[Cryptography] Have you seen...

[John Gilmore]

> Excellent article on an Latin American election hacker in Bloomberg.
> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

It is a good article, though short on independent confirmations.

> Perhaps the election security is worse in Latin America, but I would
> not bet on it given the aging balloting machines in the US and a
> very long history of stuffing ballot boxes and Yellow journalism.

Hmm, the article doesn't mention stuffing ballot boxes at all.  The
interviewed "election hacker" used methods like spying on the
opposition, breaking into their computers and cellphones, sending fake
Tweets or phone calls designed to enrage their supporters among
voters, etc.  As far as I noticed, there was no mention of actually
changing votes in government computers after they were cast.  It was
all about using dirty tricks to convince people to vote for the wrong
politician.

We do see this sort of thing in California elections.  A favorite
trick for defeating close initiatives is to buy a bunch of media time
in the last week before the election, and put out endless repetitions
of high impact ads full of lies told by credible people.  The ads are
tested on focus groups for the biggest short-term impact, regardless
of their long term truth or convincingness.  By the time the other
side can respond, bam, it's election day and their voter support has
dropped below 49.99%, and the initiative loses.  And who cares if
the voters find that they have been lied to -- two days AFTER
the election?  Elections don't get rerun just because politicians
tell lies, that's expected.  Sorry, you lost, bye.

A friend of mine ran an initiative that would require that people be
given drug treatment three times -- and failed it each time -- before
they could be put in prison for drug crimes (California Proposition
5).  The largest political contributor in the state, the prison
guards' union, told my friend as he wrote it that they wouldn't oppose
it.  The only problem was that they were screws and their mouths were
moving.  They quietly arranged to film two TV commercials -- one
featuring Attorney General Jerry Brown, who wanted their support for
his later campaign for Governor (which he won); the other featuring
the worst machine politician left in California, Senator Dianne
Feinstein.  In the ads, they called the initiative the "Drug Dealer's
Bill of Rights" and said lots of other things about it.  You can see
the ads on YouTube.  In the last three weeks of the election,
$1,000,000 from the prison guards' union suddenly showed up in the
anti campaign.  (There were also $50K to $250K chunks contributed at
the last minute by politicians who had apparently raised more than
they needed for their own gerrymandered campaigns.)  That money was
used to buy airtime for these lying TV commercials in the last week of
the campaign.

The initiative failed.  A few days before the election it was obvious.
There's an extremely entertaining Democracy Now program featuring a
debate between Atty Gen Jerry Brown and my friend (Ethan Nadelmann) in
which they end up screaming at each other on the air, despite the best
efforts of moderator Amy Goodman.  See or hear:

  http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/3/california_attorney_general_vs_drug_policy

	John