A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.
The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.
The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.
Of course it is he has told all republicans to cheat and is mobilizing his private army to attack American citizens who are going to try to vote.
I’m kinda wondering why they hadn’t done it already. If you supply these machines for voting, you should be red-teaming them constantly to get vulnerabilities fixed. Isn’t that the purpose of this agency? What do they do, stand around and wait for someone to tell them that they can be hacked?
There have been efforts to do this in the past. DEF CON’s Voting Village spent a lot of effort to get second hand voting machines and provide them for hackers to try to compromise. The voting machine companies hated it, because it often demonstrated pretty terrible security practices. Since fixing security is expensive, they often adopted a “security through obscurity” mindset and refused to have anything tested. DEF CON still has a Voting Village, though I’m not sure if they still offer up machines for direct attack. Though ya, why States are satisfied with machines which don’t come with some type of standardized testing (including Red Teaming) is beyond me. The AVS WinVote’s security was so atrociously bad that it was finally decertified in a lot of States.
That said, hacking individual voting machines would be of little use if your goal is to change the outcome of an election, especially Statewide races. Polling in the US is really distributed, meaning that any effective attack would need to have multiple people all working in concert. And hacking on a machine by machine basis would take time and possibly create a lot of noise (statistical anomalies and the like). Big shifts would really come from pre-election tampering with things like voter rolls and propaganda/influence campaigns. That’s where CISA could (or should have) helped. Showing up now is way too little too late. It’s just the Trump administration trying to build up a bullshit case of “those silly States didn’t let us help them. Now look at how badly they were all HACKED!” With, of course, Democrat wins being the only “proof” of said hacks.
I hate how they never seem to look past trump and to whatever entity controls him.
It’s obvious he’s a useful idiot. He’s not some mastermind or crime lord.
Propublica has done some really good investigative journalism on this
We all speculate his handler is Putin, that has become clearer and clearer… now that the Russian Federation is basically allies with US… it’s definitely keep your enemies closer situation favoring Russia.
I feel like feds would know that.
I think American feds are an accomplice to trump and it’s all CIA operation.
The feds know and people who don’t like it have been replaced.