Facebook Funds 'Defending Digital Democracy' Initiative At Harvard (diginomica.com) 90
An anonymous reader quotes Diginomica:
A fresh initiative aimed at information sharing about election threats and dubbed Defending Digital Democracy has the financial support of Facebook and the academic muscle of Harvard behind it. Will the project succeed where similar initiatives have failed...? On 19 July and backed by a $500,000 initial grant from Facebook, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School launched a new, bipartisan initiative called the Defending Digital Democracy Project. The project will be co-led by Robby Mook, Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign manager, and Matt Rhoades, Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign manager. The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
The group will also assess new technologies (including blockchain) to secure elections, and wants to create an information sharing infrastructure modeled "on similar efforts within the tech industry to share tech intelligence." The article says Facebook's chief security officer "hopes that election officials who are wary of cooperating with the federal government will be more receptive to working with an independent group tied to Harvard and the tech industy," and the group also includes Google's director for Information Security and Privacy.
"Facebook plans to host state and local election officials at its D.C. office later this year to discuss the information sharing organization, and launch the organization in early 2018."
The group will also assess new technologies (including blockchain) to secure elections, and wants to create an information sharing infrastructure modeled "on similar efforts within the tech industry to share tech intelligence." The article says Facebook's chief security officer "hopes that election officials who are wary of cooperating with the federal government will be more receptive to working with an independent group tied to Harvard and the tech industy," and the group also includes Google's director for Information Security and Privacy.
"Facebook plans to host state and local election officials at its D.C. office later this year to discuss the information sharing organization, and launch the organization in early 2018."
WikiLeaks publishes the Imperial project of CIA (Score:1, Insightful)
Wikileaks not appearing on Slashdot as usual.
Today, July 27th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Imperial project of the CIA. [wikileaks.org]
Achilles is a capability that provides an operator the ability to trojan an OS X disk image (.dmg) installer with one or more desired operator specified executables for a one-time execution.
Aeris is an automated implant written in C that supports a number of POSIX-based systems (Debian, RHEL, Solaris, FreeBSD, CentOS). It supports automated file exfiltration, configurable be
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Still using a mid-2010 Mac mini (Core 2 Duo) running OS X 10.9 here, I can't imagine anyone still using 10.6 or 10.7 in 2017, except Power PC Macs maybe?
Let me guess (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Let me guess (Score:1, Interesting)
That, and the acceptable narrative is one in which advertising companies (who happen to use computers to push narratives) and former campaign managers, formerly employed by loser candidates and now working for Harvard, home of elite smugness, are somehow perceived by the public as trustworthy people instead of the most despicable scum of the earth.
hopes that election officials who are wary of cooperating with the federal government will be more receptive to working with an independent group tied to Harvard and the tech industy
Were I such a wary official, I might well trust such a group of advertisers, cryptocurrency scammers, and Harvardian failed political hacks even less than I would
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Informative)
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Consider where one candidate gets 60% and another gets 40%. The best system is almost certainly not one that gives 100% of the outcome to the 60%'r, but its still clearly better than giving 0% of the outcome to the 60%'r.
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Could use something like Proportional Representation, various versions of which are used in about one hundred countries.
I don't know much about US elections, but the Electoral College just sounds like one massive statistical sampling/rounding error.
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Everyone who runs for a position in the government should have a real chance to serve so long as they get even a single vote.
The candidate that only got 1 vote may still win the "right to serve" against a candidate that got every other vote. Perhaps the probability of this occurring should simply be the proportion of votes a candidate got.
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Great! If someone runs on a platform of murdering half the population of the world to combat global whatever, they absolutely should get a chance to win. This will be awesome.
Re: Let me guess (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our murderous overlords. /s
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If Trump wants to murder half the population... do you really think he could?
Obama ran on single payer. Didn't happen because even the most powerful person in the world has limits.
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(*) Appears to have won an election, or by some other observational metric.
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The main problem with democracy is not how you turn percentages into power, it's the percentages themselves. Most people don't spend sufficient time researching their options. Critical thinking and general knowledge about the world and its history is also very useful to make the right choice. I don't blame them since voting isn't their full-time job, and each vote contributes only 0.000001% of the decision. Democracy might work if everyone spent 1000 hours taking classes and thinking about their vote, but t
Re:Let me guess (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly because of this many countries (such as we here in the Nordics) have ditched the single candidate districts and moved towards proportional representation. [wikipedia.org] It's not perfect either, but it works around this issues especially. Instead of the current binary '2 man enter 1 man leave' -from of Thunderdome politics you could just as well merge the districts so that instead of picking 1 guy from each district, you pick say, 10 and assign the seats so that the party that the 60 % party gets 6 seats for 6 of their most voted candidates and the 40 % party gets 4 seats for their top 4 guys respectively.
But this also has the 'downside' from the point of view of the established american parties that it makes gerrymandering a lot more difficult because it means you no longer get to engineer the districts so that the other side gets no power at all despite getting close to half of the votes.
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Democracy is certainly not the best system. However its still a pretty good system. The best system probably involves some dice rolling.
I'm a fan of the Constitutional Republic myself.
Consider where one candidate gets 60% and another gets 40%. The best system is almost certainly not one that gives 100% of the outcome to the 60%'r, but its still clearly better than giving 0% of the outcome to the 60%'r.
How about when both candidates combined receive less than 50% of the total vote, including voters who abstain?
FWIW, in the last US Presidential election, 51% didn't vote at all, and of those who did, 6% voted third party; that means neither D nor R candidate actually received anything close to half the total vote.
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The thing with democracy, isn't that it is perfect, but more sustainable. We could get a strong and effective ruler who could lead America into a Golden Age. Then he will eventually die, then the successor has a chance on being good, or just pure bad.
With democracy, even if you don't like the guy who is in power, chances are there is enough people for them, which will reduce the chances on taking arms.
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Re: Let me guess (Score:2)
The US is a one party system with two parties.
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A republic is any system of government in which the titular head of state is not a hereditary monarch. This includes Athenian-style direct democracy where everyone votes on every issue up to military dictatorships. Being a republic is not anything to be particularly proud of: republics have killed far more of their own citizens in the twentieth century than monarchies. Most industrial nations are either c
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Your guess is completely wrong. Perhaps you should at least read the summary before you make wild guesses based on the title.
"The hope is ... the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks."
We already have insecure electronic voting machines [telegraph.co.uk] and at least one successful attack [thehill.com]. While the changes from that attack were detected and reverted, it's just a matter of time before someone succeed
It's the People, not the Technology (Score:2, Insightful)
No matter what kind of Rube Goldberg system they come up with, it will always be at the mercy of those who implement and run it.
You know what the most secure voting system is? Paper ballots. But they are subject to manipulation just as are electronic voting systems.
The primary "flaw" in voting systems is also their primary strength...the voter is ultimately disconnected from their vote. You don't know who voted for who.
It would be nice if there were a way I could confirm that the vote I cast is actually ca
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That's if the union boss or management had access to the mail in ballots. I guess they could collect, verify the correct vote and the send it in themselves, "for you".
All the more reason mail in ballots suck and should be limited only to those who cannot physically make it to the polls.
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Technical attacks on the integrity of the voting system almost seem like acts of desperation when the usual strategies of misleading voters through coordinated disinformation campaigns stop working.
The last election seemed to be an example of coordinated propaganda campaigns failing, despite presenting relentless anti-Trump messages (and Trump's own hapless behavior) failing to produce the desired outcome.
Part of me thinks it wasn't a repudiation of media manipulation per se, but that its effect was too loc
Democrats silenced *PUBLIC* support for Trump (Score:2)
What happened was that pro-Hillary goons beat up on Trump supporters at his rallies. People were scared to admit they were voting for Trump. When asked, they said they were voting Clinton. But when election day came, they voted Trump. The fear of speaking up for Trump led many people to think Hillary had it in the bag. No need to go campaign in Michigan or Wisconsin, etc.
Ironically, if the democrat goons had not scared Trump supporters into silence, they would've heard from those supporters, and known that
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The more worrying bit about digital democracy, is it isn't the voice of the majority, but of the most vocal.
The recent healthcare stuff in congress has the following sides that seems to be prevalent.
1. Get rid of the ACA and make something new.
2. Keep the ACA and don't change it one bit.
Because the most vocal groups on the topic either really hate it or just love it.
Those people who want to do the responsible thing like.
Take a look at problems with the ACA, and see if there are ways to fix these.
See what is
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You either believe that the federal government should intrude so deeply into our lives that they control our access to health care, or you don't. There isn't much of a middle-ground. This isn't a power that is given to the federal government under the Constitution.
Re: Let me guess (Score:2)
There is plenty of room in the middle to believe that the poor should have a good effective health care safety net paid for with an equitable tax but that we should also have freedom of choice in how we purchase health care and to allow people to save up their money in good health instead of purchasing health insurance. And who on either side supports the middle income cliff/wall where millions of people make too much for subsidies, but too little to afford adequate health insurance?
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I don't think you understand my comment. A good portion of the population doesn't want the federal government involved with access to health care, at all. No federal subsidies, no bail-outs, no federal safety nets, no federal requirement of insurance by abusing the IRS to make an end-run around the Constitution for the "it's not a fine and it's not a tax but it's both." None of it. These are all issues for the states to sort out for themselves.
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Medicare and Medicaid already exist separate from the AHA.
A free marketplace could have been a solution if the feds addressed our ability to buy plans from other states. That would have been an interesting piece of legislation all on its own, without needing thousands of pages of "pass the law to find out what's in it." Conservatives could have supported that as being a legitimate use of federal powers since it's obviously across state lines. I guess that could have been some middle ground.
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From TFS (emphasis mine):
The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team...
Sounds about right - Left/Right wing protectionism, probably focused on keeping third parties from receiving fair and/or equal representation.
Re: Let me guess (Score:2)
Forget China.... the Clinton campaign worked like hell to make sure the Democratic Party primary was a coronation and not a serious primary.
How can this effort be serious when the people who worked to subvert a free and fair election in the US are given leadership positions?
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Mumble mumble blockchain (Score:1)
Technology is the golden fairy dust to fix everything.
No, folks: if there's something democracy needs is *less* opaque stuff. People have to get some trust in the democratic processes, and for that, they have to be *transparent* (to everyone).
That's why I strongly favour paper ballots *and hand counting* (gasp!). Not because they're more secure than electronics (they're not, they just have another set of vulnerabilities), but because you *need* lots of people to do that counting, ideally organized as a "cou
Clinton and Romney's managers? (Score:4, Funny)
We don't need new tech to secure our elections (Score:4, Insightful)
The most ingenious idea I have ever seen for securing ballots follows a few simple steps:
1. Assign a unique serial number to all ballots printed.
2. Use a scantron system to record the choices and serial number.
3. Let the voter either keep the ballot or a carbon copy.
4. As the votes are tallied, the serial numbers and choices are posted online on a government website so that voters can verify their vote.
Motor voter laws are probably the single biggest threat to our process aside from the lack of a solid ID requirement at the precincts. Set aside any views you have on politics and culture for a moment and just consider these facts:
1. In some states, illegal immigrants--by state policy--can get driver's licenses.
2. You can register to vote at the DMV without any form of ID showing you are a US citizen.
If any system dealing with PII, finances, etc. in your life had such a low barrier on security, would you use it? I don't think you would.
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With suitable encrypted signatures, you could set up the receipt so that you had to pay a $1000 fee to check that your vote was accurately counted, and if it wasn't, you are awarded $1,000,000 in compensation (to deliver the sting where it matters, each election oversight group could be organized like the unlimited Lloyd's "names" of old).
Why would you do this?
Well, there's a problem with ubiquitous, easily verified receipts that's usually covered in the second lecture of Public Administration 101.
I don't p
but there's also stochastic compliance (Score:3)
No, my idea doesn't work, because the Mafia can do the same thing in reverse: gather up all the receipts associated with "paid" votes, then randomly test ten (a $10,000 cost-of-doing-business fee), on penalty of worse-than-death.
I think that would reduce the enforcement cost enough to turn paying for votes into a cash-flow-positive business model.
Bear in mind that delivering on penalty of worse-than-death is not cheap (either in time now, or potential for time later). If all the rabbits are trembling enough
Re: but there's also stochastic compliance (Score:2)
Thugs can subvert an election by coercing the vote counters and elections officials far more easily than they can coerce a significant enough number of voters.
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3. Let the voter either keep the ballot or a carbon copy.
4. As the votes are tallied, the serial numbers and choices are posted online on a government website so that voters can verify their vote.
If you can verify your ballot, so could someone who could put pressure on you.
Vote for $CANDIDATE or something bad happens to your job/spouse/children/whatever is a serious potential problem.
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Vote for $CANDIDATE or something bad happens to your job/spouse/children/whatever is a serious potential problem.
No, it's not a problem and it never has been. You're crazy.
.
.
Strat :)
Re: We don't need new tech to secure our elections (Score:2)
What's more likely... coercion of elections officials or coercion of a plurality of voters?
Far far easier to coerce a small number of elections officials.
Step 1 to protecting democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
Step 1 to protecting democracy:
Don't riot when someone with different political views comes to your campus. For comparison:
Once the universities begin to act like a) they have a role in our democracy (we are actually a representative republic, but I am not going to split hairs), and b) start working constructively to improve it, then we may have something worthwhile.
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They always did, it's just that the rise of incontrovertible video evidence has made you realize it for the first time. The rest of us have been aware of it for decades.
I mean, think about it: if I had told you the story of Trigglypuff, would you have believed me? Without video? Hell no, it would sound ridiculous and made-up.
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You probably meant don't protest just because someone with a different view comes. Both of the "conservative pundits" in your link are trolls. Protest to avoid feeding the trolls. Do so regardless of party.
And yes, I changed your quote to the less inflammatory and more accurate verb. Even your link calls it protesting.
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There was a 1500 person non-violent protest. 100 people arrived (from off campus) to riot. There's a difference.
If someone is a troll, they certainly have the same legal rights to free speech. And no one denied that! It's just not a high bar. I certainly ignore trolls, and encourage society to ignore them, as a rule. And that applies to Michael Moore just as much as Ann Coulter.
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There's already a guy grading political sites... (Score:2)
http://cybertical.com
Want to "Defend Democracy" ?? (Score:2)
Paper ballots. In person. Providing any of a number of government-issued photo IDs. Cast your ballot, dip your finger in the ink.
Roll Credits, cut to commercial.
You're welcome. . .
Already a failure (Score:1)
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This project is already the failure. The US isn't a democracy and was never meant to be. You can't defend what isn't there.
Yeah, because for 241 years it's been failing. Surely it will fall apart before it gets to 242.
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Yeah, yeah, I don't believe that the OP meant the comment in that way since the vast majority of people consider the U.S. to be a democracy....technically right or wrong.
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That's hardly the point.
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Not bipartisan. (Score:1)
When you see Facebook, Harvard (or any Ivy/near-Ivy), and "bipartisan" in close proximity, it's safe to assume they're not. They're establishment if not outright left-leaning.