https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/05/30/israel-hacking-elections-worldwide/
Israel Hacking Elections Worldwide
Microsoft’s ElectionGuard a Trojan Horse for a Military-Industrial Takeover of US Elections
Mint Press News – Whitney Webb
is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to
several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch,
the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made
several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the
Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism. (More from Whitney Webb)
_________________________
Earlier this month, tech giant
Microsoft announced its solution to “protect” American elections from
interference, which it has named “ElectionGuard.” The election
technology is already set to be adopted by half of voting machine
manufacturers and some state governments for the 2020 general election.
Though it has been heavily promoted by the mainstream media in recent
weeks, none of those reports have disclosed that ElectionGuard has several glaring conflicts of interest that greatly undermine its claim aimed at protecting U.S. democracy.
In this investigation, MintPress will reveal how ElectionGuard
was developed by companies with deep ties to the U.S. defense and
intelligence communities and Israeli military intelligence, as
well as the fact that it is far from clear that the technology would
prevent foreign or domestic interference with, or the manipulation of,
vote totals or other aspects of American election systems.
Election forensics analyst and author Jonathan Simon as well as
investigative journalist Yasha Levine, who has written extensively on
how the military has long sought to weaponize public technologies
including the internet, were consulted for their views on ElectionGuard,
its connections to the military-industrial complex and the implication
of those connections for American democracy as part of this
investigation.
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In January, MintPress published an exposé
that later went viral on a news-rating company known as Newsguard.
Officially aimed at fighting “fake news,” the company’s many connections
to U.S. intelligence, a top neoconservative think tank, and
self-admitted government propagandists revealed its real intention was
to promote corporate media over independent alternatives.
Newsguard was among the first initiatives that comprise Microsoft’s “
Defending Democracy”
program, a program that the tech giant created under the auspices of
protecting American “democratic processes from cyber-enabled
interference [which] have become a critical concern.” Through its
partnership with Microsoft, Newsguard has been installed in public
libraries and universities throughout the country, even while
private-sector companies have continued to avoid adopting the
problematic browser plug-in.
Now, Microsoft is promoting a new “Defending Democracy” initiative —
one equally ridden with glaring conflicts of interest — that threatens
American democracy in ways Newsguard never could. ElectionGuard is
touted by Microsoft as a system that
aims to
“make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it’s
used in the United States or in democratic nations around the world.” It
has since been
heavily promoted by mainstream and
U.S. government-funded media outlets in preparation for its use in
the 2020 general election.
However, according to Jonathan Simon, election forensic analyst and author of
CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy,
this public relations campaign is likely just cover for more insider
control over U.S. elections. “It’s encouraging that after close to two
decades of ignoring the security issues with computerized voting,
there’s suddenly a scramble to protect our next election that suggests
those issues are finally being taken seriously,” Simon told
MintPress.
“Unfortunately the proposed solution is just more computerization and
complexity — which translates to more control by experts and insiders,
though of course that is not part of the PR campaign.”
As to the likely identity of those insiders, the fact that
Microsoft’s ElectionGuard was developed in tandem with a private
military and intelligence contractor whose only investor is the U.S.
Department of Defense offers a troubling clue. As a consequence,
ElectionGuard’s promise to “secure” elections is dubious, especially
given that Microsoft itself is a U.S. military contractor. Furthermore,
amid the
unfolding scandal of
Israeli meddling in foreign elections,
Microsoft’s growing ties to Israeli military intelligence and private
Israeli cybersecurity firms raise even more concerns about whether
ElectionGuard’s real purpose is to “secure” American elections
for candidates friendly to the establishment, especially the military-industrial complex.
Explaining ElectionGuard
According to an announcement made in early May by Tom Burt,
Microsoft’s Vice President for Customer Security and Trust,
ElectionGuard is “a free open-source software development kit (SDK)”
that “will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient
anywhere it’s used.” Burt’s statement further claims that the
ElectionGuard system “will enable end-to-end verification of elections,
open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and
allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted.”
While ElectionGuard may appear to concern itself only with electronic
ballots, the announcement states that the system “is designed to work
with systems that use paper ballots” through the use of
an optical scanner.
Notably, Microsoft chose to announce ElectionGuard only after it had
already
partnered “with major election technology suppliers who are exploring
the integration of ElectionGuard into their voting systems.” Burt
further noted that Microsoft now has “partnerships with election
technology suppliers responsible for more than half of the voting
machines sold in the U.S.” ElectionGuard partner companies include
Democracy Live, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, BPro,
MicroVote, and VotingWorks.
Another interesting, and deeply troubling, admission in the Microsoft
announcement is that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard development partner, the
Portland-based cybersecurity firm Galois, “recently received $10
million in funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a demonstration voting system to help
evaluate secure hardware DARPA researchers are developing as part of a
separate DARPA program.”
Microsoft’s announcement then notes that “the agency views ensuring
the integrity and security of the election process as a critical
national security concern and plans to implement the ElectionGuard SDK
as part of their effort to enable an end-to-end verifiable component in
future versions of their demonstration voting system.”
As deeply troubling as DARPA’s $10 million indirect investment in
ElectionGuard may seem, it is merely scratching the surface, as Galois
itself is essentially an extension of DARPA in the private cybersecurity
industry.
The “private” company whose only investor is the Pentagon
Founded in 1999 by John Launchbury, Galois quickly became close to
numerous government agencies that now – according to the Galois website –
form the vast majority of its clientele. In fact, Galois currently only
lists
the following U.S. government agencies
in its “clients” section: DARPA, the Department of Defense, the
Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, “Intelligence
Community” (i.e., CIA, NSA, etc.) and NASA. However, other clients of
Galois
include
top U.S. weapons manufacturer General Dynamics. Galois’ stated focus as
a company is research and development in advanced computer science,
with an emphasis on securing critical systems and cybersecurity. It also
dabbles in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and
machine learning.
Though it describes itself as “a privately held U.S.-owned and
-operated company,” public records indicate that Galois’ only investors
are DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), both of which are
divisions of the Department of Defense. In other words, while
“officially” a private company, its only investor is the U.S.
government, more specifically the Pentagon.
However, the company’s connections to DARPA go even further. The
company’s founder and chief scientist John Launchbury, left Galois in
2014 to become program manager and subsequently
the director
of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, which deals with
“nation-scale investments in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.”
In 2017, he left DARPA and went back to work at Galois as the company’s
chief scientist.
DARPA’s Information Innovation Office’s official purpose is to develop
advanced technology for issues of national security interest, but it
also focuses on
enhancing “human/machine partnership.”
A Galois spin-off company called Free & Fair, which develops
election technology, partnered with Microsoft to produce ElectionGuard.
Free & Fair’s website
lists its partners as DARPA, Microsoft, voting machine manufacturer
VotingWorks, vote tallying software developer Verificatum, the state
government of Colorado, and the OSET (Open Source Election Technology)
Institute. VotingWorks is a “non-profit” voting machine manufacturer
founded by a former Mozilla director of engineering and
closely affiliated with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). In addition to Colorado, other states
like Minnesota
have partnered with Microsoft’s “Defending Democracy” program, but it
is unclear if they have adopted or plan to adopt ElectionGuard as a
consequence of that partnership.
According to the CDT’s announcement of VotingWorks’ launch:
CDT will serve as a home for VotingWorks until it becomes
its own non-profit entity. This partnership means VotingWorks is
working closely with the CDT’s experienced team to rapidly ramp up
operations and begin in earnest the development of affordable, secure,
open-source voting machines for use in US public elections.”
The president and CEO of CDT is
Nuala O’Connor,
who was Amazon’s Vice President for Compliance and Customer Trust
before becoming CDT president. O’Connor was also formerly chief privacy
officer of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and has also worked
at General Electric and the U.S. Department of Commerce.
CDT’s
board
includes former Deputy Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator
for the White House under Obama and current Principal Counsel at Apple
Philippa Scarlett;
Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Julie Brill; and Mozilla’s vice
president of global policy, Alan Davidson. More troubling, however, is
its advisory council,
which includes representatives of RAND Corporation, Walmart, Verizon,
the Charles Koch Institute, Facebook and the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI).
MintPress readers are likely familiar with AEI,
one of the country’s most notorious neoconservative think tanks, known
for employing John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. One of
Newsguard’s co-founders, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is
also affiliated with the AEI.
Another partner of Galois’ Free & Fair is the Open Source
Election Technology Institute (OSET Institute, or OSETI), whose flagship
initiative is called “TrustTheVote.” One of OSETI’s co-founders and its
current CTO is
E. John Sebes, who has previously done work for DARPA and DHS. OSETI’s
strategic board of advisors includes Chris Barr of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which is
a top investor
in Newsguard; former Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling; former
Deputy Director of the NSA William Cromwell; former head of DHS’
Cybersecurity Directorate and former DARPA project manager Doug Maughan;
and Norm Ornstein of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute
and co-director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.
Aside from the numerous links to major corporations, government
agencies and neoconservative think tanks, of particular concern to Free
& Fair’s mission to develop “secure” election technology are its
connections to DHS. This is because, before, during and after the 2016
election, DHS was caught attempting to hack into state electoral systems
in at least three states — Georgia,
Indiana and Idaho — with
similar accusations also being made in Kentucky and West Virginia. In
Indiana’s case,
the DHS’ attempted hacks occurred nearly 15,000 times over a 46 day
period. In an official answer to Georgia’s claim the DHS had tried to
penetrate its electoral system’s firewall, DHS which initially denied
being behind the attempted hack,
later responded
that the attempted breach was “legitimate business” aimed at “verifying
a professional license administered by the state.” Some of the states
targeted by DHS had turned down the department’s offer to “shore up”
election systems prior to the 2016 election.
Compare this to the alleged Russian hacking into state electoral systems, which – to date – includes
only the claim
from the FBI that hackers alleged to be affiliated with Russian
military intelligence penetrated voter registration data in two counties
in Florida. That alleged hack, the details of which remain classified
and for which no evidence of it even happening has been made publicly
available, did not result in any alterations to data or other
manipulation of those systems, per FBI officials. The DHS, in contrast,
attempted to hack into the systems, not of individual counties, but
entire states and acknowledged that it did so, even though they chose
not to use the work “hack” and defended their activity. While focusing
on foreign — and especially Russian — interference may make for a more
patriotic story, the dangers posed by
domestic actors with at
least as great a stake in U.S. election outcomes appear to have been
grossly underestimated and virtually ignored by the media.
Free & Fair’s partnerships with groups tied to DHS seem to
further undermine its stated mission of providing secure and trustworthy
election technology, in addition to its parent company’s deep ties to
the Department of Defense, especially DARPA.
Russian-American investigative journalist, and author of
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, Yasha Levine explained to
MintPress
why DARPA is likely interested in U.S. election system software like
ElectionGuard and why the agency’s interest is dangerous for American
democracy:
Election systems are now being increasingly seen as a
theater for warfare between competing nation states. So, if you are
DARPA and your reason for existence is to create hi-tech weapons for the
future, then you are going to be looking at electronic voting systems
as a theater of war where the country could be attacked by a foreign
adversary. That explains why DARPA is involved.
But DARPA and some of these companies involved can also be seen as
foes of Americans’ popular will… We can hypothesize about what’s really
going on and what their intentions are, but clearly the Pentagon R&D
Lab for war should not be anywhere near America’s electoral system
because it represents a huge and powerful and unaccountable force in the
American political system whose interests often run counter to
democracy.
The fact that we are handing over the keys of American democracy to
the military-industrial complex — it’s like giving the keys to the
henhouse to a fox and saying, ‘here come in and take whatever you want.’
It’s obviously dangerous.”
From mind control to vote control?
It’s worth briefly describing why DARPA’s role at Galois is of
concern. This stems mainly from the fact that DARPA is currently
developing Orwellian and nightmarish “Terminator” technologies —
including efforts to
implant chips into soldiers’ brains,
replace most human soldiers with robot soldiers, and create
killer “Terminator” robots — and autonomous artificial-intelligence targeting systems that will
use social media to identify potential targets.
In 2015, Michael Goldblatt — then-director of the DARPA subdivision
Defense Sciences Office (DSO), which oversees the “super soldier”
program —
told
journalist Annie Jacobsen that he saw no difference between “having a
chip in your brain that could help control your thoughts” and “a
cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear.” When pressed about the
unintended consequences of such technology, Goldblatt stated that “there
are unintended consequences for everything.”
It goes without saying that the fact that an institution currently
developing what essentially amounts to mind-control technology, and that
also sees nothing
wrong with such technology, has suddenly
become so interested in creating and funding with millions of dollars a
“free, fair and secure” election system to protect American democracy
from interference, is beyond odd and suggests an ulterior motive.
Similarly, Microsoft’s
claim
that it “will not charge for using ElectionGuard and will not profit
from partnering with election technology suppliers that incorporate it
into their products” should also raise eyebrows. Considering that
Microsoft has
a long history of predatory practices, including
price gouging for its OneCare security software,
its offering of ElectionGuard software free of charge is tellingly out
of step for the tech giant and suggests an ulterior motive behind
Microsoft’s recent philanthropic interest in “defending democracy.”
In addition, Microsoft’s dual role as a major technology company and a contractor for both the
U.S. military and
the U.S. intelligence community
should also raise red flags. Indeed, Microsoft has made it abundantly
clear that it plans to forge ever closer ties with the U.S. government,
especially after Microsoft President Brad Smith
announced last December
that Microsoft is “going to provide the US military with access to the
best technology … all the technology we create. Full stop.” A month
prior to that statement, Microsoft
secured a $480 million contract with the Pentagon to provide the U.S. military with its HoloLens technology.
This close relationship that Microsoft is building with the Pentagon
may explain the company’s ulterior motive in creating and promoting
ElectionGuard, as promoting the largely DARPA-funded election technology
could help improve Microsoft’s chances in its
current bid for a $10 billion cloud services contract with the Pentagon.
Furthermore, given the numerous corporate connections as well as the
connections to the AEI, it could be argued that Microsoft and Galois’
intimate involvement in this system could be to help “guard” elections
from candidates who threaten to regulate or rein in their industries,
particularly the military-industrial complex. Of course, the claim that
ElectionGuard is “open source” is meant to mitigate such speculation, as
the open-source nature of the technology ostensibly means that no
discrete code is hidden that could be used to manipulate results.
However, as will be shown shortly, the fact that a technology is
open-source
does not necessarily mean that the data that passes through that technology is not open to manipulation from a third party.
ElectionGuard isn’t immune to manipulation
Microsoft’s
press release
announcing ElectionGuard highlights its claim that its system would
make elections more verifiable, secure, and auditable; be open
source-based; and improve the voting experience. While all of these
things sound nice enough, there is reason to believe — based on the
description given by Microsoft — that some of these claims are dubious
and misleading. Unfortunately, for now, analysis of ElectionGuard is
restricted to Microsoft’s description of the software as it is not yet
available for public examination. The ElectionGuard software kit is
expected to be released later this year on the GitHub platform.
The first aspect of the “verifiable” claim relates to a voter
tracking system, where each voter is given a unique tracking ID which
allows them “to follow an encrypted version of the vote through the
entire election process via a web portal provided by election
authorities.” Voters can choose the option of confirming “that their
trackers and encrypted votes accurately reflect their selections.”
Yet Microsoft notes that “once a vote is cast, neither the tracker
nor any data provided through the web portal can be used to reveal the
contents of the vote,” meaning that while a person can track whether
their vote was counted, they cannot verify whether the content of the
vote (i.e., who they voted for) is counted correctly or not. Microsoft
goes on to note that only “after the election is complete” will the
tracker page allow the content of the vote to be seen.
The second “verifiability” component of ElectionGuard “is an open
specification – or a road map – which allows anyone to write an election
verifier.” Microsoft then notes that this open specification would mean
that “voters, candidates, news media and any observers can run
verifiers of their own or downloaded from sources of their choosing to
confirm tabulations are as reported.”
Microsoft describes these two features as constituting “end-to-end
verifiability” (E2E-V), which Free & Fair describes as
“cryptographic technology that enables voters to vote in a normal
fashion in a polling place and have evidence that the election is
trustworthy.”
Another focus of ElectionGuard is security, for which the system
employs “homomorphic encryption, which enables mathematical procedures –
like counting – to be done with fully encrypted data” and this allows
individually encrypted votes to be “combined to form an encrypted
tabulation of all votes which can then be decrypted to produce an
election tally that protects voter privacy.” Notably, homomorphic
encryption is the only ElectionGuard security measure named in the press
release.
Election forensics analyst Jonathan Simon, author of
CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy, was not fully persuaded by the E2E-V claim. “Pardon my skepticism,” Simon told
MintPress,
“but I’ve read Microsoft’s ‘good news’ ElectionGuard flyer and it
reminds me very much of the flyers and PR material long served up by the
vendors and programmers of the
current voting equipment — the
very computers that IT experts discovered could be hacked by outsiders
and programmed to add, delete, and shift votes by insiders.”
Simon continued:
Right now, for example, they’re hawking expensive and
completely unnecessary ballot-marking devices (BMDs) that turn your
votes into a barcode, a code that no voter can read or verify. Very
slick but yet another level of non-transparency, another step away from
public, observable vote-counting, and another vector for fraud.
I’ve spent the last 17 years examining vote-count patterns and
drawing attention to a parade of egregious red flags indicative of
computerized vote-count manipulation. It has been a system designed for
concealment and about as non-transparent as a process can be. It would
be great if more advanced technology would bring transparency at last,
as Microsoft seems to promise.
But what I see so far is even more complexity — encryption that,
whether open source or not, requires the most rarefied experts to
penetrate or understand. And just a short step to full-on internet
voting — even more convenient and about as secure as, say, Facebook.
Pending a demonstration showing with perfect layperson-accessible
clarity how a third-party entity can verify aggregate vote-counts
without having to take on faith some step in the pipeline (individual
verification that ‘your’ vote was ‘counted’ is a useless
bell-and-whistle), it still feels like the same old ‘trust us’ game. I’m
willing to be persuaded but the historical context here is very
cautionary.”
Simon’s concerns reflect some controversial aspects of the
ElectionGuard approach. While encryption would ostensibly protect votes
from tampering and thus elections results, it is important to point out
that homomorphic encryption is a
malleable form of encryption.
According to
Brilliant.org:
A malleable crypto-system is one in which anyone can
intercept a cipher text, transform it into another cipher text, and then
decrypt that into a plain text that makes sense. Malleability is
generally considered undesirable in a crypto-system. Imagine you’re
trying to send the message ‘I love you’ to your friend using encryption.
You encrypt it and send it off. But, it is intercepted by a hacker on
the way. All they see is some cipher text, but they can change that
cipher text to something that will decrypt to ‘I hate you’ when your
friend tries to decrypt it. That is why malleability is not usually
wanted.”
If that’s the case, then what stops a “hacker” or another third party
— say a U.S. government agency like the NSA or a political operative
with access to the electoral cyber-pipeline — from changing a person’s
vote from Democrat to Republican or vice versa, or altering the
encrypted tabulation of all votes?
While homomorphic encryption seems a reasonable choice in one sense,
for allowing votes to be tallied without decrypting, there is an added
layer of concern given Microsoft’s past, particularly Microsoft’s
history of actually working with U.S. government agencies to bypass
encryption.
Indeed, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that Microsoft
actually helped
the National Security Agency bypass its own encryption so the agency
could decrypt messages sent via certain Microsoft platforms including
Outlook.com Web chat, Hotmail email service, and Skype. In addition, in
2009, a senior NSA official
testified
before Congress that Microsoft and the NSA worked together to create
its Windows 7 operating system, leading some to worry that Microsoft had
built a “backdoor” into the operating system to aid government
surveillance activities. Now that Microsoft’s ties to the U.S. military
and intelligence community are deeper than ever, it begs the question
whether Microsoft’s covert cooperation with government agencies to the
detriment of consumers is also a factor guiding its role in creating and
promoting ElectionGuard.
Furthermore, with Microsoft’s president
having vowed
to hand over all its technologies to the U.S. military, one wonders if
this type of encryption and methodology was not chosen on purpose,
especially given the fact that the NSA is
quite accomplished at breaking much more secure types of encryption even without help from Microsoft.
Another of Microsoft’s talking points used to promote ElectionGuard
is the fact that it will be open source, meaning the program’s code will
be publicly available, a move apparently aimed at assuaging concerns
that ElectionGuard’s code could contain hidden manipulations or
vulnerabilities.
However, investigative journalist Yasha Levine likened Microsoft’s
promotion of ElectionGuard’s still unreleased open source code to a “PR
move.” Levine told
MintPress:
Open source inevitably has bugs and vulnerabilities that
are there accidentally because all code has vulnerabilities. This is
true for open source and closed source systems. Open source just means
that people can look at it, but then that code has to be run through a
compiler that actually runs an executable program. So there you already
have a degree of abstraction and separation from the open source code.
But even if the executable code and the source code are the same, there
are bugs which can be exploited.
So, what open source does is give a veneer of openness that leads one
to think that thousands of people have probably vetted the code and
flagged any bugs in it. But, actually very few people have the time and
the ability to look at this code. So this idea that open source code is
more transparent isn’t really true because few people are looking at
it.”
Levine went on to note that there are many examples of open source
systems — including widely used open source systems — having major
vulnerabilities that go undetected for years. One of the best examples,
in Levine’s opinion, is
the “Heartbleed” bug,
which was a security vulnerability in the open source OpenSSL software,
a system that allows for the basic encryption of web traffic by
encrypting “http” connections. The Heartbleed allowed hackers access to
the memory of data servers for an estimated half a million websites and
went undetected for years, despite the fact that OpenSSL is an open
source system.
Levine also underscored the fact that both American and foreign
intelligence agencies “more than any other person or group” are involved
in seeking out such vulnerabilities and exploits, which they keep
hidden from the public in order to give themselves an advantage in
cyberwarfare. Some of the CIA’s lists of such exploits or
vulnerabilities were revealed in the
WikiLeaks Vault 7 release.
Microsoft’s ties to Israeli military intelligence
ElectionGuard is currently being promoted as a key step towards
preventing the “interference” of a foreign government or state actor in
U.S. elections in the future. Yet, there is no guarantee that
ElectionGuard itself is free from foreign influence, given that
Microsoft has deep ties to the military intelligence community of a
foreign nation: Israel.
Microsoft’s links to the Israeli military intelligence unit known as
Unit 8200, which will be discussed momentarily, are troubling for more
than a few reasons. The first is the fact that the main developer of a
new election software system aimed at protecting U.S. elections from
“foreign interference” has close ties to a foreign military intelligence
agency. It goes without saying that if the main developer of
ElectionGuard had such ties with another foreign military intelligence
agency, such as Russian military intelligence, the software would not
stand a chance of adoption in the U.S. and it would likely be a national
scandal. The fact that Microsoft’s ties to Israeli military
intelligence have not troubled proponents of ElectionGuard suggests that
the problem is not foreign interference or influence as long as the
foreign nation involved is an ally, not an adversary.
Arguably yet a graver concern in terms of the Microsoft-Unit 8200
relationship and Electionguard, is the recent slew of scandals
surrounding Israeli interference in foreign elections all around the
world. The most recent of those scandals involved the Israeli company
the Archimedes Group and its social-media influence disinformation
campaigns
to target the elections in several African and Asian nations. According to
the Times of Israel,
the CEO of the Archimedes Group, Elinadav Heymann, is a former senior
intelligence agent for the Israeli military. The group spent an
estimated $800,000 on misleading Facebook ads as part of its
disinformation campaign, a sum
much larger than the $100,000 alleged to have been spent by a Russian company on a similar disinformation campaign in the 2016 election.
Prior to this latest scandal, several private Israeli companies
were accused of seeking to collude with
the Trump campaign in 2016, namely the now-shuttered
PSY-Group — which was run by former Israeli intelligence operatives — and Wikistrat, which also has
close ties
to Israeli intelligence. The fact that private Israeli firms with ties
to Israeli intelligence and Israeli military intelligence have been
caught in recent election meddling scandals, including in the U.S.,
should be a major red flag when examining the many conflicts of
interests that enshroud ElectionGuard’s developers and how those
conflicts may inform the program’s functionality.
Microsoft has long had a presence in Israel, which dates back to
1989. However, in recent years, they have invested in and acquired in
several companies with deep ties to the IDF’s Unit 8200.
In 2015, Microsoft
acquired
Israeli cloud security company Adallom for $320 million, which would go
on to serve as a new foundation for Microsoft’s Research and
Development (R&D) Center in Israel, which has been active since
1989. Adallom’s product was subsequently rebranded as Microsoft Cloud
App Security. Adallom’s CEO and co-founder is Assaf Rappaport, who
now heads
Microsoft’s R&D Center in Tel Aviv. Rappaport, among other things,
is a graduate of the elite IDF “Talpiot” program and also served in the
Israeli military intelligence unit known as Unit 8200.
Unit 8200 is an elite unit of the Israeli Intelligence corps that is
part of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and is involved
mainly in signal intelligence (i.e., surveillance), cyberwarfare and
code decryption. It is often described as the Israeli equivalent of the
NSA and Peter Roberts, senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United
Services Institute, characterized the unit in
an interview with the
Financial Times
as “probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world
and stand[ing] on a par with the NSA in everything except scale.”
Notably, the NSA and Unit 8200 have collaborated on projects such as the infamous
Stuxnet virus as well as the Duqu malware, a
sophisticated strain
of which was used to spy on countries engaged in negotiating the
nuclear deal with Iran. In addition, the NSA is known to work with
veterans of Unit 8200 in the private sector, such as when the NSA
hired
two Israeli companies, whose executives are linked to Unit 8200, to
create backdoors to all the major U.S. telecommunications and major tech
companies including Facebook, Microsoft and Google. The unit is also
known for spying
on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories for “coercion
purposes” — i.e., gathering info for blackmail — and also for
spying on Palestinian-Americans via an intelligence sharing agreement with the NSA.
However, Microsoft’s connections to Unit 8200 go far beyond Adallom. Another example is Microsoft’s
considerable investment in Illusive Networks, an Israeli cybersecurity firm created by Team8, in which Microsoft
has also invested heavily.
Team8’s CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, who used to lead Unit 8200,
and two of the company’s three other co-founders are also veterans of
Unit 8200. Former CEO of Google (now Alphabet), Eric Schmidt, is a major
backer of Team8.
Team8 has cozied up to former NSA directors, with Zafrir giving
presentations alongside former NSA director Keith Alexander, for
example. Those efforts eventually culminated in
Team8 hiring retired Admiral Mike Rogers,
former director of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, as a “senior
adviser.” “I’ve worked with the highly talented resources of Unit 8200
in the past and so when I had the opportunity to join Team8, I knew this
was a rare and valued opportunity,” Rogers said of his hire. Team8
described the decision to hire Rogers as being “instrumental in helping
strategize” Team8’s expansion in the United States.
Rogers’ hire by a firm headed by the former boss of a foreign military intelligence agency drew
sharp criticism
from veterans of the NSA. One of those ex-NSA employees — Jake
Williams, a veteran of NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking unit —
told CyberScoop
that “Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his
technical experience …It’s purely because of his knowledge of classified
operations and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and
private-sector contractors.”
In addition to Microsoft’s ties to Unit 8200 through its connections to Adallom, Illusive Networks and Team8, Microsoft is also
developing direct ties with Israel’s military, with the IDF having adopted the company’s HoloLens technology. The IDF’s C2 Systems Department
has been using
a pair of HoloLens devices to adapt the technology for use in war for
the past three years, a precursor to what is sure to be a lucrative
military contract for Microsoft, considering that their HoloLens
contract with the U.S. military was
nearly half a billion dollars.
ElectionGuard a bloodless coup for the military-industrial complex
Following the 2016 election and the heavily promoted concerns about
“Russian hackers” infiltrating election systems, federal agencies like
the NSA have used that threat to lobby for greater control over American
democracy. For instance,
during a 2017 hearing then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers stated:
If we define election infrastructure as critical to the
nation and we are directed by the president or the secretary, I can
apply our capabilities in partnership with others – because we won’t be
the only ones, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI – I can
apply those capabilities proactively with some of the owners of those
systems.”
With Rogers — who is now employed by the Microsoft-funded and Israeli
military intelligence-connected company Team8 — having lobbied for the
direct involvement of U.S. government agencies, including the NSA and
DHS, in supervising elections, it seems likely that ElectionGuard will
help enable those agencies to surveill U.S. elections with particular
ease, especially given Microsoft’s past of behind-the-scenes
collaboration with the NSA.
Given that ElectionGuard’s system as currently described is neither
as “secure” nor as “verifiable” as Microsoft is claiming, it seems clear
that the conflicts of interests of its developers, particularly their
connections to the U.S. and Israeli militaries, are a recipe for
disaster and tantamount to a takeover of the American election system by
the military-industrial complex.
“The great irony, and tragedy, here,” according to election forensics
analyst Jonathan Simon, “is that we could so easily go the opposite
direction and quickly solve all the problems of election security if we
got the computers
out of the voting process and were willing to
collectively invest the modicum of effort needed for humans to count
votes observably in public as they once did. If democracy is not worth
that effort, perhaps we don’t deserve it.”
Feature photo | Voters use electronic polling machines as they cast
their votes early at the Franklin County Board of Elections, Oct. 31,
2018, in Columbus, Ohio. John Minchillo | AP
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