August 29 and 30, 2016


News and Views


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-foreign-hackers-accessed-state-election-systems/

FBI has found hackers accessed two states' election databases
By REBECCA SHABAD CBS NEWS
August 29, 2016, 11:47 AM
Last Updated Aug 29, 2016 11:47 AM EDT


The FBI has found that hackers accessed Arizona’s and Illinois’s state election databases, CBS News has confirmed.

The bureau issued an alert to state election officials of the attempted hacks, which was sent earlier this month and it referenced two attacks in two states that are under investigation. At least one site was compromised, CBS News confirmed.

The two states that were targeted were Arizona and Illinois, and while the FBI released a statement, it didn’t offer any details.

“The FBI routinely advises private industry of various cyber threat indicators observed during the course of our investigations. This data is provided in order to help systems administrators guard against the actions of persistent cyber criminals.”

The intrusions were first reported by Yahoo News on Monday after it obtained a copy of the alert. Yahoo said foreign hackers are responsible.

According to its report, earlier this month, the FBI’s Cyber Division issued an alert that warned: “Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems. The alert said that the FBI was investigating the intrusions into two states’ election websites whereby one resulted in the “exfiltration” or theft of voter registration data.

Only three days earlier, on Aug. 15, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson held a conference call with state election officials offering to help make states’ voting systems more secure, the report said. Johnson also said that DHS was not aware of “specific or credible cybersecurity threats” to the election.

The alert, Yahoo’s report said, didn’t identify the states that were targeted, but sources told Yahoo that they were Arizona and Illinois. While the Arizona incident appears to be limited, Ilinois’s Board of Elections general counsel Ken Menzel told Yahoo that Illinois had to shut its system down for 10 days in late July and that personal data for up to 200,000 voters had been downloaded.

Menzel told Yahoo that FBI agents confirmed that the people behind the intrusions were foreign hackers, but the bureau didn’t name the country or countries involved. He also told Yahoo that he heard the FBI was seeing whether a “possible link” existed between these attempted hacks and those at the Democratic National Committee and other political groups.

U.S. officials said last month that they believed people working for the Russian government were behind the hack of internal emails at the DNC.

CBS News’ Andres Triay contributed to this story.



http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinois-state-board-of-elections-hack-update-met-0830-20160829-story.html

Illinois election officials say hack yielded information on 200,000 voters
Rick Pearson
Chicago Tribune
August 29, 2016

Photograph -- Amid an FBI warning to state election officials to tighten election security, Illinois State Board of Elections officials said Monday they believe voters' personal information was targeted in a cyberattack. Aug. 29, 2016. (CBS Chicago)


Illinois State Board of Elections officials said Monday they believe personal information from fewer than 200,000 voters was hacked through a cyberattack of possible foreign origin that began in June and was halted a month later.

Ken Menzel, general counsel for the elections board, said no files of registered voters were erased or modified and that no voting history information or voter signature images were captured.

But he said it's possible that some voter personal information, including drivers' license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, could have been accessed of voters who entered that information when they registered to vote online.

Voters who have been registered for a long time or those who registered to vote through a registrar do not have that personal information in the state voter files, he said.

"It looks to be fewer than 200,000" names, Menzel said of the hack. "We say that the system was compromised in this context, that it's been accessed. We're very confident nothing was added, deleted or altered."

The elections board, however, warned that "due to the ambiguous nature of the attack, we may never know the exact number of affected voters."

After the Illinois cyberattack and another attempt in Arizona, the FBI issued a "flash alert" this month to warn of malicious attempts to obtain access to states' election voter registration information. The FBI alerted Arizona officials in June that Russians were behind the assault on the election system in that state, The Washington Post reported Monday. The actions by the FBI and related activity by the Department of Homeland Security were first reported by Yahoo News.

In Illinois, elections officials said the cyberattack began June 23. Board staff became aware of a security breach on July 12 and programmers used code changes to stop the malicious outside database queries.

The board also took offline outside access to its website, including its online voter registration application process, to prevent further intrusions. Notifications were made to the Illinois attorney general's office and the General Assembly under the state's Personal Information Protection Act, Menzel said.

The online voter registration portal was restored late last month and the board has added further encryption and taken other steps to enhance security, officials said.

"We've been working with the people in the governor's technology group (the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology) and they've been wonderfully helpful," he said. "There are also some interstate groups that have banded together for security issues, as well as the FBI and Homeland Security."

Menzel said there is a "reasonable suspicion" that the cyberattack was foreign.

"We know foreign servers were used, but it's not conclusive that foreign actors were involved," Menzel said. He said the FBI has "their reasons for suspecting foreign involvement, other than just some foreign servers were used."

The stepped-up activity to protect states' voter election databases comes as the FBI investigates a hack of the Democratic National Committee that resulted in the unauthorized release of tens of thousands of emails. Security and intelligence experts have said they believe the DNC was hacked by interests linked to Russia.

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Twitter @rap30



These two articles are very disturbing to me. First, it went on, at least in Illinois, for almost a month before it was detected. I think something like a Failsafe program with a very sensitive trigger mechanism would help. At the first hint of tampering from any outside source, the database would shut down. Then in a few minutes it would be opened again automatically for a squad of White Hat Hackers to trace the source of the assault. It would be fun if another way to handle it were to pop off a virus to anyone using “the back door.” We could call that the Poison Ivy technique. Then the White Hats need to seek out and close/remove that “back door” which allowed the Russians in. Many websites simply ask for a password to get on the site at all, and if the correct one isn’t given within one try or 20 seconds, the user/abuser will be locked out.

Second, what particular types of villains would want to access and, especially, tamper with our voter registration data? Well, there are the typical crooks. That’s those who want our personal data so they can steal money from our bank or use our credit card to buy highly expensive things on our bill. Then there are the more exciting crooks like individuals or groups who want to capture the election for themselves, say Donald Trump, or the most frightening of all, THE RUSSIANS.

OOPS, that’s who the FBI thinks it was. Getting access to our power grids so that they can stop whole cities in their tracks is one thing, but close-up snooping on elections or actually modifying voting results is even worse in a democratic society. The Trumpites are highly suspicious of the Islamic persona, but I am highly suspicious of THE RUSSIANS due to the year of my birth 1945 and young years. There was quite an* hysterical view of Russia in those days. (For a fun look at life in the 1950s and 60s in the great movie "The Russians are coming, the Russians Are Coming," go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWWRbn4zG0.)

It does not improve the way I feel about Trump that he has been so playfully cozy with Russian interests in the last few months, and Putin’s flirtation with him in return, makes the situation even worse. (I thought for a while recently that we were going to have an international sexual scandal.) My distrust of Russia is largely because I grew up in the 1950s during The Cold War, but it's also because of Putin's interference in Ukraine a couple of years ago. He has no scruples at all. Under Gorbachev I was actually becoming fond of Russians, but under Putin I’m not. He is not only treacherous; he is openly and audaciously aggressive. How could Trump think he can actually bargain with such a man and win? It’s like trying to pet a wild wolf. Trump has outsized ideas of just how good he actually is.


*https://www.grammarly.com/answers/questions/16479-a-or-an/

A or AN?
Should you use A or AN before the word HISTORIC?

Use of "an" or "a" before a word starting with "h" usually depends on whether the "h" is sounded or unsounded. We say "a house" but "an hour". The word "historic", and other three syllable words starting with "h" where the stress is on the middle syllable, doesn't quite fit this rule. Usage has differed over time and differs between countries and also dialects.
However, there is a group of words of three or more syllables with the stress on the second syllable, such as historic, historical, hypothesis, hysterical, habitual, harmonica and hereditary, where people tended to still use "an" rather than "a". The "h" is less well sounded in these words compared with certain other words starting with "h" where the stress is on the first syllable such as history, histogram, hypothetical, holiday and hemorrhoid, or on the only syllable such as hand, host and hymn. Thus "an historic" is still often used. The word "haphazard" is an interesting exception. Here, the stress is on the second syllable but we hardly ever see, for example, "an haphazard event" even though it fits into the same category of words as "historic" etc above. This is perhaps because the first syllable of "haphazard" is actually quite strong even though the stress is on the second syllable.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/border-patrol-officers-us-mexico-border-wall/

U.S. border officer: "Do you think a wall is gonna stop them?"
By INES NOVACIC CBS NEWS
August 30, 2016, 3:34 PM

IMAGE -- screen-shot-2016-07-26-at-3-36-47-pm.png. Agent Eisenhauer on patrol near Douglas, Arizona on the U.S.-Mexican border. CBS NEWS
IMAGE -- screen-shot-2016-07-26-at-3-36-34-pm.png, A fenced section of the U.S.-Mexican border at Nogales, Arizona. CBS NEWS
IMAGE -- screen-shot-2016-07-26-at-3-37-01-pm.png, Officer Agosttini says that illegal immigration happens every five to ten minutes. CBS NEWS
IMAGE -- screen-shot-2016-07-26-at-3-34-42-pm.png, Agent Eisenhauer on the outskirts of the Border Patrol's Tucson sector of the border. CBS NEWS
IMAGE -- screen-shot-2016-07-26-at-3-35-17-pm.png, Cars wait in line at the Nogales Port of Entry in Arizona. CBS NEWS
IMAGE -- screen-shot-2016-07-26-at-3-36-18-pm.png, Residents on the Mexican side of the border say that a higher wall will not prevent illegal immigration. CBS NEWS


The temperature dropped drastically as nightfall cloaked Arizona’s 100,000-square-mile desert, including sections on the border with Mexico, surrounding the small city of Douglas.

Matthew Eisenhauer, a border patrol agent with the Tucson sector, steered his white Chevy Tahoe off the highway onto a dirt road, parked, and stepped out into brush-covered terrain near the border.

“We had a sensor activation. Two individuals... made an incursion into the U.S.,” said Eisenhauer, setting out on foot without a flashlight, in the dark, to join fellow border patrol agents already stationed there in an effort to apprehend the suspects. According to Customs and Border Patrol -- America’s largest law enforcement agency, with an annual budget of $10.7 billion that has increased by 75 percent over the past decade -- more than 1,100 individuals are apprehended along the border every day.

As well as individual attempts to cross into the U.S. illegally, some are suspected of crimes including drug smuggling and human trafficking. Illegal immigration happens routinely, as do apprehensions along unfenced sections of the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to latest statistics, the Border Patrol reported 337,117 apprehensions nationwide in 2015, compared to 486,651 in 2014. The number of apprehensions has dropped dramatically since the year 2000, when a record high of 1.6 million people were caught trying to cross illegally.

In March 2016, the Border Patrol issued a “snapshot” of a given day; it said an average of 924 apprehensions between U.S. ports of entry occur daily, as well as 367 refusals of inadmissible persons.

A weakened U.S. economy after the 2008 recession, combined with tougher border security, has changed the landscape of illegal immigration. A recent Pew Research Center report found there are more immigrants from Mexico leaving the U.S. than coming in. From 2009 to 2014, one million Mexican immigrants and their families left the U.S. to return to Mexico, while an estimated 870,000 entered the U.S.

Of the 262-mile stretch of border that Eisenhauer oversees, 50 miles does not have a fence or wall.

“What we see is, to avoid detection, these criminal networks will try and exploit areas that are more remote... kind of a harsher terrain, with the idea that agents have less of a response time and less of response capabilities there and that there is less tactical infrastructure in those areas,” Eisenhauer told CBS News.

The idea of walling off America’s border with Mexico has become the focus of the immigration debate in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Republican nominee Donald Trump has for months argued that a wall would cut off the flow of illegal immigration into America. In controversial remarks last year, Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and claimed that the Mexican government was actively sending criminals to the United States. He has insisted that as president he would make Mexico pay for the wall he wants to build along the border.

But some border patrol agents like Eisenhauer, who typically work in remote areas, see it differently. Eisenhauer told CBS News that a “great wall” is not really the solution.

“Border fortification means a lot of things in different areas,” said Eisenhauer. “In areas where we can’t have a physical structure, we use the environmental challenges to funnel traffic into certain areas to identify and apprehend [individuals] in a more effective manner.”

That could involve “using ground sensors, using infrared or camera technology, [or] having agents there,” he said.

Eisenhauer declined to comment on “policy or legislation,” but maintained that the solution to border security requires a combination of technology, infrastructure and agents.

Outside of the border city of Douglas, Arizona, cameras can be found along the border, spaced out from one to four miles apart. Officers stationed in the Tuscon headquarters of this 262-mile border sector monitor the activity. They also oversee the six ports of entry in that area.

“The law is very clear that you must report to a CBP [Customs and Border Protection] officer before you come to the United States,” said Joe Agosttini, the assistant port director in Nogales for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which daily processes about 29,000 people crossing between the two countries.

“You can see the officer, how detailed how he or she is when you come into the port of entry -- admissibility is number one,” said Agosttini, and gestured to an agent performing a vehicular check of an incoming white car: opening the trunk, inspecting the interior as well as underneath the car.

President Obama has said that the border has never been more secure. Customs and Border Protection operates at 328 ports throughout the nation, and since 2001, the number of border patrol agents has nearly doubled to more than 18,000 today.

Asked whether these measures have resulted in a drop in illegal immigration, Agosttini noted that someone still crosses the border illegally every five to ten minutes.

“Remember something, where there’s money, there’s gonna be customers, there’s always gonna be people trying,” he said. For some criminal networks on the south side of the Mexican border, both human trafficking and drug smuggling remain a lucrative businesses [sic].

For agents like Agosttini, the question of how high a wall is, is almost irrelevant.

“Do you think a wall is gonna stop them from coming in? The fact that you have a house, would that stop a burglar from coming in?” said Agosttini. “I used to live about 30 feet from the fence, OK? I’ve been seeing these things for 30 years.”

Later that afternoon, a short drive from the port of entry, dozens of people walked along the 26-foot-high fence on the Mexican side of the Nogales border. Some even shouted over to their friends who had crossed to the American side to shop or visit family.

“What are they going to do, build a wall... that not even a helicopter could fly over?” Jose Luis, a resident in Nogales, Mexico, told CBS News through the fence. Referring to Donald Trump, he added, “He’s crazy!”

“Those who have a need to get across, they’ll find a way.... Even if they have to use catapults to fling themselves over, they’ll find a way, you know?”



On one news shot during the last few years, three Mexicans were filmed climbing over the wall, and several times the camera crews have gone into tunnels of an apparently permanent nature, in some cases even with lighting built in, so I don’t believe the idea of keeping all would be immigrants out is feasible. Heck, there is open ocean access between CA and Mexico, and I’m sure there are people on both sides who own boats large enough to transport people for a fee. I’m sure Trump knows that his comments are impossible to achieve, just like the one of “deporting 11,000,000” people. How are you going to transport them all out? It’s just not practical, but if the German example were followed it would be, unfortunately, a more likely method. I believe and hope that we in America would rebel against that sort of thing if it became known. I do fear this Rightist fear/hatred of immigrants, either Hispanic or Islamic.

Of course, Hitler’s idea of getting rid of ALL Jews was to kill them all rather than deport them. As for what to do with all those corpses, he had that figured out, too. He incinerated them in many sites across Europe. If there was no crematorium nearby, he buried them in mass graves. I looked just now to find a more accurate number of Jewish deaths than the most commonly heard 3,000,000 and found a site claiming 6,000,000. That turned out to be a clearly anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial site called www.darkmoon.me. It’s disgusting. Don’t read it.

For what looks to me to be a more serious appraisal of the rampages of the Nazis, go to http://www.scottmanning.com/content/nazi-body-count/. Manning's body count estimate is 20,000,000, not 3 or 6 million. It should be remembered that the Nazis killed also anyone who was physically or mentally disabled, gypsies, anybody whose skin was brown to black, and anyone who had the guts to disagree with them. The same rude, crude and undereducated trend that is behind all of that cruelty is unfortunately present in this country to much too great a degree today. Heaven help us. PS: I highly recommend this scottmanning site if you like to learn and think.

It seems to me that nobody knows exactly how many Jews were killed in WWII, but the idea that it could happen here; and that however many deaths there were, there were definitely TOO MANY, remains in the forefront of my thinking about those who follow Trump, if not himself. His megalomania is obvious, and that is the key personality characteristic to produce a new Hitler. The idea that killing people because they are deemed culturally or racially “different” or “impure” or “degenerate,” is a prime sign of the “degenerate” thinking of those who hold such an opinion.


See more about scottmanning below.

http://www.scottmanning.com/content/nazi-body-count/

HISTORIAN ON THE WARPATH
Nazi Body Count: 20,946,000 Non-Battle Deaths
by SCOTT MANNING on APRIL 1, 2009

The Nazi Body Count represents non-battle deaths caused by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. This includes genocide, execution of civilians and POWs, forced labor that resulted in deaths, bombing of civilian populations, imposed famine and resulting diseases, and “euthanasia.” These numbers do not include civilians who got caught in the cross-fire of battle.

The numbers are mid-estimates. The source for the numbers, R. J. Rummel’s Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder, uses of a method of accumulating all available estimates typically from government sources or scholarly examinations. The estimates are sorted by lows, mids, and highs. Averages are determined from the estimates to arrive at a low-estimate (the minimum), a mid-estimate (the more probable), and a high-estimate (the least likely).1

The Nazi body counts are grouped by country and sorted from highest to lowest. Also, an occupation death rate is provided for the countries that Nazi Germany actually occupied. This number was determined by dividing the 1939 population estimate by the body count to give the percentage that a citizen of that country was likely to be killed during that time period. An appendix at the end lists the sources for the population estimates.

Subsequent articles will examine each country in detail: Their relationship with Nazi Germany and more information on the numbers.



Go to this website to see the whole article which includes figures from 27 countries, including the USSR and the United States. This is without a doubt one of the best and most informative articles I’ve read in a long while. The US deaths he mentions are due to prisoner of war status, a total of 2,038.

For Manning’s bio, go to http://www.scottmanning.com/about/. “While software pays the bills, his real passion is history, specifically war. He currently holds a bachelor’s in military history from American Military University and he is working on a master’s in ancient and classical history.” His achievements outpace his educational attainment, however. He has published numerous published book reviews, gives speeches, and has two articles on famous battles in the Encyclopedia Britannica, in January and April, 2015, and that, to me, is impressive. To contact him, go to scottmanning13@gmail.com or Facebook.

About Scott Manning

Photograph -- Marathon, Greece. September 2014.

“. . . . Scott Manning is an analyst for a large software company outside Philadelphia. While software pays the bills, his real passion is history, specifically war. He currently holds a bachelor’s in military history from American Military University and he is working on a master’s in ancient and classical history.

When he is not studying or working, you can find Scott speaking at conferences, leading battlefields tours, or traveling the world. His journeys outside the US include Guatemala, Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, China, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Austria, Mexico, and Scotland.

You can find him active on Twitter and Facebook.

Education

American Military University, M.A. 2016 (projected), Ancient and Classical History.

American Military University, B.A. 2013, Military History, Magna Cum Laude.”