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How to Hack an Election

305 points by newscasta 11y ago

danso 11y ago
> He also splurged on the very best fake Twitter profiles; they’d been maintained for at least a year, giving them a patina of believability. > Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos. I've been wondering when more sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact. The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles...I don't mean just the trend of "Hey 3 people said something on Twitter so it's a story", but that there's also not enough skepticism paired with efficient ways for sniffing out fakery on social media. I hadn't thought about the problem of a mass army of bots suddenly creating a trending tag. It reminds me of "The Agency", a story published last year investigating how Russian operatives allegedly used human-controlled Twitter spamming to try to publicize a fake story of a Louisiana chemical plant explosion: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_... But as sophisticated as that sockpuppet campaign was...it was obviously destined to fail by the fact that an exploding chemical plant is fairly easy to confirm as true or false in real life. Trending opinions about politics don't offer such binary ways of filtering.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Propaganda takes time. Often the most effective stuff happens when you aren't even aware of it. You progress through your regular life and encounter regular things. People bitch on the internet about stupid stuff with the occasional decent argument, and nothing looks out of the ordinary. You see laughable arguments about politicians with hints of truth, or intrude, but maybe you ignore it. After a while you see more arguments along the same line of reasoning, but with more data and less vitriol. You find yourself agreeing more, even if you like the person being disparaged. You may even come around to accept a side of an argument you didn't think much about before. This is how minds are turned. First the trolls and bots do as they do. Some people catch a whiff and continue the trend. Sometimes as a joke, other times seriously. Even those who pretend to be joking will not long be indistinguishable from the fools who think they are in good company. Propaganda is not a tidal wave that comes crashing down on established opinions, it is a steady stream that eats at solid rock until it creates a deep gorge you could not have imagined structured in any other way.
  - _greim_ 11y ago
    The world is neck deep in dearly-held beliefs that would quickly die out if people en-masse embraced the kind of systematic, relentless skepticism required to combat this. Society protects these beliefs by stigmatizing skepticism, but in doing so effectively makes itself vulnerable to exploit.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      I myself am skeptical about that. Edward Bernays, who really pioneered propaganda, argued that people put elements of identity in "logic-proof compartments" because to be one thing by definition means not being another thing, and people often would rather shut out thoughts than seriously question themselves. Are you an "entrepreneur?" What about "talented?" Or "Democrat?" Or even, "Liberal?" "Conservative?" Public opinion is as much an influence on propagandists as they are on public opinion.
  - fweespee_ch 11y ago
    > Propaganda is not a tidal wave that comes crashing down on established opinions, it is a steady stream that eats at solid rock until it creates a deep gorge you could not have imagined structured in any other way. Yes. However, they swing things in a single election cycle for marginal supporters of a candidate [which are the folks that really control the outcome in the US. The majority of the states are consistent.]. http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-work.shtml http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-wo... > Roughly 14 percent of the students said the attack on their candidate made them support him even more, the researchers found. But an equal percentage of students said the advertisement weakened their support and caused them to move closer to the opponent—the one who ran the negative ad. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-01-22-psychology-political-propoganda_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergan... > •Just giving medical students pens with a drug's name on them made the students significantly more favorably disposed toward the medication than otherwise, despite their immersion in classes aimed at letting them rationally evaluate drug benefits, found a 2009 Archives of Internal Medicinereport. > •Remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland? Roughly a third of people presented with a fake ad depicting a visit to Disneyland that featured a handshake with Bugs later remembered or knew the meet up with the 'wascally wabbit' had happened to them, according to a 2001 University of Washington study. Even though Bugs is owned by Warner Brothers and verboten at a Disney facility, so it couldn't have happened.
- ggchappell 11y ago
  > The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles. Why should they care? The purpose of a news business is to make money. If it works, then it works. I think the real problem here is the incentive structure for a modern news business, as well as the network effects of sharing, links, etc.
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    Even assuming maximum cynicism, they should care about losing trust (and therefore future business) when it's shown they've spread fake news.
    - ggchappell 11y ago
      That would be the case if they did in fact lose money based on this problem. I don't know how common/significant such losses are. But it seems clear that lots of news organizations are betting heavily that such losses are less than the cost of ensuring that they publish only reliable news.
- CM30 11y ago
  The media are often... how should I say it... a tad behind the times in regards to how the internet works and how it can be exploited. For example, note all the media coverage a year or two ago about 'fake reviews' on sites like Amazon and Yelp. These have been widespread since both sites begun, yet were pretty well ignored by the media for most of that. Or the comments and articles about Reddit's launch. Apparently, the idea that someone could use fake users to start a community shocked a few unwary people (and journalists). Despite this being a forum building tactic since the internet begun, and a business tactic (to some degree) for decades or centuries. Or heck, the 'trolling' and harassment stuff about Twitter and social networks. Old tactics and behaviour, but seemingly not known by the mainstream media till it affected sites their journalists used. Really, the media is unprepared for a lot of stuff, since they're about two decades behind when it comes to knowing how technology and culture works. As for when sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact? It might well already be having one. I mean, similar stuff is endemic on Russian language forums and sites, and hey, governments have access to these techniques and useful software to help carry them out...
hackuser 11y ago
This shouldn't be a surprise: I think most HN members know that it's possible; we know that the rewards (incredible power, status, and everything you can get with them includig the spoils of office) are worth the investment (only $600K for this solution!); we know that there are many people, including politicians, unsavory enough to do it. The question is, why do we pretend it's not happening until there's a smoking gun? Consider the U.S. presidential election: The outcome is worth billions each to very many parties worldwide; it's existential to some foreign governments and actors; many in the U.S. have very powerful ideological motives. How much would it cost to hack voting machines? It seems very likely to me that it's happening, though I don't know where or to what extent. I know I'm not the first to point out this risk, but why should we assume that the reported vote count represents the actual vote? Becasue there is no smoking gun yet? That's like assuming your critical network hasn't been hacked, and doing nothing to protect it, because you haven't seen evidence of an attack yet.
- josho 11y ago
  It is happening in the US and in plain sight--yet its citizens don't seem to care. Eg. Gerrymandering, drastically reducing voting stations (see AZ), goofy voter registration law changes. These issues don't occur in other mature democracies.
  - simplemath 11y ago
    They do happen in late stage capitalist oligarchies though. We'll get Elysium, not utopia.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      We already live in Elysium. All we lack is robots preventing people from Earth (aka India/China/Nigeria/Malaysia) come join us. The ocean does a good enough job.
      - shanacarp 11y ago
        do you believe the state should exist - if so, how does it function? what are the duties of the state? how do people join the state? are there people who are "naturally part of the state" if so - why? How does this state thing work? If you don't believe in a state. Do you believe in contact? if so, why? if they get broken, how do they get enforced, or he penalties within them enforced? Who is or is not involved Do you believe in the concept of laws and law making? Who is involved in laws and law-making, especially if there is no state in your world view, but laws somehow do still exist. Your claim, and other claims you've made in the past, especially around "violence via taxes" and "violence because immigration" makes it sound like you don't think a state should exist, and all the things that come with a stable state, such as the ability to make contracts and get them enforced, have laws and create new ones. It would make you sound less cynical and more serious if you explained what you were really arguing about, what you actually did believe in, what you believe was the intelligent answer, rather than just arguing against people. Otherwise, how are you much better than the Sophists that Socrates railed against?
rossdavidh 11y ago
Ugh. I don't know if the particular people involved here are telling the truth, but I basically know that something like this must be happening, given the incentives involved. Dispiriting, I have to say, since it would be hard to beat this sort of thing without becoming what you're fighting against.
- rossdavidh 11y ago
  Also, at the end there when they implied that HRC is hiring Rendon for the general election, did anyone else find themselves thinking that this whole story could be a manipulative plant of the very sort they were discussing? Not that I think HRC is above this sort of thing.
  - pussinboots 11y ago
    well, it is bloomberg lol
  - doodlebugging 11y ago
    I wonder if the implication was that the candidate from Texas was the interested party instead of HRC. I know she is a "leading candidate" and no party affiliation was mentioned but the hacker has in the past supported right-wing candidates and Ted Cruz is also closer to being the annointed one than he was a month ago. It might not be a coincidence that dirty tricks reminiscent of past elections are just starting. It certainly appears that he is already on someone's payroll. Trump? Maybe, though it would be denied of course. Maybe this is Trump's answer to Cruz's manager. It appears though that Cruz already has a slimer helping him according to a story I read a few weeks ago. Maybe it is HRC and she's just trying to gear up for the mud-fest that will surely start once the real campaign kicks off. [Behind Ted Cruz's Campaign Manager, Scorched Earth and Election Victories - NYTimes](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-campaign-manager-jeff-roe.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-campa...)
    - clarkmoody 11y ago
      It was Rendón, not Sepúlveda (the hacker, in prison), who was allegedly helping Trump. > But Rendón says he’s in talks with another leading U.S. presidential campaign—he wouldn’t say which—to begin working for it once the primaries wrap up and the general election begins.
natrius 11y ago
Capitalism makes centralized democracy untenable, and capitalism is here to stay. So much power is controlled by infrequent elections, so influencing those elections is always worthwhile. Capitalism is an evolutionary force that selects for the most profitable business practices. People who figure out how to profit from influencing our democracies will outcompete those who don't. We can pass new laws, but that's like inventing a new antibiotic: it works for a while until evolution finds a way. We must decentralize governance to be free. But how? We can use trade to individually enforce rules. Consider ISIS. ISIS controls territory by paying people to control territory. The money ISIS pays is worthless paper. You and I give that paper value because we accept it for our work. If you want to reduce ISIS's power without anyone's permission, all you have to do is stop accepting any money they've traded for your work. We now have the ability to build decentralized ledgers of trade that you can consult to do this. Instead of relying on political parties to pursue your policy goals, you'll install an app that cuts people off from your economy when they break your rules. If this is a power that people desire, they must stop accepting anonymous money and only accept money through their policy wallet apps. We're using bad technology to organize our society and it's giving us political corruption, terrorism, and global warming. It's imperative that we decentralize democracy so we can rid the world of this unnecessary damage.
- an_account 11y ago
  "I don't like you comment, I'm gonna stop accepting money that ever went through your hands." This seems like a terrible idea that would fracture the economy in so many different ways.
  - natrius 11y ago
    If you go to a store and they reject your cash because it's too crumpled, you're probably going to start shopping somewhere else. Same logic applies here: cutting people off from your economy is bad for business. You only do it when it's worth it.
- anonymousDan 11y ago
  As an alternative, what about moving away from representative democracy (i.e. where you periodically elect someone to make decisions for you by proxy), to a system where you can optionally choose to cast your own vote for particular issues. If we had more lightweight mechanisms for performing trustworthy elections then maybe this would be feasible. I imagine by default though most people wouldn't be bothered to put in the effort to make knowledgeable decisions, and hence why you want to still have representatives.
haddr 11y ago
This is scary. Although we believe that an intelligent person would probably distinguish most social media manipulations, I think that we fall into the trap of deceptions more than we think we do. I wonder if there is some sort of study on how often significan social media manipulations occure in elections on the west.
theophrastus 11y ago
Computers are flexible mutable controllable interconnected facile adaptable devices - it's why we use them and love them so. What is it we hope for as the basic property to vote collection and reporting? It's essentially the opposite of the computer's character set. So if you insist on the convenience advances to the voting process, ("I wanna be able to vote via smart-phone!") then you'll inevitably be giving up the basic property that you really do want: veracity. So, to the first approximation: primitive paper ballots are some of the most stubborn and costly to hack.
- lazaroclapp 11y ago
  Keep in mind that you can give up anonymity instead, via cryptographically verifiable voting with confirmation receipts ;) Of course, that opens its own can of worms...
ArtDev 11y ago
Fixing the results 49% to 51%, is a way for them to seem plausible. American Election Hacker Testifies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBI33kOiKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBI33kOiKc
wakkadakka 11y ago
A 600k budget to fix or change the results of an election for a country with a GDP of 1.2 trillion? That's a ridiculously good use of money for a corrupt politician.
girkyturkey 11y ago
I found this article very interesting. I do always wonder why we pretend this isn't happening though? That's not ignorance, that's just plain stupid.
ape4 11y ago
No open <head> and no close </body> ... I don't trust this guy.
justinlardinois 11y ago
> with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “</head>” and “<body>” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. Jesus, this guy sounds like he walked straight out of a bad cyberpunk story. On the serious side, this gets to me: > Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few. It never occurred to me, but it's a novel concept: people campaigning for high office may be unaware of corruption in their own campaign. The idea of a well-intentioned politician with no idea corruption propelled them into office is scarier to me than a knowingly corrupt politician.
- guessbest 11y ago
  It is just plausible dependability for the candidate. This is traditionally how organized crime works.
  - huherto 11y ago
    I believe it is called "plausible deniability". ;)
    - guessbest 11y ago
      Yay! I'm not the only one old enough to have seen that movie on HN.
- tempestn 11y ago
  I certainly wouldn't want one, but a </head><body> neck tattoo is actually pretty amusing, to me anyway...
deepnet 11y ago
Clint Curtis testified before congress that he did just this. It remains an unproven allegation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKpvTBmdCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKpvTBmdCI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Curtis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Curtis
scotty79 11y ago
More interesting for me is why hacker decided to share it all with press agency. Is this information in the article? I might have missed it. Seems like a good way to get yourself kidnapped and tortured indefinitely.
jakeogh 11y ago
Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
huherto 11y ago
oh please. He didn't hack an election. They tried to influence public sentiment using social media. They hacked some phones and emails. But they didn't rigged the election. Just so you know. The Mexican electoral system looks like it was built by paranoiac maniac. It has many locks. Everything is done manually, votes are counted by multiple citizens, they use transparent poll boxes, special election photo ids are issued for every citizen, even the voting lists have photos, people get their thumb marked with ink, the parties are allowed to have representatives at every place, results at every place are signed, they are published at the voting place and also electronically, etc, etc. One million people participate on the election.
Gustomaximus 11y ago
Reminds me of a meeting I sat some years back with someone whose role was to run 'dirty tricks' campaigns for Microsoft in the early Apple vs. Microsoft days. He talked about stuff like ways they used to undermine Apple dev conferences so no-one would be interested to go the following year and generally white-anting their community, especially education environment. It was a bit of an eye opener. I also suspect this guy is underselling his service. The article calls $20k/mth expensive. If your going to significantly affect an election I suspect there could be another zero or more there. And I wonder if he's ever worked for 2 sides simultaneously? Given the ethics involved this wouldn't be a stretch.
thadd 11y ago
Exceptionally interesting. Also, First HN article I've also seen on Drudge. Worlds collide.
insulanian 11y ago
Am I the only one who misread this as "How to Hack an Elect_r_on"? :)
andresmh 11y ago
Somewhat related story: During the Mexican presidential election mentioned in the article, a PhD student at one of the top Computer Science departments in the U.S. got in touch with me (through a shared friend) because he saw I was doing research on Mexican civic tech. He mentioned that while he was teaching a workshop at his university, two of the workshop participants, who were employees of a powerful Mexican TV network, asked him to help them discredit or deflect the student movement described in the article (the movement was called the "Mexican spring" at the time for their use of social media). This sounded shady to the student, and he wanted to tell someone, but didn't know who. Ultimately he just avoided the TV folks for the rest of the workshop. Weeks later, The Guardian published some leaked documents that showed nefarious ties between said TV network and the then candidate. The student connected with the press then, but the story never came out. Perhaps he got cold feet, or maybe the journalists didn't think it was interesting enough.
germinalphrase 11y ago
There are many comments here pointing out the (quite reasonable) fact that hacking voting machines on a large scale is likely to be discovered and thus unsuccessful in stealing a U.S. Presidential election. Even so, the average voter is quite protective of the idea that American elections are structurally fair (a sentiment that is actively inflamed to imposed voter disenfranchisement schemes, like ID requirements). If the goal is to expose the fundamentally insecure nature of electronic voting in the US (and potential for truly fraudulent election results in tight districts) a complete invalidation of voter ballots [i.e. Big splashy, obviously fraudulent election results] would surely draw enough attention to force some public discussion of investing in secure, auditable voting machines.
dutchjourno 10y ago
Hi guys, I'm a journalist from the Netherlands and I'm working on this story. Basically in a way that you comment on it, asking myself the question what this story means for more adult democracies. So my question for you is: do you think it's likely that political campaigns have hackers on a payroll to spy on opponents agenda's and manipulate social media? I'd like to hear from you. You can email me as well on anne.sachtleven@volkskrant.nl

305 points by newscasta 11y ago

danso 11y ago

> He also splurged on the very best fake Twitter profiles; they’d been maintained for at least a year, giving them a patina of believability. > Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos. I've been wondering when more sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact. The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles...I don't mean just the trend of "Hey 3 people said something on Twitter so it's a story", but that there's also not enough skepticism paired with efficient ways for sniffing out fakery on social media. I hadn't thought about the problem of a mass army of bots suddenly creating a trending tag. It reminds me of "The Agency", a story published last year investigating how Russian operatives allegedly used human-controlled Twitter spamming to try to publicize a fake story of a Louisiana chemical plant explosion: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_... But as sophisticated as that sockpuppet campaign was...it was obviously destined to fail by the fact that an exploding chemical plant is fairly easy to confirm as true or false in real life. Trending opinions about politics don't offer such binary ways of filtering.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Propaganda takes time. Often the most effective stuff happens when you aren't even aware of it. You progress through your regular life and encounter regular things. People bitch on the internet about stupid stuff with the occasional decent argument, and nothing looks out of the ordinary. You see laughable arguments about politicians with hints of truth, or intrude, but maybe you ignore it. After a while you see more arguments along the same line of reasoning, but with more data and less vitriol. You find yourself agreeing more, even if you like the person being disparaged. You may even come around to accept a side of an argument you didn't think much about before. This is how minds are turned. First the trolls and bots do as they do. Some people catch a whiff and continue the trend. Sometimes as a joke, other times seriously. Even those who pretend to be joking will not long be indistinguishable from the fools who think they are in good company. Propaganda is not a tidal wave that comes crashing down on established opinions, it is a steady stream that eats at solid rock until it creates a deep gorge you could not have imagined structured in any other way.
- _greim_ 11y ago
  The world is neck deep in dearly-held beliefs that would quickly die out if people en-masse embraced the kind of systematic, relentless skepticism required to combat this. Society protects these beliefs by stigmatizing skepticism, but in doing so effectively makes itself vulnerable to exploit.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    I myself am skeptical about that. Edward Bernays, who really pioneered propaganda, argued that people put elements of identity in "logic-proof compartments" because to be one thing by definition means not being another thing, and people often would rather shut out thoughts than seriously question themselves. Are you an "entrepreneur?" What about "talented?" Or "Democrat?" Or even, "Liberal?" "Conservative?" Public opinion is as much an influence on propagandists as they are on public opinion.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago
  > Propaganda is not a tidal wave that comes crashing down on established opinions, it is a steady stream that eats at solid rock until it creates a deep gorge you could not have imagined structured in any other way. Yes. However, they swing things in a single election cycle for marginal supporters of a candidate [which are the folks that really control the outcome in the US. The majority of the states are consistent.]. http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-work.shtml http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-wo... > Roughly 14 percent of the students said the attack on their candidate made them support him even more, the researchers found. But an equal percentage of students said the advertisement weakened their support and caused them to move closer to the opponent—the one who ran the negative ad. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-01-22-psychology-political-propoganda_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergan... > •Just giving medical students pens with a drug's name on them made the students significantly more favorably disposed toward the medication than otherwise, despite their immersion in classes aimed at letting them rationally evaluate drug benefits, found a 2009 Archives of Internal Medicinereport. > •Remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland? Roughly a third of people presented with a fake ad depicting a visit to Disneyland that featured a handshake with Bugs later remembered or knew the meet up with the 'wascally wabbit' had happened to them, according to a 2001 University of Washington study. Even though Bugs is owned by Warner Brothers and verboten at a Disney facility, so it couldn't have happened.
ggchappell 11y ago
> The media seems generally unprepared for a coordinated campaign of fake tweets from accounts that don't have eggs as their avatar or #freeiphones in their profiles. Why should they care? The purpose of a news business is to make money. If it works, then it works. I think the real problem here is the incentive structure for a modern news business, as well as the network effects of sharing, links, etc.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Even assuming maximum cynicism, they should care about losing trust (and therefore future business) when it's shown they've spread fake news.
  - ggchappell 11y ago
    That would be the case if they did in fact lose money based on this problem. I don't know how common/significant such losses are. But it seems clear that lots of news organizations are betting heavily that such losses are less than the cost of ensuring that they publish only reliable news.
CM30 11y ago
The media are often... how should I say it... a tad behind the times in regards to how the internet works and how it can be exploited. For example, note all the media coverage a year or two ago about 'fake reviews' on sites like Amazon and Yelp. These have been widespread since both sites begun, yet were pretty well ignored by the media for most of that. Or the comments and articles about Reddit's launch. Apparently, the idea that someone could use fake users to start a community shocked a few unwary people (and journalists). Despite this being a forum building tactic since the internet begun, and a business tactic (to some degree) for decades or centuries. Or heck, the 'trolling' and harassment stuff about Twitter and social networks. Old tactics and behaviour, but seemingly not known by the mainstream media till it affected sites their journalists used. Really, the media is unprepared for a lot of stuff, since they're about two decades behind when it comes to knowing how technology and culture works. As for when sophisticated Twitter sockpuppetry would start having an impact? It might well already be having one. I mean, similar stuff is endemic on Russian language forums and sites, and hey, governments have access to these techniques and useful software to help carry them out...

hackuser 11y ago

This shouldn't be a surprise: I think most HN members know that it's possible; we know that the rewards (incredible power, status, and everything you can get with them includig the spoils of office) are worth the investment (only $600K for this solution!); we know that there are many people, including politicians, unsavory enough to do it. The question is, why do we pretend it's not happening until there's a smoking gun? Consider the U.S. presidential election: The outcome is worth billions each to very many parties worldwide; it's existential to some foreign governments and actors; many in the U.S. have very powerful ideological motives. How much would it cost to hack voting machines? It seems very likely to me that it's happening, though I don't know where or to what extent. I know I'm not the first to point out this risk, but why should we assume that the reported vote count represents the actual vote? Becasue there is no smoking gun yet? That's like assuming your critical network hasn't been hacked, and doing nothing to protect it, because you haven't seen evidence of an attack yet.

josho 11y ago
It is happening in the US and in plain sight--yet its citizens don't seem to care. Eg. Gerrymandering, drastically reducing voting stations (see AZ), goofy voter registration law changes. These issues don't occur in other mature democracies.
- simplemath 11y ago
  They do happen in late stage capitalist oligarchies though. We'll get Elysium, not utopia.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    We already live in Elysium. All we lack is robots preventing people from Earth (aka India/China/Nigeria/Malaysia) come join us. The ocean does a good enough job.
    - shanacarp 11y ago
      do you believe the state should exist - if so, how does it function? what are the duties of the state? how do people join the state? are there people who are "naturally part of the state" if so - why? How does this state thing work? If you don't believe in a state. Do you believe in contact? if so, why? if they get broken, how do they get enforced, or he penalties within them enforced? Who is or is not involved Do you believe in the concept of laws and law making? Who is involved in laws and law-making, especially if there is no state in your world view, but laws somehow do still exist. Your claim, and other claims you've made in the past, especially around "violence via taxes" and "violence because immigration" makes it sound like you don't think a state should exist, and all the things that come with a stable state, such as the ability to make contracts and get them enforced, have laws and create new ones. It would make you sound less cynical and more serious if you explained what you were really arguing about, what you actually did believe in, what you believe was the intelligent answer, rather than just arguing against people. Otherwise, how are you much better than the Sophists that Socrates railed against?

rossdavidh 11y ago

Ugh. I don't know if the particular people involved here are telling the truth, but I basically know that something like this must be happening, given the incentives involved. Dispiriting, I have to say, since it would be hard to beat this sort of thing without becoming what you're fighting against.

rossdavidh 11y ago
Also, at the end there when they implied that HRC is hiring Rendon for the general election, did anyone else find themselves thinking that this whole story could be a manipulative plant of the very sort they were discussing? Not that I think HRC is above this sort of thing.
- pussinboots 11y ago
  well, it is bloomberg lol
- doodlebugging 11y ago
  I wonder if the implication was that the candidate from Texas was the interested party instead of HRC. I know she is a "leading candidate" and no party affiliation was mentioned but the hacker has in the past supported right-wing candidates and Ted Cruz is also closer to being the annointed one than he was a month ago. It might not be a coincidence that dirty tricks reminiscent of past elections are just starting. It certainly appears that he is already on someone's payroll. Trump? Maybe, though it would be denied of course. Maybe this is Trump's answer to Cruz's manager. It appears though that Cruz already has a slimer helping him according to a story I read a few weeks ago. Maybe it is HRC and she's just trying to gear up for the mud-fest that will surely start once the real campaign kicks off. [Behind Ted Cruz's Campaign Manager, Scorched Earth and Election Victories - NYTimes](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-campaign-manager-jeff-roe.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-campa...)
  - clarkmoody 11y ago
    It was Rendón, not Sepúlveda (the hacker, in prison), who was allegedly helping Trump. > But Rendón says he’s in talks with another leading U.S. presidential campaign—he wouldn’t say which—to begin working for it once the primaries wrap up and the general election begins.

natrius 11y ago

Capitalism makes centralized democracy untenable, and capitalism is here to stay. So much power is controlled by infrequent elections, so influencing those elections is always worthwhile. Capitalism is an evolutionary force that selects for the most profitable business practices. People who figure out how to profit from influencing our democracies will outcompete those who don't. We can pass new laws, but that's like inventing a new antibiotic: it works for a while until evolution finds a way. We must decentralize governance to be free. But how? We can use trade to individually enforce rules. Consider ISIS. ISIS controls territory by paying people to control territory. The money ISIS pays is worthless paper. You and I give that paper value because we accept it for our work. If you want to reduce ISIS's power without anyone's permission, all you have to do is stop accepting any money they've traded for your work. We now have the ability to build decentralized ledgers of trade that you can consult to do this. Instead of relying on political parties to pursue your policy goals, you'll install an app that cuts people off from your economy when they break your rules. If this is a power that people desire, they must stop accepting anonymous money and only accept money through their policy wallet apps. We're using bad technology to organize our society and it's giving us political corruption, terrorism, and global warming. It's imperative that we decentralize democracy so we can rid the world of this unnecessary damage.

an_account 11y ago
"I don't like you comment, I'm gonna stop accepting money that ever went through your hands." This seems like a terrible idea that would fracture the economy in so many different ways.
- natrius 11y ago
  If you go to a store and they reject your cash because it's too crumpled, you're probably going to start shopping somewhere else. Same logic applies here: cutting people off from your economy is bad for business. You only do it when it's worth it.
anonymousDan 11y ago
As an alternative, what about moving away from representative democracy (i.e. where you periodically elect someone to make decisions for you by proxy), to a system where you can optionally choose to cast your own vote for particular issues. If we had more lightweight mechanisms for performing trustworthy elections then maybe this would be feasible. I imagine by default though most people wouldn't be bothered to put in the effort to make knowledgeable decisions, and hence why you want to still have representatives.

haddr 11y ago

This is scary. Although we believe that an intelligent person would probably distinguish most social media manipulations, I think that we fall into the trap of deceptions more than we think we do. I wonder if there is some sort of study on how often significan social media manipulations occure in elections on the west.

theophrastus 11y ago

Computers are flexible mutable controllable interconnected facile adaptable devices - it's why we use them and love them so. What is it we hope for as the basic property to vote collection and reporting? It's essentially the opposite of the computer's character set. So if you insist on the convenience advances to the voting process, ("I wanna be able to vote via smart-phone!") then you'll inevitably be giving up the basic property that you really do want: veracity. So, to the first approximation: primitive paper ballots are some of the most stubborn and costly to hack.

lazaroclapp 11y ago
Keep in mind that you can give up anonymity instead, via cryptographically verifiable voting with confirmation receipts ;) Of course, that opens its own can of worms...

ArtDev 11y ago

Fixing the results 49% to 51%, is a way for them to seem plausible. American Election Hacker Testifies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBI33kOiKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBI33kOiKc

wakkadakka 11y ago

A 600k budget to fix or change the results of an election for a country with a GDP of 1.2 trillion? That's a ridiculously good use of money for a corrupt politician.

girkyturkey 11y ago

I found this article very interesting. I do always wonder why we pretend this isn't happening though? That's not ignorance, that's just plain stupid.

ape4 11y ago

No open <head> and no close </body> ... I don't trust this guy.

justinlardinois 11y ago

> with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “</head>” and “<body>” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. Jesus, this guy sounds like he walked straight out of a bad cyberpunk story. On the serious side, this gets to me: > Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few. It never occurred to me, but it's a novel concept: people campaigning for high office may be unaware of corruption in their own campaign. The idea of a well-intentioned politician with no idea corruption propelled them into office is scarier to me than a knowingly corrupt politician.

guessbest 11y ago
It is just plausible dependability for the candidate. This is traditionally how organized crime works.
- huherto 11y ago
  I believe it is called "plausible deniability". ;)
  - guessbest 11y ago
    Yay! I'm not the only one old enough to have seen that movie on HN.
tempestn 11y ago
I certainly wouldn't want one, but a </head><body> neck tattoo is actually pretty amusing, to me anyway...

deepnet 11y ago

Clint Curtis testified before congress that he did just this. It remains an unproven allegation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKpvTBmdCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKpvTBmdCI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Curtis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Curtis

scotty79 11y ago

More interesting for me is why hacker decided to share it all with press agency. Is this information in the article? I might have missed it. Seems like a good way to get yourself kidnapped and tortured indefinitely.

jakeogh 11y ago

Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

huherto 11y ago

oh please. He didn't hack an election. They tried to influence public sentiment using social media. They hacked some phones and emails. But they didn't rigged the election. Just so you know. The Mexican electoral system looks like it was built by paranoiac maniac. It has many locks. Everything is done manually, votes are counted by multiple citizens, they use transparent poll boxes, special election photo ids are issued for every citizen, even the voting lists have photos, people get their thumb marked with ink, the parties are allowed to have representatives at every place, results at every place are signed, they are published at the voting place and also electronically, etc, etc. One million people participate on the election.

Gustomaximus 11y ago

Reminds me of a meeting I sat some years back with someone whose role was to run 'dirty tricks' campaigns for Microsoft in the early Apple vs. Microsoft days. He talked about stuff like ways they used to undermine Apple dev conferences so no-one would be interested to go the following year and generally white-anting their community, especially education environment. It was a bit of an eye opener. I also suspect this guy is underselling his service. The article calls $20k/mth expensive. If your going to significantly affect an election I suspect there could be another zero or more there. And I wonder if he's ever worked for 2 sides simultaneously? Given the ethics involved this wouldn't be a stretch.

thadd 11y ago

Exceptionally interesting. Also, First HN article I've also seen on Drudge. Worlds collide.

insulanian 11y ago

Am I the only one who misread this as "How to Hack an Elect_r_on"? :)

andresmh 11y ago

Somewhat related story: During the Mexican presidential election mentioned in the article, a PhD student at one of the top Computer Science departments in the U.S. got in touch with me (through a shared friend) because he saw I was doing research on Mexican civic tech. He mentioned that while he was teaching a workshop at his university, two of the workshop participants, who were employees of a powerful Mexican TV network, asked him to help them discredit or deflect the student movement described in the article (the movement was called the "Mexican spring" at the time for their use of social media). This sounded shady to the student, and he wanted to tell someone, but didn't know who. Ultimately he just avoided the TV folks for the rest of the workshop. Weeks later, The Guardian published some leaked documents that showed nefarious ties between said TV network and the then candidate. The student connected with the press then, but the story never came out. Perhaps he got cold feet, or maybe the journalists didn't think it was interesting enough.

germinalphrase 11y ago

There are many comments here pointing out the (quite reasonable) fact that hacking voting machines on a large scale is likely to be discovered and thus unsuccessful in stealing a U.S. Presidential election. Even so, the average voter is quite protective of the idea that American elections are structurally fair (a sentiment that is actively inflamed to imposed voter disenfranchisement schemes, like ID requirements). If the goal is to expose the fundamentally insecure nature of electronic voting in the US (and potential for truly fraudulent election results in tight districts) a complete invalidation of voter ballots [i.e. Big splashy, obviously fraudulent election results] would surely draw enough attention to force some public discussion of investing in secure, auditable voting machines.

dutchjourno 10y ago

Hi guys, I'm a journalist from the Netherlands and I'm working on this story. Basically in a way that you comment on it, asking myself the question what this story means for more adult democracies. So my question for you is: do you think it's likely that political campaigns have hackers on a payroll to spy on opponents agenda's and manipulate social media? I'd like to hear from you. You can email me as well on anne.sachtleven@volkskrant.nl