This is a cybersecurity crisis that is well on its way to creating a constitutional crisis:
The FBI has uncovered evidence that foreign hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks, prompting the bureau to warn election officials across the country to take new steps to enhance the security of their computer systems, according to federal and state law enforcement officials.
The FBI warning, contained in a “flash” alert from the FBI’s Cyber Division, a copy of which was obtained by Yahoo News, comes amid heightened concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about the possibility of cyberintrusions, potentially by Russian state-sponsored hackers, aimed at disrupting the November elections.
In any other election, this would read as the purest of CT, or the plot of one of Tom Clancy’s pulpier novels. But it’s not — this is real news, also on CBS and other media outlets very shortly I’m sure.
[S]ources familiar with the document say it refers to the targeting by suspected foreign hackers of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In the Illinois case, officials were forced to shut down the state’s voter registration system for ten days in late July, after the hackers managed to download personal data on up to 200,000 state voters, Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, said in an interview. The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful exfiltration of data, a state official said.
Sorry I’m going beyond fair use here, but this is where it gets particularly chilling:
Federal and state election officials say that the prospect of a full-blown cyberattack that seriously disrupts the November elections is remote, but not out of the question. About 40 states use optical-scan electronic-voting machines, allowing voters to fill out their choices on paper. The results are tabulated by computers.
These are “reasonably safe” because the voting machines are backed up by paper ballots that can be checked, says Andrew W. Appel, a Princeton University computer science professor who has studied election security. But six states and parts of four others (including large swaths of Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state in this year’s race) are more vulnerable because they rely on paperless touchscreen voting, known as DREs or Direct-Recording Electronic voting machines, for which there are no paper ballot backups.
As a poll worker in the Hoosier state, I’ve worked with DRE’s before and had full confidence in the validity of the results, but absolutely wondered how it would be possible to publicly verify if results had been tampered with.
I strongly doubt that the GOP has any intention to actually hack the machines themselves (if so, wouldn’t they have done that in 2012, say?), but can anyone at this point seriously say that the idea of highly-skilled, well-funded Putin-backed hackers wreaking serious havoc with our elections is preposterous? I sure can’t, and I’m really not prone to CT or paranoia.
We’ve already had Trump deliberately try to undermine the validity of our elections through statements that are pure cynical CT. And now we’ve got what sounds like a very credible threat against our elections by what is most likely a hostile foreign power who the Republican nominee is aligned with (I can hardly believe I’m writing these words, but they’re true). Our democracy depends on the vast majority of American citizens agreeing that the electoral process is valid.
This is, most likely, an act of cyber war against the US. I do not mean for one second that we at now “at war” with Russia, but we need to treat this is as the crisis it is and have non-verifiable DRE’s pulled. If that’s expensive, so be it. If that’s a pain in the ass for pollworkers like myself, so be it. If that slows down the results on November 8th, so be it.
I’m about to contact my Senators, my Representative and — for whatever it’s worth — write to the White House. I encourage you to do the same and contact anyone in media or government at any national or state level.
If tens of millions of Americans have reason to believe the General Election results this year are fundamentally invalid, we’ll have a constitutional crisis on our hands that will make Bush v. Gore look like child’s play.