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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) by gidds on Thursday March 09 2017, @01:31PM

    by gidds (589) on Thursday March 09 2017, @01:31PM (#476936)

    I heartily agree with your sentiment — in fact, I've recently been promoting the idea of paper-based elections elsewhere.  We need elections to be trustworthy, and the best way of doing that is keeping them simple enough and verifiable enough that anyone can watch the process and check every aspect for themselves.  Computer-based systems are far too complex and have far too many ways they can be subverted.

    But the article isn't really talking about that.  Unless I missed something, it doesn't mention Sepúlveda hacking the election process itself; instead, his hacking was trying to change voters' minds, not their ballot papers.  And that affects the most scrupulous and honest paper-based voting procedure just as much as computer-based ones.

    Our world seems to have evolved huge numbers of people and a large body of experience dedicated to changing people's minds about things: products, people, corporations, events, political views, &c.  The measures described in the article fill me with horror.  But trying to change people's minds is not itself a crime, and I see no easy answers.

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