Oliver Stone, where are you?
Here's the pitch.
A hacker dude talking with his hacker friends wonders about whether the Trump election could have been rigged.
He is dismissive and says, even if it was, it's good to just have it all over.
But his girlfriend, a rabid Hillary acolyte, presents him with what she calls "The Four Points" or as he puts it, "The Four Horseturds of the Apocalypse."
1. Exit polls showed HRC winning in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. But all polls have been called into question, given the limitations of their methodology.
2. Trump had railed about election rigging before the election, triggering a storm of derision from the left, who claimed even raising the concern was an attack on the integrity of democracy. Wouldn't this have been a clever ploy? Now his opponents are in no position to cry "Foul!"
3.The week before the election a widespread hack paralyzed computer systems which took down not just Amazon and Spotify but previously thought to be impregnable electronic medical record systems from Maine to Maryland. The attack occurred on a company in Manchester, NH, called DYN and rippled through the system. This demonstrated, if we didn't know before, how widespread mischief can be wrought by simply penetrating one point of attack.
4. The main argument about the impossibility of rigging an election centered on decentralization of data: Fifty states, and you'd need to attack so many points. But the election turned on just five states. And, depending on how the system is constructed, the data from thousands of polling centers, at some point, has to be fed through smaller and smaller numbers of pipelines. If you got to the point of collection, that's all you'd need to do.
Ultimately, the hacks are traced back to the point of attack and from that back to the attackers, who cannot be identified.
Many chase scenes and explosions ensue. The girlfriend keeps pushing the hacker to reveal what he knows but he argues:
1. Nobody wants to believe this, most especially the Trump people. But even among the Democrats, there is little appetite to believe it.
Watergate was known before the voting and nobody believed that for the same reasons.
2. If the election was hacked, would there be any way to assure the population that any future election was not rigged?
3. The only way to get a halfway credible accusation of hacking would be for the FBI or the NSA to endorse it and what do you think the chances are that would happen, given the politics of those two institutions?
So, the equations are solved, the technology exposed and validated, but the human factor, the willingness to believe thwarts the "right" outcome.
Hey, all we have to do is to start casting.
 |
| click to enlarge |
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteYou've got a hit on your hands with this one. Although, I'd suggest the hacker's love interest is an old girlfriend-a journalist-who he reconnects with to solve the "crime of the century". As for casting, how about Casey Affleck and Mireille Enos?
The US government just released a statement saying they have complete confidence in the election returns..hmmm..Nate Silver also said there's very little chance the election was hacked-and we know how accurate his predictions have been so far this cycle....
Maud
Maud,
ReplyDeleteWell, you are the only comrade I have found who is willing to even think about this.
I'll leave the casting to you. You seem to have your finger on the pulse.
This President Trump is a done deal, if only because nobody wants to think about this election not being over.
But, to my mind, when I was predicting the Donald would win by beating Hillary in precisely the states he beat her, I did so because I thought, if I were plotting an upset it would be to do it in the most outrageous states possible, because the big lie works better.
In the back of my mind was the idea that, "Well, if they did manage to steal the votes, change the tallies, the one check on that would be the exit polls."
Of course, the exit polls, as it turned out, did show HRC beating him in 4/5 of those Midwestern Blue Wall states, but then everyone, the experts most especially, said, "Well, you cannot trust exit polls." Of course, before the voting they were experts because they knew so much about pre election polls.
Doesn't matter in practice--we've got a new President.
But there is something, now quite quaint, in the post truth era, where fake news rules--there's an obsolete notion, soon to be found in the dust bin of history--"objective truth." If some time, in a distant galaxy of reality, the operation which changed voting results in the 2016 election is uncovered, we'll all say--oh, that's like saying there was more than one shooter at Dallas, like we never landed a man on the moon and like saying Obama was born in Kenya. If you can't believe in the election results, what can you believe in? All these conspiracy theorists are just nut cases.
Phantom