“Red flag laws let police confiscate guns without due process. Suspending the Constitution in a secret hearing is a Rubicon from which there is no return.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
Six states have enacted these laws. At their core, they allow the police to convene a Kafkaesque secret proceeding, in which an American can be stripped of his or her gun rights and Fourth Amendment rights, even though gun owners are barred from participating in the hearings or arguing their side of the dispute.
The first thing gun owners learn is when police knock on the door — ready to ransack their house and, if they resist, to arrest or even shoot them and their family…
Far from being a “consensus proposal”, the suspension of the Constitution in a secret hearing is a constitutional Rubicon from which there is no return.
Lawrence Lessig: “When voters rank their first, second and third-choice candidates, the winner is broadly acceptable.”
(Photo: Austen Leake, Tribune-Star via AP)
“Maine is not the only jurisdiction in America to use ranked-choice voting. It is just the first where it has mattered in a federal election. We should follow its example. There is plenty of time to carry its idea to the 2020 election and give all of us a system less prone to the vicious attacks, and more guaranteed to select candidates supported by at least a majority in every state…”
After nearly an hour and a half, Carsten Schürmann, an associate professor with IT-University of Copenhagen, successfully cracked into a voting machine at Las Vegas’ Defcon convention on Friday night, CNET reports.
Schürmann penetrated Advanced Voting Solutions’ 2000 WinVote machine through its Wi-Fi system. Using a Windows XP exploit from 2003, he was able to remotely access the machine, CNET reports.
The convention purchased more than 30 voting machines for the event, although, organizers didn’t specify how many models those units represented.
“The exposure of those devices to the people who do bug bounties or actually look at these kind of devices has been fairly limited”, Brian Knopf, director of security researcher for Neustar, told CNET. “And so Defcon is a great opportunity for those of us who hack hardware and firmware to look to these kind of devices and really answer that question, ‘Are they hackable?’”
A hacker tries to access and alter data from an electronic poll book in a Voting Machine Hacking Village during the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. on July 29, 2017. REUTERS
Synack, a San Francisco security platform, discovered serious flaws with the WinVote machine months ahead of this weekend’s convention. The team simply plugged in a mouse and keyboard and bypassed the voting software by clicking “ctrl-alt-del”.
“It’s really just a matter of plugging your USB drive in for five seconds and the thing’s completely compromised at that point”, Synack co-founder Jay Kaplan told CNET. “To the point where you can get remote access. It’s very simple.”
A hacker, who only identified himself as “Oyster,” tried to crack a Diebold voting machine after another team had compromised it.
Anne-Marie Hwang, a Synack intern, told CNET that changing votes can be as simple as updating a Microsoft Excel document…
A basic search will yield many photographs Trump has taken over the years with now apparent political adversaries. Does this mean, as the Newsweek article below implies, that he is really their friends? What do you think? Leave a comment below!
The Lincoln myth is the cornerstone of the ideology of American statism.
Lincoln was the most-hated president of all time during his own lifetime, as Larry Tagg documents in his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President.
The fact that he is now the most revered of all American presidents is a result of the work of generations of court historians and statist apologists who have literally rewritten American history in the same manner that the Soviets rewrote Russian history to consolidate their political power.
The deification of Abe Lincoln eventually led to the deification of all presidents, and to the American state in general, as Professor Clyde Wilson has written, effectively resurrecting a version of the medieval notion of the divine right of kings…
