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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Russian hackers attack US election systems

What, me worry? Russian hackers attempted and were partly successful in June in accessing the election databases of Arizona and Illinois.

Hackers targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, and the FBI alerted Arizona officials in June that Russians were behind the assault on the election system in that state. The bureau described the threat as “credible” and significant, “an eight on a scale of one to 10,” Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan (R), said Monday. As a result, Reagan shut down the state’s voter registration system for nearly a week.

It turned out that the hackers had not compromised the state system or even any county system. They had, however, stolen the username and password of a single election official in Gila County.

The article describes in detail the overall bad situation, including a number of additional attacks as well as the poor security surrounding the online voting option that more than 30 states use.

As usual, we are being told not to worry by the responsible government officials:

Tom Hicks, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, an agency set up by Congress after the 2000 Florida recount to maintain election integrity, said he is confident that states have sufficient safeguards in place to ward off attempts to ma­nipu­la­te data. For example, if a voter’s name were deleted and did not show up on the precinct list, the individual could still cast a provisional ballot, Hicks said. Once the voter’s status was confirmed, the ballot would be counted. Hicks also said the actual systems used to cast votes “are not hooked up to the Internet” and so “there’s not going to be any ma­nipu­la­tion of data.” However, more than 30 states have some provisions for online voting, primarily for voters living overseas or serving in the military.

Hicks has made me feel so much better!

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

2 comments

  • wodun

    Provincial ballots wouldn’t help states that vote by mail.

  • Max

    I believe this to be a faults flag operation, an excuse for the federal government to take active control over all state and county voting districts. ( I don’t have the link) They will say it is to protect us. It’s for our own good and for the good of the democracy against outside influence. To quote a famous Russian leader, “I don’t care Who votes, as long as I control the voting booth”.

    Al Gore’s greatest contribution to the party politic was to sue over the hanging Chad which resulted in the removal of machine voting. Computer voting has proven to be fraudulent, full of ways to be manipulated, and the ability to preprogram for a predetermined result.
    The unattended consequences of this action has resulted in hackers competing to determine the election results. The people at black box voting have estimated that only 5% of the voting is not tampered with. Many other states, like Washington, have passed laws forbidding recounts. The Internet is full of stories documenting irregularities in nearly every state. In most places, the women’s voting league are not allowed to oversee the counting or the process involved to verify the results. They are often not even allowed in the building in violation of state law’s.
    In Utah, years ago, commissioner in charge of County elections asked an electronics repair man to look at a locked and sealed vote machine to satisfy his curiosity about the rumors. They found a modified smart phone motherboard with its Wi-Fi and cell functions active. We all know that cell phones are programmed to receive updates when activated or at a predetermined date.
    To sum this up, there’s trillions of dollars changing hands, building and destroying of nations involving the most powerful country in the world. They would not leave this control to chance. There’s too much at stake…

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