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Nov. 21, 2020 - Epoch Times
20:41
US Digital Voting Systems Are Vulnerable to Hacking—Tony Shaffer, Former Intelligence Operative [Sept 2019] | American Thought Leaders
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At the 48th Phil Schlafly Eagle Council, we sat down with Tony Schaefer, who was formerly a senior intelligence officer in the Department of Defense and is now president of the London Center for Policy Research.
Tony Schaefer, great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Always fun.
Thanks for having me.
Let's talk about something different today.
In the past, we've talked a lot about Spygate and some of your observations, big discussion on predication.
Our audiences have loved this stuff.
I want to kind of really shift gears this time around.
So we're talking about Elvis, right?
No, Elvis.
I'm prepared for Elvis.
I don't know about anything else.
So, you know, you're the head of the London Center.
Yes.
And I know the London Center just got involved with something which I find incredibly important, okay?
Right.
And this is the National Election Defense Coalition.
Right.
NADC. Yeah.
Tell me a little bit about, you know, the idea of voter fraud having free and fair elections.
Big issue.
And big issue across the aisle.
Tell me a little bit about what this is.
Yeah, so this is something that we've actually been pretty public about it.
It seems like it's not as popular as all the other things going on in the mainstream media.
But one of the foundations of the republic we have is one individual casts a vote.
That vote is sacred.
That vote should be counted as cast, and it should be essentially It's auditable if you vote.
There's a dispute about the number of votes that should be available to be recounted or accounted for.
And there's been real issues.
As we know, for the last election, the 2016 election about Russian interference, the implication has been there's been a real blurring of of perception by the left regarding Russian interference.
Or Russians somehow interfered with the vote.
Michigan and Wisconsin really, you know, somehow they interfered with those few.
And I don't believe any of that.
But I do believe that certain threats, threat organizations, threat intelligence agencies, have determined that there's a digital vulnerability That exists within our system.
In the early 2000s, after the hanging chad, the Gore-Bush 43 election, there was all these recounts in Florida and it had to do with hanging chads.
About this physical, you know, people punch things and did the chad go through or not.
That created a whole backlash against paper.
Paper votes.
Paper votes.
And it was because of the punch system.
So we all went, at the time, and a lot of money was spent on this in the early 2000s to go to digital systems.
Now, Janet, in those days, people did not understand the inherent vulnerabilities to digital systems, that if you have access to it, you can manipulate it.
We've seen this in a certain country.
China has been accused of being able to do certain things with digitalization.
They won't manipulate things.
This coalition I work with has recognized that as a huge issue.
Dr.
Alex Haldeman is part of it.
He teaches up in the University of Michigan.
Alex has done penetrations of digital systems where he can literally hack into a system and change votes in real time.
Like one of these digital voting machines?
That exist.
Because these things are built with no security.
Wow.
They were built at a time when there was no perception of any external threat that could change.
And these are machines that are still being used today and might well be used at 2020.
Precisely.
Okay.
Wow.
So this whole coalition is focused on trying to eliminate any potential of a foreign threat penetrating into these networks to change the digital boats.
And as strange as this is, the past is prologue.
The answer has been shown by several states, including my home state of Virginia, to return to a paper ballot system where you do the optical reader.
Basically, you take and you mark with a pen or pencil a dot, and then that paper is retained.
They scribble it in.
And then that vote is counted digitally, but by an analog machine locally.
And then you have a protected It's basically a secure socket that you then send that information to the central repository in the capital, all secure.
We believe that that combination of paper ballot with a secure system with risk-limiting odds after the fact to basically do kind of spot checks is the best way to do essentially the prevention of a foreign threat being able to go into these digital systems and manipulate it.
And the arguments of some of these states is, well, they're air-gapped.
It doesn't matter.
If it's digital, I spend a lot of time in the 90s running operations to penetrate digital networks that were air-gapped away from the internet.
Wow.
It doesn't matter.
I can see why you're involved.
Yes, so I'm the threat expert.
So what we're doing now, and this is a trans-partisan commission.
I don't want to get anybody's dander up.
The trans-partisan effort is the libertarians, the traditional liberals, the progressive liberals, and there's a difference, The stand-up republic, the Never Trumpers, some of the folks on the conservative side, the Liberty Coalition, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, some of the folks over there.
The idea here is that this coalition is truly outreaching to the entire political spectrum for purposes of trying to at least agree upon securing the vote for 2020.
Okay.
And the idea simply is you as an individual should have confidence that your vote will be counted as cast And it will be sustained as cast and will not be lost and it will count towards who you believe you cast that vote for.
That's fascinating.
So I understand, just from recollection, that there's multiple different models of these digital voting machines out there in multiple states.
How many of these digital voting machines are there in the system?
Each state is different, and the honest answer is I couldn't even come up with all the numbers at this point because we're not actually focusing on everything.
The decision of the organization and the coalition is to focus only on swing states.
Now, those are Georgia, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, South Carolina.
Wisconsin and Minnesota have already kind of gone to this system, so there's really no issues there.
They've got the paper ballots.
Certain states, in particular South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Pennsylvania, all have remaining some level of digital system, the old systems that could be hacked.
And so the effort has been to work with those states to try to fix that.
I've actually been to Texas.
I testified on something called H.R. 9, I'm sorry, it was S.R., the Senate Resolution No.
9, which was trying to get Texas to abandon all digital systems before They're not.
They're not going to make it, but they're trying to find money to do that.
I've actually been to Pennsylvania four times over the past eight months.
I've testified three times in front of their legislature on this issue because they are taking this very seriously.
They're trying to find money to replace most of their systems.
They have a lot of digital systems still.
Interesting.
And then I was scheduled to go see Governor DeSantis of Florida.
During the week of the hurricane, we had to postpone that because of the hurricane.
So Florida has issues as well.
So the idea here is that we're working, I'm working as the kind of threat expert to remind people that there is truly a foreign threat.
Not only Russia, the Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans all have digital capabilities that can be focused on Manipulating systems and that's something we're trying to educate people on and then encourage the adopting of what I consider the Virginia model.
Virginia went back to this about 10 years ago where they use paper ballots with risk limiting audits and it seems to work fairly well.
Very interesting.
So do you have any sort of sense, let's say across these swing states, how many votes it would be possible to manipulate?
Boy, that's an excellent question.
And I think that I would encourage you to talk to Alex Haldeman.
Dr.
Haldeman at some point as a follow-up interview because Alex really has been the one who follows...
The vulnerability issue.
And there's two points of vulnerability which I don't think people fully understand or appreciate.
First is the machine itself.
One of the arguments is, well, it's not on the internet, so how can we worry about it?
Why should we worry about it?
And the answer is, Computers, I'm looking at a computer right now off-screen, every computer has updates, right?
I mean, you turn it on, it wants to download something.
Absolutely.
These digital machines require updates.
So firmware updates basically.
The bad guys can get into that.
With a nation-state the size of China, They can throw huge resources into compromising someone or compromising a programmer to put a line or two of code on there which can be activated or do something at a certain time.
That's the worry.
So air gap doesn't matter.
Air gap doesn't matter.
I mean, I can't go into details, but I can tell you, professionally, we spend a lot of time and resources finding out a way to penetrate foreign systems which are not on the Internet.
And we did it very successfully.
So I know what can be done, and that's what worries me, and that's what worries others.
It's like, okay, if we could do it to someone else, then they can be done to us, and that's the worry.
And all of these machines have inherent vulnerabilities because, as I mentioned, Jan, they were not designed at the time where cybersecurity was even a consideration.
Right.
So that's why it's important.
Fascinating.
How realistic, you know, you said that Texas might not even make it by 2020.
How realistic is it that...
First of all, is every swing state interested in realizing this?
And second, is it even possible to deal with this?
Part of what I'm doing next week, as a matter of fact, I'll be on the Hill, and Congress has actually done something on this.
I don't know how well they've done it.
There's something called HAVA. Essentially, I don't remember exactly what HAVA stands for, but you can Google it, H-A-V-A. And that is the pot of money that Congress set aside for each state to do updates to this election system.
Got it.
That the states who had vulnerabilities with digital systems would do something to fix them.
Well, California, I think, has digital systems, but it's kind of like, no, we're going to use this for something else.
And they did.
So they didn't actually tie the money, the federal money, which was available to fix insecurities.
They gave it to the states and said, like, ask for a grant, we'll give you money.
You know, a typical kind of entitlement program.
So some states, frankly, I don't think anybody's going to worry about California.
California's going to go blue no matter what.
I don't think anybody's really worried about that.
But the swing states are the issue.
So Pennsylvania, for example, gets a slice of that money, and they do want to use it for...
Buying new machines.
But their allotment is only because it goes by population.
I see.
So a population like California gets a lot of money, but it's not going to be used to fix anything.
A state like Pennsylvania who wants to do it, it's not going to get as much of a slice of the money.
So it's allocated based on voter registration.
Right.
So if you have a smaller population, you don't get as much, you can't fix as much.
So this is where, for example, Pennsylvania's had to figure out a way to either budget or obtain money to convert their machines over.
So I think they've got $10 billion.
Sounds like a lot of money to us, but that's not a lot of money to convert an entire state to a different system.
So they're now looking at trying to do other financing.
They need to get to about between $40 to $100 million to do this.
A lot of money.
So things like that, we've worked with the states to try to find a way to do it.
That's why I testified.
I actually testified in one hearing where Governor Wolfsky's secretary of state, female, was actually agreeing with me on the things I was saying.
He's like, yeah, we agree, but we don't have the money.
So things like that is where we believe we need to make the investment.
Anyway, back to the federal side.
We try to encourage Congress to actually put the right controls on the have a money so you just can't do a grant and just, hey, we're going to paint every polling place, you know, chartreuse.
We're going to paint it all chartreuse.
This is where we've been working.
We'll be working with Congress on that.
And we're trying right now to make sure that enough money is in the budget available for purposes of the states who want to convert over and do have time to do it.
We're doing this, we're now in September of 2019.
Not a lot of time.
I mean, think about it.
We're 14 months.
Yeah, just under a year.
Just over a year.
Unless you get the money out within the next six months, it ain't going to be done by, because you've got to do all the testing, you have to do the acquisition, you have to do the testing, you have to do the training.
All these things have to be done.
And you can't be doing that 30 days before the election.
So this is something that we're working on right now.
That's a long way of answering the question that there is federal money for it.
We don't believe it's being spent appropriately, necessarily, and this is something we're trying to work both with the states on as well as the federal legislators.
So this is the main purpose of the group, to basically try to make sure that every state that really needs this has the ability to do it in time.
And so I'm a Tenth Amendment guy.
I believe that the federal government should not be dictating to the states.
I feel very strongly about that.
So others feel that there should be a federal system which enforces and requires standards.
I just don't think it's a good idea.
I think that we need to encourage best practices and encourage funding.
It's like, hey, if you do the right thing, we're going to give you money.
If you don't do the right thing, you want to do something stupid, then we're not going to give you the money.
We're not going to tell you how to do it, but there should be some level of leverage.
And this is one of the few areas that Liberty Caucus, the Freedom Caucus, has actually said they want to fund, that this is an investment area that we should do.
So that's where I think that people do want to focus on how to find money in the system to actually ensure that as best we can, We prevent any potential for foreign adversaries to have influence regarding the digital footprint or the vulnerabilities we now know exist.
And the initiative is purely on foreign.
Well, I get this question.
I actually got this question you're asking me right now in Pennsylvania.
Well, doesn't that mean there could be domestic people, threats that could try to do the manipulation digitally?
And the answer is absolutely.
Technology is ambivalent to the nation, the user, or the individual.
It doesn't matter.
Technologies, zeros and ones, don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican.
The vulnerability is something that anybody who studies the work of the coalition...
Jim Woolsey and I did an editorial on this on Fox News about a year ago, and it was very clear from the interview we did that there was real danger to this vulnerability and that both sides should take it and pay attention to it to include the potential for domestic groups who may have an interest in trying to upend the election.
And the other thing I'll say, Jan, is that I don't necessarily think That foreign threats want to pick a winner.
I think we've seen from the past 18, I guess 24 months, That simply the perception of an election being compromised will create such chaos that an adversary could benefit from that.
So I often talk about in my threat briefings, it's not about if Pennsylvania has digital machines and they actually function.
It's about an adversary saying, oh, we penetrated the digital backbone.
And we messed it up.
You can't rely on it.
Is that true or not?
Well, but can't they say that anyway?
Well, they can if you don't have a digital system to penetrate.
Right.
That's the point.
If you remove that as a vulnerability, if you remove any potentiality of penetrating a digital system, it doesn't matter.
Got it.
But an adversary who understands the fact that Dr.
Haldeman's done the research, you can do it, You don't necessarily have to do it to say you did it.
And that becomes part of the information war which would exist.
So I've actually counseled these folks on the fact that people know you have these vulnerabilities.
It's not like you haven't advertised it.
So me being, as we've talked about before, I'm the guy that your mother told you to stay away from when you were a kid.
As a former intelligence officer, our job was to figure out how to get inside the heads of the bad guy and mess their system up.
So I'm advising people who would be targeted by the bad guys.
That's what I would do.
If I were them, that's what I would do to you.
And nothing could make them happier than being able to essentially take a state like Pennsylvania and without any effort say, we penetrated your system.
All those votes that you gave to Candidate X, we did that.
Right.
And how do you prove they did?
Especially if there's no record of how you voted.
If it's all digital, How do you know?
And that's what the point is of going to a paper trail which actually is auditable and can be recreated for purposes of accountability.
Okay, so final question, I think.
Can it be done before the 2020 election?
Yeah, that's a good question.
And the answer is I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
And I think that's why the coalition is actually working very hard to do this.
Nobody's hiding this, by the way.
I mean, this is not like a secret project.
I think this is just the first time we've had a chance to talk about it.
We are being very public about the idea of acknowledging that there's a vulnerability and people need to take notice, especially in those swing states that have digital machines.
So the answer is I know Pennsylvania is taking it very seriously.
Shout out to Pennsylvania.
I appreciate their diligence on this, both Democrats and Republicans.
South Carolina has been working this.
I don't know how well they're doing in some cases, but I think they're getting ready to buy digital machines again.
Georgia's made a bad selection of machines, and that's been something we're dealing with.
Texas is trying to find money.
They're trying to find budget offsets to maybe even buy the machines that they need.
Florida has their issues, but I think Florida's making a good-faith effort.
The government of DeSantis has put together a commission to look at this.
So the answer is we can only try, and that's what we're going to try to do in the time we have.
Well, fantastic.
It's amazing to hear about some of these bipartisan efforts that are in play.
I know.
To try to safeguard the democracy, right?
It's hard to believe some people actually do.
Look at the truth as something we should focus on, and real threat is something we should focus on despite the political emotion that we see today in the media.
I appreciate that.
Actually, do you have anything you'd like to say to our readers and our viewers?
Well, no, if I could, to take a statement, I have always appreciated coming on for an honest airing of issues.
I can honestly say you ask really hard questions, which I really do appreciate having.
I'd rather have hard questions that are a bit challenging to answer rather than have softball questions which inform nobody of anything.
So I appreciate the fact you guys actually do try to To just ask for answers which are factual and complete.
Tony Schaefer, thank you.
Always great to be on.
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