[IP] "How to steal an election by hacking the vote" (Ars Technica PDF)
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steve Goldstein <steve.goldstein@xxxxxxx>
Date: October 30, 2006 5:02:41 PM EST
To: "David Farber [IP]" <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>, dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Dewayne Hendricks)
Subject: "How to steal an election by hacking the vote" (Ars Technica
PDF)
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars
The 27-page downloadable PDF begins this way:
How to steal an election by hacking the vote
By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
One bad apple...
Ads by Google
Real Tech Support
No Scripts, No OSRI 24/7, Guaranteed results.
www.yourtechonline.com
Advertise on this site
What if I told you that it would take only one person-one highly
motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either
authorized or unauthorized access to the right company's internal
computer network-to steal a statewide election? You might think I was
crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that's only a
remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think
I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping
and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this
scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in
some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only
will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get
suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly
wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't blame you.
So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately
skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in
damage to America's private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from
the safety of his parents' basement, and that many of the victims in
the attack would never know that they'd been compromised? Before the
rise of the Internet, this scenario also might've been considered
alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it's all too real.
Thanks to the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording
electronic (DRE) voting machines in states and counties across
America, the two scenarios that I just outlined have now become
siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the same large, unhappy
family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our national
election infrastructure is now largely an information technology
infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote
fraud is now an information security problem. If you've been keeping
track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of
high-profile breaches in public- and private-sector networks, then
you know how well we're (not) doing on the infosec front.
Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica,
I've followed the merging of the areas of election security and
information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly
in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I've
yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well
and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida
recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article,
I'm going to show you how to steal an election.
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/