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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-happen-here dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.

Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá's upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words "</head>" and "<body>" stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto's victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.

When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:09PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:09PM (#476434)

    Well, given that Runaway submitted this one, it may be moot. At first brush, I thought this was yet another lame attempt by the DNC to push the "election was hacked!" narrative while continuing to offer exactly zero evidence. Then I saw your comment and also noted who submitted it on IRC.

    At the same time, we should always be wary of being lulled by the "it can't happen here/to me" instinct.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:22PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:22PM (#476604)

    Well, voting machines still have to deal with the legacy of Diebold's CEO promising to "win the election" for the Republicans (in Ohio?).

    We know software. Humans write it. We should never trust elections to magic counting boxes.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:51PM (#476705)

    Runaway1956's Soviet brainwashing [soylentnews.org] kicked in. He says "comrade" now. [soylentnews.org] Sad!