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egypturnashThesis: The US election system is horribly compromised, due to our voting kiosks being designed to make it terribly easy to put the fix in.
There have been incidents of voting machine code getting out. There have been incidents of them simply vanishing. Various analyses of what code has leaked suggest that it's got a lot of back doors.
Thesis: People with the skill to discover and use back doors tend to be... well, there's a strong strain of intellectual right-wing Libertarianism, but even those tend to be opposed to a government that looks like something out of Orwell.
So: If the vote is being hacked to the corporate warmonger party from above, and it's this riddled with holes... How long before someone hacks the other way, from below?
Of course, the hacker mindset would be as likely to result for a landslide for Bart Simpson or Zippy the Pinhead as to actually pull in a direction opposite the official miscounting. And it'd be damn risky, and whoever did it would probably have to remain absolutely quiet about it for a few years. How long could anyone remain quiet about a killer hack like that? I doubt I could.
There's probably a decent short story in it, at least.
There have been incidents of voting machine code getting out. There have been incidents of them simply vanishing. Various analyses of what code has leaked suggest that it's got a lot of back doors.
Thesis: People with the skill to discover and use back doors tend to be... well, there's a strong strain of intellectual right-wing Libertarianism, but even those tend to be opposed to a government that looks like something out of Orwell.
Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election.- this story - probably exaggerating.
So: If the vote is being hacked to the corporate warmonger party from above, and it's this riddled with holes... How long before someone hacks the other way, from below?
Of course, the hacker mindset would be as likely to result for a landslide for Bart Simpson or Zippy the Pinhead as to actually pull in a direction opposite the official miscounting. And it'd be damn risky, and whoever did it would probably have to remain absolutely quiet about it for a few years. How long could anyone remain quiet about a killer hack like that? I doubt I could.
There's probably a decent short story in it, at least.