Jeb Johnson Quotes

Zt the time he made this statement, some Russians—probably with the blessing of the Russian government—had been hacking the e-mail computers of the Democratic National Committee and making embarrassing e-mails public through Wikileaks. Many Americans were concerned at the possibility that Russia, another nation, or a non-state group could hack into the voting machines and the computers that tally the votes. This statement was made to reassure them. There are 9000 different polling places where Americans can vote in a Presidential election. There is no single entity that anyone could hack to rig the vote counts. And there is no uniformity in the voting machines used, the tabulating and aggregating methods and machines, and the software that is used to tally the vote in cities, counties and states. And no voting machines are connected to the Internet.

Many computer experts and security operatives view this kind of advice and strategy as counter-productive as there are some computer security extremists who so harden computer systems and networks that they function poorly and cause really harmful operational problems. The classic case was the FBI agent in Minnesota who before 9-11 had information that Muslims foreigners were taking flying lessons. She wanted to get the information to the national security FBI people, but she was not allowed to send the information by e-mail. Instead she had to use a "secure" system that was much slower and could not be viewed by the people who might have been able to connect the dots and do something about it. The FBI has now a better balance between functionality and security, but it is a good example of how "security fanaticism" can make us less safe.

Florida’s vote counting system was extremely primitive and highly subjective, and no one could really ever tell whether Al Gore or George W. Bush ever won the state whose electoral votes determined the election of 2000. The Supreme Court finally decided that Bush would be president, but no one wanted such a situation to ever happen again. Blackwell had better technology in Ohio in the next election but Ohio various techniques were used to keep some Blacks from voting.

Without a paper trail, there is no way to audit an election to prove that there ahs not been any tamering with the vote counting, the machines that do the counting or the processes of aggregating the results of all the machines in a state ort other election district. Without a hard copy paper trail, there is no way to be certain that some of the voting or aggregating machines had not been hacked and manipualted.

There is a constant race between the developers of hacking and cyberattack software and the developers of security and protective software.

A few weeks before, the computers of the Democratic National Committee were hacked and thousands of private and confidential e-mails were made public. The security experts claimed that the hackers came from Russia.

Describing the increasing trend of young computer hackers who generally had hacked just for the challenge getting involved in hacking with a political and ideological causes—sometimes even working for governments.