Thursday, November 16, 2017

Respect for the office...

I like how people say if I can't respect the 45, then respect the office of the POTUS. I respond, "Why? You elected Trump as president, knowing full well he was unfit, and you didn't care. How is that respecting the office?"

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Voter Suppression Security Flaws

From Indivisible.org, how big data is being used for voter suppression--and how inept the oppressors are with sensitive information:

On October 23, a story broke in Mother Jones, ProPublica, and Think Progress that caused a big stir in voting rights circles. A group of citizens in Illinois had discovered some smoking-gun evidence that the problematic Interstate Crosscheck program had some major security issues—and that key people knew about them.
WHAT DID YOU GUYS DISCOVER? COULD YOU WALK US THROUGH THE SECURITY PROBLEMS YOU FOUND?
  • Within the past two weeks we discovered massive security failures in the Crosscheck program and in how the Illinois State Board of Elections (SBE) handles voter data.  
  • We sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to Illinois and other states for information about the program. We were startled by what we got back.
  • For starters, we received multiple usernames and passwords that election officials use to log in to voter data and Crosscheck systems.
  • The primary problem here is not that we have these passwords, but that the records show that every official and IT department involved in this process has been sending those usernames, login passwords, and decryption passwords in clear text in regular old emails—sometimes on chains with up to eighty recipients. Those are really bad security practices, even under normal circumstances. Anyone could have these passwords, and they could have been used while the election officials would have been none the wiser.
  • In addition, Crosscheck asks states to upload their entire voter file to a server that does not use any encryption protocols. This means that every state’s username and password to this central server housing 100 million voter records is sent in clear text across the Internet.
  • Even worse: even after there was an unprecedented rash of hacks against voter registration systems in 2016, Crosscheck and the twenty-eight participating states changed nothing and continued their poor security practices in 2017.
  • In addition to these technical issues, we also exposed another flaw: if we can get information about thousands of voters through FOIA requests this way, other people can too. For example, we have about 1,000 Kansans voter information plus the last four digits of their social security number thanks to Florida. It appears that voter data sent to Crosscheck is then susceptible to open records requests in other states.
As someone who has helped create and maintain databases for technical development and manufacturing, this reveals how the custodians of this personal data don't understand what they are doing, don't trust the procedures they've implemented, don't trust each other in maintaining the information records, and simply don't care about the personal information in their care and custody.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

A Rotting Mustard Seed

So much criticism of Liberalism posits that the idea of social and cultural progress at the expense of tradition is balloon-juice at best, hedonism at worst. At the heart of this critique is the (often unspoken) catechism "we have to live in the real world" usually expressed in historical anecdotes carefully chosen to prop up this restricted viewpoint. How telling is this look to the past--the history of economic/cultural repression justified by "that's just how things are" to keep us frozen in an eternal profit-loss margin continually favoring a fortunate wealthy few, a trade of a few shekels for the souls of the American people, using historical merit to maintain this obvious lie. Since the historical evidence is overwhelmingly against this worldview, such support from the past must be treated as an article of faith. Anyone who uses this faith to justify the violent treatment of people based on color, gender, status or income is someone who has a vested interest in maintaining this violence--be the cost physical, emotional, economic, social, or cultural--to keep the tears and blood flowing for their personal benefit alone.

Red, White and Blue Bruising

It never ceases to amaze me how Conservatives condemn socialism, yet the conservative answer to every issue, political, social and cultural, is to beat us all over the head with the economy and ram it down our throats. Money is the go-to weapon, the default stance of the GOP. Money must flow from our hands into the hands of ultra-conservatives. In order to keep the money flowing into their coffers, conservatives must lie, cheat, steal and wage wars, with overt applause from their closet fascitti supporters--all the while sneering at Liberals for being "unrealistic."

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

The Law of the Gun

In case we haven't figured it out yet, the NRA wants to kill us all. After the recent shooting in a Colorado Wal-Mart, police then reviewed the store videos to see what the killer did while in the store. But the police discovered several people in the Wal-Mart drew their own guns at the sound of gunshots. So the police had to track each gun handler one by one to determine who was the true killer; wasting valuable time and effort to conduct their investigation. This result is deliberate; this is what our paranoid NRA is after, a cloud of confusion to frustrate all efforts to prosecute killers who use firearms of any kind to slaughter women and/or people of color. The more guns in use, the more difficult it is to bring murderers to justice. If everyone is armed, all can act with impunity. For the NRA, any gun is a ticket marked "get out of jail free." No longer subject to the rule of law – justice and due process superseded by a sacrosanct 2nd amendment – potential killers now freely roam the USA, putting all of us in danger; a danger we cannot alleviate by simply adding more guns. The use and possession of firearms must be regulated and subject to law to protect us all from the insanity of "peace by the biggest gun."

Thoughts for the Day 20240304

Let's not mince words this terrible day:  the Supreme Court rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump,  bowing and motioning him to wal...