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
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.
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?
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
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.