2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWake Up: Your Vote Doesn't Count
"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.
Sepúlvedas career began in 2005, and his first jobs were smallmostly defacing campaign websites and breaking into opponents donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasnt cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few."
"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."
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/
Don't bother commenting on the validity of this before you go read the article...
It's amazing to me that people think that election hacking is a conspiracy theory in 2016... like all those billion dollar corporations just dump money into politics without trying to rig the outcome... give me a break.
global1
(25,285 posts)the good old US of A?
almost impossible to know really... and smart money would place that counterpart well outside US borders...
I'd 100% say that any national campaign worth a sh!t has access to people like this though... because their money people would know who they are... heck the campaigns probably don't even know half the time... they're just amazed to suddenly get a lot of new phone numbers to call, or email addresses to spam, etc.
We see it here all the time... I've seen numerous posts where people say they never signed up to a certain candidates mailing list, but then they suddenly start getting hit up for money.. it happened to me...
On top of that, when you look at what happened in AZ, well... it could be a simple computer glitch, but......... then again........
And of course, we'll likely never know...
What we know for a fact is that e-voting is unsafe, as a rule, and computer databases are routinely hacked, as a rule... and the government is wildly inept at protecting their data...
questionseverything
(9,664 posts)what i think to myself is
there is literally no paper to count in most those states
all blackbox voting in miss,alabama, Arkansas,ky
not that paper counted by machines is much better but in theory it the ptb allowed it votes could be counted
but as the article points out there are a million ways to cheat an election
firebrand80
(2,760 posts)msongs
(67,462 posts)EdwardBernays
(3,343 posts)Bump this for the morning crowd.
bigwillq
(72,790 posts)I live in solid blue CT, where the DEM nominee is going to win no matter what I do.
The only votes that really matter are those in swing states.
EdwardBernays
(3,343 posts)Read the article I'm not even sure you'll be sure that those votes are accurate.
Only 3/10 Americans have faith in the American Democratic system. I'm sure that number will only continue to fall.
Orsino
(37,428 posts)Why would we believe that they would get squeamish over actual ballots?
And rigging is exactly why the damned machines were invented and implemented.
The good news is that voting still does sway elections..just not the way we'd like to believe.