REBELLION DEFENSE - ERIC SCHMIDT Pentagon, Special Operations, Kissinger PT1

https://reportglobalnews.com/2020/05/i-could-solve-most-of-your-problems-eric-schmidts-pentagon-offensive/

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

In July 2016, Raymond Thomas, a four-star general and head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, hosted a guest: Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google.

General Thomas, who served in the 1991 gulf war and deployed many times to Afghanistan, spent the better part of a day showing Mr. Schmidt around Special Operations Command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla. They scrutinized prototypes for a robotic exoskeleton suit and joined operational briefings, which Mr. Schmidt wanted to learn more about because he had recently begun advising the military on technology.

After the visit, as they rode in a Chevy Suburban toward an airport, the conversation turned to a form of artificial intelligence.

“You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Mr. Schmidt told General Thomas, the officer recalled. “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems.” General Thomas said he was so offended that he wanted to throw Mr. Schmidt out of the car, but refrained.

Four years later, Mr. Schmidt, 65, has channeled his blunt assessment of the military’s tech failings into a personal campaign to revamp America’s defense forces with more engineers, more software and more A.I. In the process, the tech billionaire, who left Google last year, has reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community.

Mr. Schmidt now sits on two government advisory boards aimed at jump starting technological innovation at the Defense Department. His confidants include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and ex-Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. And through his own venture capital firm and a $13 billion fortune, Mr. Schmidt has invested millions of dollars into more than half a dozen defense start-ups.

In an interview, Mr. Schmidt — by turns thoughtful, pedagogical and hubristic — said he had embarked on an effort to modernize the U.S. military because it was “stuck in software in the 1980s.”

He portrayed himself as a successful technologist who did not believe in retirement and who owed a debt to the country for his wealth — and who now had time and insight to solve one of America’s hardest problems. The goal, he said, “should be to have as many software companies to supply software of many, many different kinds: military, H.R. systems, email systems, things which involve military intelligence, weapons systems and what have you.”

Mr. Schmidt is pressing forward with a Silicon Valley worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue. While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation and other unintended consequences, Mr. Schmidt said he was convinced that applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations — including deadly ones — would make service members more efficient and bolster the United States in its competition with China.

His techno-solutionism is complicated by his ties to Google. Though Mr. Schmidt left the company’s board last June and has no official operating role, he holds $5.3 billion in shares of Google’s parent, Alphabet. He also remains on the payroll as an adviser, earning a $1 annual salary, with two assistants stationed at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

REBELLION DEFENSE - ERIC SCHMIDT Pentagon, Special Operations, Kissinger PT2

https://reportglobalnews.com/2020/05/i-could-solve-most-of-your-problems-eric-schmidts-pentagon-offensive/

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

That has led to allegations that Mr. Schmidt is putting Google’s financial interests ahead of other considerations in his defense work. Late last year, a federal court ordered a congressional advisory committee he leads to turn over records that could shed light on whether Mr. Schmidt had advocated his business interests while heading the group.

Mr. Schmidt said he had followed rules to avoid conflicts. “Everybody is rule-bound at the Pentagon, and we are too,” he said.

Google and the Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Schmidt’s work.

Even without those complications, shifting the military’s path is no simple task. While Mr. Schmidt has helped generate reports and recommendations about technology for the Pentagon, few have been adopted.

“I’m sure he’ll be frustrated,” said Representative Mac Thornberry, a Republican of Texas who nominated Mr. Schmidt in 2018 to an advisory committee on A.I. “Unlike the private sector, you can’t just snap your fingers and make it happen.”

Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that progress was slow. “I am bizarrely told by my military friends that they have moved incredibly fast, showing you the difference of time frames between the world I live in and the world they live in,” he said.

But he said he had little intention of backing down. “The way to understand the military is that the soldiers spend a great deal of time looking at screens. And human vision is not as good as computer vision,” he said. “It’s insane that you have people going to service academies, and we spend an enormous amount of training, training these people, and we put them in essentially monotonous work.”

REBELLION DEFENSE - ERIC SCHMIDT Pentagon, Special Operations, Kissinger PT3

https://reportglobalnews.com/2020/05/i-could-solve-most-of-your-problems-eric-schmidts-pentagon-offensive/

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

‘You Want to See These Things’

Mr. Schmidt’s first brush with the military came in 1976, while he was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he focused on research on distributed computing, funded by money from Darpa, a research arm of the Defense Department.

The work catapulted Mr. Schmidt into his technology career. After completing his graduate studies in computer science, he worked at various tech companies for more than two decades, including the networking software maker Novell. In 2001, Google appointed him chief executive.

The search engine company was then in its infancy. Its 20-something founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were fresh out of a Stanford University doctorate program and had little business experience. Mr. Schmidt was hired to help guide them, providing “adult supervision,” which he did — and then some.

Mr. Schmidt took Google public in 2004 and built it into a behemoth, diversifying into smartphones, cloud computing and self-driving cars. The success turned him into a business celebrity. In 2009, he served as a tech adviser to the Obama administration.

In 2011, with Google worth nearly $400 billion, the company announced Mr. Page was ready to resume the C.E.O. reins. Mr. Schmidt became executive chairman.

In that role, Mr. Schmidt took on new projects, many of which brought him to Washington. In 2012, he participated in classified briefings on cybersecurity with Pentagon officials as part of the Enduring Security Framework program. In 2015, he attended a seminar on the banks of the Potomac River, hosted by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter, on the use of technology inside the government.

“It was all interesting to me,” Mr. Schmidt said. “I didn’t really know much about it.”

He also traveled to North Korea, Afghanistan and Libya while writing a book about technology and diplomacy, and dabbled in politics, lending technical support to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to her 2016 presidential campaign.

His venture capital fund, Innovation Endeavors, was active too. It invested in start-ups like Planet Labs, which operates satellites and sells the imagery to defense and intelligence agencies, and Team8, a cybersecurity company founded by former Israeli intelligence members.

REBELLION DEFENSE - ERIC SCHMIDT Pentagon, Special Operations, Kissinger PT4

https://reportglobalnews.com/2020/05/i-could-solve-most-of-your-problems-eric-schmidts-pentagon-offensive/

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

At the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Carter asked Mr. Schmidt to meet. He had a proposal: Could Mr. Schmidt lead the Defense Innovation Board, a civilian advisory group tasked with bringing new technology to the Pentagon?

“We were in one of these dumpy hotels, and there he is with his small entourage walking in, and he basically said to me, ‘This is what I want to do. You’d be the perfect person to be chairman,’” Mr. Schmidt said.

Mr. Schmidt said he turned down the role because he was busy and had no military background. But Mr. Carter argued that Mr. Schmidt’s tech expertise was needed, as the U.S. military — which had once been a center of innovation — was falling behind companies like Google and Facebook in software and A.I.

Mr. Schmidt ultimately agreed. (Mr. Carter did not respond to requests for comment.)

As head of the Defense Innovation Board, Mr. Schmidt began touring military bases, aircraft carriers and plutonium strongholds. The trips, which took Mr. Schmidt to about 100 bases in places like Fayetteville, N.C., and Osan, South Korea, were a distinct break from his well-heeled life in Silicon Valley.

“You want to see these things,” Mr. Schmidt said. “I got the nuclear missile tour. Things that are hard. I got a tour of Cheyenne Mountain so I could understand what their reality was.”

One of the first trips was to Tampa to visit General Thomas, who is known as Tony, where Mr. Schmidt saw maps and live video feeds displayed on massive screens. “Eric’s observation was that a huge part of what the military does is it sits and watches,” said Josh Marcuse, the then executive director of the Defense Innovation Board who was on the trip.

The visits made tangible what Mr. Carter had told Mr. Schmidt about how the military was lagging in technology. Mr. Schmidt soon made suggestions to change that.

Some of his ideas were impractical. Eric Rosenbach, then the chief of staff to Mr. Carter, recalled Mr. Schmidt once telling him that the Pentagon would be better off if it hired no one but engineers for a year.

Others were useful. At an Air Force facility in Qatar in 2016, Mr. Schmidt visited officers who scheduled flight paths for the tankers that refueled planes. They used a white board and dry-erase markers to set the schedule, taking eight hours to complete the task.

Mr. Schmidt said he recalled thinking, “Really? This is how you run the air war?” Afterward, he and others at the Defense Department worked with the tech company Pivotal to ship software to the officers.

REBELLION DEFENSE - ERIC SCHMIDT Pentagon, Special Operations, Kissinger PT5

https://reportglobalnews.com/2020/05/i-could-solve-most-of-your-problems-eric-schmidts-pentagon-offensive/

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

On another trip to a military base in South Korea in 2017, an intelligence analyst complained to Mr. Schmidt that the software he used to review surveillance videos from North Korea was clunky.

“Let me guess,” Mr. Schmidt said, according to a Defense Department aide who traveled with him. “You don’t have the flexibility to change that.”

In December 2017, Mr. Schmidt stepped down as Google’s chairman but remained on the board. He said he was seeking a new chapter.

“If I stayed as chairman, then next year would have been the same as the previous year, and I wanted a change of emphasis,” said Mr. Schmidt. “As chairman of Google, what I did is I ran around and gave speeches, and went to Brussels and all the things that Google still does today. It’s much better to work on these new things for me.”

Google declined to comment on Mr. Schmidt’s departure as chairman.

By then, Mr. Schmidt’s ties to Google had caused problems in his defense work. In 2016, Roma Laster, a Defense Department employee, filed a complaint at the agency raising concerns about Mr. Schmidt and conflicts of interest, Mr. Marcuse said.

In the complaint, earlier reported by ProPublica, Ms. Laster, who worked with the Defense Innovation Board, said Mr. Schmidt had asked a service member what cloud computing services their unit used and whether they had considered alternatives. She said Mr. Schmidt faced a conflict of interest because he worked for Google, which also provides cloud services.

Mr. Marcuse, who now works at Google, said Mr. Schmidt was “scrupulous and diligent” in avoiding conflicts. Mr. Schmidt said he followed the rules forbidding conflicts of interest. Ms. Laster did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Schmidt soon got caught up in another issue between Google and the military. Google had signed a contract in 2017 to help the Pentagon build systems to automatically analyze drone footage to identify particular objects like buildings, vehicles and people.

Mr. Schmidt was a proponent of the effort, called Project Maven. He said he encouraged the Pentagon to pursue it and testified in Congress about the project’s merits, but was not involved in the agency’s selection of Google.

But the effort blew up in 2018 when Google employees protested and said they did not want their work to lead to lethal strikes. More than 3,000 workers signed a letter to Mr. Pichai, saying the contract would undermine the public’s trust in the company.

It was a black eye for Mr. Schmidt. Military officials, who said Project Maven was not being used for lethal missions, condemned Google for abandoning the contract. Google employees also criticized Mr. Schmidt’s ties to the Pentagon.

“He has very different goals and values than the engineers at his company,” said Jack Poulson, a Google employee who protested Mr. Schmidt’s military work and who has since left the company.

Mr. Schmidt said he sidestepped discussions about Project Maven because of conflict-of-interest rules, but wished he could have weighed in. “I would have certainly had an opinion,” he said.

Last April, Mr. Schmidt announced he planned to leave Google’s board. He had helped create an A.I. center backed by the Pentagon in 2018 and had also become co-chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a new group advising Congress on developing A.I. for defense.

A month after leaving Google, Mr. Schmidt invested in Rebellion Defense, a software start-up founded by former Defense Department employees that analyzes video gathered via drone. His venture firm later put more money into the company, and Mr. Schmidt joined its board.

REBELLION DEFENSE - ERIC SCHMIDT Pentagon, Special Operations, Kissinger PT6

https://reportglobalnews.com/2020/05/i-could-solve-most-of-your-problems-eric-schmidts-pentagon-offensive/

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

The investment led to more trouble. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy and civil liberties group, sued the A.I. commission last September for failing to turn over records. EPIC said the group was stacked with industry executives like Mr. Schmidt and others from Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, who could potentially sway the government in favor of their companies’ interests.

Mr. Schmidt was under scrutiny because of Rebellion Defense and how he could push the government to use the start-up’s services, EPIC said.

“We don’t have any public disclosure about what information Eric has provided to the commission about his business interests,” said John Davisson, an attorney at EPIC.

In December, a district court ruled the A.I. commission must disclose the records requested by EPIC. The commission has released hundreds of pages of documents, most of which do not involve Mr. Schmidt or his businesses. EPIC said more records are set to be released.

Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Rebellion Defense, said Mr. Schmidt advised the company solely on hiring and growth. Mr. Schmidt said he did not advocate for the Defense Department to buy technology from the start-up.

He has continued plowing ahead. In November, he unveiled a $1 billion commitment through Schmidt Futures, the philanthropic firm that he runs with his wife, Wendy, to fund education for those who want to work in public service.

“People listen to me, either because I’m right, or because I’m from Google in the past, or they knew me, or because I can bring money to the table,” he said. “I don’t care, as long as I have a positive impact.”

https://safety4georgians.com/

JULY 24 2017

ARTICLE ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING IN GEORGIA PT 1

My name is Larry Vaughn. This is my website. You last saw me In 1975 in Amity, New York. I was the town’s mayor when a rogue police chief tried to frighten 4th of July tourists with talk of a great white shark lurking off the shallow waters. Needless to say, I was not pleased with the panic that ensued. “No danger!” I said. “Fun in the water!” Then the shark started gobbling people up. I now regret that I did not do more to protect the people who trusted me, and I want to make sure the same thing does not happen to the voters of Georgia. There are sharks lurking offshore (in Russia, for example) who want to hack your votes. Like me, your elected leaders are quick to shout “No danger!” Help me #protectGAvote

Beginning with the DNC hack in spring of 2016, it dawned on me (maybe I’m slow to the party, but eventually it clicks) that the retail market in voter registration databases is a bad idea. That’s been highlighted in the last few weeks by Kris Kobach’s ill-fated attempt to federalize voter information in a searchable facility. This was one of the key take-aways from the recent Time article on that chillingly describes how access to voter registration can be used to disrupt elections without ever touching one of those insecure DRE voting machines.

I even worked out a threat scenario and circulated it to some friends who agreed (1) it is plausible, and (2) it is not obviously illegal. You can see why if you follow the complicated trail in Guardian article. Or if you just look at what the people creating the market in your voting data say about it:

Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign

Eric Schmidt

April 2014

Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about (“the benefits of ACA to you” etc.)

The point is to be able to create dashboard, accurate to the individual vote level, that is predictive of future voter behavior. Civis Analytics is one such company: are not a retail commodity.

Beginning with the DNC hack in spring of 2016, it dawned on me (maybe I’m slow to the party, but eventually it clicks) that the retail market in voter registration databases is a bad idea. That’s been highlighted in the last few weeks by Kris Kobach’s ill-fated attempt to federalize voter information in a searchable facility. This was one of the key take-aways from the recent Time article on that chillingly describes how access to voter registration can be used to disrupt elections without ever touching one of those insecure DRE voting machines.

I even worked out a threat scenario and circulated it to some friends who agreed (1) it is plausible, and (2) it is not obviously illegal. You can see why if you follow the complicated trail in Guardian article. Or if you just look at what the people creating the market in your voting data say about it:

Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign

Eric Schmidt

April 2014

Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about (“the benefits of ACA to you” etc.)

The point is to be able to create dashboard, accurate to the individual vote level, that is predictive of future voter behavior. Civis Analytics is one such company:

Civis Analytics, a company founded by the chief analytics officer of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has raised $22 million in Series A funding.

I’m not happy there’s a market in voter data, but I am even less happy that political parties, market analysts, and election owners do not seem to understand the significance of unauthorized access. Unless there is a statute to the contrary, trading and in this kind of information is no more serious than buying and selling grocery store loyalty data.

I want the voter data market to be regulated. There is no consensus around this topic, but I am convinced this is a security hole big enough to drive a truck through. I have friends who disagree, saying transparency in voter roles is important to prevent vote buying/trading, voter intimidation, and other problems. Agreed, but that’s a long way from giving tacit approval to monetizing my contact and other personal information.

https://safety4georgians.com/

JULY 24 2017

ARTICLE ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING IN GEORGIA PT2

[As a side note: I am baffled that my NRA-supporting friends have not been as up in arms (get it?) about this as they have about federal gun ownership registries.]

Regulation of this market, like many in the information age, will be messy. Just look at how colleges and universities wrap themselves around the axle to comply with FERPA-mandated protection of student data, for example. But that does not mean it should not be done. At the very least, regulation can force information aggregators like the DNC and the RNC to provide safeguards to deter the sort of casual intrusion marking the 2016 election.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is often quoted as skeptical about the threat of web-based attacks on the State’s computerized voting systems. The Secretary makes many such pronouncements, but he also professes to know few details of the underlying technologies. I suspect that Kemp’s knowledge base concerning such matters will disappear completely with the recently announced firing of Merle King and the incident-prone Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University. It was King who famously introduced the (incorrect) idea that Georgia’s voting machines were “air-gapped,” a measure that–even if true–would have little impact on the end-to-end security of the elections system.

When it comes to election hacking, low tech is always cheaper and, in most cases, it is much better.

NOW @BrianKempGA wants to train CES on data security? Sometimes I think @The_KristinaT is just messing with us. https://t.co/6jQMODLJaE

— Larry Vaughn (@honlarryvaughn) July 15, 2017

I have already previewed some of the main vulnerabilities here, here, and here, but will have a lot more to say in the next few days about high-tech vulnerabilities. I want to use today’s post to point out that no self-respecting spy/hacker would resort to such exotic measures without first trying much less risky (and far less expensive) ways of hacking an election.

The human element is always the first choice in espionage.

Human espionage is an ancient art; in fact, it has even been called the oldest profession. Unfortunately, espionage is still alive and well in today’s post Cold War environment. If anything, it is even more rampant. Events in the news remind us of this, such as the recent arrests of two Lucent Technologies employees, and a catering employee of MasterCard International for the theft of trade secrets. Throughout history and in current times efforts to identify indicators of espionage have been made. Unfortunately these efforts have met with limited success. In every instance of espionage, the person involved had access to information. Understanding this, and the fact we have the ability to control access to computer file systems, is critical to protecting information

I will give just one of many examples that Russian election hackers are certain to know well. The U.S. government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on encryption technology aimed at thwarting even the most well-funded adversaries. This is one of the oldest ideas in information and communications security. It dates from the British cracking of German Enigma codes in World War II. The idea behind encryption security is that there should be a concrete price for technology that can be used to crack a code. For the British, that price was the cost of mounting the deciphering unit at Bletchley Park.

https://safety4georgians.com/

JULY 24 2017

ARTICLE ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING IN GEORGIA PT3

For modern hackers, the price tag is the cost of building a deciphering super computer. Those costs have soared over the last 25 years. In the 1980’s, a $20 million supercomputer would have been sufficient to hack into all but the most highly sophisticated encrypted communications. But it is an arms race, and today only National intelligence services and a few non-state actors are able to invest upwards of $500 million annually to reliably decrypt enemy communications.

One reason for this shift in strategy is that the most damaging breaches in history have been ridiculously easy to mount, and not all that expensive. Six million dollars would have done it. That was the total price tag for turning CIA intelligence officer Alrich Ames ($2.5M), FBI agent Robert Hanssen ($1.4M), U.S. Navy communications officer John Anthony Walker ($1M), and intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard (a bargain at $50,000), all of whom became spies for foreign powers. Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, get thrown in for free.

I mention this point only because, among Logan Lamb’s and Chris Grayson’s discoveries when they stumbled into the unprotected servers at Kennesaw State, were files containing election day passwords. Brian Kemp claims the files were enrypted and password protected. Lamb and Grayson say no, and the the directories that I have seen myself back up the Lamb and Grayson accounts.

Either Kemp knows this and is simply lying to the public, or (more likely than not) he is ill-informed about what was going on the the Kennesaw operation.

Either way, why would a Russian attacker go through the trouble of mounting a web-based attack on voting machines when Georgia’s election officials simply handed over the election day keys to voting systems?

It’s not that hard to figure out that someone is lying. There are the inevitable tells:

In order to convince the accuser, a liar may respond to an allegation with a truthful statement that casts him in a favorable light.

Or

Going into attack mode against the questioner

But usually it’s just too darn hard to keep your stories straight. That’s what trips people up. That’s what’s causing Brian Kemp’s story about stolen poll books to unravel. His office first reported that the poll books were stolen from a Cobb County precinct manager’s car. Not to worry said Kemp’s office:

the stolen machine, known as an ExpressPoll unit, cannot be used to fraudulently vote in Tuesday’s election but that it does contain a copy of Georgia’s statewide voter file

Not a question that anyone was asking, but ok. It’s not a small point however that it was not a single stolen machine, but five of them.

Oh, and by the way:

the poll book that was stolen did have a flash card with a voter list on it. But, it does require some knowledge or expertise to use machine to retrieve the information.

Wherever would someone get “some knowledge?” It better be hard to do because, like a needle being passed among addicts in some back alley that flash card is a perfect vehicle for delivering malware to voting machines. And there are now five of them out there.

Kemp was upset that it took a couple days for Cobb County officials to let him know they had screwed up, but then it was all ok because the missing machines had been found in a dumpster. Until they weren’t: “…safe in a landfill,” was the reassuring message from election officials.

https://safety4georgians.com/

JULY 24 2017

ARTICLE ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING IN GEORGIA PT4

Kemp was so relieved he had a ceremony for the police officers who “recovered the stolen equipment.” Except that they actually did not recover the stolen equipment, which was safe in a landfill. “Too expensive to dig it up…” they said.

Finally, in an attempt to put the whole thing to bed, Kemp’s Office had to reassure us:

…no voter information had been taken from the stolen voting equipment and the equipment was destroyed before being placed in a landfill.

Now how the heck did they know that? Police never actually had the machines in their possession, so how did they know they had been destroyed? And how would you know whether voter information had been taken from the machines in any event?

There are those flash cards. Those are not mentioned at all. Were they in the landfill too?

You see where all this is going, don’t you? Taken together not much about this entire story makes much sense, unless you believe that Kemp and Georgia election officials are just making all this up on the spot. That’s what eventually trips up a liar.

Let’s call in someone who knows a little about tripping up liars.

A small, local newspaper in an Atlanta suburb, beat the Atlanta-Journal and Constitution (AJC) to the real impact that Georgia’s outdated, insecure computerized election system has on the state’s economy.

Over the last 20 years, Atlanta has become an international innovation hub for cyber security. Kleiner-Perkins backed Internet Security Systems was launched by a Georgia Tech freshman and went on to become one of the most important enterprise security firms in the country before it was acquired by IBM. SecureWorks, another Atlanta start up was acquired by Dell in 2011. Atlanta’s tech scene is relying on a planned $50M cyber security center to cement its brand as the place to be.

That’s why the Newnan, Georgia, Times-Herald, article about the effect of national publicity about Georgia’s out-dated insecure election system provokes one of those “Whatever can they be thinking?” moments. The AJC, which you would expect to be a booster, has missed this story completely (In fact, the AJC has been so conspicuously wrong/absent on the Georgia elections story that you have to wonder what the heck is going on in their editorial meetings).

The Time-Herald piece was not original reporting, I can excuse them for concluding that the election systems are safe and unchallenged, but the paper correctly points out that recent national attention can do serious damage to Georgia’s reputation:

…it is an ignominious way for the world to recognize Georgia’s growing role in cybersecurity. Fort Gordon near Augusta is the new home of the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command and a branch facility of the National Security Agency that contracted with the company employing the alleged leaker.

The state is establishing a cybersecurity research center at Georgia Tech, near the headquarters of some of the private sector’s most successful digital-security firms and the country’s major hub of financial transaction processing. Stories from here like this one are likely to become less infrequent.

The Peach State is at the center of this story because it is now at the center of cybersecurity.

Ironic that the Secretary of State’s Office, which has major responsibility for business development, has contributed to this state of affairs by not moving swiftly and decisively to shore up Georgia’s voting technology. Why would new investment be attracted to a place that apparently cannot manage 1999-era systems?

Even if you think that the fuss over Georgia’s system is much ado about nothing, or is part of a liberal effort to explain away electoral failures, you should be concerned about the impact it might have on this growing piece of the local economy. It’s a shame, because the entire problem can be fixed tomorrow with relatively little investment.

#protectGAvote

https://safety4georgians.com/

JULY 24 2017

ARTICLE ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING IN GEORGIA PT5

http://times-herald.com/news/2017/06/election-hack-leak-has-special-interest-for-georgians

30 Reasons (Part 3) to believe that Georgia’s computerized voting system may not be as secure as election officials claim

1.Georgia election officials consistently misstate operating characteristics and functionality of the computerized election system. These misstatements are designed to convey an impression that the system has security and recovery features that, in fact do not exist. For example, in sworn testimony before Fulton County Judge Adams, the Fulton County chief election administrator claimed under cross-examination that Accuvote TS voting machines maintain a voter verified trail because an image of the voter’s ballot is stored in memory. Unsupported claims of isolation, multi-layered protection and proper user authentication abound in statements from election officials.

1. Election officials raise problems with alternative methods of verifying votes, where none exist. Richard Barron (Fulton County administrator) for example, claimed that paper ballot counts have 5% error rates (and are therefore at least as error-prone as any method of counting votes). There have been scientific studies of this matter. Barron is off by an order of magnitude. Proper hand counting methods have error rate up to 0.5% and even low-cost methods have error rates of only 2%.

1. Physical security of devices and chain of custody are important to election security in Georgia, and the use of tamper-proof seals is often cited as an important link in the security chain. Not only are tamper-proof seals of the type used in Georgia readily online, election workers often break the seals and re-seal devices without prior authorization. That type of breach for example might be prompted by a desire to check a machine for damage as was observed by independent 3rd parties during the June 20 runoff.

1. According to CES Executive Director Merle King, Georgia’s computerized voting systems use a version of Windows that dates from the early 2000 and is unpatched and unsupported by Microsoft. Unpatched operating systems are vulnerable to malware of all type and significantly increase the likelihood of successful hacks.

1. There has never been an independent security evaluation of Georgia’s computerized election system.

1. Georgia’s election officials have never looked to see whether their systems have been hacked. Despite claims to the contrary, no one in CES or the Secretary of State’s Office has actually checked to see whether the election system has been hacked. This includes the immediate aftermath of the CES break-in, during which it would have been appropriate to see whether malware had been introduced or the systems had otherwise been compromised. A representative from the US Department of Homeland Security testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that DHS has not conducted such an analysis either.

1. CES Executive Director has stated publicly that CES scrounges for used and reconditioned equipment to replace its aging components. Information about information assurance measures for these devices has not been released. Nor does CES have any idea about whether these parts have ever been connected to the Internet.

8.Secretary of State Brian Kemp was one of the few secretaries of state objecting to DHS offer in 2016 to designate election systems as critical national infrastructure, which would have dramatically increased the security-related resources available to the state. In fact, Kemp used the occasion to pick a fight with DHS by accusing the agency of a “massive attack” on Georgia’s systems. That accusation was refuted thoroughly by DHS Inspector General in an open letter.

1. Secretary of State Brian Kemp issues dismissive statements to the press, but has yet to respond to this letter or this letter about Georgia’s system security posed by a group of distinguished computer scientists. These questions were designed to increase the public confidence in the security of the underlying system.

1. The premise underlying Georgia’s approach to paperless DRE voting systems was undermined in 2003, shortly after the implementation of HAVA and the chartering of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), when the National Institute of Standards (NIST) was asked to formulate the alternatives to a voter verified paper trail. NIST in turn chartered the Auditability Working Group to conduct an exhaustive study. The 2011 report of the NIST Working Group rejected the very idea of paperless voting. The report begins with the main conclusion:

>>11806628

Dominion screeching a lot…have they no balls?

Why don't they sue her ass if they feel Powell has maligned their shit Company?

>>11806594

>>11806649

I was here he said to dig on all aspects of REBELLION DEFENSE

Suspects this company and it's investors may be involved in bug on electronic voting…

Also commented on a post I made and mentioned to dig on Pentagon HackerOne Rebellion Defense was doing

Of course the entire fucking board was too busy shitting on each other and sliding

FUCKEDUP BEYOND BELIEF