Hacking Democracy

Last updated
Hacking Democracy
Hackingdemocracydvdcover.jpg
The controversial electronic voting documentary
Directed by Simon Ardizzone
Russell Michaels
Produced byRobert Carrillo Cohen
Simon Ardizzone
Russell Michaels
Starring Bev Harris
Kathleen Wynne
Andy Stephenson
Harri Hursti
Herbert Hugh Thompson
Ion Sancho
Release date
  • November 2, 2006 (2006-11-02)
Running time
82 minutes
CountryUnited States
Language English

Hacking Democracy is a 2006 Emmy nominated documentary film broadcast on HBO and created by producer / directors Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone, with producer Robert Carrillo Cohen, and executive producers Sarah Teale, Sian Edwards & Earl Katz. Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with 'e-voting' (electronic voting) systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the United States, especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.

Contents

In 2007 Hacking Democracy was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism – Long Form. [1]

Demonstrated flaws

The documentary follows Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, director and associate director for nonprofit election watchdog group Black Box Voting, as they attempt to discover the extent to which it would be possible to alter results on the electronic voting machines of Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions). Andy Stephenson, an employee of Black Box Voting from July–December 2004, assisted with comparisons of audit documents in Volusia County and obtained a secret videotape of Harris interviewing a voting machine testing lab. Kathleen Wynne captured live video of Harris finding voting machine records in a Volusia County trash bag, and captured video of Cuyahoga County, Ohio elections workers admitting that the initial 3% recount ballots had not been randomly selected during the 2004 presidential election. Harris and Wynne then embarked on a series of five voting machine hack tests with Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti in 2005 and 2006. During the course of the documentary, multiple methods of tampering with the votes are shown.

The first is through editing the database file that contains the voting totals. This file is a standard Microsoft Access database, and can be opened by normal means outside of the encompassing voting program without a password. Some jurisdictions have disabled Microsoft Access, making it more difficult to alter the database, but this protection was shown to be bypassed by Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson through a Visual Basic program which searched for a string of text and edited the file through external means. However, alterations of the results in either of these fashions would be caught if a vigilant elections official compared the results with voting machine tapes. [2]

Another hacking technique was demonstrated through hacking the actual computer code used in the Diebold Accu-Vote memory cards. This method was discovered by Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti and is known as "the Hursti Hack". In this hack, Harri Hursti rigged the Diebold optical scan voting system to make the wrong candidate win by adding negative (minus) votes to one race. This resulted in that race having votes literally subtracted from its vote total. These methods were tested by the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, on the actual Diebold optical scan voting system used by Tallahassee, Florida in all their prior elections. This method demonstrated, contrary to a previous Diebold statement, that a person attempting to rig the votes of a precinct would need access to only the memory card, not the optical scan voting system or tabulation software. This method, when cross-checked between the optical scan voting system and tabulation software, perfectly mimics a legitimate result, and further makes the voting machine produce a false zero-vote print-out, falsely confirming that the memory card has no votes inside it before voting begins. Following this historic hack Ion Sancho stated: "If I had not known what was behind this I would have certified this election as a true count of the votes." [2]

Reaction

Even though no one from Diebold Election Systems admitted to having seen the film, [3] Diebold President David Byrd suggested that Hacking Democracy was "replete with material examples of inaccurate reporting", and demanded that it not be aired. [4] [5] His criticism was based on an earlier film made by the same three filmmakers. However, HBO refused to remove it from their schedules. In addition Diebold wrote a letter to HBO referring to the famous vote changing 'Hursti Hack' featured in the film, claiming that "Harri Hursti is shown attacking a Diebold machine in Florida. But his attack proved later to be a complete sham." This statement by Diebold was proven to be wholly wrong by independent computer scientists at UC Berkeley who investigated the Hursti Hack.

California's Secretary of State commissioned a Special Report by scientists at UC Berkeley to investigate the Hursti Hack. Page 2 of their report states:

Harri Hursti's attack does work: Mr. Hursti's attack on the AV-OS is definitely real. He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card. He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system, including the GEMS election management server.

One of Diebold's objections to the film was that it failed to mention that Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins computer science professor and vocal Diebold critic, may have a conflict of interest. Rubin at one point owned stock options in VoteHere, which sells auditing software and systems for voting machines. However, Rubin disposed of his stock options and withdrew from the VoteHere advisory board in August 2003, and says he had not had any meaningful contact since joining over two years before, except occasionally receiving press clippings. [6]

DVD release and online movie

The film was released on DVD on March 20, 2007. It includes deleted scenes, a trailer and director biographies.

Hacking Democracy was published for online viewing on Amazon Instant Video on 30 September 2016. Also the film is available to view on Vimeo On Demand. [7]

The Sequel

In March 2020, HBO and Hacking Democracy directors / producers Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale released the follow-up film, Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections. [8] [9] In 2021 this sequel was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary. [10] The film was also produced by Michael Hirschorn and Jessica Antonini.

The film reveals the hacking attack on the presidential election in 2016, through the exclusive on-camera interview with the hacker known as CyberZeist. CyberZeist penetrated the Alaska Division Of Elections' state vote tabulation computer system on 6 and 7 November 2016, and on election day, 8 November 2016. [11] [12] CyberZeist successfully achieved this attack only weeks after the Alaska Division Of Elections admitted that Russian hackers had attempted to carry out a comparable attack. [13] [14]

The film's world famous elections cybersecurity expert, Harri Hursti, discovered that most hackers install a range of software that will be hidden in multiple components of a computer, so that even wiping the hard drive will not remove the hackers’ access. CyberZeist told him, “I’ll go under their radar even if they are 24/7 monitoring it [the vote-counting server].” When reviewing the hack on the Alaska Division of Elections’ servers, Hursti discovered that CyberZeist could read or write any file, including system files: In other words, CyberZeist could have planted vote-stealing software that might still be there, waiting for a command to activate. As Hursti showed in Kill Chain, threat-actors might not even be looking to change results in an election, but to sabotage democracy and bring the process into disrepute. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI), was a subsidiary of Diebold that made and sold voting machines.

Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots.

Bev Harris is an American writer, activist, and founder of Black Box Voting, a national, nonpartisan elections watchdog group. She helped popularize the term "black box voting", while authoring a book of that title.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Felten</span> American computer scientist (born 1963)

Edward William Felten is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he was also the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy from 2007 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2019. On November 4, 2010, he was named Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, a position he officially assumed January 3, 2011. On May 11, 2015, he was named the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. In 2018, he was nominated to and began a term as Board Member of PCLOB.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Election Systems & Software</span>

Election Systems & Software is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, voter registration and election management systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, Ballot on Demand printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.

A DRE voting machine, or direct-recording electronic voting machine, records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. These are typically buttons or a touchscreen; and they process data using a computer program to record voting data and ballot images in memory components. After the election, it produces a tabulation of the voting data stored in a removable memory component and as printed copy. The system may also provide a means for transmitting individual ballots or vote totals to a central location for consolidating and reporting results from precincts at the central location. The device started to be massively used in 1996 in Brazil where 100% of the elections voting system is carried out using machines.

The Volusia error is an example of the problems with electronic voting from the 2000 US presidential election.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas W. Jones</span> American computer scientist

Douglas W. Jones is an American computer scientist at the University of Iowa. His research focuses primarily on computer security, particularly electronic voting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ion Sancho</span>

Ion Voltaire Sancho was an elected public official who served Leon County, Florida, as Supervisor of Elections for 28 years, from 1989 to 2017. During his time in office, he was admired for his integrity as a voter advocate and elections expert, and became nationally known for his role in the Florida presidential election recount of 2000. He was also known for his appearance in the 2006 investigative documentary Hacking Democracy.

Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson is a computer security expert, an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, and the Chief Technology Officer of Symantec. He is also the Program Chairman of RSA Conference the world's largest information security conference with over 25,000 attendees annually. Thompson is the co-author of a book on human achievement titled The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success published by Penguin in 2013 and has co-authored three books on information security including, How to Break Software Security: Effective Techniques for Security Testing published by Addison-Wesley, and The Software Vulnerability Guide published by Charles River 2005. He is perhaps best known for his role in exposing electronic voting machine vulnerabilities as part of the HBO Documentary Hacking Democracy. He was named one of the "Top 5 Most Influential Thinkers in IT Security" by SC Magazine and has been referred to by the Financial Times as "One of the world’s foremost cryptology and internet security experts."

The Hursti Hack was a successful attempt to alter the votes recorded on a Diebold optical scan voting machine. The hack is named after Harri Hursti.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harri Hursti</span> Finnish computer programmer

Harri Harras Hursti is a Finnish computer programmer and former chairman of the board and co-founder of ROMmon, where he supervised in the development of the world's smallest 2-gigabit traffic analysis product that was later acquired by F-Secure Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brad Friedman</span> American activist

Bradley Louis Friedman is an American blogger, journalist, actor, radio broadcaster, director and software programmer, most known for his criticism of election integrity issues in the United States. Friedman graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in 1983 and received a BFA from New York University's (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.

Simon Nicholas Knight Ardizzone is an editor and filmmaker. He produced and co-directed the documentary Hacking Democracy with Russell Michaels (2006) and co-directed Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections (2020) with Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale. He was an editor on the TV documentaries: God Is Green (2007); Britain's Greatest Monarch (2005); and What Made Mozart Tic (2004).

Election cybersecurity or election security refers to the protection of elections and voting infrastructure from cyberattack or cyber threat – including the tampering with or infiltration of voting machines and equipment, election office networks and practices, and voter registration databases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic voting in the United States</span> Facet of American elections

Electronic voting in the United States involves several types of machines: touchscreens for voters to mark choices, scanners to read paper ballots, scanners to verify signatures on envelopes of absentee ballots, and web servers to display tallies to the public. Aside from voting, there are also computer systems to maintain voter registrations and display these electoral rolls to polling place staff.

<i>Kill Chain: The Cyber War on Americas Elections</i> 2020 HBO documentary film

Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections is an American television documentary film produced by Ish Entertainment, Blumhouse Productions and HBO Films. The film examines the American election system and its vulnerabilities to foreign cyberwarfare operations and 2020 presidential election interference. The film also features hackers at the conference DEF CON in their attempts to test the security of electronic voting machines.

Aggelos Kiayias FRSE is a Greek cryptographer and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Edinburgh and the Chief Science Officer at Input Output Global, the company behind Cardano.

<i>Absolute Proof</i> 2021 film by Mike Lindell

Absolute Proof is a 2021 political propaganda film directed by and starring Mike Lindell. It was distributed by One America News Network and promotes the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden. The documentary was removed by video hosting sites YouTube and Vimeo for violating their community standards.

Sarah Teale is a British-American documentary film producer and director, known for her Emmy nominated HBO documentaries Hacking Democracy, Dealing Dogs, The Weight of the Nation and Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections.

References

  1. "The 28th Annual Emmy Awards for News & Documentary: The Nominations". EmmyOnline.org. Archived from the original on 2015-02-20. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  2. 1 2 "Interviews & Features | TVGuide.com". Archived from the original on 2006-11-11. Retrieved 2006-11-11.
  3. "HBO defends "Hacking" from criticism". Monsters & Critics. Archived from the original on 2006-11-16.
  4. Janofsky, Michael (2006-10-31). "Diebold demands that HBO cancel documentary on voting machines". Bloomberg News. Retrieved 2006-11-03.
  5. Lerer, Lisa (2006-11-01). "Diebold Gives HBO A Thumbs Down". Forbes. Archived from the original on November 30, 2007.
  6. "Statement of Avi Rubin on Relationship with VoteHere Inc". Johns Hopkins University. 2003-08-17. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  7. "Home". hackingdemocracy.com.
  8. "Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections".
  9. Forbes.com
  10. "News 2021 Nominees (Documentaries) – the Emmys".
  11. "Hackers broke partway into Alaska's election system in 2016. Officials say no damage was done".
  12. ADN CyberZeist Records [ dead link ]
  13. "Alaska was unsuccessfully targeted by Russian Cyber Actors in 2016 election".
  14. "Russian hackers 'unsuccessfully targeted' Alaska voter database last year, state says".
  15. "What Happened when Our Election-Hacking Doc Came Out During Coronavirus".

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