Ohio Department of State was diverted for the 2004 vote count falls between two ranges known to be leased to the RNC. This raises the suspicion that it was an RNC computer, impersonating the state of Ohio computer, that performed the official vote tabulation in 2004. This diversion is so unusual (and brazen!) a ruse, that it is inconceivable that it happened without Blackwell’s explicit consent.

Perhaps Anonymous decided that these spoiled rich boys could no longer have their thieving, cheating way any longer. Here is the letter which was supposedly put out by Anonymous explaining how they hacked the hack. LOVE IT!!!  Oh, click on the image to pull up a PDF file.

• Supposed ANONYMOUS letter about hacking Karl Rove's computer servers.(CLICK for larger view)

  
   Click for full letter. 

  
  
  Motley News Dot Net read more.
  
  Occupy For Accountability Dot Org reports Anonymous warned Rove about use of his system two weeks prior to the election.
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  Benjamin T Moore Jr

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  THANK YOU ANONYMOUS!!!

  • 
    

    During the weeks running up to election night, I was asked by numerous people if I thought President Obama was going to win. My response was a qualified "yes!" The reason it was *qualified* was because I have been aware of "Black Box Voting Fraud." If you do not know what that is, Google it. In brief, it has been proven that these electronic voting systems we've gone to can be hacked rather easily.

    
    

    There is even a documentary about this showing how it is done. Furthermore, in almost every jurisdiction where these systems have been put in place, a law has been passed to immediately *destroy* the hard copy records of votes so that *only* the digital records remain. WHY??? The reasons are rather obvious... if you get to a situation requiring a recount, you just hit the "tabulate key" and the computer spits out the exact same results as the last time. Thus, no actual recount occurs. Nobody actually looks at the hard copy paper ballots, it is all digital. A virus or a skilled hacker can make the vote come out any way you want it to for a fee.

    
    

    WHY MY CONCERN

    
    

    In order for this scheme to work successfully, you *NEED* to make people believe that the election is *close.* When people *believe* that the outcome could have gone either way, they are less likely to contest the results and do a forensic investigation on the machines if the results go against them.

    
    

    I watched poll after poll - usually conservative polls - showing that the race was extremely tight and some *always* put Romney ahead by a point or two. This concerned me because this was the *EXACT* scenario I envisioned necessary to pull off electronic voting fraud. I am a fan of Nate Silver's 538 Blog which has proven it's self the most accurate and reliable polling site for several election cycles now. Nate Silver - who was proven exactly right - didn't even have Romney close. Gallup, Rasmussen and other's always had Romney extremely close or ahead. Both positions could not be correct. Numbers are numbers and there are only so many things you can do to them before you begin erasing the actual numbers and putting the ones you want in place.

    
    

    Nate Silver shows his numbers and explains his methodology clearly. His approach is highly transparent. Anyone can fact check him and do the calculations for themselves. Not so much with some of the other polling sites and in particular those sites that showed a close race or a Romney lead. So, yes, looking at the way things were shaping up... I had some concerns!

    
    

    GUARDIAN ANGELS???

    
    

    It seems that I was not alone in my suspicions and concerns. The Hacker Group known as Anonymous was watching and working behind the scenes as well. They had discovered a piece of software known as ORCA that had been inserted by Karl Rove's operation in what is known as a "man in the middle" attack. The man in the middle attack works like this. Say you're mailing a letter to someone and you place your letter in mailbox to send it to them. Unbeknown to you, *I* own that mailbox. I collect your letter, read it, change it and send it on to whomever you're corresponding with. They *THINK* their letter is from you, but it is really from me. They respond. When their letter gets to *my* mailbox, I open it, read it and change it and send it on to you. The end result is you and your friend *believe* you're communicating directly with one another, when in essence you're communicating with me.

    
    

    This is what ORCA was designed to do. The votes from the Ohio precincts were being sent into Ohio's election tabulation center... or so they thought. Orca was designed to redirect those precinct results to RNC computers located in Tennessee. There the numbers could be changed to show a Romney win and *NOBODY* would have been the wiser.

    
    

    The Hacker group Anonymous stepped in and blocked ORCA by placing a firewall into the software thus preventing ORCA from functioning or being accessed by Karl Rove and his team of miscreants. This is why Karl was so shocked on election night. This is why he disputed Ohio because he *knew*... or as it turns out, he *THOUGHT* he knew that the fix was in. This is also why Mitt Romney was in shock! He had been assured that he was going to be the winner. He had already *paid* for the election.

    
    

    I'm not religious... but I will say, "THANK GOD FOR ANONYMOUS!" I love you guys!!!!

    
    

    The Progressive Influence. "If the report is true  I join Mr. Moore in....ANONYMOUS I love you guys!"