The Progressive-Democratic Party is rolling out a new plan of campaign for the 2018 elections. It’s a populist one, but what interests me is this. The Republicans have run, for the last several election cycles, on “take back our country.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), in endorsing her party’s new campaign plan, said
This is one step that Democrats are offering to take back our government[.]
What an instructive, illuminating difference.
China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength—the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.
What happens when the People’s Republic of China starts reaching inside other nations to do this?
France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance. Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.
The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….
It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.
It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.
The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.
Rebel forces in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday announced that they plan to hold a referendum calling for the creation of a new state known as Malorossiya, which translates as “Little Russia.”
In a statement published on the rebel-aligned Donetsk News Agency, rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that the new state would aspire to include not only the areas under insurgent control, but also the rest of Ukraine.
This wouldn’t be occurring now, had our government and those of Europe hadn’t been so meek in the face of Russian aggression in the two eastern oblasts and then without a whimper accepting Russian partition of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.
Maybe now, the lot of us will stop bleating about the Minsk accord and remind Russia of its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum. Maybe now the lot of us will start selling/leasing/granting Ukraine the weapons and supplies it needs to defend itself and to take back from Russia the three oblasts.
Certainly these are different from each other in method and often (but not always) in purpose, but is there an important difference were these successful in altering our election outcomes or in raising doubt about those outcomes?
I didn’t think so.
Why, then, are so many who should know better so obstructive of the Federal effort to understand the method and extent of election fraud?
There were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the voter-registration system on Election Day 2016, State Election Commission says
That’s the subhead of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal piece on US Election Hacking Efforts. Illinois was hit as badly:
…hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug 12, 2016…. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.
Accessed, not simply trying to, as was the case in South Carolina, the state with those 150,000 hack attempts. In all, at least 21 states (I say “at least;” the WSJ just cited the 21) were targeted, and the intelligence community’s consensus is that the Russians were behind most of the attempts.
That should give an idea of the extent of the hacking at/into our election system. Isn’t election fraud—another version of influencing or altering our election outcomes at least as serious? Domestic defrauding of our elections, in some senses, would be even worse; it would be a betrayal by our own.
But so many governors refuse to cooperate with Federal efforts to characterize election fraud.
Go figure.