Matt Blaze
Scientist, safecracker, etc. McDevitt Professor of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown. So-called expert on election security and a few other things. Slow photographer. RF nerd. Occasionally blogs at mattblaze.org/blog
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- Feel better!
- I did a little thread over on Mastodon with some speculation on the Fulton County election office search warrant. federate.social/@mattblaze/1...
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View full thread(Minnesota has open primaries - any voter can select which party primary they want to vote in at the time of the primary. There's no party registration, so the primary selected (and not made public) is the only indicator of party affinity in the voter database there.)
- So one can only speculate on why DoJ would want the redacted information, given that the basic names and addresses, etc, are already public info. See: revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/201.091
- It is curious. is curious. Minnesota's voter rolls, like those of most states, are essentially public, including name, address, phone number (if given), and elections voted in. The only information redacted (by law) is DoB, SSN (etc) and which party's primary elections they chose to vote in.
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- Wow, we wrote that over 10 years ago, and even then we had already been having the same discussion for over 20 years before that. I'm tired.
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- Fairly impressed that "sycophant" is in his working vocabulary. Though I suppose as 50 cent words go, that's one that should be familiar to him.
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- Russ and Daughters would like a brief word.
- More people need to just call them on their lies immediately. They melt like this guy.
- Almost painful to watch. Almost.
- The trick to be taken seriously is to act seriously, something the election deniers don't seem to be capable of doing.
- I’ll take these theories seriously when the advocates of them submit papers to legitimate, refereed journals and propose actual, as opposed to handwavy pie in the sky, mechanisms of action. For now I’m with election security experts like @mattblaze.org who hasn’t seen anything close to reasonable.
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- It pingpongs back and forth. The playbook seems to have been written in 2016 by over-zealous Clinton supporters, but Clinton herself wanted nothing to do with it. Then in 2020 MAGA went into full conspiracy mode, but that time, their candidate amplified it. Harris, fortunately, isn't biting.
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- Tennessee does do post-election audits. They aren't the universal RLAs that would be best, but it's not like there are no post-election checks there. These people don't care, however.
- Oh brother. Exactly the same voodoo statistical and political analysis that has already been debunked in the other places they’ve been peddling it. (Hint: GOTV efforts by either candidate readily explains exactly what they’re seeing).
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- Wow. It never occurred to me that that there could be a film adaptation, but, yeah. "A 114 part mini-series".
- Seen on Reddit: "42 is just old people 6 7" And... well... yeah. Can't really argue.
- Um, but... OK. yeah.
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- He seems to have blocked me. Or at least I never saw the post you quoted. In any case, my advice remains the same: put up or shut up. If they have evidence to support their extraordinary claims, publish in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise, not my (or anyone’s) job to “disprove” them.
- Tomorrow in my election security course we dissect election denial BS, always fun. I'm grateful to the "election truth" conspiracy people for keeping the 2020 dream alive in 2024, giving us a steady stream of new (actually recycled) material. The pillow guy gets old after a while.
- I really want to know the full story behind this epic hack, and yet I also hope it is never solved.
- It's my favorite day! It's the 38th anniversary of the Max Headroom signal broadcast intrusion! 1st incident lasted 25s during the 9PM news on WGN-TV in Chicago; The 2nd, 2hrs later, lasted ~90s on PBS affiliate WTTW during Dr. Who. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqge...
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- Yeah, I'd find that definitely unsurprising.
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- Yeah, I’ll pass
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- Oh, that’s amazing!
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- perfect
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- Weird Al's UHF was practically a documentary
- That said, I'll bet there are a fair number of AM and FM radio stations out there still using easily hijacked analog STLs. Probably none in the major markets, but there are a lot of small stations operating on shoestring budgets using old equipment.
- For context: STL means "Studio-Transmitter Link", a UHF or microwave link between the broadcast studio (usually located downtown) and the (usually unstaffed) transmitter site (with a big tower somewhere, maybe on a hill). Pogramming is fed to the transmitter over the STL.
- If you can't see the beauty in this, we will never be able to be true friends.
- One interesting question is whether there are any US TV broadcasters still using analog STLs (that would be vulbnable to the Max Headroom attack). I suspect that the switch to digital ATSC in the early 2000's pretty wll killed them off when broadcasters had to replace their transmitters.
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- Oh, that's great!
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View full threadBeen there. Sympathies.
- In particular, you're absolutely right that nothing can prepare you for this. Overwhelming doesn't begin to describe it.
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- To be clear, it's Coperfied in the Epstein files.
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- Sadly, yes.
- The Max Headroom hack wasn't done by overwhelming the broadcast signal (which would require an extremely powerful transmitter), but rather by overwhelming the "studio transmitter link" that feeds programming to the transmitter. This is conceptually straightforward, but required meticulous planning.
- So whoever did it had an impressive amount of broadcasting knowledge and skill, had access to relatively esoteric gear, and did a deep research on the specific STL setups used by the two stations. And used all this capability to pointlessly goof around for a few minutes. Beautiful.
- Why is this my favorite hack of all time? - It was harmless, but exploited and demonstrated a serious vulnerability - The combination of technical sophistication and utterly juvenile content - No one ever took credit or explained it. It was pure art
- Less than a year later, we got the Morris worm, which, but for a few unfortunate bugs, could have been similar.
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- I'm a computer scientce and tech law law professor, and don't think I'd be able to put together an intellectually honest invited talk that avoided all those topics and words. Pure madness.
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- Yes, benign idiocy is refreshing when it's in a sea of toxic idiocy.
- Trump's censor in chief at the FCC, Brendan Carr, just sent a letter to the heads of BBC, NPR and PBS informing them he's launching a "news distortion" probe into the BBC's editing of a documentary on Trump's Jan. 6 activities. Here it is:
- As far as I know, the obligation to avoid "news distortion" (part of the public interest standard, and which could affect license renewal) applies specifically to news programming, not to documentaries (which is what the BBC program was).
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- There's a lot of amazing disassociated ranting in there, but my favorite is on page 5, where he says "... if there were a Nobel Prize in fiction..." Um, there is, actually.
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- Thank you!
- The unfortunate truth is there's no simple, clean narrative about election security right now. There are real vulnerabilities. Not all states do sufficiently rigorous post-election audits to provide robust assurance. But there's also simply no evidence to support claims that elections are hacked.
- It pains me that people take my work and that of my colleagues out of context - or outright misrepresent it - to make specious claims of election fraud. But it's also critical that we have frank discussions of elections - warts and all - and how to improve them.
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- I run the conference to which you appear to be referring, and I'm not sure where you're getting weird the idea that we dont talk about Risk Limiting Audits. In fact, this year Philip Stark (who has served on our board) gave a talk about RLAs and led a workshop on how to conduct them.
- (You should all 👀 when established US hacking cons start losing venues over current politics,)
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View full threadDisclaimer: I've not seen the pamphlet in question (though that seems beside the point).
- Anyway, if there's more to this story, I definitely want to know.
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- What a travesty, and St. John's should be ashamed. I wonder if this has to do with SJQ being one of the two major universities in NYC (the other is John Jay) to with large criminal justice programs. This means a large number of the students (and adjunct faculty) are cops or in adjacent fields.
- I can't see any other explanation for such a weird overreaction to a complaint about an apparent "anti police" pamphlet merely being left on a table.
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- Or perhaps it’s a prisoner of war in the War on Christmas, being put on public display in violation of international law.
