2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumBloomberg: How to HACK an Election (FASCINATING ARTICLE - A TRUE STORY)
We all know our elections are being tampered with - Ohio and the .gov server, Diebold, ES&S, and most recently, the purging and changing of voter registrations in AZ. Here is the fascinating story of a man who rigged elections in Latin America for a living. It would be naive to believe it could never happen here.
Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time.
By Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis | March 31, 2016
Photographs by Juan Arredondo
From Bloomberg Businessweek
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 Bogotás 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 Nietos 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.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone...
SNIP
...Sepúlveda says he was offered several political jobs in Spain, which he says he turned down because he was too busy. On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. Im 100 percent sure it is, he says...
SNIP
...In July 2015, Sepúlveda sat in the small courtyard of the Bunker, poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, and took out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He says he wants to tell his story because the public doesnt grasp the power hackers exert over modern elections or the specialized skills needed to stop them. I worked with presidents, public figures with great power, and did many things with absolutely no regrets because I did it with full conviction and under a clear objective, to end dictatorship and socialist governments in Latin America, he says. I have always said that there are two types of politicswhat people see and what really makes things happen. I worked in politics that are not seen...
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/
Aerows
(39,961 posts)(The arguments)
1. This is conspiracy theory
2. Bloomberg isn't a reliable source
3. That happened in Latin America, it could never happen here in the US
4. This is sensationalism, there is no evidence other than this guy
5. We have never had evidence/prosecutions for election fraud in the US
Please feel free to add to the list.
reformist2
(9,841 posts)Aerows
(39,961 posts)nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)and if people believe this is not happening HERE...
Todays_Illusion
(1,209 posts)Paragraph 11.
"On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. Im 100 percent sure it is, he says.
And this: near the end, counting from the last paragraph, 4 and 5 up from the bottom:
"Sepúlvedas contention that operations like his happen on every continent is plausible, says David Maynor, who runs a security testing company in Atlanta called Errata Security. Maynor says he occasionally gets inquiries for campaign-related jobs. His company has been asked to obtain e-mails and other documents from candidates computers and phones, though the ultimate client is never disclosed. Those activities do happen in the U.S., and they happen all the time, he says.
In one case, Maynor was asked to steal data as a security test, but the individual couldnt show an actual connection to the campaign whose security he wanted to test. In another, a potential client asked for a detailed briefing on how a candidates movements could be tracked by switching out the users iPhone for a bugged clone. For obvious reasons, we always turned them down, says Maynor, who declines to name the candidates involved."
FourScore
(9,704 posts)jillan
(39,451 posts)ucrdem
(15,512 posts)Kidding. About the story, I don't doubt that there's funny business galore in many if not most elections, including several I've voted in, but this braggadocio is not exactly plausible.
Bread and Circus
(9,454 posts)...of truth and transparency.