Internet Security Issues | CTVotersCount.org

Beware of the Watchdog that does not bark any details

NYTimes story that justifies our skepticism on NC ePollbook story: In Election Interference, Its What Reporters Didn’t Find That Matters

Among other things, we learned that intelligence agencies had intentionally worded their conclusions to specifically address “vote tallying,” not the back-end election systems—conclusions that were not even based on any in-depth investigation of the state election systems or the machines themselves, but on the accounts of American spies and digital intercepts of Russian communications, as well as on assessments by the Department of Homeland Security—which were largely superficial and not based on any in-depth investigation of the state electionsystems or machines themselves.

As we said in our earlier post: See No Evil, Find No Monkey Business, ePollbook Edition

the simple case is that we now have no reason to trust the claim that it was all a simple software error, that the Federal and State Governments were actually protecting us.

NYTimes story that justifies our skepticism on NC ePollbook story: In Election Interference, Its What Reporters Didn’t Find That Matters <read>

I had been on the cyber beat for six years and had grown accustomed to deep, often lengthy digital forensics analyses of cyber attacks against a wide range of targets: Silicon Valley start-ups, multinational conglomerates, government agencies and our own Times breach by Chinese government hackers. In the vast majority of cases, it takes investigators months or years to discover that hackers had indeed been lurking undetected on victims’ machines…

Yet American intelligence officials were adamant in a report in January—just two months after Election Day—that vote tallies had not been hacked. This despite the broad consensus among United States intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election through an extensive disinformation and propaganda campaign, as well as the hacking of electoral databases and websites, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

My colleagues Michael Wines, Matthew Rosenberg and I set out to find out how government officials had nixed the possibility of vote hacking so readily. It was especially unclear to us given that officials at the Department of Homeland Security testified last fall that Russian hackers probed election systems in 21 states, with varying degrees of success, and that months later, a National Security Agency report found that Russian hackers had indeed successfully infiltrated VR Systems, an election service provider in eight states, including he battlegrounds North Carolina, Florida and Virginia.

As we dug more into our investigation, the more unresolved incidents we found.

Among other things, we learned that intelligence agencies had intentionally worded their conclusions to specifically address “vote tallying,” not the back-end election systems—conclusions that were not even based on any in-depth investigation of the state election systems or the machines themselves, but on the accounts of American spies and digital intercepts of Russian communications, as well as on assessments by the Department of Homeland Security—which were largely superficial and not based on any in-depth investigation of the state election systems or machines themselves.

In fact, we discovered that precious little research had been conducted, the result of legal limits on the authority of intelligence agencies to address domestic issues and states’ historic reluctance to permit federal oversight of elections.

This is associated with another story in the NYTimes: Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny<read>

In Durham, a local firm with limited digital forensics or software engineering expertise produced a confidential report, much of it involving interviews with poll workers, on the county’s election problems. The report was obtained by The Times, and election technology specialists who reviewed it at the Times’ request said the firm had not conducted any malware analysis or checked to see if any of the e-poll book software was altered, adding that the report produced more questions than answers.

Neither VR Systems — which operates in seven states beyond North Carolina — nor local officials were warned before Election Day that Russian hackers could have compromised their software. After problems arose, Durham County rebuffed help from the Department of Homeland Security and Free & Fair, a team of digital election-forensics experts who volunteered to conduct a free autopsy. The same was true elsewhere across the country.

As we said in our earlier post: See No Evil, Find No Monkey Business, ePollbook Edition <read>

the simple case is that we now have no reason to trust the claim that it was all a simple software error, that the Federal and State Governments were actually protecting us.

We will post this under Skullduggery and Errors, since obfuscating and distorting the facts is deliberate skullduggery.

If [Connecticut] Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would Anyone Know?

NPR story by Pam Fessler: If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would Anyone Know? Fessler quotes several experts and election officials including Connecticut Assistant Secretary of the State Peggy Reeves:

Still, Connecticut Election Director Peggy Reeves told a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel on Monday that many local election officials are ill-equipped to handle cybersecurity threats.

“Many of our towns actually have no local IT support,” she said. “Seriously, they don’t have an IT director in their town. They might have a consultant that they call on if they have an issue. So they look to us, but we’re a pretty small division.”

Reeves said the best protection against hackers is probably the fact that the nation’s voting system isso decentralized, with different processes and equipment used in thousands of different locations.

We certainly agree with that and the cybersecurity experts quoted.

NPR story by Pam Fessler: If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would Anyone Know? <read> Fessler quotes several experts and election officials including Connecticut Assistant Secretary of the State Peggy Reeves:

Still, Connecticut Election Director Peggy Reeves told a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel on Monday that many local election officials are ill-equipped to handle cybersecurity threats.

“Many of our towns actually have no local IT support,” she said. “Seriously, they don’t have an IT director in their town. They might have a consultant that they call on if they have an issue. So they look to us, but we’re a pretty small division.”

Reeves said the best protection against hackers is probably the fact that the nation’s voting system isso decentralized, with different processes and equipment used in thousands of different locations.

We certainly agree with that and the cybersecurity experts quoted.

Amid Charges Russia Hacked U.S. Election, Keith Alexander Encourages eVoting for Canada

Former NSA Chief and now CEO cyber security contractor says Canada needs more cyber security, cyber weapons, and should deploy electronic voting: Don’t let cyberattack threat deter Canada from online voting, says former head of NSA

foreign interference that may have influenced the U.S. election should not deter Canada and other countries from embracing online voting, says the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency.

Retired U.S. general Keith Alexander, speaking at a defence industry trade show in Ottawa, also said it is important the Canadian military have some kind of offensive cyber capacity, even if that ability is limited.

There is no going back to a manual voting system, Alexander said in an interview with CBC News following his remarks to defence contractors, in which he warned that both government and private sector networks are vulnerable to a rising tide of “destructive” cyberattacks…

The U.S. experience is something to learn from, he said, but it should not make countries like Canada leery of e-voting.

Former National Security Agency director Keith Alexander, seen here testifying before the U.S. Senate intelligence committee in March, says Canada may need to develop an offensive cyber security posture or the ability to shut down cyberattacks. (Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

foreign interference that may have influenced the U.S. election should not deter Canada and other countries from embracing online voting, says the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency.

Retired U.S. general Keith Alexander, speaking at a defence industry trade show in Ottawa, also said it is important the Canadian military have some kind of offensive cyber capacity, even if that ability is limited.

There is no going back to a manual voting system, Alexander said in an interview with CBC News following his remarks to defence contractors, in which he warned that both government and private sector networks are vulnerable to a rising tide of “destructive” cyberattacks…

The U.S. experience is something to learn from, he said, but it should not make countries like Canada leery of e-voting.

“You can create a system where people can authenticate and vote online,” said Alexander, who in addition to running the NSA during the Edward Snowden leaks, was also head of the U.S. military’s cyber command.

We agree that everyone including all levels of the U.S. Government need to beef up cyber security. Yet, no system is yet, or ever will be completely secure. There are several reason against Internet Voting at this time:

No system has proven secure and likely cannot be made secure. Especially a system used over the Internet, presumably on consumers’ computers and smart phones.
Encryption is not sufficient and is not even safe, with holes provided by organizations within the U.S. Government.
Proposed systems for public online voting implementation do not and cannot provide voter verification and publicly verifiable auditing of results.
No commercial system has successfully passed a credible security audit or open security test. Most vendors have resisted any such testing.

Meanwhile it is pretty clear that U.S. voter registration systems were hacked before the November election. Consider the latest document leaked to the Intercept: Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before the 2016 Election <read> No evidence yet that the 2017 election was manipulated or deterred by such an attack, nor actual evidence that the Russian Government was involved. There is also little evidence to the contrary. A difficult thing to prove either way. One problem with the Internet and cybersecurity is that it is easy to make it look like someone else did it. Evidence that looks like Russian hackers could come from elsewhere, and even then its a far cry from Russian hackers to determining it was the Russian Government. From the Intercept:

The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

Dr. Harri Hursti addresses the potential for Russian election attacks

Dr. Harri Hursti is a respected international expert on electronic security, especially electronic voting. In a recent interview he addressed the risks and chances of correctly attributing the source of attacks, specifically focusing on Russia.

What do you think of the news that a member of Congress says there is “no doubt” that Russia is behind recent attacks on state election systems

The article makes several dangerous assumptions about the security of elections and election systems. Representative Adam Schiff said he doubted (Russians) could falsify a vote tally in a way that effects the election outcome. He also said outdated election systems makes this unlikely, but really, it just makes it easier. The voting machines were designed at a time when security wasn’t considered, included, or part of the specifications at all.

Dr. Harri Hursti is a respected international expert on electronic security, especially electronic voting. CTVotersCount readers may recall his role in the film Hacking Democracy demonstrating the “Hursti Hack” of Connecticut’s voting machines, the AccuVote-OS scanners.

In a recent interview he addressed the risks and chances of correctly attributing the source of attacks, specifically focusing on Russia <read>

What do you think of the news that a member of Congress says there is “no doubt” that Russia is behind recent attacks on state election systems

The article makes several dangerous assumptions about the security of elections and election systems. Representative Adam Schiff said he doubted (Russians) could falsify a vote tally in a way that effects the election outcome. He also said outdated election systems makes this unlikely, but really, it just makes it easier. The voting machines were designed at a time when security wasn’t considered, included, or part of the specifications at all.

These outdated computers are extremely slow. They don’t have the extra horsepower to do decent security on top of the job they were designed for…

So there’s no proof of voter registration tampering?

As in voting machines, the registration machine don’t have the capability of logging an alteration, and they are trivially altered themselves. It’s meaningless to claim there’s no evidence, since the systems don’t have the capability to report when they’re altered…

How can the US be so sure it’s Russia?

It can’t. It is very hard to find from where a network attack is coming from. It is equally easy to make certain that investigators will find “the trail” which is pointing to the wrong direction. Therefore under the assumption that you’re dealing with a skillful attacker, any trail found is a red flag for the fact there are so many ways to make it virtually impossible to find the trail. Any conclusive looking trail “found” should be considered suspect. Unless it’s a false trail, you can only say we suspect them, and until you get to the real people to the level of the actual perpetrators true identities, you can’t make a conclusion as to “where” they come from…

Given your Cold War background, does this feel familiar?

The Cold War was all about ideology, and therefore a large concept was something that we today call hybrid warfare. In that game the actual technological attacks are equally important as the psychological influencing of the general population with misinformation and misdirection. So this is all very familiar.

Also, something we in the Western world don’t understand is how deeply patriotic Russians are. Individual Russians, and self-organized groups, are willing to go to great lengths on their own, with their own initiative, if they believe that what they do will benefit Mother Russia, and/or in hope and believe that their actions once known will be rewarded.

Given your Cold War background, does this feel familiar?

The Cold War was all about ideology, and therefore a large concept was something that we today call hybrid warfare. In that game the actual technological attacks are equally important as the psychological influencing of the general population with misinformation and misdirection. So this is all very familiar.

Also, something we in the Western world don’t understand is how deeply patriotic Russians are. Individual Russians, and self-organized groups, are willing to go to great lengths on their own, with their own initiative, if they believe that what they do will benefit Mother Russia, and/or in hope and believe that their actions once known will be rewarded…

I would suggest reading the complete article. Dr. Hursti provide ans international prospective we do not fully comprehend.

A Meeting, A Hearing, and Lots of Nonsense

In the last two weeks there was a meeting of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and a hearing of the House Science and Technology Committee on “Cyber and Voting Machine Attacks”. In total there were seven “experts” giving their opinions along with many of the committee members giving theirs. For the most part, solid facts and reason were missing. The general plan seemed to be officials going overboard in reassuring the public.

One speaker was featured in both meetings, the Louisiana Secretary of State. He claimed, perhaps half joking, that it would take so many conspirators to rig an election that they would be better off just voting for their candidate — that got a lot of laughs, apparently at the expense of those who think our elections are vulnerable. He also claimed that hacking was hard to do since it takes programming skills. Actually programming skills are quite widely known and there are several ways to hack elections that do not require programming skills.

Another was the Secretary of State of West Virginia. She is widely known as a strong proponent of Internet voting. Readers may recall that she came to Connecticut to tout a pilot of Internet voting that was wisely not continued by the West Virginia Legislature. She also declined to describe new voting security measures she has taken, lest they become known. The EAC Committee seemed to agree with that failed theory, known as Security Through Obscurity.

Ironically, that same Secretary of State from West Virginia was given an award at the meeting by the EAC, partially for her strides in security.

Overall there was too much focus on cyber risks, from foreign powers, and from Russia. In the Committee meeting it was accepted that Russia hacked the DNC, although to our knowledge has not been proven.

There were two highlights.

The statement and comments by Dan Wallach from Rice University, the only true expert on election security present in either meeting.
The opening remarks by the Science and Technology Chair. He made a very clear statement of the importance of fair elections to democracy.

<Video of the Science and Technology Committee Meeting>
Lest some accuse me of being alarmist, let me reiterate and add to my position recently expressed in a letter to the Hartford Courant:

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary.

The risks come from foreign adversaries, domestic interests, partisans, independent hackers, and election insiders including vendors. Elections can be compromised without access to the Internet, without coding, and without altering computers. Political insiders, especially, have the motives and opportunities.

In any one election race the risks are low to moderate, yet the stakes are high. The closer the vote, the less certain the peoples’ votes were reflected in the declared winner. It is too late to do much before November, yet we should not rest once the election is over and decided. The time for deliberate action is in the months and year or two after a presidential election.

Hack Pointless? Or State of Denial?

Earlier this week Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, ROVAC President Melissa Russell and the Manchester CT Registrars of voters talked to NBC Connecticut. We add some annotation to the transcript, in [Brackets].

Even the machines used to digitally tabulate election results aren’t connected to the internet in cities and towns. Melissa Russell, a Bethlehem Registrar of Voters, with the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut reiterated the point that physical record keeping in Connecticut places the state at an advantage. [Not having voting systems connected to the Internet is definitely an advantage. Yet, not so much against local insider attacks, especially when local officials and their leaders are so confident (overconfident?)]

Local registrars, like Jim Stevenson and Tim Becker in Manchester, wonder what a hacker could really get from a hack of even a local election computer. [The answer, known for years is: Even skilled amateurs could change the result printed by the scanner. One method is the widely know Hursti Hack. UConn has articulated others. We are left to wonder why NBC did not interview anyone with expertise to answer the registrars questions. ]

NBC Connecticut
CT Election Officials Say a Hack Nearly Pointless
By Max Reiss
CT Election Officials Say a Hack Nearly Pointless
(Published Monday, Aug. 29, 2016)

After the FBI notified election officials nationwide of a hack on election databases in Arizona and Illinois, many went on alert, on the lookout for specific IP addresses. [A word to the wise: There are many IP addresses out there. It is suspicious activity that needs to be guarded against, not particular IP addresses.]

In Connecticut, state election officials said the IP addresses in question haven’t yet shown up on state servers, but added that the information obtained in Illinois, a list of more than 200,000 and their voting data like addresses and phone numbers, are already publicly available in Connecticut. [Yes, but they are available at a price. We might question if Russians or other groups outside of Connecticut asked for a copy. Also all the risks that concern Illinois are still there, if the data are available in a legitimate way, its just a bit easier in Connecticut to obtain.]
“I think someone said it was like hacking the phone book,” quipped Secretary of the State Denise Merrill.
She explained that Connecticut has perhaps the most decentralized voting and registration system in the country with 169 cities and towns that act as their own districts. Built into that system is an entirely paper based trove of voter cards, ballots, and backups. [There are advantages to decentralization, and some downsides. Its much harder to mount a general attack systems across the state. Yet, it is easier to compromise local systems. Local officials are much less capable of protecting systems. Local insider attacks are easier to accomplish. Let us remember that partisan officials have at least as much motivation as the Russians to change results – and local officials have more opportunity. Most election officials are of high integrity, yet they are not immune to the same forces that have landed Connecticut Governors, Mayors, Legislators, and Police in jail.]

“When you go into vote and you go to register on the list, it’s all still on paper so there is no simple database that’s containing all of the information,” Merrill said. [Actually its called the Centralized Voter Registration Database (CVRS). It is vital on election day to accomplish Election Day Registration and check voters who might have been incorrectly registered. That paper list in the polling place is only as good as the CVRS was a few days before the election, when the list was printed. An attack on the CVRS could involve changing many registrations so voters are not registered on election day, or sent absentee ballots to false addresses to be voted illegally. Addresses could have been changed without hacking the CVRS by Online Registration. To do online registration requires a voter’s CT Driver ID. That Driver ID could be obtained by hacking the DMV database, if it is not in the CVRS. (Has anyone checked the security of the DMV database?]

Voter lists themselves are already public records and campaigns purchase lists from the Secretary of the State every year.

Local registrars, like Jim Stevenson and Tim Becker in Manchester, wonder what a hacker could really get from a hack of even a local election computer. [The answer, known for years is: Even amateurs could change the result printed by the scanner. One method is the widely know Hursti Hack. UConn has articulated others. We are left to wonder why NBC did not interview anyone with expertise to answer the registrars questions, to satisfy that wonder. ]
“They would get, you know, name, address, phone number, DMV information such as license number, which is already made available if someone wanted to come in through Freedom of Information,” said Stevenson, the Democratic Registrar of Voters. [I doubt Driver ID is FOIable. If it is, we have problems for voter registration and other reasons. Once again, NBC could/should have asked experts.]

Even the machines used to digitally tabulate election results aren’t connected to the internet in cities and towns.
Melissa Russell, a Bethlehem Registrar of Voters, with the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut reiterated the point that physical record keeping in Connecticut places the state at an advantage. [Not having voting systems connected to the Internet is definitely an advantage. Yet, not so much against local insider attacks, especially when local officials and their leaders are so confident (overconfident?)]
We also have the advantage of a paper ballot system, where we can look at every vote cast in the case of any discrepancy to make sure our elections equipment has performed accurately. [They CAN. Candidates and the public cannot. The record of officials in looking carefully during post-election audits is quite questionable <See the Citizen Audit Reports> ]
Becker, the GOP registrar in Manchester, explained how state law mandates that each town keep individual paper records for voters, meaning altering results or hacking, would be a tall task.
“They would have to destroy the fire proof cabinets in 169 cities and towns to actually mess with our voter list.” [As we said before, they could alter the CVRS records and the paper records used at the polls would be wrong. The registrar’s office usually uses the online system first, so they would have to be concerned in a particular case to check the paper voter registration record. If there was a mass attack it would disrupt the whole election day to have each polling place call the registrars office to check the paper for each voter. Once again, an insider attack on those paper records would be relatively simple.]
Published at 10:26 PM EDT on Aug 29, 2016
Source: CT Election Officials Say a Hack Nearly Pointless | NBC Connecticut
http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/CT-Election-Officials-Say-a-Hack-Nearly-Pointless391684361.html#ixzz4Ipw9JbFD
Follow us: @nbcconnecticut on Twitter | NBCConnecticut on Facebook

How to excite the public about electronic voting: “Russia Might Hack an Election”

Apparently Donald Trump and the media have done in a few days what computer scientists, security experts, and voting integrity advocates have failed at for at least sixteen years: Excite the public about the dangers of electronic voting.

Apparently the threat of a sophisticated Russian hack is more threatening that an election being taken by the equivalent of amateur electronic ballot stuffing.

There are a lot of articles we could site, but one of the most comprehensive comes from Politico Magazine. It is written from the prospective of Princeton researchers, with lots of history and articulated concerns, with relatively little red baiting. How To Hack An Election In 7 Minutes

Our bad for suggesting that partisans, insiders, or domestic hackers could do the job and not emphasizing that foreign powers, including Russia could do it. Our bad for demonstrating that smart amateurs could do it without a sophisticated expert conspiracy. Apparently the threat of a sophisticated Russian hack is more threatening that an election being taken by the equivalent of electronic ballot stuffing.

It is a long read. I will summarize the concerns, with my comments in brackets []:

The powers that be seem duly convinced. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently conceded the “longer-term investments we need to make in the cybersecurity of our election process.” A statement by 31 security luminaries at the Aspen Institute issued a public statement: “Our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups.” Declared Wired: “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets.”

For the Princeton group, it’s precisely the alarm they’ve been trying to sound for most of the new millennium. “Look, we could see 15 years ago that this would be perfectly possible,” Appel tells me, speaking in subdued, clipped tones. “It’s well within the capabilities of a country as sophisticated as Russia.” He pauses for a moment, as if to consider this. “Actually, it’s well within the capabilities of much less well-funded and sophisticated attackers.”…

The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there…

In American politics, an onlooker might observe that hacking an election has been less of a threat than a tradition. Ballot stuffing famously plagued statewide and some federal elections well into the twentieth century…

[Apparently we are much less concerned about a domestic hack than a foreign one. History shows there is a lot of motivation and also a lack of a strong response to domestically stolen elections]

But the tipping point came in 2006, when a major congressional race between Vern Buchanan and Christine Jennings in Florida’s 13th district imploded over the vote counts in Sarasota County—where 18,000 votes from paperless machines essentially went missing (technically deemed an “undervote”) in a race decided by less than 400 votes. Felten drew an immediate connection to the primary suspect: The ES&S iVotronic machine, one of the many ordered in Pennsylvania after they deployed their HAVA funds. Shortly after the debacle, Governor Crist announced a deadline for paper backups in every country in Florida That year, Maryland Governor Bob Erlich urged his state’s votersto cast an absentee ballot rather than put their hands on a digital touchscreen—practically an unprecedented measure. By 2007, the touchscreens were so unpopular that two senators, Florida’s Ben Nelson and Sheldon Whitehouse form Rhode Island, had introduced legislation banning digital touchscreens in time for the 2012 election.

Precincts today that vote with an optical scan machine—another form of DRE that reads a bubble tally on a large card—tend not to have this problem; simply by filling it out, you’ve generated the receipt yourself. But that doesn’t mean the results can’t still be tampered with, and Felten’s students began writing papers that advised election officials on defending their auditing procedures from attempted manipulation.

Each state bears the scars of its own story with digital touchscreens—a parabola of havoc and mismanagement that has been the fifteen-year nightmare of state and local officials…

Today, Halderman reminds me, “the notion that a foreign state might try to interfere in American politics via some kind of cyber-attack is not far-fetched anymore.”

The Princeton group has no shortage of things that keep them up at night. Among possible targets, foreign hackers could attack the state and county computers that aggregate the precinct totals on election night—machines that are technically supposed to remain non-networked, but that Appel thinks are likely connected to the Internet, even accidentally, from time to time. They could attack digitized voter registration databases—an increasingly utilized tool, especially in Ohio, where their problems are mounting—erasing voters’ names from the polls (a measure that would either cause voters to walk away, or overload the provisional ballot system). They could infect software at the point of development, writing malicious ballot definition files that companies distribute, or do the same on a software patch. They could FedEx false software to a county clerk’s office and, with the right letterhead and convincing cover letter, get it installed. If a county clerk has the wrong laptop connected to the Internet at the wrong time, that could be a wide enough window for entry of an attack.

“No county clerk anywhere in the United States has the ability to defend themselves against advanced persistent threats,” Wallach tells me…

[We strongly doubt that many county clerks or local registrars in Connecticut has the ability to detect or defend against unsophisticated threats]

What would be the political motivation for a state-sponsored attack? In the case of Russia hacking the Democrats, the conventional wisdom would appear that Moscow would like to see President Trump strolling the Kremlin on a state visit. But the programmers also point out that other states may be leery. “China has a huge amount to lose. They would never dare do something like that,” says Wallach, who recently finished up a term with the Air Force’s science advisory board. Still, statistical threat assessment isn’t about likelihoods, they insist; it’s about anticipating unlikelihood.

[What would be the political motivation for a single insider, corporation, or a few partisans to attack an election and install their favorite President, Senator, Governor or Mayor?. Do we really have to answer?]

The good news is that Wallach thinks we’d smell something fishy, and fairly fast: “If tampering happens, we will find it. But you need to have a ‘then-what.’ If you detect electronic tampering, then what?”

[Where there is smoke, in the U.S. it seems there are more dire warnings of “Conspiracy Theorists”. Our track record investigating and correcting suspicious elections is worse than poor. See our <Book Review of Ballot Battles>]

No one has a straight answer, except for a uniform agreement on one thing: Chaos that would make 2000 look like child’s play. (Trump aping about “rigged elections” before the vote is even underway has certainly not helped.) The programmers suggest we ought to allow, for the purposes of imagination, the prospect of a nationwide recount. Both sides would accuse the other of corruption and sponsoring the attack. And the political response to the country of origin would prove equally difficult—the White House is reported to be gauging how best to respond to the DNC attack, a question that poses no obvious answers. What does an Election Day cyber strike warrant? Cruise missiles?

The easiest and ostensibly cheapest defense—attaching a voter verified paper receipt to every digital touchscreen—presents its own problem. It assumes states audit procedures are robust. According to Pam Smith at Verified Voting, over 20 states have auditing systems that are inadequate—not using sufficient sample sizes, or auditing only under certain parameters that could be outfoxed by a sophisticated attack—states that include Virginia, Indiana and Iowa.

[And Connecticut. We will save for another time a list of the inadequacies in our post election audit law and its implementation. We are not sure that Verified Voting includes CT in the 20, yet we point out that only about half the states have audit laws, leaving the vast majority of that half with inadequate audits.]

“There’s a very simple and old-fashioned recipe that we use in our American democracy,” Appel says. “The vote totals in each polling place are announced at the time the polls closed, in the polling place, to all observers—the poll workers, the party challengers, any citizen that’s observing the closing of the polls.” He goes on to describe how the totals in that precinct would be written on a piece of paper—pencils do just fine—then signed by the poll workers who have been operating that polling site.

“Any citizen can independently add up the precinct by precinct totals,” he continues. “And that’s a very important check. It’s way that with our precinct-based polling systems, we can have some assurance that hacked computers could not undetectably change the results of our election.”
[That is far from feasible, considering the vast number of districts and counts to be accumulated. Go ahead and try doing that just in Connecticut, from the results filed in 169 town clerks offices and balance them with the totals posted for the Presidential Primary on the Secretary of the State’s website]
There could be a greater lesson in Appel’s point. Technology didn’t create the problem. Perhaps technology is intrinsic to the problem—our lack of trust that has metastasized in a surveillance culture was bound to aggrandize the problems of voting, the most trusting civic act we know. It seems unlikely to expect a singular cure to the American presidential election, not because of the incomprehensibility of cryptography or the untrustworthiness of tech companies, but because there is no such thing as the singular election: 8,000 jurisdictions in a leaky mess of federalism and poorly spent dollars. The neat results and cable announcements on election night represent an optical illusion, like a series of ones and zeroes, whizzing beyond our apprehension.

[As we said we are far public verification of a Presidential Election, or for that matter almost any Federal, State, or Local election.]

If Russia hacked the DNC? What me worry?

Did Russia hack the DNC, DCCC, and Hillary’s Campaign. And does it only matter who the hackers are?

With little disclosed evidence, the prime story has been the question of who hacked the sites. That is an important aspect of the news, yet there are other important issues obscured, perhaps intentionally by the focus on that one aspect of the hacks.

Did Russia hack the DNC, DCCC, and Hillary’s Campaign. And does it only matter who the hackers are?

This has been quite a week with for hackers and the media coverage of hacks. With little disclosed evidence, the prime story has been the question of who hacked the sites. That is an important aspect of the news, yet there are other important issues obscured, perhaps intentionally by the focus on that one aspect of the hacks. Less covered are:

The unfair, perhaps illegal, conduct of the DNC disclosed in the emails and voice mails.
The possibility that elections themselves can be manipulated directly through changing results, messing with registration systems etc.
Is Wikileaks extra guilty for disclosing the information when they did? Should they have held it until after the election, like the NYTimes did with James Risen’s story of a failed CIA operation?
Should we feel safer if the hacks are not from the Russian government, and are actually the work of foreign amateurs? Domestic amateurs? Republicans? Business interests? Israel? China? The CIA? The NSA? Political Insiders? or Vendor Insiders? Which group, if any, would you rather have manipulate our elections?
Would we be safer if the perpetrator(s) kept the information secret? Why would that be preferred? What if Trump had secret information on Hillary or her campaign? What if Democrats or their supporters have hacked similar information on Trump or the Republicans and are not disclosing it? The information disclosed obviously hurts the DNC, yet other information could be more valuable to opponents, if it were not disclosed.
In whose interest is the disclosure of the information? In whose interest is blaming the attack on Russia?
In whose interest is focusing only on determining the perpetrators? Obviously those exposed by the emails and the actual perpetrators, if not Russia.

Some articles to consider. Bruce Schnier in the Washington Post: By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines <read>

The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack.

From The Conversation by Richard Forno: How vulnerable to hacking is the US election cyber infrastructure? <read>

Of course, the desire to interfere with another country’s internal political processes is nothing new. Global powers routinely monitor their adversaries and, when deemed necessary, will try to clandestinely undermine or influence foreign domestic politics to their own benefit. For example, the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence service engaged in so-called “active measures” designed to influence Western opinion. Among other efforts, it spread conspiracy theories about government officials and fabricated documents intended to exploit the social tensions of the 1960s. Similarly, U.S. intelligence services have conducted their own secret activities against foreign political systems – perhaps most notably its repeated attempts to help overthrow pro-communist Fidel Castro in Cuba…

One of the most obvious, direct ways to affect a country’s election is to interfere with the way citizens actually cast votes. As the United States (and other nations) embrace electronic voting, it must take steps to ensure the security – and more importantly, the trustworthiness – of the systems. Not doing so can endanger a nation’s domestic democratic will and create general political discord – a situation that can be exploited by an adversary for its own purposes…

Democracies endure based not on the whims of a single ruler but the shared electoral responsibility of informed citizens who trust their government and its systems. That trust must not be broken by complacency, lack of resources or the intentional actions of a foreign power.

Online Voting Is Risky, Riskier than Online Banking

My letter to the Hartford Courant today.

To the Editor,

The article in the Sunday July, 10 Smarter Living Section, “Democracy in The Digital Age”, is a one-sided disservice to readers. The article, abbreviated from Consumer Reports original, provides a one-sided case for online voting. The article quotes the CEO of a company selling online voting at a huge expense to governments around the world. She touts the benefits without detailing the risks. The system she touts as secure, has never been proven secure. It has never been subjected to a public security test. Unlike the printed version, the original article at Consumer Reports details the risks of online voting…

My letter to the Hartford Courant today.

To the Editor,

The article in the Sunday July, 10 Smarter Living Section, “Democracy in The Digital Age”, is a one-sided disservice to readers. The article, abbreviated from Consumer Reports original, provides a one-sided case for online voting. The article quotes the CEO of a company selling online voting at a huge expense to governments around the world. She touts the benefits without detailing the risks. The system she touts as secure, has never been proven secure. It has never been subjected to a public security test. Unlike the printed version, the original article at Consumer Reports details the risks of online voting, quoting a nationally known voting integrity advocate and a recognized computer scientist specializing in electronic voting, . How ironic that the lead article in the same section, “Protecting Your Data”, points out how risky it is to do banking transactions over the internet from free wi-fi sites. If the unedited Consumer Reports article was provided, readers would have learned why, with all its risks, Internet banking is actually much safer than online voting.

Here is the “full” abbreviated Courant Article: <read>

Original Consumer Reports article quoting Pam Smith and Aviel Rubin <read>

If they fear Internet privacy and security, why would they vote that way?

A new government survey highlights the consequences of Internet insecurity. From the Washington Post: Why a staggering number of Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to <read>

Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday…

The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities…

Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday.

This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fall-out of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities…

The survey showed that nearly 20 percent of the survey’s respondents had personally experienced some form of identity theft, an online security breach, or another similar problem over the year before the survey was taken last July. Overall, 45 percent said their concerns about online privacy and security stopped them from using the Web in very practical ways…

“NTIA’s initial analysis only scratches the surface of this important area, but it is clear that policymakers need to develop a better understanding of mistrust in the privacy and security of the Internet and the resulting chilling effects,” wrote Goldberg, the NTIA analyst. “In addition to being a problem of great concern to many Americans, privacy and security issues may reduce economic activity and hamper the free exchange of ideas online.”