90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, August 12, 2019

Why blockchain-based voting could threaten democracy

As the desire to increase voter turnout remains strong and the number of online voting pilot projects rises in the U.S. and abroad, some security experts warn any internet-based election system is wide open to attack, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

Public tests of blockchain-based mobile voting are growing.

Even as there's been an uptick in pilot projects, security experts warn that blockchain-based mobile voting technology is innately insecure and potentially a danger to democracy through "wholesale fraud" or "manipulation tactics."

The topic of election security has been in the spotlight recently after Congress held classified briefings on U.S. cyber infrastructure to identify and defend against threats to the election system, especially after Russian interference was uncovered in the 2016 Presidential election.

Thirty-two states permit various kinds of online voting – such as via email – for some subset of voters. In the 2016 general election, more 100,000 ballots were cast online, according to data collected by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The actual number is likely much higher, according to some experts.

One method of enabling online voting has been to use applications based on blockchain, the peer-to-peer technology that employs encryption and a write-once, append-many electronic ledger to allow private and secure registration information and ballots to be transmitted over the internet. Over the past two years, West Virginia, Denver and Utah County, Utah have all used blockchain-based mobile apps to allow military members and their families living overseas to cast absentee ballots using an iPhone.

Mike Queen, deputy chief of staff for West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, said that while the state currently has no plans to expand the use of the mobile voting beyond military absentee voters, his office did "a ton of due diligence" on the technology before and after using it.

"Not only does blockchain make it secure, but [the blockchain-based mobile app] has a really unique biometric safeguard system in place as well as facial recognition and thumb prints," Queen said via email after 2018 General Election.

Security experts disagree. The issues around online voting include server penetration attacks, client-device malware, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and other disruptions, all associated with infecting voters' computers with malware or infecting the computers in the elections office that handle and count ballots.

"If I were running for office and they decided to use blockchain for that election, I'd be scared," said...

Trump Ending Welfare-Dependent Immigration, Saving Taxpayers Billions

President Trump is set to save American taxpayers billions of dollars as his administration announces a new rule on Monday that will essentially ban welfare-dependent legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the United States.

A new regulation set to be published by the Trump administration will ensure that legal immigrants would be less likely to secure a permanent residency in the U.S. if they have used any forms of welfare in the past, including using subsidized healthcare services, food stamps, and public housing.

The regulation will be a boon for American taxpayers in the form of an annual $57.4 billion tax cut — the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.

The National Academies of Science released a report two years ago, noting that state and local American taxpayers are billed about $1,600 each year per immigrant to pay for their welfare, where immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash welfare than American citizen households.

A recent Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) study notes that about 63 percent of noncitizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of taxpayer-funded welfare, while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare. This means that noncitizen households use nearly twice as much welfare as native-born American households.

In California — with the largest noncitizen population in the country at almost 11 million or nearly 30 percent of the state’s total population — more than seven-in-ten, or 72 percent, of households headed by noncitizens are on at least one form of welfare. Compare that to the findings that only about seven-in-twenty, or 35 percent, of native-born households in California are on...

An Illegal Alien Shot This Man's Son Dead. Now He Hopes to Spare Other Parents His Grief.

Steve Ronnebeck with his children, including Grant at right, in an undated photo.

An Arizona man whose son was shot and killed by an illegal

immigrant says he doesn’t want another parent to experience the loss he still feels nearly five years later.

“It’s devastating,” Steve Ronnebeck, who lives in Phoenix, says in an interview about the loss of his son Grant, who was killed at age 21 by an illegal immigrant over a pack of cigarettes.

On Jan. 22, 2015, Grant was working the overnight shift at a QuikTrip gas station in Mesa, Arizona, two hours and 56 minutes from the border city of Nogales in northern Mexico.

Ronnebeck says an illegal alien from Mexico, identified as Apolinar Altamirano, came in at 3:45 a.m., asked for cigarettes, and dumped out a jar of change on the counter.

Grant started to count the change, but apparently not fast enough, according to a police report.

Altamirano, then 29, asked why he wasn’t giving him cigarettes, and Grant replied that he had to count the change.

Altamirano then pulled a gun, and Grant offered him a pack of cigarettes “right away,” Ronnebeck says.

“This man at that point shot Grant point-blank in the face, killing him instantly,” Ronnebeck tells The Daily Signal, citing video camera footage. “He then stepped over Grant’s body, grabbed a couple more packs of cigarettes, and walked out the door.”

His son’s murder, he says, spurred him to speak out on the threat that unrestrained illegal immigration poses to America.

Today, Ronnebeck, 52, is on the advisory board of WeBuildTheWall.us, a citizens organization working to raise awareness as well as funds for a wall along the southern border.

“I definitely have learned that I need to fight, not just for him, [but] for other people. I’m not looking to be famous,” Ronnebeck tells The Daily Signal. “I just don’t want this to happen to anybody else. And he gave me that purpose in my life.”

Ronnebeck has two other children: a daughter, now 28, and a younger son, now 19. He laments that Grant’s life ended before it truly began:

He was just starting his life. He had dreams, he had plans. You don’t really realize all the things that you miss until you start missing them. Christmas, the holidays, they’re terrible.

It seems like there’s this four-month period where it starts at about Thanksgiving and then you have Christmas, and then you have...

Social and economic crises, real and imagined, often seem to bring out the most wrongheaded thinking in matters of government policy. Following the 2008 financial crisis and with the fear of “global warming,” there has been a revival in the case for “democratic” socialism. But now its proponents are “out of the closet” with a clear cut and explicit call for forcefully imposed, authoritarian central planning of the world.

John Feffer is affiliated with the Washington, D.C.–based Institute for Policy Studies, a “progressive” think tank that has never seen a government command or control, regulation or redistribution that they seemingly have not liked – as long as it reflects their version of preferred social engineering compared to anyone else’s, of course. He has recently made, “The Case for a Coerced Green New Deal,” on the website of The Nation magazine (July 30, 2019).

The world, he warns, has a window of perhaps 12 years to transform the way people work and live, or its curtains for the planet. Belching out the carbon dioxide by-product of using fossil fuels, the atmosphere is heating up with feared disastrous consequences for all living things on earth. For decades, people have talked and talked and talked about the dangers of global warming; but the time for talk has reached its end, Mr. Feffer declares. It's time for concerted, planned and comprehensive action of the type proposed in the Green New Deal legislation submitted to Congress earlier in 2019.

China as a Model for a Future Eco-Authoritarianism

He compares two lifeboats lost at sea, whose ship survivors are facing doom if they do not reach the safety of land. On one of the lifeboats, the occupants form committees to discuss and debate which direction to go and how best to manage the meager supplies they have on board. All their jabbering eats up precious time and limited resources, with no definitive decision about what to do. Here is seen the dilemma and dysfunction of indecisive democratic decision-making.

On the other lifeboat, after some debate and discussion, a “leader” emerges and takes charge. He assigns tasks to the people in the lifeboat, he decides on a course for the boat to follow (hopefully) to reach land, and organizes how best to ration out the available supplies for the lifeboat occupants until safety has been reached.

As far as John Feffer is concerned, the time for the delays and indecisiveness of the democratic talking shop of the first lifeboat type is now passed. America and the world must follow the authoritarian model of the second lifeboat. He greatly admires the example of modern China under President Xi Jinping. Under his clear and determined leadership, China knows where it is going, and why. Government directs and plans the overall direction of Chinese society and the economy. The global dimension to China’s role in the world is seen in its Belt and Road project to link more of the world to China’s future development. And the Chinese government has even publicly embraced the idea of an environmentally friendly future for China. (See my article, “Economic Armaments and China’s Global Ambitions”.)

So is Mr. Feffer ready to give his oath of allegiance to a world with Chinese characteristics? Alas, no. President Xi shows determined and forthright leadership, but he is, well, sort of like Donald Trump with the goal of “making China great again.” Besides, while talking clean air, China keeps building coal-burning furnaces. And the Belt and Road strategy for establishing China’s place in the global sun is not geared to bend other countries to fighting global warming, but to serve China’s national interests.
If Not China, Then America’s Green New Deal

Furthermore, Mr. Feffer declares that the problem is that China, well, is not “eco-authoritarian” enough to take on the mantle of “Climate Leviathan.” As he put is, “China is actually not Leviathan enough.” There are too many competing government ministries and regional and business interests for the sufficient and more centralized “stringent standards” needed for a China to compel the world in the direction he wants President Xi to take it. He does not say it, but we could imagine that in a sleep time dream, Mr. Feffer might very well wish for the reincarnation of an environmentally devoted Chairman Mao who would show the leadership qualities not to brook disagreement, dissent or decentralization to get in the way of a unified and fully centralized plan to save mankind from the current heat wave.

Turning away from his wistful wish that China would lead the way, Mr. Feffer sees the national populisms cropping up in various countries to have the right sentiments to do away with the greedy capitalist exploitation from which the world suffers. But they are too nationalistically focused and too often against fighting climate change as he sees its danger. Of course, there is always the hope that the United Nations could play the role of global central planner, but the UN is bogged down in the dead end of talking head committees and unenforceable resolutions.

But don’t completely lose a positive attitude, because Mr. Feffer sees salvation in the Green New Deal (GND):