Kremlin Connection

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article195231139.html

Dashboard confessional

http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/

Information literacy is important.  The link above is a tool to track Russia propaganda.  Be informed and mine for facts.

Icon*

*photo found on google images from this blog post (but it's not the author's photo either)

Panderer in chief

noun

dated

noun: pander; plural noun: panders

1. 1.

   a pimp.

   • archaic

     a person who assists the baser urges or evil designs of others.
     
     
     

     Donald Trump is weak.  He panders to criminal actors who are set to undermine his own country. 
2. 
   

"Shakespeare's Panderus...is an aged degenerate and coward who ends the play by telling the audience he will bequeath them his diseases'" (Wiki..)  Guess it's time to read this one. Suits you to a "T", Trump.

Hi, I'm not a prostitute and you may have sold yourself many times over, but my freedom is not for sale.  Everyone knows, you know that the Kremlin attacked us by meddling in our elections.  

Pandarus bequeathing us his diseases

How do you know if you haven't checked?

I feel like a mom telling a child to look in his room for his missing shoes.

This article is very concerning.  Govt official say there is no evidence, but what evidence has been gathered?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dhs-doesnt-want-to-know-about-vote-hacks

DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.

“Although we continue to judge all newly available information, DHS has not fundamentally altered our prior assessments,” the department told TPM.

Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”

David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”

Why do we have to consistently ask our government to do their job?!

Barbra Streisand is Nuts

This is what I have become.  I am now sending rambling emails grappling with my gut feeling.

I really wish that movie guy's voice said "Barbra Streisand is Nuts" in this trailer

BURR: Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?
COMEY: I'm confident. When I left as director I had seen no indication of that whatsoever.
                        -from here

Later in the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) asked Clapper, “the intelligence community says, ‘It would be extremely difficult for someone – including a nation-state actor to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyberattack or intrusion,’ and you say to that earlier today as well that we have no evidence that vote tallies were altered or manipulated in anyway?”

“That’s correct,” Clapper said.
                        -from here

Jeh Johnson: "I know of no evidence that through cyber intrusion, votes were altered or suppressed in some way."  -this particular quote is only quoted in rightwing online presence??  I just noticed this.  I got it from the Hill opinion blog below (spin link)

Oh good!  Here’s a spin that Republicans are taking…Obama’s Homeland Security was trying to hack into voter registration systems in some states… Cybersecurity experts have confirmed…oh really?  So vague.  However…this WSJ story might be interesting if I could read it..well, it looks like it was a nothingburger (can’t believe I'm using that term-Twitterhead)

Ok, so this is why I still have reservations after three different people in the federal government claim that no votes were altered.  God, this is insane…

From what I have read, some of these machines did not have the security features turned on –such as an auditing function.  How much jurisdiction and authority does the federal government have over state elections systems?  How do they check or verify the votes?  I don’t know if I should believe, but via @mikefarb I have seen places in Wisconsin and I think Georgia where the tallies were inconsistent.  The federal government is doing an audit on all of these machines???  How did they have the time?  How can they if the feature is turned off?  So yes, Feds can say with confidence they have seen nothing to indicate altered votes, but what measures have they taken to investigate each county/state?  They have information already with 50 states and however many counties?  I’m fully for mail in/paper ballot at this point.

Also…another thought.  Maybe the question of whether Kremlin hacked is the problem.  Maybe Kremlin helped, but maybe someone inside the US hacked.  That’s a little wacko, but just a thought.  Why did Republican voter data firm leave 198 million voter data exposed online for three days?

Why did Jeh Johnson’s attempt to designate our elections systems as critical govt infrastructure meet with opposition (and why was it not that already? I think I saw due to view of too much federal intrusion).  Johnson said he did it anyway. ? 

Also this exchange is weird, but only because I don’t understand it (at 33:02, Schiff, but more specifically around 33:44 and something about pollsters and social scientists) This article states that said designation would have given states priority if they sought help in possible cyberattacks.. huh??  Our voting machines are not a priority?

I’m considering becoming a poll worker.  I don’t know if I should be a democrat or republican election judge.  Do the democrats oversee the republicans and vice versa or do democrats sign up to be republican election judges because they think they are corrupt and the same for republicans?  Why is there a partisan distinction?  

I need to research this Senate Intelligence Committee hearing