From Kindergarten to University: Homeland Security Culture in America

Global Research
Sancho Jones

In early March of 2009, The Department of Homeland Security, held it’s annual National Fusion Center Conference [1]. The conference highlighted the necessity for Fusion Centers to achieve Baseline Capabilities in the sharing of information and intelligence with the federal government and each other.

At the end of the same month the DHS gave a press release [2] to announce their selection of Purdue, and Rutgers Universities to co-lead the newest Center of Excellence (COE).

Centers of Excellence were created through the Homeland Security Act of 2002; the first centers began operation in 2004. With the addition of the newest one above, there are a total of 12 Centers across the country. The total number of these centers is skewed; as each center is in collaboration with multiple universities; as well as being partners with local, state, federal, and international entities. These COE’s also work with national laboratories, and corporate partners such as the RAND corporation to offer viable real world applications. In the end, there aren’t 12 centers, but a web of several hundred, and possibly thousands of centers.

The official list[3] of 12 centers are overseen by the Orwellian “Office of University Programs” [4]. The “Strategic Objectives” of this office are quoted as follows:

•  Foster a homeland security culture within the academic community through research and educational programs.
•  Strengthen U.S. scientific leadership in homeland security research.
•  Generate and disseminate knowledge and technical advances to advance the homeland security mission.
•  Integrate homeland security activities across agencies engaged in relevant academic research.
•  Create and leverage intellectual capital and nurture a homeland security science and engineering workforce.

Notice, their admitted overall goal is not only to ‘disseminate knowledge’ and technical advances for the homeland security ‘mission’, but also to create a Homeland Security Culture within the educational system; [5], 6].

Each COE website[3] has an education link; not all sites have their educational portion up for viewing. The ones who do have the educational curricula visible, show programs offered for K-12 and college curricula, into graduate school education. From Purdue University’s COE website [7],

“This program is designed to support undergraduate and graduate students in developing the skills to become preeminent scientists in the homeland security specific and technical community.”

The Orwellian Office of University Programs, is not only creating “Obama’s Youth”, but also creating  “scientists” who are studied in Department of Homeland Security disciplines!

Two Centers of Excellence stood out from the rest. The first, is Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism [8], or START which is based at the University of Maryland.

Amongst other activities, they do as the name suggests; they create studies. Hidden amongst the Islamic Jihad studies[9] were the reports of the real terrorists; you, and I!

Two reports stuck out more than the rest. The first was a study conducted from 2007 to 2008, and finished with the creation of the U.S. Extremist Criminal Terror database[10]. The study, and now database focus on far-right extremists; the data base of U.S. Extremist Crime, comprises 1990 to 2005.

The other study of interest was,“Homegrown Radicalization and the Role of Social Networks and Social Inclusiveness in the United States”[11]. There is no finished report of this study. The last update was, July 31, 2008. It seems this study is the one requested through The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955/S. 1959)[12] “The act would establish a national commission and a university-based “Center for Excellence” to study and propose legislation to prevent the threat of “radicalization” of Americans.” Interestingly enough, just a few months after the final START study update on July 31, 2008, the DHS released, The “Domestic Extremism Lexicon”[13]. This Lexicon was a “newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed “right-wing extremists” concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats.”[14] All this came from the START Center of Excellence!

Did Expert Witness, Activists Thwart a Rove Ohio Vote Plot?

The Justice Integrity Project

By Andrew Kreig

 

A software expert’s testimony last week may have thwarted a plot to flip enough votes to secure a victory for GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Building on years of efforts by activists, election software critic Michael Duniho testified in Ohio's state court that secret software installed on Ohio machines could enable officials to flip enough votes to select a different statewide winner that the one chosen by voters. 

Duniho, a retired National Security Agency analyst, is shown at right in similar testimony in Arizona, where he is a local elections official. 

Duniho provided his explosive testimony first via telephone to a federal judge in a temporary restraining order hearing in the morning, and then to Franklin County Judge Mark Serrott to amplify his written affidavit, published here. The testimony supported an injunction request by election machine critics who have argued for years -- with scant previous success in courts and in the media -- that election machine software tampering has enabled theft of major elections, and thus poses a grave danger to the democratic process.

On Election Day 2012, their litigation and testimony raised the issue to unprecedented prominence. The litigation against state officials would have put any plotters on notice of serious threat of investigation and retribution. 

The contrary view is that no plot ever existed -- and that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, shown at left, and fellow Republicans are being falsely suspected of bad intentions. Husted has denied misconduct in court filings. I reached out to him also for more specific questions, and shall update this post with any comment he or his staff provide. The Ohio Secretary of State's website contains background information.

This column reports Duniho’s testimony, and summarizes other evidence that election software poses a threat to fair elections. Reported also are: an Oct. 24 news conference announcing a chart alleging a Rove-linked “empire” of vote theft; a half dozen recent books on electronic election fraud; and a survey of a decade of major scandals, books, and articles.
The documentation draws on my previous columns, my research for a forthcoming book, Presidential Puppetry, and my ongoing interactions with research sources, several of whom asked my advice concerning their recent  news announcements in Washington. I suggested they announce litigation before Election Day because the public tunes out complaints from losers.

Update: I am scheduled to appear Nov. 12 on vote theft-critic Harvey Wasserman's 3 p.m. (EST) radio show on the Progressive Radio Network to discuss next steps with him and his fellow pioneer in the election integrity movement, Robert Fitrakis, a 2012 Green Party Congressional candidate. Fitrakis, based in Columbus, is a professor, attorney, website editor, and co-author of several books with Wasserman. Fitrakis filed the suit alleging electronic voting theft in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election and elsewhere.

Theirs and my multiple roles are increasingly typical in modern communications. Many news makers blog and broadcast these days, thereby blurring the lines between being a news source and part of the media. 

An even greater departure from past categories is that Karl Rove covered the Democratic National Convention September on a press pass. This was while he was also in the process of spending an estimated $300 million to help Republican candidates via his American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS funds. Also, he was allegedly scheming to steal elections via software fraud and voter suppression. Rove, like Husted, denies wrongdoing, and failed to respond to my request for comment on specifics. Whatever the facts on election fraud, Rove clearly is part of the Washington punditry elite delivering news to the nation.

The Duniho Testimony
 
Michael “Mickey” Duniho is a volunteer election official in Pima County, Arizona. He became prominent this fall among electronic voting machine critics because of his videotape testimony in an Arizona case arguing that dishonest officials can easily steal votes electronically. The photo above portrays that testimony, not his remarks by telephone in the Ohio litigation Nov. 6.

Duniho worked nearly four decades as a National Security Agency computer expert before his retirement. NSA is far larger and more secretive than the better-known CIA. It has vast information gathering and storage capabilities reported, among other places, in a series of authoritative books by former NSA staffer James Bamford.

Duniho claimed that the United States faced the threat of vote theft in Ohio because Husted, Ohio's secretary of state, had secretly installed software on voting machines covering 80 percent of the state’s population for no apparent legitimate purpose. The witness said the software could enable vote theft by officials, and no actual “emergency” required its installation throughout Ohio in violation of a state law requiring testing before installation. Also, Duniho said the voting machine company, Electronic Systems and Solutions (ES&S), appeared to be cheating the state on the cost of the software.

Husted’s legal team rebutted Duniho’s affidavit and testimony. The presiding state court judge failed to issue the injunction requested by the plaintiff.

A whistleblower in Husted’s office prompted the litigation by telling the Fitrakis team Thursday that the state secretly installed the controversial software in September. The Fitrakis suit was one of several he filed in state and federal courts last week with the cooperation of Columbus attorney Clifford Arnebeck, at left.

The litigation failed to attract much news coverage from major news outlets. Historically, reporters ignore allegations of electronic vote fraud as, in general, too complex and controversial. NBC News Political Director and Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd sent a Tweet this fall claiming election machine fraud is a “conspiracy theory” unworthy of coverage. 

Similarly, the New York Times published on Nov. 8 what can only be described as a biased, mocking profile of Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University professor and author who has documented election fraud. The Times article was A Long Day for a Professor Suspicious of Voting Machines. In contrast to the snide approach by the Times reporter, a YouTube video garnered more than 80,000 views with its more straightforward interview, visible here: None Dare Call It Stolen: US Election Fraud in 2012?
Despite such handicaps, the litigation last week doubtless reminded elections decision-makers that civil and perhaps criminal investigation could await them if dubious election results occurred. A reporter such as NBC's Chuck Todd can ignore a story. A defendant must respond in court, sometimes by sworn testimony that could potentially escalate into a criminal investigation that trumps secrecy provisions in official contracts with private vote tabulation companies.

The Secretary of State's Role?
Several voting theft opponents allied with Fitrakis and Arnebeck helped publicize the Ohio-litigation with a news conference Nov. 5 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Speakers included Clint Curtis, a Florida IT consultant who helped pioneering whistle blowing in the field by alleging that a Florida congressman asked  him to help defraud voters in the 2000 election. Also speaking were Harvey Wasserman, a frequent co-author with Fitrakis of books and articles on the topic, and Lori Grace, who has helped provide funding for such research. The activist group Protect Our Elections created a video of the speakers.

Several days previously, Ben Swann, a television-consumer reporter based in Cincinnati for Fox News affiliate WXIX-TV, published an investigative report describing how electronic vote thievery can occur. Swann’s video was widely circulated until YouTube removed it for violating terms of service. Election theft critics hope that such news reports encourage the FBI to demand records and interview all those involved. 

Their view is that massive elections fraud can be accomplished by very few conspirators so long as the operators are sufficiently expert and corrupt.

On Oct. 24, I  co-moderated with Arnebeck a news conference at the National Press Club. Alabama attorney Dana Jill Simpson and IT consultant Jim Marsh unveiled a new chart that they described as “Roadmap to Karl Rove’s Empire of Election Fraud.”

The chart is displayed at right, here on a downloadable link, and in larger size below. The relationship chart diagrams voting machine companies, and their ownership (including by Romney and Bush family backers).  Also, it asserts that a national training network runs a significant part of the nation’s back-office election operations through private companies hired by partisan officials who conduct operations in secret because the voting companies use proprietary software immune from outside scrutiny. 

Simpson, Marsh, and Arnebeck also announced formation of a new organization, Election Protection Action. This is one of several small civic groups across the country that have developed election fraud research for years, primarily in obscurity. 

Simpson has said she formerly worked with Rove and his allies on campaign opposition research that inevitably led, by her account, to campaign dirty tricks that soured her on the Republican Party. Among her allegations is that SmarTech, a Chattanooga IT consultancy, has played major role helping Republicans control elections, government websites, and government email  traffic both through the United States and globally.

Alabama Test Run For Election Theft?

Now a progressive, Simpson says that when she was a Republican volunteer opposition researcher she visited SmarTech in the days it was handling vast volumes of sensitive political traffic. Also, she has been reported to be knowledgeable on certain circumstances of one of the nation’s most notorious election software mysteries, the late-night switch of nearly 7,000 votes in rural Baldwin County that flipped Democratic Governor Don Siegelman’s reported re-election victory in 2002.
Speaking also at the Oct. 24 news conference was Siegelman's daughter, Dana, 27. She said the family went to bed on Election Night in 2002 believing news reports that her father had won re-election, but awoke to learn that votes had been shifted electronically in Baldwin County for never-disclosed reasons. She said that Alabama's Attorney General William Pryor, a Republican since elevated to the federal appeals court, threatened to arrest anyone who tried to investigate the vote-change. 

Therefore, she said, there was nothing her father could do except try to run again for governor in 2006. However, the Bush administration indicted him on corruption charges in 2004. When that case fell apart, they indicted him against before a different judge, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller, who was able to help prosecutors secure corruption convictions by making many pro-prosecution rulings that have puzzled legal experts for years but have been affirmed by appeals courts, including Pryor's. The convictions were primarily for Siegelman's reappointment to a state board in 1999 of a Republican who had donated to a non-profit that Siegelman supported.

In 2007, Simpson broke with the Republican Party to swear that she was aware of a Republican plot for years to prevent Siegelman from running for re-election in 2006 by framing him on corruption charges with the help of “Karl” {whom  she identifies as most likely Karl Rove] and Fuller, whom she swore was picked to preside over Siegelman as judge because the judge "hated" the defendant and wanted to "hang" him.

Nonetheless, Fuller has remained on the case, and in August ordered Siegelman, now 67, to resume a seven-year sentence. Dana Siegelman, at left with her father before his reimprisonment, is leading a nationwide petition drive to persuade President Obama to pardon her father. The petition is here.
 
She said it has been signed by 34,000 people so far, including an unprecedented group of 112 former state attorneys general who separately wrote the Supreme Court that Siegelman's actions did not constitute a crime under the law. The Justice Integrity Project has gone beyond that finding and concluded that prosecutors and the trial judge framed Siegelman, thereby creating a notorious political prosecution of global significance. 
The Siegelman prosecution is the kind of result that can occur when vote thieves acquire the power to appoint prosecutors and judges. 

Simpson’s “roadmap” devised with Marsh is so other researchers, including the media and law enforcement personnel, can understand the ownership, operation, and goals of the nation’s vote-tabulation process. The critics allege that the process is increasingly secret and controlled by partisan officials seeking to rig outcomes in selected locales when the stakes are high enough.



Rove has denounced her as someone who makes incredible allegations. Also, he states that he has never met her. Vanity Fair columnist Craig Unger examined her allegations, SmarTech's responses and , and Rove’s denials in his recent book, Boss Rove. Unger found her to be more credible than Rove on the specifics.

I have reached a similar conclusion. Rove has failed to respond to my requests for comment, or an in-depth interview. Furthermore, representatives of the Romney family have denied that family or Bain investments in a voting tabulation company, HIG Capital, which controls Hart InterCivic, has a fraudulent purpose.

Historical Background of Software Fraud
 
Fitrakis, Arnebeck, and Wasserman have alleged election machine fraud for years, including in litigation alleging that the 2004 presidential election was determined by IT fraud. In their  books and unsuccessful lawsuits, they say Ohio’s electoral votes went to President Bush via what they call a “Man in the Middle” strategy whereby IT consultant Michael Connell helped arrange for SmarTech to have access to Ohio’s votes before they were announced to the public. 

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a GOP partisan, arranged Connell’s consultancy via his company, GovTech, which hosted its operations at SmarTech in Chattanooga. Blackwell denied any improper motive or result. Yet Steve Spoonamore, the top IT employee for 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, testified that the set-up enabled vote-switching without public knowledge. Connell described in a 2008 pretrial deposition the specifics of how he set up vote transfers. Connell died a month later when his airplane crashed. I summarized that history in a 2010 column. An appendix to the column provides hot links to nearly a decade of major books and articles in the field.

The concept of "election fraud" orchestrated via voting machine software is different from "voter fraud," which typically refers to ineligible voters casting ballots. Republicans have enacted many harsh voter suppress laws to restrict voting by largely Democratic groups, as Huffington Post columnist Dan Froomkin noted Nov. 12, Voter ID: The More You Know, The Less You Like It. Some voter fraud does in fact exists, counters Melinda  Pillsbury-Foster, a host of World Truth Radio who formerly had close contacts with prominent conservatives. But, she says, whatever actual problems exist in voter fraud have been grossly magnified by the media to create a false equivalence with the much-greater problem of massive elections fraud.

Summing up
Conventional wisdom is that no plot existed this year, or ever in the past. But we’ll never know for sure unless the relevant operatives and officials are examined under oath. 

Michael Duniho took the process to a new level on Election Day, Nov. 6. Let’s hope that the beginning, not the end, of any questions.

GOP Set to Steal USA’s Banana Republic Election

U.K. Progressive

Florida Gov. Rick Scott at a bill signing ceremony in Miami.

This is The Monday Line
by Denis G. Campbell

Every four years the world is ‘treated’ to a Presidential election in the USA. Every four years a handful of states display a level of vote larceny that, if it occurred in a third world dictatorship, would have former President Jimmy Carter leading a group of sober faced UN election observers to carefully parse words and discuss “irregularities.” Every four years we are subjected to right wing talking points about Democrats stealing the election because they demand to vote while coffee spews out our noses because the coordinated theft is on the Republican side. These same flim-flam artists stand before microphones and say, teary-eyed, “God Bless our best Democracy in the world!”

Well screw parsing. I’m call ‘bullshit’ and so should you.

Voting is a right and a responsibility. In the 2008 Presidential election, only 61.6% of those eligible to cast votes did, and that was up from the average since 1980 of 56%. As a state official in charge of elections, Secretaries of State used to run adverts encouraging people to vote. Now they spend their time in highly politicised battles to remove voters from the opposite party? That’s what they do in Iran and Uganda, not the USA.

The machines with no paper trail…As we reported here last week there is a need to match hand recounts by precinct size. Paper ballots leave a trail that can prove election fraud deep inside the computerised voting system. So when an Arizona citizen’s group was forced to file Mandamus brief and suit to force the county to follow the law, a (recent Republican Governor Jan Brewer appointed) Pima County Judge got the case. He will rule later Monday on a motion that will force election officials to select and sort ballots in their 1% random hand-count sample along precinct lines.

That specific sort and reporting will help to prove retired NSA Analyst Michael Duniho, Francois Choquette and James Johnson’s assertion that there is a real software ‘fix’ built into the machine.

Of course local county election officials continue to fight this tooth and nail because the trail could lead to them. They have fought transparency since 2006 and yet were quick to claim in the Arizona Star that voting was safer and more secure than ever.

The best example though of how states and counties avoid being called to task is in this letter from the Arizona Secretary of State. The only link back to election machine software fraud is via the Duniho/Choquette/Johnson assertion that the fix is in for larger precincts. So the Pima County election commission conveniently and quietly through secret petition to the Sec State office made sure no one would ever be able to connect those dots.

The Arizona Secretary of State wrote into the 2012 election manual that it would be a good idea to sort paper ballots by precinct for the mandatory hand count by precinct. BUT, Pima County requested and won an exemption from following the state’s election directive for… (wait for it…) the 2012 Presidential election.

So the new rule that would prove election fraud built into the machines has been conveniently overturned by the Republican Arizona Secretary of State. Bananas anyone?

Ohio and Florida Incompetent or Criminal?The GOP is not even trying to gloss over their attempt to steal this election in key swing states. In Florida and Ohio their work is legend. Even in Pennsylvania the House leader actually went on camera and said, “voter ID, that will win this state for Mitt Romney? (Job) Done!”

And the USA’s gutless wonder of an Attorney General, Eric Holder, sits back and lets them do it? Jack and Bobby Kennedy would have had federal troops stationed in both states and Ohio Secretary of State Husted and Florida Governor Scott would have long been removed in handcuffs and leg irons with the Feds supervising these elections.

Husted ignored multiple direct judicial orders. He appealed them all the way to the US Supreme Court and LOST yet still blithely sits in his Columbus, Ohio Office and denies the extension of early voting hours in his state.

Florida Governor Rick Scott has directly defied several court defeats and still tries to purge hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls just before the election. He also refused to do what two Republican governors did before him, expand early voting hours. He instead cut the number of hours by 1/3, eliminated Sunday voting (when African American churches would carpool after services to vote), the elderly have had to queue in the hot sun for up to five hours to cast a ballot and whoops, there have been voting ‘mistakes’ in a state and election George W. Bush won by 537 votes?

• 1,000 African American votes had a ‘glitch’ in Miami,
• Palm Beach County (the county of the 2000 butterfly ballot debacle) had 30,000 absentee ballots go out with the wrong bar code and have to be re-marked by officials on new ballots to be counted (what could possibly go wrong there?) and

• heavily Democratic Broward County also has huge irregularities as problems appear only in large Democratic leaning counties?

Millions enjoy the flexibility of early voting. This means they can vote on the weekend to avoid losing time at work. Early voting though favours Democrats and urban voters. So Republican election officials in the six swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Michigan have tried throughout this campaign to limit voting, require IDs many elderly and minorities do not have (or they must buy them effectively creating a Jim Crow law poll tax) or simply removed these people from the vote rolls altogether.

Why? Because President Obama leads Hispanic voters by 65 percentage points, African Americans by 90 points and women by 50 points.

And What if I told you…The President’s brother was a Governor of a key state during a hotly contested election and in another the challenger’s son controlled the largest electronic voting machine company? You would think we’re talking about Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe right?

You would be wrong. George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was Florida Governor when that state pushed him over the top in 2000. Mitt’s son Tagg Romney controls Hart Intercivic and the four other companies are run by bundlers and huge donors for him.

Remember when politicians did everything in their power to avoid the appearance of impropriety? Remember when the crises exploded over under-the-table money hidden in freezers? Now they don’t even try to hide it.

- – - – -

So tomorrow night we will cover the election and pray it does not again become another conservative Supreme Court ‘selection.’ Armies of lawyers have been dispatched around the USA to document and file emergency motions if the election does not go their way.

It could be a very long night or voters, tired of GOP attempts to block and steal could seal the deal very early. There is not much chance of it being anything in between.

In any event, US Democracy loses a bit more lustre and the rest of the world wonders why anyone would buy that export? What good is a win if you steal it? Why is the US GOP only focused on what they can get away with rather than governing?

This is not my late-father’s Republican Party.

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Denis G Campbell is the author of 6 books including 'Billionaire Boys Election Freak Show,' 'The Vagina Wars' & 'Egypt Unsh@ckled.' He is the editor of UK Progressive Magazine and provides commentary to the BBC, itv Al Jazeera English, CNN, MSNBC and others. His weekly 'World View with Denis Campbell' segment can be heard every Thursday on the globally syndicated The David Pakman Show. You can follow him on Twitter via @UKProgressive and on Facebook.

Mickey Duniho: Evidence of Vote Counting Fraud in Pima County?

Editor's Note: With the analysis is a full video of the Election Integrity Commission's emergency meeting held on October 26th to hear retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho's explanation of how his study of local elections support nationwide trends found in a paper published by Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Commission member Dr. Tom Ryan has a PhD in computer programming and agrees with what Duniho has discovered.

The video begins with Benny White refusing to participate because of his ardent support for Pima County. He mistakenly assumes that the board meeting is discussing the simple lawsuit that was filed to get Pima County to comply with Arizona State statutes. Arnold Urken is a commission member tied to the county with his role of County Administrator. The chair, Charles Geoffrion, is assigned by Pima County and the meeting itself is also attended by John Moffatt, the Pima County employee previously involved with election data shenanigans.



Mickey Duniho
Analysis in PDF

Former NSA analyst, Michael "Mickey" Duniho

A paper published by Francois Choquette (Aerospace Engineer, Statistics, California) and James Johnson (Senior Quantitative Financial Analyst, California) outlined anomalies found throughout the United States in the Republican Presidential Primary that always favored Mitt Romney. The favoritism correlated strongly with precinct size, and did not correlate with any other logical choices (such as population density, income levels, race, etc). The paper asked readers to confirm their analysis and report on findings.

I analyzed the 2012 Presidential Preference Primary in Pima County and confirmed their analysis. I also analyzed two 2012 Board of Supervisors Republican primaries and found no apparent anomalies. I analyzed many 2010 races and found anomalies in all statewide races, always apparently favoring Republicans (except for propositions). I found no anomalies in the LD28 State Senate race.

The correlation of Republican (or in the case of the Republican Presidential Primary, with Mitt Romney) strongly suggests vote count fraud, which would occur in larger precincts because it is easier to hide it there.

Pima County has persistently refused my requests to sort early ballots before doing the state-required hand-count audit because they say it is too much trouble. These statistics suggest another reason: they may be hiding vote-counting fraud.

We need to re-examine early ballots for the 2010 election, if they are still available, to confirm the hypothesis of vote-count fraud or to certify that there was none. This would involve removing the ballots from the vault under a court order, sorting them by precinct, and then hand counting some of the larger precincts. It appears from the data that we might discover vote-count fraud in every state-wide race in that election. We need to re-examine the Republican Presidential primary early ballots in the same way, sorting them by precinct and then hand counting some of the larger precincts.

If the contention of vote-counting fraud is correct, we could be victimized by vote-continuing fraud in the November election, affecting not just the Presidential race but also state-wide races and possibly county-wide races. Anomalies in the 2010 general election appeared to show about ten percentage points taken from the Democratic candidate and added to the Republican candidate’s total. This changes the outcome of any race that is closer than 20 percentage points.

Here are some charts showing apparent vote flipping and others confirming no fraud in a race. Each chart shows a different race. Lines that move up from left to right represent votes added through fraud. Lines that move down from left to right represent votes taken away from a victim through fraud.

The first chart shows a race that was clearly not flipped, the LD28 State Senate race. It is not a county-wide race, so there were fewer precincts to analyze. The wiggles on the left of the chart represent small precincts with so few votes as to render statistical analysis less useful.

In the larger precincts, the lines are flat, showing no votes transferred from one candidate to another.

The second chart is another race that apparently had no evidence of fraud. This is the 2012 Pima County Board of Supervisors race between the incumbent Ray Carroll and challenger Sean Collins. This race had even fewer precincts (62) than the LD28 State Senate race (92 precincts), so the lines are not perfectly flat, but they do not show any significant slope, leading me to believe there is no evidence of fraud.

The next chart is another Board of Supervisors primary race (District 1, Republican) that shows no evidence of fraud. The small number of precincts (65) causes what would be flat lines in a larger data set to appear wiggly, but again there is no discernible slope for any candidates.

The next chart is the 2010 Giffords-Kelly race, showing an apparent shift of ten percent of the votes from Giffords to Kelly. Unfortunately for Kelly, Giffords appears to have run more than 20 percent better than Kelly so that even with the shift she still won the election by a small percentage. Making an assumption of fraud, this suggests that it might have been programmed into the computer before the counting begins and could not easily be changed during the election process. [Note: I have been advised by the author of the report I was following that I need to account for relative party registration numbers in this chart, which might lessen the steepness of the slopes if Democrats tend to be found in larger numbers in smaller precincts and Republicans in larger numbers in larger precincts. I am working on getting precinct-level voter registration data for 2010 so that I can recalculate this chart to more accurately reflect the anomaly.]

Arizona Citizens' Election Integrity Lawsuit Explained by Attorney Brad Roach and Republican Candidate Bill Beard

From left to right:  Attorney Brad Roach,  John Brakey,
Bill Beard, Chris DeSimone 

KVOA Wakeup Tucson at 7:00 AM Mountain Time on 1030 AM radio

Stay tuned for the final clip containing Pima County shill Benny White refusing to
participate in the Elections Integrity Board's emergency meeting scheduled to discuss former NSA employee Mickey Duniho's analysis of past elections. White mistakenly assumed that the meeting was going to discuss the pending lawsuit requiring Pima County to follow existing election laws. One can assume he is also mistaken in thinking he can be a co-defendant in that case because he ultimately would be acting against significant members within Pima County's Republican Party who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.




NSA Analyst Mickey Duniho's presentation to the Pima County's Election Integrity Board will be posted later this evening.

Pima commission to discuss chance of election fraud in larger precincts

Arizona Daily Star
Carli Brosseau

The Pima County Election Integrity Commission is holding a special meeting today to talk about whether one member's statistical analysis of votes in recent elections shows evidence of fraud.

Under the group's bylaws, an emergency meeting can be held if at least five of the nine members call for one.

Michael "Mickey" Duniho
His presentation to the Election Integrity Board
will be posted on The Intercept today.

Mickey Duniho, a retired National Security Agency computer programmer, requested the meeting two days ago after he began plotting cumulative votes by precinct and noticing that outcomes seemed to differ by precinct size.

He was replicating earlier studies done by California researchers Francois Choquette and James Johnson, an aerospace engineer and a financial analyst. The researchers argue that their analysis of the recent Republican primary shows Mitt Romney making strange vote gains in most states' large precincts.

Duniho - formerly a Republican election observer in Maryland, a supporter of Democrat-backed lawsuits against Pima County's Elections Department and now a registered independent - said that his results seem to parallel those of Choquette and Johnson, who tried to account for their findings using demographics.

He is now collecting demographic data by precinct to try to explain his results with other factors, such as whether a precinct is rural or the affluence of the precinct's residents.

Duniho suspects that the patterns he found show a 10 percent flip of votes in favor of the Republican candidate in the 2010 race between Raúl Grijalva and Ruth McClung and the race between Gabrielle Giffords and Jesse Kelly the same year, as well as votes switched to benefit Romney in the Republican primary.

"The problem is figuring out what the statistical evidence does mean," Duniho said. "The computer is a black box. It is very easy for the guy who wrote the program to do just about anything."

At today's meeting, Duniho hopes to persuade the county Elections Department to sort early ballots by precinct before doing the hand-count audit required by law.

He has been advocating for that sorting, as well as for upping the percentage of ballots hand-counted, for about six years, arguing that his method boosts the chances of revealing fraud if it were to occur.

By law, Arizona counties must do a hand-count audit of 1 percent of early ballots and 2 percent of precincts in at least one federal and one state race. Pima County already audits more than required - 4 percent of precinct-cast ballots and 1 percent of early ballots. No local races are audited.

Some of the commission's members have argued strongly against holding the meeting and worry that it could unnecesarily increase fears about the vote count.

Benny White providing false testimony
to the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
about John Brakey's arrest while monitoring
elections in the Fall of 2008.

Benny White, a Republican election observer, responded to news of the meeting request with a sharply worded email.

"After reviewing the academic research involved with the links in the message, I conclude that the allegations being made are absolute nonsense," he wrote. "These academics don't take into account the fact that election results are the response by voters to campaigns and candidates. …

"I think there is a greater probability that fluctuations in the electrical voltage of the lines serving the election department have more to do with variations in election results than these alleged anomalies."

The county's technical consultant on election matters, John Moffatt, agrees that the data do not seem to show a vote flip in Pima County, but he does think the California researchers may be on to something with their findings in some other states.

Pima County employee John Moffatt speaks of
"witch hunts" in the past, but is responsible
for the incoherent rationale that required a suit
to obtain electronic public records. 

"It's worth paying attention to, and we took it seriously," he said. "My personal opinion is that it's another witch hunt, but our responsibility is to check this stuff out, not just blow it off."

He adamantly rejects allegations that county elections staff somehow tampered with any results.

The county's elections director, Brad Nelson, will not be at the meeting to approve a change of audit procedures because of family issues, but county workers involved in those processes caution that while it's theoretically possible to make Duniho's suggested change, it would be logistically difficult.

"That's a monumental task," Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez said. "It's kind of late to be changing the procedures in the middle of a major election."

The sorting machine needed to do the job efficiently would cost at least $125,000, said Chris Roads, deputy recorder and registrar of voters.

To do the sorting by hand would likely take two days, Moffatt said.

The window to challenge a vote count after an election in Arizona is five days after the canvass.

'Just trust us' - NSA to privacy advocates in court

Russia Today

The US National Security Agency isn’t outright rejecting claims that they’ve been conducting surveillance on everyone in the country, but they want Americans to at least give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their intensions.

The NSA was in court again this week to challenge a potential class action lawsuit that aims to end the governmental agency’s electronic surveillance program begun by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; but while the plaintiffs in the case want to abolish the warrantless wiretapping and spying on innocent civilians started under that administration’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, the government’s argument is now one that requires Americans to accept the agency’s insistence they’re really not up to anything worth worrying about, Courthouse News reports.

In Federal Court this week, the NSA said that the public should simply trust the government when they say they aren’t abusing any powers legally or illegally in place to engage in clandestine surveillance of each and every citizen.

A San Francisco courthouse was the venue for the latest episode in the matter of Jewel v. NSA, a 4-year-old case that charges the spy agency with once and still operating an "illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance.”Lead plaintiff Carolyn Jewel brought on the suit back in 2008 with the assistance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and on behalf of current and former customers of AT&T who say they were affected when the telecom giant allowed the NSA unfettered access to their systems to spy on the communications of any customers they wish.
The plaintiffs say that the NSA ordered the attachment of surveillance devices to AT&T’s master network in order to have the ability to divert any communication routed through their service to secure facilities to allow for "an unprecedented suspicionless general search." When former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake condemned the agency’s overly broad and costly surveillance of innocent Americans in 2007, the government attempted to silence him by filing an indictment under the Espionage Act of 1917.

When Jewel v NSA ended up in federal court in 2010, US District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker originally dismissed the case, only for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deciding to reinstate it last year.

"Since September 11 and now, through two administrations, the executive has engaged in unprecedented assertions of power without regard to the constitutional and statutory limits of its authority,” attorney Richard Wiebe wrote in the case’s initial filings. “It has correspondingly sought to exclude the judiciary from adjudicating whether these exercises of executive power have stayed within the limits set by the Constitution and by Congress."

Currently, the government alleges that they do not have to respond to charges of unwarranted eavesdropping because they have immunity in instances where disclosure could disrupt national security. As Courthouse News previously reported, the federal government “claims to have invoked state secrets privileges that protects it from any litigation consequentially stemming from supposed violations of those acts.”

Plaintiffs, however, say that the government waived its right to sovereign immunity when it put itself in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as well as the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment that protects Americans from unlawful searches and seizures.

US data whistleblower: 'It's a violation of everybody's constitutional rights'

Former National Security Agency official Bill Binney says US is illegally collecting huge amounts of data on his fellow citizens

Guardian
Paul Harris

Bill Binney believes he helped create a monster. Sitting in the innocuous surroundings of an Olive Garden in the Baltimore suburbs, the former senior National Security Agency (NSA) official even believes he owes the whole American people an apology.

Binney, a tall, professorial man in his late 60s, led the development of a secret software code he now believes is illegally collecting huge amounts of information on his fellow citizens. For the staunch Republican, who worked for 32 years at the NSA, it is a civil liberties nightmare come true.

So Binney has started speaking out as an NSA whistleblower – an act that has earned him an armed FBI raid on his home. "What's happening is a violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. That's pretty straightforward. I could not be associated with it," he told the Guardian.

Binney, a career NSA employee who first volunteered for the army in the mid-1960s, has now become a high-profile thorn in the side of NSA chiefs when they deny the programme's existence.

At a hacking conference this summer in Las Vegas, NSA director General Keith Alexander said the NSA "absolutely" did not keep files on Americans.

"Anyone who would tell you that we're keeping files or dossiers on the American people knows that's not true," Alexander told an audience of computer and security experts. But Binney himself was at the same conference and publicly accused Alexander of playing a "word game".

"Once the software takes in data, it will build profiles on everyone in that data," he told a convention panel there.

Binney's outspokenness has earned him media appearances on shows across America's political spectrum ranging from ultra-conservative Glenn Beck's TV show to the liberal radio icon of Democracy Now.

"This is not a political issue. People on both sides are concerned," Binney said.

The story Binney tells is one of extreme over-reaction by America's national security establishment post-9/11. He recounts developing a small software system, called ThinThread, in the late 1990s at the NSA where he was the technical director of the organisation's 6,000-strong World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group.

ThinThread correlated data from emails, phone calls, credit card payments and Internet searches and stored and mapped it in ways that could be analysed.

Binney wanted to use ThinThread to track foreign threats but it worked too well and kept catching data on Americans too.

So Binney's team built in safeguards that encrypted that data. But, by 2000, the NSA decided to go with developing a larger scale programme called Trailblazer to be built by outside contractors (that eventually failed to make it past the design stage) and ThinThread was effectively mothballed.

Then September 11 happened. Within a few weeks, Binney says, he realised parts of ThinThread were now being used by the NSA in a massive and secret surveillance operation.

But his safeguards had been removed allowing for far more targeted surveillance of American citizens. "I knew the dangers so I built in protections. And you could still find the bad guys with the protections in it. But that wasn't what they wanted so they took those things out," Binney said.

Binney quickly left the agency and kept his silence. But that was not the end of the story. In late 2005, the New York Times broke the story that the NSA was engaged in large-scale warrantless electronic surveillance.

The scandal eventually led to the passing of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 which, many critics say, simply gave legal protection to the agency's data-mining operations.

The programme has thus effectively continued under the Obama administration, which has launched a ruthless crackdown on national security whistleblowers, especially those leaking NSA secrets.

Binney gradually began to protest behind the scenes. Yet that earned him an FBI raid by armed agents as he showered at his home. "Here's a guy coming into my shower and pointing a gun at me. I'd been co-operating with these people. Why are they doing this?" he said.

Over the past year Binney has gone fully public, detailing what he believes is a massive effort under the Obama administration to collect virtually all electronic data in the country, from Facebook posts to Google searches to emails.

It is a deeply secret programme, Binney says, that is called Stellar Wind. He points to the NSA's creation of a giant data centre at Bluffdale in Utah as part of the system.

The gigantic building is set to cost $2bn and be up and running by 2013.

It is being designed to store huge amounts of accessible web information – such as social media updates – but also information in the "deep web" behind passwords and other firewalls that keep it away from the public.

As an example of Stellar Wind's power, Binney believes it is hoovering up virtually every email sent by every American and perhaps a good deal of the people of the rest of the world, too.

"I didn't expect it from my government. I thought we were the good guys. We wear white hats, right?" he said.

For Binney, Bluffdale is a symbol that the national security policy conducted by Obama has been little different than that of Bush.

Obama has renewed the Patriot Act, tried to broaden the powers of detention of American citizens for national security reasons, and deployed the anti-spy Espionage Act more times than all other presidents combined.

"They are still continuing the same programmes – actually, Obama is doing more in some areas," Binney said. Nor is Binney optimistic of rolling back the surveillance.

Last week the House of Representatives voted for a five-year extension to the controversial 2008 FISA amendments.

Yet Binney believes there has been too much of a sacrifice of civil liberties in order to fight terrorism. "People should feel the ability to go out there and and do anything that they want to without being looked at all the time. Monitored. Watched," he said.

"The terrorists win, OK? We've lost because we have destroyed our society just to combat them and there was really no reason to do that."

Binney is also determined to keep on speaking out. "I don't see any other recourse. Everybody needs to wake up to what we are doing here and whether we want it or not. There is a big hole at the end of this tunnel and it drops off to nowhere." he said.

FBI stored information on Apple device users hacked

Examiner

Cynthia Hodges

Twelve million Apple device user's personal information stored on the laptop of FBI agent were exposed by hacktivists targeting the agency.

One million of the Apple device IDs have been released, including full user names, addresses and telephone numbers attached. In the announcement released on Twitter, hackers said they figured a million would be enough to make their point.

"Why exposing [sic] this personal data?" asked the unnamed writer of the Pastebin posting announcing the data dump, who claimed to be affiliated with the anti-government hacktivist group AntiSec. "Well, we have learnt it seems quite clear nobody pays attention if you just come and say 'Hey, FBI is using your device details and info and who the [expletive] knows what the hell are they experimenting with that," well sorry, but nobody will care."

In Forbes, Parmy Olson points out that the breach raises many questions, not only about the security of federal devices, but of why an agent might have (allegedly) been carrying a database of Apple UDIDs, with user's personal information, and even Apple Push Notification Service tokens of iPhone and iPad users.

It isn't the first time the hacktivists have exposed vulnerabilities in the security of federal agencies computer networks, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, DoD and the FBI.

In January, hacktivists of the Anonymous collective breached a conference call between FBI agents and Britain’s Scotland Yard in which the Anonymous and LulzSec wee discussed.

Anonymous released an audio recording of a January conference call between FBI agents and Britain’s Scotland Yard in which the hacktivist group Anonymous was discussed.

The FBI confirmed the authenticity of the recording, and said the agency was investigating to how hactivists linked to the Anonymous network managed to intercept a conference call.

The AntiSec group argues that the FBI will “deny or ignore” the latest Apple ID incident, but says that someone should care how the FBI obtained the vast amount of information on Apple users and how it’s being used to track citizens.

The USA Patriot Act gives the feds authority to collect information on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or consent and without a warrant - if is connected to a suspected terrorist investigation, which as defined includes any American citizen.

Both candidates for U.S. President in the 2012 election fully support the USA Patriot Act, and it may be the only issue on both sides of the isle that the U.S. Congress can agree on.

This Is How We Know The Shocking Facts About Spy Campaign 'TrapWire' Are True

Business Insider
Michael Kelley

Last week WikiLeaks published internal emails from the U.S. private security firm Stratfor that describe a widespread surveillance network called TrapWire that was created and is run by former members of the CIA.

RT first broke the story about the system's staggering reach into the privacy of passersby and informative stories followed.

Then several news outlets claimed that the growing dismay was misguided, specifically the claim that cameras linked to TrapWire utilizes facial recognition software.

Ryan Gallagher of Slate said the reports are "rooted in hyperbole and misinformation" and Scott Shane of the New York Times called them "wildly exaggerated."

But one thing – besides the fact that the founder of TrapWire's parent company said the software "can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition" – proves to us that the reporting on TrapWire is rooted in reality: Mickey Mouse does it. 

A Naomi Wolf article in the Guardian about the rise of security cameras at Occupy hangouts and multi-billion dollar biometric technologies industry includes this story: 

A software engineer ... visited Disneyland, and ... the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

It turns out that Disney applies biometrics – that is, the statistical analysis of biological data – in the form of scanning visitor fingerprint information and identifying people with facial recognition software.

In fact, "Walt Disney World is responsible for the nation’s largest single commercial application of biometrics" and after 9/11 the government sought "Disney’s advice in intelligence, security and biometrics," as reported in 2006 by Karen Hamel of News 21.

Hamel listed several former Disneyland employees that have gone on to fill "some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. intelligence and security communities," including:

• Disney executive Gordon Levin, who was part of a group convened by the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies to help develop a plan for "Passenger Protection and Identity Verification" at airports by using biometrics.

• Eric Haseltine, who left his post as executive vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering in 2002 to become associate director for research at the NSA and then became National Intelligence Director John Negroponte’s assistant director for science and technology.

• Bran Ferren, who served on advisory boards for the Senate Intelligence Committee and offered his technological expertise to the NSA and the DHS.

So if Mickey does it at "the most wonderful place on Earth" – and willingly shares his biometrics secrets with the government – then it's no stretch that TrapWire actively spies on people all over the world.