Calling All Geeks and Nerds
The hacker network Anonymous claimed in a press release that Republican activist and Fox News anchor, Karl Rove tried to steal votes electronically. According to the group, Rove laid tunnels through voter tracking software intended to switch votes in three states from Obama to Romney during a server crash, essentially stealing the election.
There’s a You Tube about it here.
I dunno know a whole lot about how this would work and if it is possible that it could even happen. So Don A and the rest of the Nerd Troops — whaddya think?
The trick is to alter the counter (before the election) so it reflects negative votes for a candidate. This doesn’t show up because the programming isn’t designed to show the presence of a negative. The count of voters remains the same, it’s just “redistributed” from one candidate to another. It was demonstrated on Diebold machines several years ago but Diebold refuses to make its coding public so it can be tested.
1The 2 don’t match up perfectly. The first one implies that there was some sort of plan to rig the vote count. I had heard several people suggesting that the GOP governors could flip votes to Romney (http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25513&Itemid=39), that Romney family linked businesses were set to give Ohio to Mittens (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32748.htm and http://www.legitgov.org/Romney-Family-Linked-Voting-Machine-Company-Will-Count-Votes) . These seem to be what the pre-election video is referencing.
The post-election PDF which describes how the GOP’s Get Out The Vote project was sabotaged sounds more like what actually happened. The first reports were that it was a simple case of an untested software system failing when placed under a heavy load. The Anonymous PDF describes one way that someone might have been able to push such a system. But since it is claiming credit after the fact, it could be like those cases where someone commits a terrorist bombing and 4 groups immediately claim they did it.
But here’s the question we were kicking around this weekend at my house — assuming Anonymous actually did this obviously criminal act, was it simply malicious mischief or was it a guerrilla tactic which did a small amount of damage to a bridge in order to prevent that train loaded with soldiers who were on a mission of massacre?
2Anything is possible, but this doesn’t strike me as likely. Ostensibly, ORCA was designed to facilitate Republican GOTV efforts. There would be no need to have such a cover for a vote stealing effort. Just some server somewhere. It’s not clear why vote stealing would require a server crash, either.
Not saying it couldn’t be done.
3I’m not a computer nerd, but I do know that most all conspiracy theories are wrong, and they are usually an excuse for poor critical thinking skills.
My first question about conspiracy theories is how many people are involved. More people means less chance of secrecy or success.
Second, I ask how many “leaps of faith” are required. Occam’s Razor shaves clean!
Also beware of people who argue using ideas not evidence. When they produce tangible and testable evidence then we can determine the truth.
Making the case for the probability of the event is NOT evidence. Metaphors are not evidence, accusations are not evidence. Explaining how something could happen is not evidence. And questions are certainly not evidence.
They are accusing some people of a major felony. If they could make it stick, I believe they would have made the evidence public. (But I’m arguing by idea, not by fact.)
4An aside. On election night as I watched the returns, I imagined Mitt reaching in his shirt pocket and pulling out a receipt for the state of Ohio. He paid for it and he could not imagine why he was not getting his money’s worth.
Then he took a closer look and realized that he bought Omaha, not Ohio.
Oops.
5I’m not a “nerd”. But I’ve been using a computer long enough to know that if a person sets their mind to do it, any computer in the world….. whether it be The United States Department of Defense….. or yours and mine…….. can be hacked.
Been screaming for years for paper ballots. At least, you have a paper trail.
6Karl Rove is billed by many as some kind of genius-
7Bush’s Brain is an example. However his record is does not support this claim. He won elections in Texas using Guns, God and Gays as issues. Then he got a person named George Bush elected as governor when half the people thought it was the other Bush. He lost the 2000 election- Al Gore won and the Supreme Court elected Bush. In 2004 he won Ohio by only a few votes using anti gay marriage in issues which was also on the ballot in 14 states.
The only truly secure computer is one that isn’t connected to anything. And you still need to worry about the security of the people using it.
8I’ve been working in IT for 50 years, often at the leading edge of technology.
What disturbs me about the entire electronic voting system is the vulnerability for fraud. The software is not open for independent professional review because it’s considered ‘trade secret’. The code could be made public and protected by copyright. That would at least give the IT world the ability to examine it and verify its honesty and neutrality.
Lacking any voluntary exposure, I have no problem with Anonymous exposing it. It may technically be illegal, but it was technically illegal at the time to agitate for womens sufferage, end segregation, get out of Vietnam, etc.
9While this could explain why Turd Blossom lost his entire mind on FOX that night, I agree that, while technologically plausible, it’s impossible in a practical sense.
What I do believe is more likely, but still pretty unbelieveable, is that Anonymous crashed ORCA on election day, is taking credit for it, and is claiming it was a secret backdoor into rigging th election.
What I think is most likely, is that ORCA crashed on its own due to poor design (it should have been implemented on a state-by-state basis, instead of all that running back to Boston) and that Anonymous is trying to take credit and claim heroism.
It’s like if a gas leak blew up an embassy, and al Qaeda claimed responsibility because the embassy was full of agents provocateur.
10Unless solid evidence proves the contrary, I’m willing to give the Republicans credit for building a really stupid GOTV system.
The entire Romney campaign was one flub after another, so its natural to conclude that ORCA was another big top/down plan executed by over-confident over-paid flunkeys.
11This is a long read, but fascinating as hell.
Yeh. Rove planned to “steal” Ohio, which explains why he screamed so much when it was called for Obama.
@OldMayFly….. ORCA was hacked.
This article is “fairly” solid evidence.
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/newVR/index.php?q=node/41
Paper Ballots people, is the only way to go.
12I kind of hate that this is making the rounds. There is already talk of Obama rigging the election. While those of us on the left might see this as Anonymous “saving” the election and even (the youtube video) promoting election integrity, but I don’t think the right is going to see it that way. If I were a Romney supporter I might see this as evidence that hackers had manipulated the vote for Obama. As far as DonA’s question, I think the actions preventing the manipulation of the votes, if what they are saying is true, was a good if illegal action, but maybe not the best or even the most efficient action to prevent a bad event from happening. But the crashing of ORCA (the GOTV software), if true, seems like just malicious mischief unrelated to preventing the vote switching.
13Watch this video of Thom Hartman on Susie Madrak’s website Suburban Guerrilla. It will make you think! http://susiemadrak.com/
14It seems as if these people had access to Rove’s computers and did not bother to copy the malicious program to present it as evidence. They want us to take their word for it that a crime was attempted. That’s one big leap of faith. We have no way to test their credibility.
If they convince me it will be with documents and witnesses that can be cross examined, not implications and innuendo by unnamed sources.
15A number of factors, in no particular order:
16* The voting machines are completely opaque and unauditable. Here’s a WaPo graphic on how we handle things that are *really* important.
* The companies that make the voting machines are run by hard-core Republicans. The president of Diebold famously promised to “deliver Ohio for Bush” in 2004.
* There have been a string of “completely unexpected upsets” connected to the machines, invariably with Republican winners.
* There have been a string of “midnight updates” to the machines just before elections. (From an IT standpoint, this is absolutely horrible practice — there’s no way to test the updated systems before the election.)
* In 2004, the exit polls showed Kerry winning Ohio. Exit polls are how the UN determines whether elections are fair or not. In addition, the Ohio elections people cleared the electronic machines (the only records of votes were the central computer records) *in defiance of a Federal court order*.
* The ORCA system was supposedly a “scratch list” system. If that was all it was, it was grossly overcomplicated — a mid-level programmer could hack out one in a week. It also had an obviously and grossly underpowered Internet connection. (As an IT pro, I say, “WTF??”)
Let the FBI sort it all out.
If they can rummage through the e-mail of the Director of the CIA….
They should be able to sort this out.
17There was an interesting diary on Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/17/1162678/-Anonymous-claims-it-stopped-Karl-Rove-from-hacking-the-vote) that was labeled conspiracy theory. However the technical details discussed and the context of this story is important.
From one commenter (G2geek, whom I’ve rec’ed before for his knowledge and common sense):
“The person who received and published the Anon letter, has background in the design & development of sophisticated software methods of intelligence collection & analysis.
Among them, analytic tools for use in conjunction with “social” sites.
He also has track record with progressive members of Congress, and before that, as a telecoms transmission engineer.
This passed his sniff test. And if he was the first & only person to whom Anon sent their letter, it’s probable that they checked out his background first. ”
and
“2004 Vote totals from a few Ohio counties mysteriously passed through a server in Tennessee, on their way to being reported as giving Bush the lead that gave him the election.
ORCA was cover for a man in the middle attack.
That attack is what Anon thwarted.”
Here’s a link to Thom Hartmann discussing this topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=REn1BnJE3do
(Sorry if I goofed up that last one!)
18Doesn’t bother me at all that somebody, regardless of who they are, or how they accomplished it,….. prevented Karl Rove from stealing another Presidential election.
@Lyntilla….. there are some people in this country who are NEVER going to acknowledge Barack Obama ….. is President of these United States…..sad as it may be.
They still want to see his birth certificate.
If it bothers them…… too bad…. so sad.
19Yet another year in which I praise and cherish Oregon’s vote by mail system. It offers about 3 weeks of early voting, you can drop it off at a ballot box or mail it in, and there’s a paper trail. I suppose there could be shenanigans in the elections office when they’re counting, but they can’t mess with my ability to submit a ballot knowing it says what I mean.
The only thing I miss is going down to the firehouse or church or school and seeing all the nice seniors signing voters in. I remember the platter of cookies, and the smell of weak percolator coffee… those were the days.
I do always take my ballot to the county elections office ballot box – I still want that sense of “I voted!” which just dropping the ballot in the mail doesn’t give me. My only real complaint is that they don’t slide an “I voted!” sticker in the ballot packets so we can slap it on our chest the day we droop our ballot.
20I have a girlfriend in WA who says they vote by mail, too. Was news to me. Not how we do it in TX. I grew up in Houston where they had these huge mechanical voting booths with mechanical curtains and I was so looking forward to being old enough to vote in one. But I never got the chance as when I was old enough to vote, I was voting elsewhere. My first election was with a paper punch ballot. I was appalled. No machine? These days we are using electronic tablets (Austin, TX). Like so many, the software is proprietary and many wonder as to its reliability.
21Wow, Miemaw! Thanks for the great link. I’ve always totally agreed with you on the necessity of paper ballots. And now I’m convinced you are right about ORCA.
22Most of what Anonymous has done seems to have come in the form of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks through access to Root Server Systems. For the uninitiated, a DDoS attack attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing a denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.
Yahoo, Buy.com, RIAA and the United States Copyright Office are among the victims of DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks can also create more widespread disruption. In October 2010, for example, a massive DDoS attack took the entire country of Myanmar offline.
IF I understand the video correctly, Anonymous seems to be claiming that they used the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (that is what it is called – I swear I did not make this up!), a network stress testing application that has been used by Anonymous to accomplish its DDOS attacks in the past to test both the Ohio system and Roves systems. They seem to be claiming that when Ohio failed they were faced with choices.
They claim that to allow him to go through with it and then provide proof (which can be done, hackers do leave a trail), would potentially have resulted in another Bush scenario and that it might take months to sort out – provided of course that the Supremes allowed that to happen. Now we could argue that Obama did not need Ohio but Anonymous could not guarantee that scenario at the time and they felt their best bet was to put up a firewall to block the Roveian Rats from sneaking in the election backdoor and changing the numbers. News reports seem to be indicating that there is reason to suspect that some form of DDos attack occured http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/11/romneys-fail-whale-orca-the-votetracker-149098.html
I’d like some proof but as a chick who has had some CISCO Systems, CNA course work I can tell you that the scenario is highly plausible which is why I darn near gave birth to a small cow when JJ posted that Mitten’s son was buying his way into the voting machine industry. What can I say, I left my trusting nature behind in 2000 and buried it in the backyard in 2004.
There are lots of articles by reputable journalists and scientists indicating that there are HUGE issues associated with electronic voting.
http://nomorestolenelections.org/news/salon-princeton-university-study-demonstrates-how-diebolds-machines-can-be-hacked?page=9
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/27/votinghack/
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/03/24/64711/most-electronic-voting-isnt-secure.html
They were discussing the issues associated with this at Black Hat and Def Con (the two big hacker and defense contractor technology expos), back in 2004. Andrew Gumbel had a great book about this back in 2005, “Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America,” I think it is out on Kindle, and it makes a good albeit depressing read. The bottom line – eelectronic election manipulation is both possible and there is reason to believe that it occurs.
Allow me to make the following observations: There has never been a computer system or program built that could not be hacked. There never will be one that can not be hacked. Never. Let me repeat that, N-E-V-E-R. Any Internet security person who is worth their salts will tell you that. All you can do is make it tough enough to slow them down. How? By putting up a firewall, running your antivirus software (update it), checking for malware, cookies and bots on a daily basis and hoping for the best. This is why major corporations back up their data regularly off site and it is why they pay millions of dollars to security professionals to continuously monitor their systems and upgrade them based on new information.
States and governments do not have the kind of money to devote to this. They do the best they can with what they have and they tend to operate with a mostly volunteer and or poorly paid, scantily trained army of workers. It is not enough, I know my husband and I are electronic (E) judges on election day. Miemaw is absolutely right – we all need a paper print out / ballot.
If you are asking if Anonymous is capable of doing this, the answer is most definitely yes.
If you are asking if Karl Rove’s minions are capable of doing this the answer is also yes.
The question is of course, did they? I don’t know but it certainly would explain a lot wouldn’t it?
My guess is that this is being looked into and that if there is proof out there it will eventually be found. But my guess is also that Karl baby will never do time any more than Tom Delay will. You know what they say, “you can’t hang a millionaire in America.” But I am betting the Koch brothers would like to try the concept out on Karl right about now.
23And as to why it worked in 2004 and not in 2012 …
24@shortpeople One of my cow-orkers used to work for NSA and says that the only secure computer is one that is in a windowless room, not connected to any network, has no non-volatile storage, and is unplugged.
@Miemaw — we worked very hard to get the touch screen/Direct Recording Electronic machines in our county replaced with optical scan devices that read a physical paper ballot marked by the voter. If all else fails they can be read by the Mark I eyeball but, like the punch cards with hanging chads, the intent of the voter in cases where there are erasures or incompletely filled ovals remains a judgement call.
25I have nothing to add except to shout “hooray” that this topic has finally made it into the m$m. I think that exposure is a large part of the reason they weren’t able to steal a third presidential election.
26In the forest and trees department, it really doesn’t matter whether it was in play this time. An electronic voting system with no auditable recount trail (ie paper) will either fail or corrupt an election sooner rather than later. Absent some form of print out there will always be doubt and the conspiracy theorists will have credible complaints. Every voting system should be recountable!
27This is all I’m going to say about this. Ya’ll remember the “Help American Vote Act”…. if you don’t the Wiki can refresh your memory…… like it did mine.
It was overwhelmingly passed by Bush, and his Congress, right after the Supreme Court declared him “President”.
That’s when we all went to using the Diebolds..and the e-Slates, and whatevers…… And, that’s when Karl Rove started promising a “never-ending Republican majority”….
I’m not paranoid. (or a “conspiracy theorist” …. but I do not think for one minute, that we would have been forced to used electronic voting machines, if the folks who forced them on us, (Bush et al) had not been totally ASSURED by the companies who furnished them, that they could manipulate the data contained in them, just about any way they wanted to, whenever they needed to.
Up until this election, they had.
That’s what I think.
That’s my take on all this.
28I agree that the electronic voting machines are vulnerable. Furthermore, I wouldn’t have any faith in printed reports from such machines – if you can hack votes, you can also have the machine print out what you want.
But I’m not seeing anything here that gives evidence that ORCA was able to do this. How was it supposed to be inserted as the man in the middle? And between what servers?
29I am convinced that all this is possible. I agree that paper ballots should be used and that the voting machines should be transparent and not proprietary. However, I have yet to see anyone come forward with actual evidence that an election has been stolen electronically.
There is just one fly in the ointment of the theory that the machines under control of proprietary companies in the favor of Republicans have and are stealing elections for Republicans. If this is actually going on…. why did Obama win in 2008?
30