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COULD HACKERS SAVE THE WORLD?
Rebel Yell - 14.09.2003 06:34
Electronic voting might be used by US Republicans to steal the 2004 presidential election. But couldn't hacktivists tamper with the results too? This article demonstrates that American voters are so stupid hackers have a moral obligation to intervene.
COULD HACKERS SAVE THE WORLD?
Brain dead Americans don’t deserve to vote for president in 2004 – so maybe hacktivists should!
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The overwhelming majority of Americans are brain dead. Not clinically, of course – although it would be much better for the world as a whole if they were – but they are as deeply detached from reality as if they lacked what Woody Allen once referred to as his ‘second favourite organ.’
There is abundant evidence that Americans just don’t know how to think. A recent poll found that 69% of them thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks. That most Americans believe something for which there is no evidence is a powerful testament to the ignorance of the citizens who control the world’s only military hyperpower.
It’s just not true that they are only ignorant because the U.S. press is nothing but a vehicle for White House disinformation. A recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of voters cannot name even one of the nine candidates for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Since only a few weeks earlier frontrunner Howard Dean was on the cover of the nation’s two major mass-circulation current affairs magazines – Time and Newsweek – one has to wonder what most Americans had actually been doing during those two or three weeks. Inspecting facial pimples with extraordinary attention? Discussing the finer points of J-Lo’s ass?
Perhaps Americans had a lot more on their minds in August than the future of their country. August tends to be hot – which can make you lazy – and some Americans (albeit a relatively privileged few) may even have been on vacation.
But there are simply no excuses for what Americans have done to themselves over the last thirty-odd years.
Politically, no one knows how to shoot themselves in the foot better than the American public. For 35 years if we count Nixon’s 1968 electory victory as the beginning of the rot or 23 if we attribute it to the Reagan victory of 1980, Americans have been voting in droves for policies that – inter alia - have destroyed the country’s manufacturing base, forced most of the people to work harder and longer for no financial benefit, taxed the poor more heavily and the rich more indulgently than any other industrialized country, sent a larger share of tax revenues into the pockets of private corporations, and ensured that an ever declining proportion of national capital has been invested in the country’s future.
Americans seem incapable of drawing logical conclusions from their past mistakes. Although every four years – when they elect a presidential administration - they decide which direction the country goes in, polls consistently demonstrate that a majority of Americans believe that their country is going in the wrong direction. That not voting for rightwing fruitcakes who want complete and utter corporate domination of the country might just help to create a better country seems never to have occurred to them. Instead they keep voting for the same old garbage time after time – with the predictable result that their country keeps going in the wrong direction..
Nothing has changed since September 11. Recent polls show that Americans know that they are now more at risk from terrorism than ever before and that the invasion of Iraq is already a certified disaster – and yet the same polls show that they still support Bush’s overall policy on terrorism and revile the U.N. because it did not back the invasion. They know by now that the Republican imperative of tax cuts at any price leads to the destruction of all the services they expect from government, and yet they still vote – as they recently did in Alabama – against the proposal that they might have to endure higher taxes to pay for them, even though the proposal came from a relatively sane Republican.
American politicians and journalists constantly pander to the cesspit of ignorance that is late 20th-/early 21st-century America. No one told the criminally disengaged denizens of this sitcom-sedated nation that if they bomb other countries of course they should expect the odd act of retaliation. While ever more obese Americans sit on their fat asses watching comedies about nothing like Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond, no one cares to tell them that their ‘not negotiable’ lifestyle is endangering the very survival of life on the planet.
In fact, no one tells them anything that they need to know because no one wants to be perceived as the bearers of bad tidings. Only ‘anti-Americans’ tell them these things – which leaves Americans to think that anti-Americanism has nothing to do with the way the U.S. actually conducts itself internationally and everything to do with foreigners’ inexplicable malice towards their ‘freedom.’
Well, I for one am not brain dead and I am certainly capable of reading the facts and drawing sound conclusions. And my conclusion from my examination of the historical record is that Americans must be the worst anti-Americans around because they can’t even look out for their own basic interests. They can’t make sure that they have enough time to raise their kids properly, that they get paid for their overtime, that they get health care and paid vacations like workers in other countries, and that they aren’t exposing themselves and their children to unnecessary risks by supporting foreign policies that only earn them the world’s hatred. How, then, can this apparently congenitally-stupid mass be allowed to decide what the world’s policies should be on AIDS, terrorism or global warming?
For, terrible as the prospect may seem, next year Americans get to decide who ultimately rules the world. Growing numbers of Americans are afraid that the decision is going to be taken out of their hands by electronic electoral fraud. But we have already seen that Americans are too stupid to be allowed to vote anyway.
What’s the solution? The advent of electronic voting without appropriate safeguards means that results can easily be tampered with. Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.com has already demonstrated that persistent amateurs can do it. No IT degree required! The Republican party is, of course, the force most likely to want to tamper with the 2004 count. But if the voting machines are so full of holes Harris compares them to Swiss cheese, then doesn’t that create the possibility that the machines can be hacked into from Montreal? From Paris? From Caracas?
Could the next presidential election be decided by votes slipped into the California results from Helsinki? Into the New Hampshire results from New Delhi?
Let’s hope so!
Would hackers dare to attempt such a thing?
God help us if they don’t!
 Website: http://rebel_yell.blogspot.com
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