gracchusdixit

The surreal annual gathering of an organization called DEF CON just came to an end in the no less surreal city of Las Vegas.   Inspired by the 1980s movie War Games, in which a runaway computer simulation pushes the world to the brink of nuclear war, DEF CON began life as an “underground” conclave for amateur computer wizards and hackers.  Since its founding more than 20 years ago, DEF CON has morphed into something far more significant than a playground for counter-culture whiz-kids.  Amateurs still populate the convention in droves, but so do countless cyber-security professionals, Defense Department recruiters, and the denizens of our nation’s various intelligence agencies.

One of the central attractions of DEF CON is a series of “contests,” in which the precocious attendees vie to see who can most quickly “hack” supposedly secure digital devices or websites.  One of the targets of this year’s contests were the electronic voting machines used by just about every state in the country.  Only three companies—two American, one Canadian—manufacture these machines, and the security of their devices has been the subject of controversy for years.  It therefore surprised no one that the digital geniuses at DEF CON were able to hack and compromise each and every one of these machines in a matter of minutes.

Since the “election” of Donald Trump, we have been assured by the powers that be— the heads of our intelligence agencies, the political establishment in general, and compliant journalists—that Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential election was limited to the fabrication of conspiracy theories, the dissemination of phony news, and the manipulation of social media.  Time and again, we have been told that “no evidence” exists to suggest that such “meddling” had any effect on the votes themselves.  This has always been an improbable proposition, just as the euphemistic word “meddling” vastly understates the true extent of what the Russians actually did.  

The system by which votes are counted in this country amounts to a hopelessly complicated Rube Goldberg machine.  This system lacks uniform standards and is nearly impossible to monitor or police, because, for reasons that have never made any sense, we leave it up to the states to administer what is the most fundamental and universal of democratic rights—the right to vote.  Some of those states have shown themselves to be quite willing to manipulate elections themselves; others are merely incompetent.  Many do not require paper ballots to back up and verify electronic votes, and the three private companies that manufacture the machines that tally those votes are less than entirely reputable.  The political allegiances of their owners are suspect, their digital infrastructure is antiquated, and the security of their devices is (to put it mildly) questionable.  That the hackers at DEF CON could so quickly compromise these devices merely underscores flaws that have been apparent for years.

Given the extensive cyber capabilities of the Russians and their clearly malign intent, why would anyone imagine that they are capable of anything less?  The argument that the Russians would content themselves with operating at the margins of our vulnerable election system, when they could attack that system directly, has never been plausible.  They have launched direct attacks on European elections on more than one occasion.  It defies logic that they would attempt anything less here.  

Yet the pretense continues.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently published the first of what will be several reports of its investigation of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.  Because the report is heavily redacted, only about 30 percent of what it has to say can be read by the public.  It is not surprising, but nonetheless disturbing, that the most heavily redacted portions deal with Russia’s direct attack on our voting systems.  Even so, the public bits are ominous enough.  

The report provides a detailed and chilling account of nothing less than a systematic attack by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, on every aspect of our electoral system, ranging from the private companies mentioned earlier to state and local boards of election, from voter databases to election websites, from electoral candidates to election officials themselves.  

Despite all this, the report bends over backwards to reassure us that it “has seen no indications that votes were changed, vote-tallying systems were manipulated, or that any voter registration data was altered or deleted”.  This almost pathetic protestation, like all the assurances that have preceded it, rings increasingly hollow. 

Indeed, the committee’s report finally admits that its “insight is limited,” because it did not “examine the servers or other relevant items” belonging to the victims of the Russian attack.  It goes on to concede that “a sophisticated actor could target efforts at districts where margins are already small, and disenfranchising only a small percentage of voters could have a disproportionate impact on an election’s outcome”.

That, of course, is a plausible description of what happened in 2016.   

Donald Trump eked out the narrowest of electoral college victories in the face of a decisive popular vote defeat.  His win was the consequence of 77,000 votes cast in three states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where his margins amounted to substantially less than one percent of the total votes cast.  It may be that these razor-thin margins were legitimate.  It strains credulity, however, to persist in the belief that Russia’s attack played no role in producing them.  

Yet that is what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would now like us to believe.  Despite all the evidence, despite its own admissions, despite logic and common sense, the committee, much like the nation as a whole, declines to confront the terrible but all too likely possibility that the 2016 presidential election was hacked by a hostile foreign power, thereby producing an illegitimate result. As long as we fail to confront this possibility head-on and resolve the fundamental political issues it raises, our democracy is at risk.  We may soon find that it has not only been hacked but hacked to death.