In the documentary Kill Chain, the weaknesses of America’s basic election infrastructure are laid bare
www.theguardian.com
Hack the vote: terrifying film shows how vulnerable US elections are
Voting booths in Kill Chain. Photograph: HBO
In the documentary Kill Chain, the weaknesses of America’s basic election infrastructure are laid bare
Adrian Horton
@adrian_horton
Thu 26 Mar 2020 09.23 EDT
Even as much of America grinds to a halt, coronavirus has yet to derail the date of the 2020 election. Which introduces a perhaps underestimated terror, as explained in one of the more deceptively scary documentaries to drop in recent weeks: the vulnerable voting machine. That seemingly benign piece of equipment – the hardware of American democracy – is, as several experts explain in HBO’s Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections, nothing more than an obsolete computer. And these machines’ vulnerabilities to hacking are “terrifying”, Sarah Teale, co-director along with Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels, told the Guardian. America’s current election infrastructure is, as Kill Chain explains, a prescription for disaster – an outdated, willfully naive system no more prepared for attack than four years ago.
Kill Chain re-examines foreign interference in the 2016 election with critical and scientific distance. The film follows the liabilities of the American democratic system even further than fake news, to its basic infrastructure: the machines in poll booths across the country, the very method through which votes are tallied, the databases in which voter data – name, address, eligibility – are stored.
The process of voting in the United States is idiosyncratic and often chaotic, but no matter how each polling station is managed, the vast majority rely on electronic machines
produced by three companies with removable hardware such as USB flash drives or memory cards. Individual incidences of alleged voting malpractice – for example,
the purge of 340,000 voters, mostly people of color, from the Georgia rolls in 2018 – are thus part of a pattern of election vulnerabilities across the country known in cyberwarfare as a kill chain, as the voting security expert and veteran hacker Harri Hursti explains in the film. Most Americans vaguely know of Russian interference in 2016, but Kill Chain offers forensics on specific events in this pattern: the
scanning and examining of state election registration databases; the
hacking of the Election Assistance Commission, in which an unknown Russian actor accessed and sold information from a federal database on election technology throughout the country. Teale interviews a young man in India known online as “Cyberzeist”, who
hacked into an Alaskan vote counting computer in 2016 and claimed to be able to alter votes and voter data.
Hursti, who is originally from Finland, has been studying weaknesses in the American election system for more than 15 years. He first appeared on HBO in 2006, in Teale’s documentary
Hacking Democracy; in a clip replayed in Kill Chain, a young and somewhat smug Hursti shocks the supervisor of elections in Leon county, Florida, when he easily hacks the county’s Diebold voting machine with just a tampered memory card. Hursti realized then that “this is way worse than I would’ve ever believed”, he told the Guardian. But 15 years later, little has changed; the Diebold machines are still in use in 20 states. “If somebody would try to explain to me everything I have seen and experienced and learned myself, I wouldn’t believe it,” Hursti said, characterizing America’s election infrastructure as “ridiculously broken”.
“We started pitching this film [in 2016] because nothing has really changed since 2005,” Teale said. Back then, the machines’ producers brushed off criticism as slander. But in 2017, Hursti could purchase an AccuVote TSx, one of the most common machines in the country, from an Ohio warehouse for $75 to test its hackability. The machine became part of the
Voting Village, an initiative Hursti co-leads at the hacker conference DefCon, in which participants can attempt to hack various models of voting machines in use in the United States. In 2019’s conference, all were found to be easily hackable.
“Adversaries are fast to adapt,” said Hursti, who laid out the underlying issue as one of pace: “If you take the most magnificent hack you can imagine today – six months down the road, it is just a good hack. And two years later, it’s just average.” Voting machines, meanwhile, are kept in service for decades; a new “secure” batch
purchased for $107m by the state of Georgia came installed with dead-on-arrival Windows 7, said Hursti, “so you see how hopelessly this conversation is outdated”. And until recently, there were no cybersecurity experts on staff at the machines’ manufacturers, an oversight Teale called “mind-blowing”.
Harri Hursti and Maggie MacAlpine carry voting machines they purchased in Kill Chain. Photograph: HBO
“I hope ordinary Americans will come to the understanding that if any part of the election was connected to the internet it is vulnerable, and that these machines are vulnerable to hacking,” said Teale. Both Teale and Hursti are concerned with recent confidence in new measures such as ballot-marking machines or individual bar codes – both of which put yet another computer, and thus another hacking vulnerability, between the voter and the vote. “If they cannot see how they voted, if there isn’t a piece of paper with that clearly on it, it can be changed,” said Teale.
But Kill Chain also offers some areas of promise, especially in the form of paper ballots, which present a clear trail of evidence, and mandatory risk-limiting audits in which a random, small yet statistically significant sample of the votes are hand-counted to ensure an uncompromised process. And the film includes interviews with three senators – Democrats Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Warner Virginia and Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma – who are awake to the vulnerabilities of America’s elections and the risk of another attack in 2020. Klobuchar and Lankford co-sponsored the
Secure Elections Act, a bipartisan bill which would require states to keep back-up paper ballots and conduct the risk-limit audit. The measure has not passed Congress; the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky,
has refused to bring it to the floor, citing lack of need.
Both Teale and Hursti maintain that it’s not all reason to despair. Teale encourages insisting on paper voting at individual polling stations and advocating for mail-in ballots. And above all, said Hursti, vote. “Voting apathy is as bad a problem – nothing in this should be discouraging you to vote.” And vote all the way down the ballot, which usually gets less attention and votes and is thus easier to rig – “that’s where the money and motivation for local adversaries are,” said Hursti. And if you really care, get involved as a poll worker. “Right now, the population of poll workers is very old and they’re not technologically savvy,” he said. “They need help.”
Even in the context of a pandemic, Teale said, Americans should wonder how we’re going to pick who will lead the country in the next crisis. “How are we going to vote in the primaries, and how are we going to vote in November?” she said. “I think we should all be pushing on our election officials to be thinking ahead.”
- Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s elections will premiere on HBO on 26 March and in the UK at a later date
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4-years of articles from the corporate media talking about the cyber security nightmare that is the modern US election system leading up to what they now call the "most secure election in American history".
Politico: How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes (Aug 5, 2016)
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144/)PBS: Recounts or no, U.S. elections are still vulnerable to hacking (December 26, 2016)
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/recounts-no-u-s-elections-still-vulnerable-hacking)CBS: Hacker demonstrates how voting machines can be compromised (Aug 10, 2016)
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rigged...s-demonstrate-voting-threat-old-machines/)FOX: Princeton Professor demonstrates how to hack a voting machine (Sep 18, 2016)
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmihqVmKGT4)Politico
: Will the Georgia Special Election Get Hacked? (June 14, 2017)
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...orgia-special-election-get-hacked-215255)CNET: Defcon hackers find it’s very easy to break voting machines (July 30, 2017)
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https://www.cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/)CNN: We watched hackers break into voting machines (Aug 11, 2017)
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA2DWMHgLnc)Slate
: America's Voting Systems Are Highly Vulnerable to Hackers (Feb 22, 2018)
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics...ll-dangerously-vulnerable-to-hacking.html)NYT: I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians. (April 5, 2018)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-machine-hacking-russians.html)Axios: There's more than one way to hack an election (July 3, 2018)
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There's more than one way to hack an election: Election Hacking: Voting-Machine Supplier Admits It Used Hackable Software (July 17, 2018)
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https://www.newsweek.com/election-hacking-voting-machines-software-1028948)Voting Machine Hacks at DefCon: 11-year-old hacks Florida voting systems. (Aug 12, 2018)
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBA3nH-b-NE)Guardian
: Why US elections remain 'dangerously vulnerable' to cyber-attacks (Aug 13, 2018)
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/13/us-election-cybersecurity-hacking-voting)CBS: Why voting machines in the U.S. are easy targets for hackers (September 19, 2018)
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-voting-machines-in-the-u-s-are-easy-targets-for-hackers/)Jenny Cohn: The genesis of America’s corrupted computerized election system (Oct 10, 2018)
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https://jennycohn1.medium.com/the-corruption-of-americas-computerized-elections-3d5b77124ebe)New York Times: America's Elections Could Be Hacked. Go Vote Anyway (October 19, 2018)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/midterm-elections-hacking.html)Scientific American: The Vulnerabilities of Our Voting Machines (Nov 1, 2018)
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-vulnerabilities-of-our-voting-machines/)GQ: How to Hack an Election (November 5, 2018)
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https://www.gq.com/story/how-to-hack-an-election)NYBooks: Voting Machines - What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (November 5, 2018)
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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/05/voting-machines-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/)Salon: Philly ignores cybersecurity and disability access in voting system selection (Feb 16, 2019)
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https://www.salon.com/2019/02/16/ph...-in-voting-system-selection_partner/)Politico: State election officials opt for 2020 voting machines vulnerable to hacking (March 1, 2019)
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https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/01/election-vulnerable-voting-machines-1198780)TechCrunch: Senators demand to know why election vendors still sell voting machines with ‘known vulnerabilities’ (Mar 27, 2019)
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https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/senators-security-voting-machines/)Salon: New "hybrid" voting system can change paper ballot after it's been cast (March 28, 2019)
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https://www.salon.com/2019/03/28/ne...-paper-ballot-after-its-been-cast_partner/)AP: New Election systems use vulnerable software (July 13, 2019)
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https://apnews.com/article/e5e070c31f3c497fa9e6875f426ccde1)Vice: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials (Aug 8, 2019)
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Exclusive: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials: Watch this hacker break into a voting machine (Aug 10, 2019)
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https://www.cnn.com/videos/business...oth-hack-def-con-orig.cnn-business)Washington Post: Hackers were told to break into U.S. voting machines. They didn't have much trouble. (Aug 12, 2019)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...-together-tackle-holes-election-security/)MIT Tech Review: 16 million Americans will vote on hackable paperless machines (Aug 13, 2019)
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https://www.technologyreview.com/20...-on-hackable-paperless-voting-machines/)Salon: Hackers can easily break into voting machines used across the U.S. (August 14, 2019)
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https://www.salon.com/2019/08/14/ha...es-used-across-the-u-s-play-doom-nirvana/)FOX: Election machine keys are on the Internet, hackers say (August 22, 2019)
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https://www.foxnews.com/tech/i-have-the-keys-to-your-voting-machine-probably)NPR: Cyber Experts Warn Of Vulnerabilities Facing 2020 Election Machines (Sep 4, 2019)
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https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/7550...abilities-facing-2020-election-machines)Jenny Cohn: America’s Electronic Voting System is Corrupted to the Core (Sep 7, 2019)
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https://jennycohn1.medium.com/ameri...corrupted-to-the-core-1f55f34f346e)Washington Post: U.S. voting machines vulnerable to hacks in 2020, researchers find (Sep 27, 2019)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...rs-find/5d8cf823602ff14beb3da99e/)Motherjones: Researchers Assembled over 100 Voting Machines. Hackers Broke Into Every Single One. (Sep 27, 2019)
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/defcon-2019-hacking-village/)The Hill: Voting machines pose a greater threat to our elections than foreign agents (Oct 2, 2019)
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https://thehill.com/opinion/technol...ur-elections-than-foreign-agents)RollingStone: John Oliver Breaks Down Faulty Election Machine Security on 'Last Week Tonight' (November 4, 2019)
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https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-...curity-voting-machiens-hack-907626/)Bloomberg: Expensive, Glitchy Voting Machines Expose 2020 Hacking Risks (November 8, 2019)
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ng-machines-expose-2020-hacking-risks)NYBooks: How New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy (Dec 17, 2019)
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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/...machines-could-hack-our-democracy/)Washington Post: Voting machines touted as secure option are actually vulnerable to hacking, study finds (Jan 8, 2020)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ing-study-finds/5e14cc6e602ff125ce5bd747/)NBC: 'Online and vulnerable' - Experts find nearly three dozens U.S. voting systems connected to internet (Jan 10, 2020)
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/el...ind-nearly-three-dozen-u-s-voting-n1112436)AP: Reliability of pricey new voting machines questioned (Feb 23, 2020)
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https://apnews.com/article/ae388fb69d14e5d3619128a591cdc0c4)The Guardian: Hack the vote - terrifying film shows how vulnerable US elections are (Mar 26, 2020)
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/26/kill-chain-hbo-election-hacking-documentary)AJC: In high-stakes election, Georgia’s voting system vulnerable to cyberattack (Oct 23, 2020)
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https://www.ajc.com/politics/electi.../TBFT5U5BH5AZZPFPZTP3LFQ7RY/)@KanekoaTheGreat