RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November's presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
What, are you sh*tting me? This is Voice of God nonsense. True because they say so. God, here, is the NSA and all its presumed moral authority, backed by collected (illicitly, little doubt) data points and packages that Ed Snowden, the inspiration for the establishment of The Intercept, referred to in the title of besieged memoir as a Permanent Record. Think: God and Judgement Day and the sh*t you posted or allowed on your timeline years ago now coming back like that proverbial little red rooster coming home to f*ck you. Had they already forgotten Risen's Intercept piece about his tenure at the NYT that included the paper's kowtowing to the NSA and killing the important StellarWind story? Have I gone mad? Am I to end up lost as Lear without a fool to see me home?
What Reality had right was the question of how it is possible that this material never made it to the MSM? It's that f*cking banal. But, as it is so hesitant, it never would have gotten past decent editing. The article did go on to reassure the public (while, at the same time, undermining the value of the top secret report), by confidently stating:
That review did not attempt to assess what effect the Russian efforts had on the election, despite the fact that "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards." According to the Department of Homeland Security, the assessment reported reassuringly, "the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying."
So, in other words, the Russians weren't really meddling in the election a couple days before, as implied, and as grasped by Reality, after all. For a moment, I felt like the love-glowy Jesus crucified between two thieves -- the "loveable" Turd Blossom, Karl Rove, who provided us with the prospect of a future of rolling pearlharbors, and his even more loveable progenitor, Charles Colson, who, when he was released from the federal pen for his role in Watergate, was allowed to vote in the 2000 Florida election, despite so many of his fellow felons, all black, having been denied by Jeb Bush's regime.
What's immediately a wonder is how Intercept subscriber Reality Winner missed out on Glenn Greenwald's pieces that laughed at and excoriated the Russiagate disinformation campaign that flooded the MSM and was assisted by networks hiring members of the Intelligence Community (IC), such as the liar-liars John Brennan and James Clapper who provided play-by-play claptrap. Intercept co-founder Greenwald would eventually quit the publication, citing its "censorship" of a piece he wrote in October 2020, a couple of weeks before the election showdown between Trump and Joe Biden. Greenwald, as the NY Post had already done, wanted to flout evidence of Biden family corruption found on a laptop computer left at a shop by Hunter. Greenwald hissed at the diss:
The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept's editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.
The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden's conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.
The controversial blogger left folks wondering if he preferred four more years of Trump over the grizzled Joe. Did he mean to play James Comey at the last minute, who probably did more to harm Hillary than any pretended Russian involvement in her electoral demise?
But, more importantly, investigative journalist Greg Palast had already quite convincingly provided stats and analysis that detailed how Trump had stolen the 2016 by means of Republican secretaries of state determining at the last minute which provisional and mail-in votes would count, mostly from Democratic-leaning minorities (Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans) and university students. Palast showed how this had been an especially effective strategy in the so-called swing states. Trump's enablers had done it in 2016 and they would do it again in 2020, he argued.
Indeed, Trump was caught on tape trying to squeeze more votes than he was entitled to by 'losing' some minority ballots out of voting officials in Georgia (they are considering going after him for it). The strategy is so effective, because, technically, it's legal to question how chad hangs. Dang, but Trump, despite extra scrutiny of votes, almost won in 2020 anyway (four states had to be recounted). The Russians? How about the Republicans, instead? With the help of the Democrats.
But funnier, Trump has more recently complained that voting machines had been meddled with in 2020 by nefarious agents of cynicism on the Left (presumably) to keep him from returning to his Rightful throne. Trump specifically accused Dominion machines of having flipped and switched -- without evidence -- losing him hundreds of thousands of votes. Depressingly obese, according to NPR, only three companies dominate the market of voting software suppliers in the US. They are: Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting System, Hart InterCivic. The "EVID" references in the NSA top secret document almost certainly refer to ES&S proprietary voting tabulators.
ES&S has a history of tabulation problems that have been reported in the past without reference to Russians. Dominion used to be owned by the notorious Diebold, which helped give us the debacle in 2000 in Florida and again in 2004 in Ohio. However, Anderson Cooper, who Reality Winner is sweet on (she has his signed picture on her desk at work), debunks the Dominion huff-and-guff. Nevertheless, and as agent Taylor kids Reality, "The man cuts a figure, what can you say?," despite Anderson's willy-producing wiles, plenty of scrutiny is going onto the three main voter software suppliers, all owned by Republican partisans.
Further depressing evidence that there has been on-going worry, from citizens who still care, that voting machines are inadequately secured, and that that knowledge is known, and, therefore, rife for exploitation by the crypto-fascists who hate democracy. At the 2018 Def Con Hackathon, according to a piece in US News and World Report,
Thirty-five kids ages 6 to 17 were able to hack into mock voting websites, voting machines and a voter registration database during a hacking conference over the weekend.
Kidsplay. An embedded video in the piece answers the posed question: Can States Stop Election Hacking? A year later, a Wired piece tells us that not only have the recommendations for improving security been ignored, in some cases the problem has worsened. The title says it all:Some Voting Machines Still Have Decade-Old Vulnerabilities.
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