By Aaron Kesel
The federal government just announced on Friday that election officials in 21 states had Russian hackers target their systems before last year’s presidential election according to the Associated Press. But what about the DHS’s own attempted meddling in the election, getting caught red-handed running unauthorized scans for vulnerabilities in voter databases in more than five states?
Last year, before the election the federal government was attempting to declare state election systems as “critical infrastructure.” After that attempt failed, it seems they attempted to illegally take matters into their own hands and scanned election systems without first notifying each respective state official.
Several states reported the reconnaissance scans for vulnerabilities in their servers performed by DHS IP addresses.
Cyber security experts agree the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security attempted to hack into states’ voter registration systems in Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, and West Virginia.
According to one report published by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, under the Obama administration, attempted to hack the Indiana State electoral system nearly 15,000 times.
The second case was revealed by Georgia’s secretary of state wh0 stated that the DHS tried to breach its firewall of computers housing voter registration data on November 15.
Unlike the CIA’s narrative that the Russians hacked the election, this is well documented, and even the DHS itself has admitted it, blaming a “rogue employee.”
The problem that has since emerged for the DHS is that there are now ten separate cyber attacks known coming from the DHS, trying to breach Georgia’s computers housing Americans’ voting data that was scanned for vulnerabilities in 2016.
The other problem is the timing of the attacks. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told The DCNF Jan. 24, 2016, he was suspicious because four of the 10 attacks against the Georgia election network occurred as he was about to talk to DHS officials, or coincided with his public testimony opposing designation of election systems as “critical infrastructure.”
Georgia and Indiana aren’t the only states to confirm that the DHS attempted hacking them according to a report from WSB-TV in Atlanta; two more states, West Virginia and Kentucky, also confirmed the same DHS IP address accessed their election system close to election day.
DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told the Georgia Secretary of State that the DHS accessing Georgia’s election system was a federal contractor conducting “normal” internet searches on the website.
That’s not all. The DHS also attempted to hack Idaho, and Maine, while the agency may have also backdoored Hawaii’s election systems which seemingly had problems after being “secured” by the agency. Call it another long list of coincidences.
In Idaho, Secretary of State Lawerence Denney said that his state had detected attempts to hack the state’s election system on Nov. 8, 2016.
Denney said that when they “looked at IP addresses that tried to get into our system,” there wasn’t “a single IP address from a foreign country,” such as Russia, but one from “our own Department of Homeland Security,” Computer World reported.
The DHS explained that:
When DHS conducts a cybersecurity scan of a network or system, we do so only with the cooperation and consent of the system owner.
On November 3, 2016, it was reported that Hawaii was working with the Department of Homeland Security to secure its election systems.
On November 8, 2016, there were reports of equipment problems at 18 different polling places with ballot scanning machines.
The argument that many without any type of knowledge of security are making is that it’s possible that DHS IP addresses were spoofed. The problem with this is that if this were done, it would have been pointless because spoofing your IP address as a DHS IP address would do nothing but show your IP address as the DHS’s. You would not be able to receive information data packets and, instead, the IP address you spoofed would receive those replies.
In simple terms, imagine you spoof a phone number—as was possible with Skype years ago—and someone called that number back. They wouldn’t be talking to you, but would instead be talking to the real owner of that phone number you spoofed. For another example, it’s the equivalent of sending a letter with the wrong return address and expecting to receive your letter.
Thus it’s exposed that a rogue group in the DHS tried to hack the election, which should be worrying because originally the DHS wanted to oversee the election to prevent just this. There have been no reported incidents where any states had their votes changed, but the DHS never looked into it – one has to question why.
On his way out of office then-DHS secretary Jeh Johnson signed an order designating election systems as “critical infrastructure” that U.S. President Donald Trump still hasn’t rolled back, meaning the federal government could easily rig the election disguised as protecting our election integrity.
On election day voters all across the U.S. reported that their votes were being switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, according to CBS. It is not known who hacked these machines or how many votes may have been affected, and it probably never will be, but this should concern you – it’s a bipartisan issue.
All 50 state-level secretaries of state have urged the Trump administration to repeal the DHS directive. It’s worth noting that according to the WikiLeaks Stratfor documents, the 2008 election results were manipulated by Democrats.
As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Democracy requires constant vigilance.”
Image Credit: chrisdiontewalker
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post and is Director of Content for Coinivore. Follow Aaron at Twitter and Steemit.
This article is Creative Commons and can be republished in full with attribution. Like Activist Post on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, follow on Twitter and at Steemit.
Thanks for this note. Maybe try to do a story about bringing it to MSM media attention and the excuses they give for ignoring it?
Our mainstream media propagandists ignore quite a bit of reality. They even twist reality into the twilight zone at times.
I don’t even watch TV “news” anymore — it was just too devastating to the neurons.
The same Deep State forces that put out the MSM propaganda are also working to make it literally difficult for independent sources to survive. Nowadays, the political dimension of media coverage overshadows the dimension of personal entertainment/info value/interest.
I live in the Seattle TV market and so the local news has even been infiltrated by the left and is hardly watchable other than for the weather forecast. During the day I’m a fan of FOX Business for a little less of the politics than regular network news even their FOX News brethren. But other than that you’re exactly right…
“U.S. Government Announces 21 States Had Hackers Target Their System – Leaves Out DHS Hackers”
Well, DUH!
While the synagogue has had us quaking over “Sharia Law” – they had their Shabbos Goi in D.C. pull this;
http://www.takebackourrights.org/docs/Christians-full%20page.html
In SPITE of this;
ARTICLE I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
TO (obviously) accomplish this;
“It is our duty to force all mankind to accept the seven Noahide laws, and if not ~ they will be killed.” ~ Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg
“We have exterminated the property owners in Russia. We are going to do the same thing in Europe and America
(The Jew, December, 1925, Zinobit)
Which will result in this (wet dream) for the synagogue;
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/617dab31dced4949f0cc993b843fb2761ab243f132edd5ab9a6860727d7410e7.png
Easy fix. Paper ballots, always in public view, and counted in public, with the public monitoring the whole thing. Might take a day longer, but the results would be right.
That’s why it will never happen.
Michigan still has paper ballots and we get the counts in before the next morning. Although for the recount somehow some of those went missing and in a few places more showed up than cast ballots in the election, but those were only in places like Detroit so I’m sure it was just isolated anomalies and didn’t effect the actual votes… Yeah right. Cheaters will cheat no matter the system we use, the paper ballots did allow us to see it easier though. With the recount it was enough to void those precincts results and that is why the recount was stopped before it could be certified. Otherwise a certain crooked candidate might have been shown for the total loser she was even in the strongholds of her supposed power.
Is there anything the govt is being truthful about, anything at all?? Or do you…feel like I do because you KNOW they have been lying about everything and they’ve been doing it for a long, long time?? So knowing their propensity to tell tall tales if they tell anything at all about everything, the real question should be why believe them about…anything?? Their word is about as good as their currency…
The (((dept of homeland security))) need to GO! As does the Nazi Patriot Act the NDAA, the TSA …so many things that must go.
Two words: Paper Ballots