News:

Testimonial: "I cannot see a slither of a viable defense for this godawful circlejerk board."

Main Menu

How to hack an election

Started by P3nT4gR4m, April 01, 2016, 12:48:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

P3nT4gR4m

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

QuoteAs for SepĂșlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, "When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything."

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

QuoteHe wasn't cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants

That's surprisingly affordable, really.

Hey Cain, if one were so inclined, are there any nations that strike you as particularly vulnerable to this? I'd guess newer/less stable democracies but it would be naive to think this couldn't easily be done in any developed nation too. I could see quite a lot of scope for this to be used in say, eastern European countries.



Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Q. G. Pennyworth

Quote from: Junkenstein on April 01, 2016, 01:20:44 PM
QuoteHe wasn't cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants

That's surprisingly affordable, really.

Hey Cain, if one were so inclined, are there any nations that strike you as particularly vulnerable to this? I'd guess newer/less stable democracies but it would be naive to think this couldn't easily be done in any developed nation too. I could see quite a lot of scope for this to be used in say, eastern European countries.

There is nowhere this couldn't work. CNN reports on twitter trends right along with every other major network and nobody's reading papers anymore.

P3nT4gR4m

If this isn't used extensively in the developed world, then the governments are dumber than I thought. It's a double edged sword, tho. Social media is how we almost won the scottish indyref. Geriatric old fucks who still consume traditional propaganda and are therefore immune to the internet is how we lost it. Westminster spent an absolute fortune on a print and teevee blitzkrieg.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

My initial reaction was along the lines of "This must happen everywhere" but thinking about it I'm not so sure.

To start with, you'd need to convince those spending money that this is more viable/effective than the traditional media partners they know and have been bribed by. If you take the major parties out of the mix, then I can certainly see someone like UKIP trying this out.

It would be nice to see the Green party or somesuch use this and be quite open about it after the fact. It may even cause some kind of electoral reform that has been decades overdue here.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

P3nT4gR4m


I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

Thanks. I was feeling far too happy for a minute there.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Given that most of the US seems to get their political information from Facebook memes and Twitter, I am unsurprised.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


P3nT4gR4m

There's irony in the fact that, whilst futurists and transhumanists are speculating on the viability of alternative cognitive substrates, it's already happened. Half of humanity have offloaded most of their thinking and reasoning to facebook and twitter  :lulz:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on April 02, 2016, 09:46:18 AM
There's irony in the fact that, whilst futurists and transhumanists are speculating on the viability of alternative cognitive substrates, it's already happened. Half of humanity have offloaded most of their thinking and reasoning to facebook and twitter  :lulz:

a la ex machina.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."