Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

Alternate Title: How to Hack Your Local Election for about $30 and in only 4 Minutes

Note: This post is not intended to be subversive or illegal in any way, shape or form! This information is provided to you so that you can become educated and informed about how unreliable and easily hackable e-Voting elections are. Additionally, once you have been presented with this information it’s your civic duty to DEMAND a 100% physically verified election. Failure to do this will most likely result in an unelected government, a hacked government, that doesn’t care about you or representing your views. If you don’t act NOW, after this election it may very well be too late.

[ Skip Straight to the Video ]

The November mid-term elections are coming up fast, and Utah has a brand-new, electronic voting system that you’ll have to use to “cast your ballot.” (Maybe your state does, too!)

Ballots

Simply put, counting all those paper ballots by hand is just too darn hard! No, really, that’s the reason the powers that be give for why we don’t use paper ballots.

This leads to an problem inherent in any type of voting: The count is only as accurate as the people (or machines) that are counting. Now, since no party on the ballot wants another party to be counting their votes, there are usually representatives from all parties on hand to participate in and/or supervise the count. This makes sense for a couple reasons: 1) it keeps the people counting honest, and 2) all persons involved in the count then certify their count as being accurate and complete, therefore theoretically ruling out the possibility of embroiled recounts that seem to have no end (anyone remember Florida?).

There has to be a better way to count all those ballots

States have tried punch ballots that can be read by computers to help facilitate the counting of ballots. The idea is that you still have a paper ballot, so it’s still accurate. The problem is with those darn hanging chads (not to mention that they’re apparently too difficult to punch all the way out for voters of one state that juts out into the ocean in the Citrus Belt… But that’s fodder for another rant.

e-Voting

So the logic has been: since computers count the ballots anyway, why not just have the people vote right on the computers? That way we can get rid of all those pesky ballots! And of course they’re accurate (shhh… don’t tell them there’s no paper trail, or any other way to double-check the accuracy of the “ballots” cast).

And then you get all the computer hackers in the world working on cracking them. Some do so with malicious intent.

Just how easy is it to crack one of these new-fangled contraptions?

Watch this video and see how you can hack an e-Voting machine with a $30 USB thumb drive (and adapters) and a #2 Phillips screwdriver in under 4 minutes.

Scared yet?

If that doesn’t scare you, check into these links.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s Latest Internet Explorer [download MSIE7], Mozilla has released the second major release of its Firefox browser.

Improvements in this release include:

• Fixed memory leaks and improved performance
• Built-in phishing protection will warn the user of suspicious sites
• Persistent sessions will restore the session after system restart
• Smart spell checking for web forms
• Live Titles and microsummaries help sites convey the latest interesting content
• Improved add-on manager helps the users manage extensions and themes
• Enhanced security and localization support for extensions
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• (See Firefox 2.0 release notes for further details)

[Download Firefox 2.0 (final)]

According to a KSL.com story “The Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah believes the damage done by guns grows more common every year. It wants to plant a different future with fewer violent shootings.” How does it plan to do that? “The violence prevention advocates urge all of us to take action and talk to our legislators [about stricter laws for gun ownership], especially as the population swells.”

Lorna Brown, Gun Valley Prevention Center Board Member: “Now is the time to act. We shouldn’t wait until it gets worse; it certainly will get worse unless we do womething about it.”

So what are they advocating?

We should pass a law that makes it illegal to shoot someone.

We should pass a law that a person cannot possess a firearm while in the commission of a crime.

We should pass a law that a person who’s committed a violent crime in the past (dometic violence or a felony, for example) cannot carry or even own a firearm (then let’s take away their right to vote so they can’t try and get this law repealed).

We should pass a law that a person cannot conceal a firearm unless they’ve gone through a bunch of training and background checks, and has submitted their fingerprints and photograph for documentation.

We should also establish an elite group of people that enforce these laws that we can call any time night or day to come and apprehend anyone that doesn’t obey these laws.

We should set up secure buildings surrounded by fences topped with razor wire where we can lock up people who don’t obey these laws.

Once we pass those laws I think we’ll all be safe.

That won’t work

We’ve already got all those laws and very simply, they don’t work!

Something must be done about “violence” of all kinds, not just violence involving the use of guns. A violent crime committed with a firearm is no more or less tragic that a violent crime committed with a knife, tire iron, bat, or even fists.

We need to eliminate violent individuals from our neighborhoods; tell them we don’t want them here, they’re not welcome.

Utah Legislature, listen up

• Create an online database (just like the sex offender’s registry) that lists ALL violent crimes commited (including the location of the crime and the residence of the criminal).
• Pass “Castle Doctrine” legislation to protect law-abiding citizens from retaliation should a criminal force them to defend themself, their family, and their property.
• Repeal “Duty to Retreat” laws that effectively empower the violent criminal by forcing the law-abiding victim to “run away.” (These are also known as “The Criminal’s Safe Workplace” guarantee.)
• In short, since the police aren’t required by law to protect individual citizens, give the individual citizens the tools to do it themselves!

Who Will it Be?

Who will be the State Senator or State Representative that will sponsor this legislation?

With elections upcoming, I’d like to know, reply to this post and I’ll drum up support for you at the grassroots level.