Election Security Report by Intelligence Community - Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections
This bookmark will lead you to the 15-page declassified joint intelligence agency report on foreign interference in 2020 elections which is much easier to read than what the White House published last night. All of the intelligence agencies combined all of their data into a single report and then made it public. I put a copy on my own servers in case they later deleted it.
During Trump's speech last night, the White House released several heavily-redacted documents on their website which actually disprove the claims that were made about foreign interference in our elections. In CLASSIFIED reports (which I can't share), around 5-7 states reportedly had systems related to voting compromised but no changes to vote totals were found. Russia and Iran influenced many voters through psy-ops and disinformation campaigns (I'm sure you all noticed that activity in your social media feeds), but there is no evidence that they altered actual votes in our election systems. China had plans to interfere, but they didn't execute them.
By complete accident, I actually caught Russian hackers attempting to compromise the voting machines in Georgia during one of our previous primary elections, but I did not obtain any evidence of their success. I put everything I knew into an affidavit that I filed in federal court and also I personally hand-delivered it to the FBI. I even contacted the Georgia Secretary of State (at the time Brian Kemp) and asked him to preserve all evidence. Kemp went onto the evening news in a panic and falsely claimed that Obama was hacking them, and later when he found out it was the Russians and that they were trying to help them win, he went silent and used a magnetic bulk eraser to destroy all of the hard drives on their servers. During that election, Kemp became Governor of Georgia. All of that is now public record, so I won't waste your time re-hashing all of it here again because we need to focus on the upcoming elections.
As far as Trump's claims that China received our voter files: the voter files are public information, so Trump's voter roll hacking allegations against China are bullshit. In some states you can freely access the data through a web browser, and in most other states you can simply purchase them from the Secretary of State from that state for a relatively small fee.
One of the things that greatly protected us is the fact that each state runs their own elections. If we had a centralized election system or database (like Trump is demanding and in the proposed SAVE act), then exploiting a single vulnerability could compromise the entire election system. That is dangerous! As of now, hackers would have to breach each state individually and they would leave behind an enormous trail of forensic evidence in attempting to do so. They'd have to flip votes in at least all of the swing states or a significant number of other states to actually change the outcome of an election. That's the way we want to keep it.
Two greater foreign nation-state hacking concerns that I have that nobody ever talks about are:
1) In what appears to be two separate attacks (X1 and X2) in 2014 and 2015, China obtained all of the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) databases which hold all of the private information of our government employees. I am especially concerned about the SF-86 applications that are used to obtain security clearances. Those forms would be a treasure trove of blackmail material and leverage for espionage operations. They presumably obtain those that were approved and denied, which means they'd have blackmail on those who weren't able to obtain a clearance or those who had to get waivers to obtain one. We believe that over 21 million personnel records were stolen.
2) In 2019-2020 , Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service obtained all of the federal PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) court files from our judicial branch using the SolarWinds supply chain vulnerability. They even got the SEALED court documents from the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, which is why the courts went back to filing paper copies again for documents to be placed under seal. This is like the crown jewels when it comes to data, because they have more evidence than the public has on the evidence and allegations against all parties in our federal court system. Like the stolen OPM data by China, this gives Russia an unimaginable amount of data to blackmail our citizens and especially all of our government employees. It would not surprise me if both China and Russia work together to share this data and commit further actions against the USA.
Both of these massive breaches were publicly acknowledged by the government, so you can do more research on them if you're interested. However, there still has been very little done to secure our government systems from intrusion or to mitigate the damage able to be done with the stolen data. Trump has dismantled all of our federal agencies and fired all of the smartest people in our government who would be capable of saving us. Hand-marked paper ballots are the safest to be used in our elections, but then we still have to closely watch the security of the electronic vote tabulators. Hand-counted audits are necessary as a precaution, and fully hand-counted recounts may be necessary in the event of any questionable results. Those can take an extremely long amount of time, which sometimes causes people to be even more suspicious about the security of our elections. Remain vigilant but don't be distracted by Trump's bullshit!