>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal,* etc...*
This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup the GOP's centralized GOTV operation?
They could point LOIC at the IP receiving all the real-time field reports, set up hidden wireless jammers around Boston Garden, and any number of other hacks and exploits to disrupt this centralized system.
I use the GOP and Anonymous as an example here, but it could work in any direction. It's one thing for a campaign to lose due to its own incompetence and negligence, but quite another to lose due to outside interference and being the target of cyberwarefare.
Or what if the ones implementing the system were the 'sympathizer group'. They wouldn't have to do any sort of jamming or anything, just give out insufficient instructions in how to use the system, incorrect passwords and make sure the system crashes a bunch.
Intercepting field reports? By the sounds of it, Team Obama had all the info they needed and this just opens the door to serious legal problems.
In general I haven't encountered too many Republicans in software development. Libertarians, yes. Republicans, no.
This is a great point, and it's one of the more frustrating things to encounter as a developer who knows more than just "the language I'm writing a website in". Security is not optional and security must be managed at every level of the infrastructural stack.
But that's hard, and nobody's going to know anyway, so let's just roll with it.
Politico's article on ORCA today claims that one of the major problems was that they deployed the system in their election night HQ just prior to the election, and the surge of legitimate traffic on election day triggered their DDOS defences. They'd never tested it in that location with realistic traffic levels.
This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup the GOP's centralized GOTV operation?
They could point LOIC at the IP receiving all the real-time field reports, set up hidden wireless jammers around Boston Garden, and any number of other hacks and exploits to disrupt this centralized system.
I use the GOP and Anonymous as an example here, but it could work in any direction. It's one thing for a campaign to lose due to its own incompetence and negligence, but quite another to lose due to outside interference and being the target of cyberwarefare.