Putin Election Hack RG
That was one of the many reasons Putilov despised democracies. It was too damn easy for men like himself to overturn their elections. The stupid Americans had proven that point themselves at a Las Vegas computer convention. At one exhibition, US cyber experts changed the voter tabulations on thirty different voting machines, turning thirty mock-election losers into winners. The experts changed those election outcomes in mere minutes. Furthermore, they left no trace, no evidence of their criminal machinations.
Putilov had, of course, done the same thing during America’s last presidential election. Unfortunately, Putilov’s hackers weren’t as good as the Vegas cyber-experts, and US investigators were able to confirm that Russia had hacked into America’s voting systems. To counter that assertion, Putilov immediately launched a disinformation campaign. He ordered one of his stooges—that country’s idiotic FBI director, Jonathan Conley—to issue a statement claiming that the US voting systems was too spread-out and too diverse for hacking to succeed. That statement was of course a flat-out lie. The voting machines’ software could be compromised in a heartbeat—as the Vegas conference had proved—and, anyway, the main tabulators, which counted the votes, were connected to the Internet. In fact, the cyber-tools necessary for stealing elections—especially those needed to purge voter registration lists and and to falsify absentee ballot requests—were readily available online. Consequently, Putilov could hack into them with a vengeance. Likewise, the systems’ manufacturers and support technicians could plant vote-plundering malware any time they wanted. Nor were the manufacturers interested in stopping Putilov’s election hacking. In the documentary, Hacking Democracy, cyber-expert, Bev Harris, had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt how vulnerable they were. But the machines’ manufacturers—instead of thanking her for revealing the flaws in their systems—had threatened to sue her.
You got off lucky, bitch, Putilov thought to himself. In my country, I’d have had you jailed, killed—or both!
God, Putilov hated that documentary. He was sure that after it came out the Americans would build a cyber-security firewall around their voting systems. In that documentary and on her website, www.BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris had described defect after defect after defect in America’s voting systems. For instance, she showed how Touchscreens could be programmed to register one’s votes for the opposite candidate. She laid out how incredibly simple it was to flip absentee and mail-in ballots and make them register as votes for a candidate’s rival. She pointed out how in one district votes for Al Gore in Florida had been subtracted from Gore’s final tally instead of being added to it. She demonstrated how—after voting systems had been hacked and the vote tabulations changed to elect the loser—forensic investigators lacked the technological means to detect and prove the system had been hacked and the outcome altered. She laid out for the world how hackable US elections were.
But the imbecilic Americans did . . . nothing.
Lenin must have been laughing his ass off. His primary nemesis, capitalism itself, was to blame for much of the US voting system’s failures. Voting technology in the US was run and controlled by private companies, who were, many believed, politically biased. They wanted US elections riggerd. These voting technology firms had fought federal investigators’ attempts to study their machines’ flaws and to create software, which would shield their machines from hackers. The state and local Republican politicians had also blocked efforts to prevent election hacking. They had made sure that government couldn’t monitor and investigate US elections and that there was almost no way to audit the vote tabulations afterward. Only two out America’s fifty states created systems that allowed for accurate vote recounts. Putilov and his allies could even kill many of their opponents’ votes in the cradle before their ballots could be cast. Putilov could purge any and all voters who were ex-felons, who had the same names as other voters in the registry or who had failed to vote in recent elections.
Putilov’s hackers could therefore overturn almost all US elections at the state, local and national level with impunity. There was nothing America could do about it. As Wired magazine had titled one of its articles, “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy to Target”.
And now with the help of J. T. Tower and their Saudi allies, he and an elite cadre of global oligarchs were poised to purge the earth of all its socalled democracies. The pernicious plague of “one-person, one-vote” would be flung down the planet’s “memory hole” for all time to come.
You can’t help but love capitalism, can you? Putilov thought grinning. It had made him the richest man in the world, and now with a little help from himself and his friends, the Old Free Enterprize System was about to wipe all those reprehensible representative democracies off the face of the earth.
Putilov couldn’t wait to hack the next election. He would be even better at it next time. After the coming election his band of merry cyber-thieves would leave no evidence whatsoever.
--from Robert Gleason’s The Evil That Men Do
How North Korea Could Nuke the US and Get Away With It
Robert Gleason is an Executive Editor at Macmillan Publishers in New York City. He has written seventeen books—six of them on nuclear terrorism. His most recent book is And Into the Fire. He starred in a History Channel two-hour special, which was devoted largely to nuclear terrorism, has discussed nuclear terrorism on PBS, NPR, Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, the Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs TV Shows, on hundreds of other shows and has spoken on the subject four times at Harvard. Mr. Gleason has also worked with inmates in over 60 prisons, and New York has named a day after him for the work he’s done for prison literacy. His website is www.RobertGleasonBooks.com. Here is a clip from his History Channel special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXrlcf_R1KY and also from a recent Lou Dobbs TV Show http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/5487673976001/?#sp=show-clips
cell: 917-622-5748 email: roberthgleason@gmail.com
Donald Trump has recently expressed concerns that North Korea will soon have the ability to hit the US and its allies with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. That such an attack would result in the thermonuclear obliteration of the Hermit Kingdom and is therefore highly unlikely in no way diminishes the president’s conviction that these ICBM strikes are a serious threat. On the other hand, President Trump ignores the fact that there is a way for North Korea to nuke the US with relative impunity. Kim Jong-un could send terrorists into US cities with crude but powerful, Hiroshima-style nukes, have them detonated and then deny all knowledge of the attacks. As we shall see, he would, in all likelihood, get away with it.
The Institute for Science and International Studies estimates that Kim Jong-un has between thirteen and thirty nuclear weapons or their equivalents. Many of these are believed to be secreted throughout his country, some of them hidden in mountain tunnels. Since we cannot locate them, we cannot destroy them. Were Kim Jong-un to smuggle several of those nukes into the US—a feat that, as we shall see, is depressingly easy to pull off—and then incinerate a half-dozen US cities, we would in all probability never know whether North Korea was responsible. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen has made this point in a book entitled, BLINK OF AN EYE. A nuke is detonated in an American city, after which Secretary Cohen takes the reader through the various governmental investigations necessary to determine that weapon’s country of origin. Identifying that nation turns out to be astonishingly difficult. Even if the investigators somehow discover which nation created the fissile bomb fuel, how do the investigators know whether another nation purloined it, built their own bomb and then nuked their perceived enemy? The alleged country of origin could be a fall guy, not a perpetrator. The attack could have been “a False Flag Operation.” As Secretary Cohen demonstrated in rigorous detail, a rogue state could nuke the US and avoid retribution.
Nor would North Korea have to use its terrorist nukes pre-emptively. They could employ them in retaliation for a US attack on his country. Suppose, for whatever reason, Donald Trump did bomb North Korea’s nuclear facilities, what would stop North Korea from dispatching terrorists to the US and having them nuke several American cities? If Kim Jong-un adamantly denied responsibility, he might very well avoid blame. In fact, the North Korean leader would not even have to smuggle actual nukes in the US. Were he to sneak the bomb-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) in the US, terrorists could easily use it to assemble several Hiroshima-style terrorist nukes on US soil. The bomb-fuel would take up far less room than an entire weapon, and a Hiroshima-style bomb is shocking simple to fabricate. As Luis Alvarez, who designed the Hiroshima bomb’s triggering mechanism, wrote that a high school student could build the Hiroshima bomb, once he was in possession of the bomb-grade HEU. Moreover, such fissile bomb-fuel is not that hard to smuggle. Bomb-grade HEU or plutonium gives off primarily alpha rays, rather than beta or gamma rays, and alpha rays can be blocked by paper or even skin. Were the fissile bomb-fuel smuggled packed in a small steel canister, then loaded into a shipping container, the radiation would be extremely difficult to detect.
So why would Kim Jong-un opt for a strategy that would result in his country’s thermonuclear annihilation—and, if he survived, his own incarceration and execution—when, by following another more efficacious strategy, he could nuke several American cities and escape unscathed? The answer is he wouldn’t.
That our leaders ignore the feasibility of nuclear terrorist attacks demonstrates a blind denial that verges on the delusional. Why are they so willfully indifferent to this threat? Perhaps because such nuclear terrorist challenges cannot be met with simplistic solutions and grand-standing rhetoric nor would our responses to these terrorist threats generate lucrative defense industry contracts. Yet we cannot deny these threats are far more probable than ICBM strikes. We live in a world, in which nations such as North Korea, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can, if they so choose, order up the nuking of US cities, proclaim their ignorance of the attacks and, quite conceivably, never suffer our nuclear revenge.
The good news is that such assaults are not inevitable. There are strategies for preventing them, but they require hard thinking, meticulous planning and honest courage, not belligerent bombast and unreasoning violence. Such thinking requires a new mindset, unclouded by 1960s Cold War rationales.