Should Voting Systems be Classified as Critical Infrastructure?

While members of all political party voters seem to diss the notion that Russia intruded on voting systems in 2016, the proof is there. If you watched former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson during his congressional testimony, it was not so much his responses but more about what members of congress know, to pose questions to Johnson.

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J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, contended U.S. election equipment is “vulnerable to sabotage” that “could change votes.”

“We’ve found ways for hackers to sabotage machines and steal votes. These capabilities are certainly within reach for America’s enemies,” Halderman told senators.

He said he and his team spent 10 years researching cyber vulnerabilities of election equipment. The professor said:

Some say that the fact that voting machines aren’t directly connected to the internet makes them secure. But, unfortunately, this is not true. Voting machines are not as distant from the internet as they may seem. Before every election, they need to be programmed with races and candidates. That programming is created on a desktop computer, then transferred to voting machines. If Russia infiltrated these election management computers, it could have spread a vote-stealing attack to a vast number of machines. I don’t know how far Russia got or whether they managed to interfere with equipment on Election Day. More here from Daily Signal.

Okay…still a non-believer? Let’s see what the States experiences.

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Click here for additional video and interactive map of states using paper ballot backup systems.

Elections officials outgunned in Russia’s cyberwar against America

WASHINGTON/Charlotte Observer

Local officials consistently play down suspicions about the long lines at polling places on Election Day 2016 that led some discouraged voters in heavily Democratic Durham County, N.C., to leave without casting a ballot.

Minor glitches in the way new electronic poll books were put to use had simply gummed things up, according to local elections officials there. Elections Board Chairman William Brian Jr. assured Durham residents that “an extensive investigation” showed there was nothing to worry about with the county’s new registration software.

He was wrong.

What Brian and other election officials across eight states didn’t know until the leak of a classified intelligence is that Russian operatives hacked into the Florida headquarters of VR Systems, Inc., the vendor that sold them digital products to manage voter registrations.

A week before the election, the hackers sent emails using a VR Systems address to 122 state and local election officials across the country, inviting them to open an attachment wired with malicious software that spoofed “legitimate elections-related services,” the report said. The malware was designed to retrieve enough additional information to set the stage for serious mischief, said the National Security Agency report disclosed by the Intercept, an investigative web site.

That wasn’t the only type of attack.

The new revelations about the Kremlin’s broad and sophisticated cyber offensive targeting Democrat Hillary Clinton and aimed at seating Donald Trump in the Oval Office have set off a wave of worry about the security of the nation’s voting systems. State election officials, facing questions as to whether they ignored oddities or red flags, have responded by accusing intelligence agencies of failing to alert them of the risks.

The truth is a hodge-podge of electronic machinery that enables Americans to exercise their most sacred democratic right is weakly guarded by state and local agencies. Those officials are quick to assure the voting public that their systems are secure, but they lack the resources and technical know-how to defend against cyber intrusions, or even to perform forensic examinations to ensure nothing happened.

Election officials in Illinois, another state that VR Systems lists as a customer, did not find out they were hacked by Russian operatives late last June until a week or two later. By then, the Russian operatives had downloaded about 90,000 voter registration records, leading to an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said Ken Menzel, general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections. Menzel confirmed a Bloomberg report that the Russians appeared to have made unsuccessful attempts to alter or delete some records.

In Georgia, where a nationally watched congressional runoff race is scheduled for Tuesday, Politico magazine reported that a U.S. hacker from a national laboratory seeking to expose vulnerabilities in election systems was able to easily download millions of voter records from Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, which manages them. Election watchdog groups say subsequent warnings to the state about a hole in their system went unheeded for months.

David Jefferson, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who has acted in his personal capacity in trying to safeguard election integrity, said he believes it is “absolutely possible” that the Russians affected last year’s election.

“And we have done almost nothing to seriously examine that,” he said.

“The Russians really were engaged in a pattern of attacks against the machinery of the election, and not merely a pattern of propaganda or information warfare and selective leaking,” said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor. “The question is, how far did they get in that pattern of attacks, and were they successful?” Election officials across the country may not even know if they’ve been attacked, computer scientists say, pointing to the scenario that played out in Durham County.

EASY PREY

State and local voting systems appear to be easy prey for sophisticated hackers.

Five states use electronic voting machines with no paper backups, precluding audits that might verify the accuracy of their vote counts. They include Georgia, scene of Tuesday’s 6th District runoff election, Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina. Parts of another nine states also are paperless, including the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania.

Although Congress has discouraged use of internet voting because of the potential for hackers to tamper with ballots, some 32 states allow military and overseas voters to transmit ballots online or via insecure fax machines. Alaska, Washington state and Hawaii have been the most permissive.

“If we don’t fix our badly broken system before the next major presidential election, we’re going to be hacked into,” said Barbara Simons, author of “Broken Ballots,” a 2012 book about election security published by Stanford University. “It might not just be Russia. It might be North Korea, China, Iran or partisans.”

While the Netherlands opted to shift to paper ballots when alerted the Russians were trying to swing its election outcome to the right, U.S. election officials have stood pat.

But former FBI Director James Comey, in widely watched testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, said “there should be no fuzz” about Russia’s barrage of millions of social media messages spreading falsehoods about Clinton.

“The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle,” he said. “They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts … And it is very, very serious.”

America’s saving grace could be its decentralized system in which cities, counties and states have used federal grants to procure a wide variety of voting equipment, limiting the potential impact of a single attack.

But that doesn’t mean targeted attacks couldn’t tip the outcome of closely divided races, even for the presidency.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

On Jan. 6, American intelligence agencies issued a declassified report accusing Russia of the cyber attack ultimately aimed at helping Trump, calling it the Kremlin’s “boldest” operation ever aimed at influencing the United States. In a brief notation, the report said that, while the Russians targeted state and local voting systems, they did not attempt to corrupt vote-tallying equipment.

On the same day the report was released, in one of his last acts as U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson proclaimed the nation’s election systems to be “Critical Infrastructure,” a designation that not only makes their security a higher priority, but improves the climate for federal-state cooperation. Because state and local officials exert total control over their operations, the agency only can investigate a vulnerability or possible breach if asked to do so – an obstacle the new designation didn’t change.

A senior Homeland Security official, in an interview with McClatchy, batted down as wildly exaggerated a Bloomberg report stating that Russian cyber operatives had made “hits” on voting systems in 39 states. Every web site is constantly scanned by “bad actors,” just as burglars might case homes in a neighborhood. That doesn’t equate to hacking, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

“The ability to manipulate the vote tally, that’s quite complicated,” the Homeland Security official said. “We didn’t see an ability to really accomplish that even in an individual voting machine. You have to have physical access to do that. It’s not as easy as you think.”

Some of the nation’s top experts in voting security disagree.

Lawrence Livermore’s Jefferson voiced frustration with the “defensive” refrain of denials from state and local election officials, including the National Association of Secretaries of State.

“Election officials do not talk about vulnerabilities,” Jefferson said, “because that would give the advantage to the attacker. And they don’t want to undermine public confidence in elections.”

Halderman said Homeland Security officials told him they were unaware of a single county in any state that had conducted post-election forensic examinations of their voting equipment.

The Homeland Security official who spoke with McClatchy said the main concern for agency cyber specialists is not about vote-tampering; it’s related to the ability of intruders to sow confusion and chaos. That could entail schemes to foul voter registration data by, for example, removing the names of voters from the rolls so they are turned away at polling stations.

“This scenario is what we witnessed on the ground in North Carolina on Election Day,” said Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for the election watchdog group Verified Voting.

“If attackers wanted to impact an election through an attack on a vendor like VR Systems,” she said, “they could manipulate or delete voter records impacting a voter’s ability to cast a regular ballot. Or, they could cause the E-Pollbooks (electronic databases of voters) to malfunction, hampering the check-in process and creating long lines.”

North Carolina was considered to be a swing state in the presidential race, and Durham County, with an African-American population of more than 37 percent, had voted more than 75 percent in favor of putting and keeping Barack Obama in the White House. Last year’s governor’s race was a dead heat entering Election Day.

The chaos in Durham County led to 90-minute delays. Some voters rang a Voter Protection Hotline to complain that their names had disappeared from the registration system or that they were told they already had voted.

The county hired a contractor to investigate the foul-up, but the inquiry never examined whether the system was hacked.

Twenty other North Carolina counties used the system, including Mecklenburg County, encompassing most of Charlotte. Though none reported problems on the scale of Durham County, release of the NSA report prompted the North Carolina Board of Elections to order a new investigation.

A former FBI agent is leading the inquiry. Critics say the three-member investigative team again lacks expertise in forensics.

Mindy Perkins, VR Systems’ president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that the company immediately notified all of its customers as soon as it was alerted “to an obviously fraudulent email purporting to come from VR Systems” and advised them not to click on the attachment.

“We are only aware of a handful of our customers who actually received the fraudulent email,” she said. “We have no indication that any of them clicked on the attachment or were compromised as a result.”

She said the company has “policies and procedures in effect to protect our customers and our company.”

Even so, Russia succeeded in sneaking up on U.S. agencies, voting system vendors and intelligence agencies.

Halderman, the University of Michigan expert, said he believes the best solution is for states to require paper trails for all voting equipment and post-election audits to ensure the vote counts are authentic.

“There’s no guarantee that we’ll know we’re under attack,” he said, “unless we do the quality control that we need by doing these audits to detect manipulation.”

 

 

 

 

Global Blackouts, Anywhere in the World, Courtesy Russia

Fitful sleep last night after reading a very long detailed piece on Russian hackers versus Ukraine. Why, well the same tools and language they use have been found on American infrastructure and systems. Last thoughts before sleep were those of life before the internet and how people get emails with attachments that should never be opened. The short summary is just below. The more detailed and terrifying truth follows. It is a long summary, must be read…it is something like a cyber Hitchcock Twilight Zone disaster thriller, but it happened and happened often.

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Further, during a hearing in the House with former DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson revealed a couple of key facts. One is told that during the election cycle, when the DNC hack, officials on numerous requests refused assistance, cooperation and discussions with DHS and FBI about foreign cyber intrusions. What was the DNC hiding? The other fact is Obama had the full details in intelligence briefings daily leading into November and December and refused to tell the country about Russian interference. He waited until after the elections and into December to take action. Why?

Okay, read on….

Image result for ukraine blackout CommentaryMagazine

Russia’s New Cyber Weapon Can Cause Blackouts Anywhere in the World

Hackers working with the Russian government have developed a cyber weapon that can disrupt power grids, U.S researchers claim. The cyber weapon has the potential to be absolutely disruptive if used on electronic systems necessary for the daily functioning of American cities.

The malicious software was used to shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev, Ukraine last December. Called ‘CrashOverride’ the malware only briefly disrupted the power system but its potential was made clear.

With development, the cyber weapon could easily be used against U.S with devastating effects on transmission and distribution systems.

Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that examined the malware said, “It’s the culmination of over a decade of theory and attack scenarios, it’s a game changer.”

Dragos has dubbed the group of hackers who created the bug and used it in Ukraine, Electrum. The group and the virus have also been under scrutiny by cyber intelligence firm, FireEye, headed by John Hultquist. Hultquist’s company has nicknamed the group Sandworm and are keeping watch for clues of another attack.

The news of the malware comes in the middle of the ongoing investigation into Russia’s influence on the recent Presidential election. The Russian government is accused of trying to influence the outcome of the election by hacking hundreds of political organizations and leveraging social media.

While there is no hard evidence yet, U.S. officials believe the disruptive power hackers are closely connected to the Russian Government. U.S. based energy sector experts agree the malware is a huge concern and concede they are seeking ways to combat potential attacks.

“U.S utilities have been enhancing their cybersecurity, but attacker tools like this one pose a very real risk to reliable operation of power systems,”said Michael Assante, who worked at Idaho National Labs and is former chief security officer of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

CrashOverride

CrashOverride is only the second known instance of malware specifically designed to destroy or disrupt industrial control systems. The U.S. and Israel worked together to create Stuxnet, a bug designed to disrupt Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos believes CrashOverride could be manipulated to attack other types of industrial control such as gas or water, though there has been no demonstration of that yet. But the sophistication of the entire operation is undeniable. The hackers had the resources to only develop the malware but to test it too.

The malware works by scanning for critical components that operate circuit breakers, then opening these breakers, which stops the flow of electricity. It continues to keep the circuit breakers open, even if a grid operator tries to close them. CrashOverride also cleverly comes with a “wiper” component that erases the existing software on the computer system that controls the circuit breakers. This forces the grid operator to revert to manual operations, which means a longer and more sustained power outage.

Potential outages could last a few hours and probably not more than a couple of days as U.S. power systems are designed to have high manual override capabilities necessary in extreme weather.

As mentioned above, you need to read the full detailed version here and just how the FBI, global cyber experts at the request of Ukraine worked diligently for accurate attribution to a Russian cyber force intruding on power systems. Hat tip to these experts and the story needs to go mainstream, as we are in a cyber war, the depths impossible to fully comprehend. Ukraine is the target and cyber incubation center for Russian cyber terrorists where they test, review, adapts and keep going without consequence.

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Okay, read it all here. Hat tip for the detailed summary and the people doing quiet investigative cyber work.

 

Terror Funding, Likely Given their Names

 

21 MEN INDICTED IN MASSIVE CIGARETTE SMUGGLING SCHEME

AFTER INVESTIGATION BY BRONX DA, NYPD, NYS TAX DEPT.,

HOMELAND SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS

Nearly 10,000 Cartons Seized, Alleged Tax Fraud is $20 Million

Cheap Cigarettes Sold in Stores Citywide, Undercutting Law-Abiding Merchants (official indictment here)

Bronx cigarette smuggling could be financing more than just fancy houses and jewels; police worry about terror funding

THE BRONX — When police raided the Bronx home of cigarette smuggling suspect, Hector Rondon, on Leland Avenue recently, they didn’t find him right away.

Then, one of the agents felt something odd under a rug in Rondon’s bedroom.

It turned out to be a trap door that led to a crawl space.

That’s where Hector Rondon was found naked — his hiding spot a failure.

Rondon is one of three, accused ringleaders in a massive cigarette smuggling ring with roots in North Carolina.

That’s where cartons of cigarettes were purchased for about $50 a piece, far cheaper than the sales price in New York of $120 to $130 a carton.

The ring allegedly purchased 5,000 cartons of cigarettes every week in North Carolina and Virginia and sent them to New York.

A $5.00 pack of cigarettes down south can fetch $8.00 on the black market in New York, where heavily-taxed smokes normally sell for $13.00 a pack.

“It’s an incredibly lucrative business,” said Jean Walsh, Chief of Investigations for the Office of Bronx District Attorney, Darcel Clark. “In many ways, it’s more lucrative than drug dealing.”

Walsh believes millions in illegal proceeds could have been transferred overseas, although her office has also accounted for millions in real estate, gold, and jewelry.

“Cash is very difficult to track,” Walsh told PIX11. “They know that. They know we know that.”

Shareef Moflehi, 30, was at the top of the hierarchy of 21 men who were indicted.

Walsh said he recently bought a Mediterranean-style villa in Mount Vernon, New York for $675,000 cash.

Now, the District Attorney’s Civil Forfeiture Unit will try to seize $15,210,000 in assets from Moflehi and his alleged cohorts.

It will seek to take $1,757,945 from another defendant, Saleh Ali Qasem of the Bronx.

The DA is looking to seize five houses, cash, jewelry, and gold.

Jean Walsh told PIX11 her office is still working to track all the money, but she and the NYPD, along with state investigators and federal agents, are well aware of how cigarette smuggling has been tied to terror funding in the past.

Going way back to 1993, financing for the first, World Trade Center bombing was directly linked to cigarette smuggling in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Not long after the 9/11 terror attacks, two Lebanese-born brothers were convicted in North Carolina of sending their smuggling profits to Hezbollah, a group with a stated goal of wiping out Israel.

More recently, a 2015 cigarette smuggling ring in the Bronx was sending vast amounts of cash overseas to the Middle East and Africa.

New York smokers looking for a bargain may not be aware of all this.

But they’re very aware of the places that sell untaxed cigarettes—which they can find in 60 to 80 percent of the delis and smoke shops in New York City.

“There’s always a secret stash of the untaxed cigarettes that are just out of sight,” Tarek Rahman, Chief of the Special Investigations Bureau in the DA’s office, told PIX11.

****

DEFENDANTS

NOMAN ALBAHRI, 36, 1875 Gleason Ave, Bronx

SAMIR HOSIN, 29, 98 Ridgewood Ave, Bronx

OMAR JHURY, 26, 49 N. 10th Ave, Mount Vernon

JAMAL KARKAT, 26, 1735 Hobart Ave, Bronx

TAHIR KASTRATI, 50, 1723 Colden Ave, Bronx

HECTOR RONDON, 44, 826 A Leland Ave, Bronx

SHAREEF MOFLEHI, 30, 121 Stephens Ave, Bronx, & (recently) 369 Westchester Ave, Mount Vernon

PAZAL MOHAMMED (AKA JOHN), 30, 28 Bobwhite Plain, Hicksville, NY

ABRAHAM SHARHAN (AKA IBRAHIM), 34, 4165 Grace Ave, Bronx, 63 Sherwood Ave, Yonkers, NY

YASSER SUFYAN (AKA MALIK), 31, 191 Bennett Ave, Yonkers, NY

AMMAR SHAMAKH, 33, 101 Vincent Drive, Clifton, NJ

NAGIB MOHAMED SHARIF ALI, 39, 3746 Riverside Drive, Raleigh, NC

SHAHER DAHJAT DARI (AKA BOO BOO), 28, 1269 Waterloo Drive, Rocky Mount, NC

MAEEN M. ALSAYIDI, 34, 11 East 2nd Street, Clifton, NJ

OMAR NASSER, 22, 508 Woosdwalk Lane, Rocky Mount, NC

ILYAS MAMUN, 47, 3459 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY

ABDUL WAHED SALIM (AKA AMIGO), 32, 207 Maddux Drive, Pikesville, NC

SALEH ALI QASEM, 34, 1025 Underhill Ave, Bronx

MOHAMED SIDI AMAR, 39, 300 Addison way, Petersburg, VA

YAHI OULD CHEBIH, 36, 29 Craterwoods Court, Petersburg, VA

TAHIR OULD ELY LEMINE, 39, 169 Craterwoods Court, Petersburg, VA

 

198 Million US Voters Exposed, Vulnerable/Hearing Scheduled

Deep Root Analytics behind data breach on 198 million US voters: security firm

Anyone with an internet connection was able to access a huge database of personal information on US voters ahead of 2016 elections, a security firm says. The database helped the Republican Party’s presidential campaign.

A data analytics firm that helped US President Donald Trump’s election campaign exposed personal information on 198 million Americans, a security firm revealed on Monday.

Chris Vickery, a researcher at the consultancy Upguard, discovered a misconfigured database containing information on almost every registered US voter compiled by data analytics company Deep Root Analytics.

The information was used by the Republican National Committee to help win the 2016 presidential race.

The database contained “names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details,” as well as data described as predicted data about voter behavior on policy preferences and likelihood of choosing a particular candidate.

Upguard said the database “lacked any protection against access” and was available to “anyone with an internet connection.”

It described it as “a treasure trove of political data and modeled preferences used by the Trump campaign.” It said the information was used to help influence potential voters and accurately predict their behavior.

Deep Root takes responsibility

Deep Root released statements confirming that files were accessed without its knowledge. “The data that was accessed was, to the best of our knowledge, this proprietary information as well as voter data that is publicly available and readily provided by state government offices,” the statement said.

“Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access.  We take full responsibility for this situation.”

“We do not believe that our systems have been hacked. To date, the only entity that we are aware of that had access to the data was Chris Vickery,” it added.

Data breach hunter

Analyst Chris Vickery, a self-described “data-breach hunter,” last year discovered a breach of 191 million voter records in Mexico. Upguard said the latest leak was the largest known breach of voter data in history, with the equivalent of 10 billion pages of text.

It said the database modeled voters’ position on almost 50 different issues with the files offering insights into the algorithmic strategy used by Trump’s campaign to target voters.

The exposure “raises significant questions about the privacy and security Americans can expect for their most privileged information,” the researchers said.

“It also comes at a time when the integrity of the US electoral process has been tested by a series of cyberassaults against state voter databases, sparking concern that cyber risk could increasingly pose a threat to our most important democratic and governmental institutions.”

Meanwhile:  Image result for electronic voting

A research group in New Jersey has taken a fresh look at postelection polling data and concluded that the number of noncitizens voting illegally in U.S. elections is likely far greater than previous estimates.

As many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election, which put Barack Obama in the White House.

The research organization Just Facts, a widely cited, independent think tank led by self-described conservatives and libertarians, revealed its number-crunching in a report on national immigration.

Just Facts President James D. Agresti and his team looked at data from an extensive Harvard/YouGov study that every two years questions a sample size of tens of thousands of voters. Some acknowledge they are noncitizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

Just Facts’ conclusions confront both sides in the illegal voting debate: those who say it happens a lot and those who say the problem nonexistent.

In one camp, there are groundbreaking studies by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

On the other side are the professors who conducted the study and contended that “zero” noncitizens of about 18 million adults in the U.S. voted. The liberal mainstream media adopted this position and proclaimed the Old Dominion work was “debunked.”

The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.

Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

These numbers are more in line with the unverified estimates given by President Trump, who said the number of ballots cast by noncitizens was the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

Last month, the president signed an executive order setting up a commission to try to find on-the-ground truth in illegal voting. Headed by Vice President Mike Pence, the panel also will look at outdated voter lists across the nation with names of dead people and multiple registrants.

For 2012, Just Facts said, 3.2 million to 5.6 million noncitizens were registered to vote and 1.2 million to 3.6 million of them voted.

Mr. Agresti lays out his reasoning in a series of complicated calculations, which he compares to U.S. Census Bureau figures for noncitizen residents. Polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

“The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate,” Mr. Agresti told The Washington Times.

He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero” claim on two flawed assumptions. First, they assumed that people who said they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names showed up in a database.

“This is illogical, because such databases are unlikely to verify voters who use fraudulent identities, and millions of noncitizens use them,” Mr. Agresti said.

He cites government audits that show large numbers of noncitizens use false IDs and Social Security numbers in order to function in the U.S., which could include voting.

Second, Harvard assumed that respondent citizens sometimes misidentified themselves as noncitizens but also concluded that noncitizens never misidentified themselves as citizens, Mr. Agresti said.

“This is irrational, because illegal immigrants often claim they are citizens in order to conceal the fact that they are in the U.S. illegally,” he said.

Some of the polled noncitizens denied they were registered to vote when publicly available databases show that they were, he said.

This conclusion, he said, is backed by the Harvard/YouGov study’s findings of consumer and vote data matches for 90 percent of participants but only 41 percent of noncitizen respondents.

As to why his numbers are higher than the besieged ODU professors’ study, Mr. Agresti said: “I calculated the margin of sampling error in a more cautious way to ensure greater confidence in the results, and I used a slightly different methodology that I think is more accurate.”

There is hard evidence outside of polling that noncitizens do vote. Conservative activists have conducted limited investigations in Maryland and Virginia that found thousands of aliens were registered.

These inquiries, such as comparing noncitizen jury pool rejections to voter rolls, captured just a snapshot. But conservatives say they show there is a much broader problem that a comprehensive probe by the Pence commission could uncover.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which fights voter fraud, released one of its most comprehensive reports last month.

Its investigation found that Virginia removed more than 5,500 noncitizens from voter lists, including 1,852 people who had cast more than 7,000 ballots. The people volunteered their status, most likely when acquiring driver’s licenses. The Public Interest Legal Foundation said there are likely many more illegal voters on Virginia’s rolls who have never admitted to being noncitizens.

Here comes the Congressional hearing: Image result for electronic voting NYTimes

The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing on U.S. election security Wednesday.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who is a part of that probe into alleged Russian meddling, will be playing a leading role. Warner says there are states that have not publicly come forward to share that the Russians tried to hack their elections in 2016.

“I’m not trying to embarrass any state. I just want to make sure that Americans realize how serious this threat is,” Warner said.

Warner is working with Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) this week to learn more about the nation’s election systems.

Hearings this week on Capitol Hill will cover Russia’s cyber efforts during the 2016 race, America’s response efforts, and potential threats to future elections.

“We have elections obviously this year in Virginia. I want to make sure that the integrity of our election system is safe from hacking and I’m not sure we’re fully prepared,” Warner said.

While Warner says Russia was not able to change any vote totals, more steps must be taken.

“If you can get into the overall statewide voter file, you could do some mischief. So I just want to make sure that we’re on guard,” Warner said.

One issue Warner raises is that if states faced hacking attempts in 2016, the federal government views them as a victim, and it’s up to the state to come forward.

“It’s up to the state to be willing to volunteer that. I don’t think that’s smart, is it in our country’s security to keep secret the fact that it was literally many many more states?” Warner said.

Virginia just held primaries last week, and now it’s time for the commonwealth to prepare for the general election in the fall.

“We’ve got to redouble our efforts to make sure that our most critical democratic process of free and fair elections continue to be free, fair and non-disputable,” Warner said.

Wednesday’s hearing is set to begin at 9:30 a.m. in Washington, D.C.

 

 

The Slow Death of Britain and Europe

There have been a number of terror attacks in recent weeks in Britain and across Europe. No one is willing to discuss the causes for fear of retribution by migrant groups, religious organizations and government leaders.

The most recent attack occurred when Darren Osbourne, originally from Whales rented a van and ran into several people outside the Finsbury Park mosque killing one and injuring several others. He is being charged with terror activities. Islamists have been waiting for this reckoning and the powder keg continues to smolder.

The Finsbury Park mosque has a nasty history.

*** Moving on to yet another secret in Britain…

Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400 Rotherham Children? Political Correctness

A story of rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police—is emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a civilized country.  Its origins, however, lie in something quite ordinary: what one Labour MP called “not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat.”

Imagine the following case. A fourteen-year old girl is taken into care by the social services unit of the town where she lives, because her parents are drug-addicted, and she has been neglected and is not turning up in school. She is one of many, for that is the way in Britain today. And local government entities—Councils—can be ordered by the courts to stand in for parents of neglected children. The Council places the girl in a home, where she is kept with others under supervision from the social services department. The home is regularly visited by young men who try to entice the girls into their cars, so as to give them drugs and alcohol, and then coerce them into sex.

***

The girl, who is lonely and uncared for, meets a man outside the home, who promises a trip to the cinema and a party with children of her age. She falls into the trap. After she has been raped by a group of five men she is told that, if she says a word to anyone, she will be taken from the home and beaten. When, after the episode is repeated, she threatens to go to the police, she is taken into the countryside, doused in petrol, and told that she is going to be set alight, unless she promises to tell no one of the ordeal.

Social workers tell girls they cannot help them

Meanwhile she must accept weekly abuse, in return for drugs and alcohol. Soon she finds herself being taken to other towns in the area, and hired out for sexual purposes to other men. She is distraught and depressed, and at the point when she can stand it no longer, she goes to the police. She can only stutter a few words, and cannot bring herself to accuse anyone in particular. Her complaint is dismissed on the grounds that any sex involved must have been consensual. The social worker in charge of her case listens to her complaint, but tells her that she cannot act unless the girl identifies her abusers. But when the girl describes them the social worker switches off with a shrug and says that she can do nothing. Her father, his drug habit notwithstanding, has tried to keep contact with his daughter and suspects what is happening. But when he goes to the police, he is arrested for obstruction and charged with wasting police time.

Over the two years of her ordeal the girl makes several attempts on her own life, and eventually ends up abandoned and homeless, without an education and with no prospect of a normal life.

Impossible, you will say, that such a thing could happen in Britain. In fact it is only one of over 1,400 cases, all arising during the course of the last fifteen years in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, all involving vulnerable girls either in Council care or inadequately protected by their families from gangs of sexual predators. Almost no arrests have been made, no social workers or police officers have been reprimanded, and until recently the matter was dismissed by all those responsible as a matter of no real significance. Increasing public awareness of the problem, however, led to complaints, triggering a series of official reports. The latest report, from Professor Alexis Jay, former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, gives the truth for the first time, in 153 disturbing pages. One fact stands out above all the horrors detailed in the document, which is that the girl victims were white, and their abusers Pakistani.

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Sociologists convinced government that the police are racist

Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into the conduct of the British police was made by Sir William Macpherson a High Court judge. The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report accused the police – not just those involved in the case, but the entire police force of the country – of ‘institutionalised racism’. This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be accused of it.

However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated people of different races and without regard to their ethnic identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of ‘institutionalised racism’, simply on account of the institution to which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression. MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.

Police more concerned with political correctness than crime

The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old crime of racism the new crime of ‘Islamophobia’. No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.

Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls, and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation.

Rotherham Town Hall. (Wikipedia) Rotherham Town Hall, Wikipedia

No One Will Be Fired

This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists. The intention of the activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddy-duddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of society – the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the illegals – as oppressive and demeaning. They enthusiastically propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking revenge on a social order from which they feel alienated.

Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the doctrines, like religious mantras which they hope will keep them safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted without resistance the huge transformations that have been inflicted on them over the last thirty years, largely by activists working through the Labour Party. They have accepted immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad against the surrounding social order. They have accepted the constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things are theirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.

And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests are made, and the elected Police and Communities Commissioner for Rotherham, although forced to resign from the Labour Party, refuses to resign from his job. After a few weeks all will have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can resume.

 

 

 

Media of The Strange Death of Europe

The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth-rates, mass immigration and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive change as a society. This book is not only an analysis of demographic and political realities, but also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes reporting from across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who appear to welcome them in to the places which cannot accept them. Told from this first-hand perspective, and backed with impressive research and evidence, the book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel’s U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away. In each chapter he also takes a step back to look at the bigger issues which lie behind a continent’s death-wish, answering the question of why anyone, let alone an entire civilisation, would do this to themselves? He ends with two visions of Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-strange-death-of-europe-9781472942241/#sthash.LFXH2Clt.dpuf