|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 9:24:24 GMT -5
All that means that a great deal of the integrity of our elections comes down to a handful of private companies. That should make everyone nervous. I thought your go-to position is that everything is done better by private companies and government can't do anything right. Now it makes you nervous? In you're attempt at snark, you made my point. Yes. Private companies are immeasurably better at what they do than are government bureaucracies. I've been there. I've been on both sides. I've seen the motley collection of mediocrities that staff government IT operations. Why does anyone take one of those jobs? Because it's the best they can do. Anyone with enough talent and competence is working for 3x the salary in the private sector. None of this is a secret. I have lots of friends in senior positions at big time tech operations. They make no secret of the fact that they know their government customers are idiots. So the point is made. We've put ourselves in a position of having to trust those companies, because the government technologists who nominally are supposed to keep them honest lack the competence to do so. I'd feel a lot better about things if we were to gather a collection of senior security analysts from private industries like banking and investments and have them do a serious audit. People (from the private sector, where the talent is) who are responsible for real people's real money. Simple example: If I understand it right, Dominion systems don't use any internal encryption. Among other things, that means that anyone with root access can alter just about anything they want, so much so that it is relatively easy to set up a machine to print one set of numbers on the paper report, and send different numbers for tabulation.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 9:00:10 GMT -5
Didn't feel right continuing the discussion in Howard's thread. I apologize to Howard and everyone else for taking this particular tangent in his thread. I thought it was relevant, but in hindsight, I should have started a new thread in the first place. Continuing this discussion there would be disrespectful. That is my problem. I cannot find the actual language, just the summary by prejudicial (semi) news sites. I suspect Governor Brown (who I do not have great affinity for, but who is doing a decent job in Oregon) did not take "to the airways to ask residents to call police on their neighbors if they suspect a gathering of more than 6 people." I suspect that was written to incite prejudice. So it goes. David, respectfully, how hard did you look? "Kate Brown Call Cops" pointed at Google will take you right to it. www.kgw.com/article/news/politics/oregon-covid-freeze-call-police-neighbors-kate-brown/283-d25ae28a-f177-4b68-a5a6-882004da1862Reporter: "I asked Governor Brown yes or no should Oregonians be calling the cops on their neighbors?" Brown: “This is no different than what happens if there's a party down the street and it's keeping everyone awake,” Brown said in an interview Friday. “What do neighbors do [in that case]? They call law enforcement because it's too noisy. This is just like that. It's like a violation of a noise ordinance.” Reporter: "So yes?" Brown: "Yes, yes". (I have to say your governor's pet phrase "common sense measures based on science" cracks me up. Science exists because common sense can't be trusted.) What Clarke was pointing out is no different than a point I've made repeatedly: When you put coercive policies in place, no matter how well intended or well justified, at the end of the line those policies are enforced by men with guns. Eric Garner found that out the hard way. How many Oregonians will similarly find out the hard way? So with the veracity of the quote confirmed, and the existence of the policy confirmed, let's go back to the hypothetical: You're a cop. Do you obey the order? I brought this up because people were asking how could it be that the Nazis could do what they did? I'm trying to make the point that "pack all those people into that train then force them into the gas chamber" is never the first thing that happens. Its what happens after after long sequence of much smaller moral violations, each one serving to erode the sensibilities and break down the moral conditioning of the culture. It's easy to look at obviously immoral acts from history and say "I would never do that!" It is infinitely harder to look at less obviously immoral acts in the present and say "Even though refusing this will cost me my career and my family's security, I can't do it". This subject makes me think of the great tradition of English law and liberty we inherited, and this quote from William Pitt: "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter"
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 0:19:54 GMT -5
There aren't any statistical anomalies that haven't been seen before. That is smoke. Not like these.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 0:18:35 GMT -5
Jeff, give me the governor's quote please. Seems like there might be some editorializing going on here. I don't have it. I read it at the office and dont have the link on my phone. Search your local TV station websites.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 0:06:44 GMT -5
Probably. (I really dont like the loaded word "conspiracy". I read it as "considering any of this is unreasonable". I dont agree.) I look at it like this: The motive for hacking is self-evident. Literally billions of dollars are at stake. What about opportunity? There's a pretty good study linked (of all places) from Mother Jones that lays out a bunch of it. If I wasn't tapping on my phone, I'd post the link. "Mother Jones vote machines" will probably get it on Google. From Sep 2019, plus or minus. Then I ask myself "Suppose some entity, with the requisite level of sophistication, undertook to alter the outcome using those vulnerabilities. Are our systems robust enough to know?" Which gets me to my personal familiarity with local government. In my first hand experience, Election Commissioners are pretty far down the food chain when it comes to competence. It's a crap job, the nature of which does not self-select for high performance individuals. That creates an environment where you have minimally competent officials being led around by commercial vendors...and those vendors have an obvious conflict of interest. Which is to say, that vendor's customers dont know any more about those systems than the vendors tell them, and aren't competent to know if they are being bs'd. All that means that a great deal of the integrity of our elections comes down to a handful of private companies. That should make everyone nervous. Jeff, With all due respect, you ask a question that you want answered your way. Your question seems to me to be, why in this election, (as opposed to every other election) shouldn't we distrust every state's result and have someone asking questions? My response is, there is no question about the results except the trumped up (I know, clever) charges. The problem is, there are statistical anomalies (I posted earlier in the thread) that we've never seen before. Now, they are not proof of fraud, but fraud is one of the possible explanations for them. The smoke is there. There are several possible fires that would explain it. Fraud is one of them. And it really wouldn't be that hard to find. A forensic computer analysis of an adequately large number of machines (including routers and servers), selected at random, would probably be all it takes.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2020 23:55:48 GMT -5
Meanwhile, on Friday, Oregon Governor Kate Brown took to the airways to ask residents to call police on their neighbors if they suspect a gathering of more than 6 people from at least two households is taking place. Violators are subject to 30 days in jail and a $1250 fine. No exceptions exist for family Thanksgiving gatherings. Sheriff David Clarke advises citizens to refuse the police entry. If they come back with a warrant, continue to refuse. Make them execute a forcible entry, while you video their actions for social media. So, let's say you're a cop in Oregon. You've been on the job for six years. You have a wife and two young children. You are ordered to break down the door of a home because they have 20 people over for Thanksgiving. Do you obey? Jeff, I seemed to miss that. Where are you getting your information? What exactly did my governor say? It was on one of the local Portland stations, IIRC. I don't think she said "we're sending cops to break down your doors". That part came from Clarke. He was running the thread to its logical conclusion. If the police are called on a gathering at a private home, and they tell the cop "get a warrant or f+ck off", what happens? What happens if he gets a warrant and they still tell him to f+ck off? Are they going to be willing to execute a forced entry?
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2020 23:48:39 GMT -5
So far, I dont see any reason to think that Trump's people are competent enough to know that, let alone find it. I'm also a bit troubled that no one else seems curious enough to look. Jeff, There seems to be little reason to suspect hacked machines or fraud unless you buy into the whole conspiracy crap Probably. (I really dont like the loaded word "conspiracy". I read it as "considering any of this is unreasonable". I dont agree.) I look at it like this: The motive for hacking is self-evident. Literally billions of dollars are at stake. What about opportunity? There's a pretty good study linked (of all places) from Mother Jones that lays out a bunch of it. If I wasn't tapping on my phone, I'd post the link. "Mother Jones vote machines" will probably get it on Google. From Sep 2019, plus or minus. Then I ask myself "Suppose some entity, with the requisite level of sophistication, undertook to alter the outcome using those vulnerabilities. Are our systems robust enough to know?" Which gets me to my personal familiarity with local government. In my first hand experience, Election Commissioners are pretty far down the food chain when it comes to competence. It's a crap job, the nature of which does not self-select for high performance individuals. That creates an environment where you have minimally competent officials being led around by commercial vendors...and those vendors have an obvious conflict of interest. Which is to say, that vendor's customers dont know any more about those systems than the vendors tell them, and aren't competent to know if they are being bs'd. All that means that a great deal of the integrity of our elections comes down to a handful of private companies. That should make everyone nervous.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2020 22:42:57 GMT -5
You're missing the point of the hypothetical.
There have been multiple instances in this thread if people placing themselves in the position of low-level Nazi operatives, and wondering if they would have had the courage to disobey.
While I think such questions are very good things to ask, there is also something you might describe as facile in the framing.
In framing the question that way, the really hard stuff is compressed away. The only question left is one of personal courage.
It's easy for us (when visualizing ourselves in the position of low level Nazis, that is) because the predicate question (something like "are my leaders immoral?") has already been answered by history.
When those decisions need to be made in real time, however, we dont have the luxury of that historic conclusion. We have to answer the first question ("are my leaders immoral?") before getting to the second ("do I have the courage to disobey?")
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2020 22:27:48 GMT -5
I read an interesting article today that discussed various technical/security vulnerabilities in the Dominion systems.
Which puts me right with Christie. So far, what I've seen from Team Trump is pretty lame. Embarrassingly lame.
That said, there is plenty of lame to go around. "No evidence"? Please. They've presented lots of evidence. Generally inadequate evidence, for a number of reasons, but saying "no evidence" is dumb. All it does is encourage conspiratorial thinking.
If there is any "there" there, it won't be of the sort that Guiliani etal have produced so far. Guiliani should just go smoke cigars and drink martinis and stop all this.
What Team Trump needs to present is some evidence of hacked voting machines. Real evidence, based on forensic analysis of the machines, the servers, the routers, etc.
If such hacking took place, there's a discoverable trail sitting there. It really cant be concealed.
So far, I dont see any reason to think that Trump's people are competent enough to know that, let alone find it. I'm also a bit troubled that no one else seems curious enough to look.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2020 17:53:05 GMT -5
Meanwhile, on Friday, Oregon Governor Kate Brown took to the airways to ask residents to call police on their neighbors if they suspect a gathering of more than 6 people from at least two households is taking place.
Violators are subject to 30 days in jail and a $1250 fine. No exceptions exist for family Thanksgiving gatherings.
Sheriff David Clarke advises citizens to refuse the police entry. If they come back with a warrant, continue to refuse. Make them execute a forcible entry, while you video their actions for social media.
So, let's say you're a cop in Oregon. You've been on the job for six years. You have a wife and two young children. You are ordered to break down the door of a home because they have 20 people over for Thanksgiving.
Do you obey?
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 22, 2020 12:11:11 GMT -5
I was three months old to the day.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 22:00:38 GMT -5
Do you really want to risk the result over a probably ineffectual bit of fraud? I think the better form of that question is something like "how hard would it be to find people willing to take that risk in exchange for a $20 bill?"
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 20:02:04 GMT -5
Signature verification is itself a very inexact thing under the best of circumstances. I have little faith that election workers are in any any position to catch most fraud that way.
But set that aside. Even if you allow the notion that the fraudulently submitted mail in ballot would be exposed when the person tries to vote in person, that still doesn't imply any real jeopardy for the fraudster.
Authorities will still have to prove the fraud. In my hypothetical, all I have to do is say nothing.
With a bit of care, I won't have left any forensic evidence on the ballot, and even if I had, there's no way they're going to go through a DNA workup over this. Plus the ballot will have passed through who knows how many hands by then anyway, so even if I hadn't taken any precautions and even if they went through a full forensic workup, the odds of them being able to extract usable evidence to pin it on me is next to nil.
Plus, this entire scenario ignores the very real fact that those databases are filled with duplicate records. For all I know, my daughters are registered at their new addresses, but instead of updating their existing records, the clerk created a new one.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 18:47:25 GMT -5
Did you request the ballots or did they just show up in the mail? Had to request them here. Our township elected to go to all mail in ballots and all registered voters were sent a mail in ballot. The option of in person voting was also open. I am not sure what the protocol was in other townships or counties. That part of the process is what concerns me. Our Election Commissioner doesn't proactively send out ballots, but they do send postcards to every registered voter. The idea is to give you a chance to update your registration before the deadline. Apparently (some of) my daughters aren't particularly interested in all this. In addition to the three of us that still live at my house, I received four postcards for daughters who don't live there anymore. They have never bothered updating their registration since they moved. If we had a system where ballots were automatically sent to the address on the registration, and if I was a dishonest person, I don't see what keeps me from filling them out and sending them in, other than the threat of subsequent prosecution, which seems highly unlikely. Like I said weeks ago, the nature of list maintenance in a predominant "vote in person" environment is fundamentally different than the nature of list maintenance in a predominant "vote by mail" context. A list maintained under the "vote in person" set of assumptions, if used in a "mostly vote by mail" situation without first being audited/cleaned, will by definition open a major vector for fraud.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 11:34:59 GMT -5
Maybe where you are but here we have to show voter Id and signature to get a ballot in person. Kind of wish that was standard procedure everywhere. But after you mark it and put it in the box, it's untraceable. I don't know about Bruce's jurisdiction, but that's not the case here. Every ballot has a unique serial number. When you present yourself at the polls, they find your name on the registration list. You sign the list, and then the serial number of your ballot is recorded next to your name.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 10:48:59 GMT -5
What terrifies me most is this: Look at those pictures, and what do you see? I see educated men. Sophisticated men. Presumably all quite intelligent. Each of them had demonstrated qualities that elevated them to the top of their respective hierarchies. And yet they were responsible for the greatest act of deliberate and methodical and industrialized mass murder in history. That isn't supposed to be possible. That's not supposed to happen. But it did. And millions of Howards carry the scars. We all carry the scars. Incomprehensible is exactly the right word. But it is our duty to comprehend. We have to. Even if we can't.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 10:31:17 GMT -5
It's all so heartbreaking, Howard, the profound loss your family suffered.
Our capacity for cruelty is boundless. The veneer of civilization is terrifyingly thin.
Thank you for is. We need to remember. Forever.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 20, 2020 9:59:42 GMT -5
I think they made some interesting accusations, but my takeaway is no different than before: If they've got a smoking gun, they need to file their evidence in court. Do you think they won't? And if not, why not? My sense of things goes something like this. The smoking gun has to be really big and really smoking. So far, what I've heard (and to be clear I didn't listen to every minute of the presser...just kind of skimmed/fast forwarded it) I don't see any big guns. The arguments I heard sounded something like "we found lots of tiny guns all over the place". Guiliani did make some sweeping statements to the effect that there was a broad conspiracy involving a handful of Democratic-run cities, but the specifics weren't there. Let's assume for the moment that the real story is every bit as bad as the most dedicated Trump supporter would have you believe. As near as I can tell, it goes roughly like this: Team Biden established a coordinated effort to manufacture Biden votes via fraudulent mail-in ballots across multiple jurisdictions. They also infiltrated Dominion voting software such that Trump votes were actually tabulated as Biden votes. All that was pre-staged and ready to go, but then on election night it almost blew up in their faces. Trump votes (actual ones) were pouring in at such a rate, they threatened to overwhelm the finger Team Biden had put on the scale. So they were forced, against all precedent and reason, to abort the count in the middle of the night in order to crank up the presses and manufacture even more Biden votes. Then lo and behold, once the counting started again, a huge wave of Biden votes washes in, securing his victory. I think, more or less, that's what's being alleged. And if all that is true, that would be the biggest crime in history. My point above (the one you quoted, that is) is that Guiliani etal need to produce evidence of the conspiracy itself. Not evidence of the effects of the conspiracy, but evidence of the underlying conspiracy. All the "these envelopes were opened improperly" or "those election observers were kept too far away" stuff is not enough. Even if all those things are true, and I'm reasonably sure that plenty of them are, they are small-ball. If things actually happened in a manner generally consistent with my summary, there will be evidence. Lots of evidence. Not evidence by effect, but direct evidence of the thing itself. THAT is the evidence that Guiliani needs to produce. I agree that the national media's steadfast bias exists, and is a scandal in and of itself, but I don't see this playing out the way you suggest. Forget the national media. They've already lost control of the sense-making apparatus. The GIN exists, but it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The error being made that I see is thinking all this needs to get sorted out in the compressed time frame before January. I don't think that's possible, but I also don't think that's necessary. A more realistic sequence (assuming, arguendo, that the "greatest crime in history" scenario is actually true) goes more like this: Biden is inaugurated. For the next two years, either independently, through some honest whistleblower at the NSA*, or through the Republican controlled Senate, the conspiracy is methodically investigated and exposed. Republicans regain control of the House in 2022. Biden and Harris (or Harris and "X", in the reasonably likely event Biden isn't still President in 2022) are both impeached and convicted. The Democratic Party, exposed at an institutional level as the biggest crime racket in history, is effectively destroyed. It is, I suppose, possible that Team Trump finds their really big, really smoking gun in the next few days, but I doubt it. Unless they do, I don't see any reason to believe Biden won't be inaugurated in January. * The "greatest crime in history" scenario will have, by necessity, left a digital paper trail a mile wide that is at this very moment, securely ensconced in the NSA's servers. I wonder how many more Edward Snowdens are out there. I sort of split the difference. Like I said, Guiliani's awkwardness isn't an argument, and any outlet that reports on his awkwardness with the inference that his appearance is relevant to the situation at hand exposes themselves as fundamentally unserious. That's "Access Hollywood" level analysis. At the same time, communication matters. I know I've told this story before, but what the heck: I was doing a consulting contract for OPD back when the DC shooter situation was going on. The Chief of Police in DC (or maybe it was somewhere in Virginia? Wherever) was on the TV daily, looking really bad, getting tripped up by reporters, and generally not doing any good for himself, mainly because on a day to day basis, he didn't have anything to say. In a conversation with Omaha's Chief of Police, he explained what DC guy was doing wrong. "What you do is find the best looking woman you have and stick her in front of the microphone every day. The Chief is never seen in public, until the day comes when he can step up to the mic and say 'We got him'." That seems like good advice for Guiliani right now. And it goes a bit beyond his appearance. The messaging itself is lacking. The problem I see with Guiliani is his experience as a prosecutor has him trained to make a slow, methodical case. Following him as he talks can be a chore. That won't cut it. Before they ever went to the microphone yesterday, that group needed to have an answer to a single question: "What is the one sentence we want to make sure everyone remembers coming out of this?" That's it. One sentence. Clear. Concise. Easy to remember. What is the message? The irony here is that that is something Trump does brilliantly.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 19, 2020 21:59:20 GMT -5
I watched bits and pieces.
I think they made some interesting accusations, but my takeaway is no different than before: If they've got a smoking gun, they need to file their evidence in court.
Which is to say, if they can actually back up what was asserted today, then we should all want to see it.
Guiliani should never speak in public on this matter again. He looked horrible. But his awkwardness isn't an argument.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Nov 19, 2020 20:20:57 GMT -5
I'm sitting here trying to think what I could have been doing a few months ago that caused me to miss this thread.
Sorry about that, and sorry about your friend.
|
|