Anonymous: Occupy the November Election

Anonymous and Occupy are launching a new operation encouraging people to vote in the November elections. (Credit: Anonymous/Occupy Movement)

Summary: Hackers urge citizens to vote out lawmakers, but also declare war on the government.

Anonymous continues its transition to digital revolutionaries, partnering with the Occupy movement to urge people to vote in the November elections.

The activist group has announced a new joint effort to hold politicians accountable to the people.

“Last year, many of our elected officials let us down by giving in to deep-pocketed lobbyists and passing laws meant to boost corporate profits at the expense of individual liberty,” the groups said in an online flyer. “Our Senators and Representatives showed how little they cared about personal freedoms when they voted overwhelmingly to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).”

The NDAA allows for the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, even U.S. citizens, without trial and expands the use of U.S. military in this country. Civil libertarians allege that the law violates due process and other constitutional rights and gives the military authority to engage in civilian law enforcement.

And then there’s the proposed SOPA/PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act) measures, which have been in limbo since Wikipedia, Google and other sites staged blackouts and other actions to protest the legislation. Anonymous, and other opponents, argue such a measure would give authorities broad power to shut down Web sites for the mere accusation that they had pirated content on them.

Anonymous launched denial-of-service attacks on the Web sites of the Justice Department, the FBI, Universal Music, the Motion Picture Association of America and others in an anti-SOPA protest after the arrest of the founder of the file-hosting site MegaUpload for alleged piracy.

“Even if the goal was to merely regulate pirated content, the ambiguous wording demonstrates that the authors and supporters of SOPA and PIPA have little-to-no understanding of the Internet’s architecture or the frightening implications of the legislation,” Anonymous writes.

The collective urges people to hold elected officials accountable for supporting NDAA, SOPA and PIPA. (The activists have also been actie in opposing the European anti-piracy law called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).                  More

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control - 2012 Elections

iStockphoto/dcdp

h/t – @VFWd 

 

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab’s scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder.

Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor.  Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton’s demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system — as I wrote for Salon back in 2006 — relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is
needed for the attack on the Diebold system.

Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.           More