Speaker 1: Pushkin, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. So you can
Speaker 1: talk about fake news and propaganda and astroturfing, but all
Speaker 1: of those things hacked the greater process. The conversation around
Speaker 1: the election. Election meddling undermines what sits at the foundation
Speaker 1: of American democracy, confidence in our voting system. Whether hacking
Speaker 1: takes the form of masking the original source of a
Speaker 1: campaign message to make it seem like it comes from
Speaker 1: the grassroots, so called astarturfing, or disseminating intentionally false information,
Speaker 1: it all leads Americans to question the legitimacy of the
Speaker 1: democratic process. In twenty sixteen, we discovered Russian backhackers were
Speaker 1: responsible for disinformation campaigns. In response, Congress directed three hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty million dollars to the fifty states to boost
Speaker 1: election security. But did it really help? Is it useful
Speaker 1: to compare electoral outcomes to poll results? You're not going
Speaker 1: to believe it, right, I mean, the problem of voting,
Speaker 1: as opposed to any other computer security mechanism is that
Speaker 1: after the fact, it's partisan. Is there a problem with
Speaker 1: the expectation we have than that the winner of election
Speaker 1: ought to be declared immediately? So yes, a slower process
Speaker 1: would enable us to do more checking before announcing anything.
Speaker 1: The American people don't like that. I mean, even going
Speaker 1: to sleep before knowing is bad. With increasingly long election seasons,
Speaker 1: I'd sleep better on election night hearing than my candidate one,
Speaker 1: But wouldn't we all sleep better knowing that whatever the result,
Speaker 1: it was guaranteed to be accurate. The tech is real,
Speaker 1: but the tech is solvable. None of what you've described
Speaker 1: is exotic or untried. Why has it been so difficult
Speaker 1: to convince other states to put in place some of
Speaker 1: these already available voting techniques Because the problems are not technical.
Speaker 1: The problems are political Elections security is mostly solvable. Brush
Speaker 1: Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist. He teaches cybersecurity
Speaker 1: at the Harvard Kennedy School. My co host Malcolm Gladwell
Speaker 1: talked with Schneier about the threats that loom over the
Speaker 1: vote this fall. When we talk about elections being hacked,
Speaker 1: what does that mean? I'm assuming that there are fifty
Speaker 1: different things that fall under that category. So we'll talk
Speaker 1: about hacking the voting process, and that's a process by
Speaker 1: which you cast your vote. We also talk about hacking
Speaker 1: the broader electoral process. So when the Russians hacked the
Speaker 1: Democratic National Committee and posted a dump a lot of
Speaker 1: information online, they weren't hacking the vote. They were hacking
Speaker 1: the overall election process. So you can talk about fake
Speaker 1: news and propaganda and astroturfing and all of those things
Speaker 1: hack the greater process, the conversation around the election. And
Speaker 1: that's one very separate branch. The other branch is hacking
Speaker 1: the vote itself, or the process by which you and
Speaker 1: I go to vote. And there you have four places
Speaker 1: where you can affect things, sort of affect the outcome.
Speaker 1: The first is the registration process, and we've read about
Speaker 1: and seen different hacks on the voting rolls so that
Speaker 1: when you go to vote, you can't at that point
Speaker 1: this particular kind of hacking. Is it really about taking
Speaker 1: people off the rolls. It's a couple of things. In
Speaker 1: California some years ago, people had their party affiliation change
Speaker 1: from Republican to Democrat. You can change the address of somebody,
Speaker 1: so they go to vote and they were told to
Speaker 1: go to a different poll. And some of these are easy.
Speaker 1: Many states have online systems to change your registration that
Speaker 1: aren't well authenticated. Others is to pull people off the
Speaker 1: voting roles. Others are to erase the voting roles. What
Speaker 1: happens if we get to election day in a certain
Speaker 1: state and the voting roles don't work and we don't
Speaker 1: know why. So a lot of things against the voting roles.
Speaker 1: The second is the thing we talk about all the time,
Speaker 1: which is the vote itself. Is your vote recorded accurately.
Speaker 1: The third is the tabulation process. May no matter how
Speaker 1: you vote, there's this sort of automated, sort of manual
Speaker 1: process by which the numbers out of each machine get
Speaker 1: increasingly aggregated, the numbers in the building, the numbers and
Speaker 1: the precinct, the numbers in the town, the city, the state,
Speaker 1: you know, all the way up to the national if
Speaker 1: that matters. And then the last, which I think people
Speaker 1: don't think about a lot, is the reporting process. And
Speaker 1: we have seen and this was something that we think
Speaker 1: is thwarted in eighteen erroneous reporting where the numbers are right.
Speaker 1: But the press release says the opposite of those four
Speaker 1: things that you've identified, Can we rank them in order
Speaker 1: of seriousness? Which is the one that worries you the most?
Speaker 1: I would not rank them. I think ranking is dangerous.
Speaker 1: I think they're all risky. Yeah, if I'm a chaos agent,
Speaker 1: how did what's the level of difficulty involved in spreading
Speaker 1: chaos in the American electoral system. It will depend on
Speaker 1: the technology. So we can talk about voting machines and
Speaker 1: some are more secure than others. And I vote in Minnesota.
Speaker 1: We use optical scan voting. I have a piece of paper,
Speaker 1: I fill in ovals and then that is tallied using computer.
Speaker 1: That is the gold standard. It is a voter verifiable
Speaker 1: paper audit trail now is real hard to mess with that,
Speaker 1: and you can mess with the tabulating, but there's a
Speaker 1: paper backup. You can do a recount. Some states vote
Speaker 1: on touch screen machines. We've had times those machines have
Speaker 1: opened up and that it's been zero to zero, zero
Speaker 1: to zero. What does that mean? Right? No votes to
Speaker 1: no votes? Something went wrong today. Those machines are a
Speaker 1: lot worse than you want them to be. The companies
Speaker 1: keep them very secret, but there have been audits. At
Speaker 1: Defcon hacker conference, I think a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: we had a bunch of machines and a voting village
Speaker 1: and they were all hacked. Companies say they're all flying,
Speaker 1: they're often online. There's a lot of ways to go
Speaker 1: after those those machines. So this isn't like hacking into
Speaker 1: the NSA. This is like, this is some This is
Speaker 1: a lot more garden variety kind of hacking that we're
Speaker 1: talking about. It's a lot more garden variety. Give me
Speaker 1: a description of the most vulnerable system. What would be
Speaker 1: the one? Touch screens, touch screen voting. Anybody voting on
Speaker 1: touch screen voting is taking a chance. Now that's in
Speaker 1: the US country like Estonia, they have internet voting that
Speaker 1: is even more dangerous than going to a machine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't design a secure internet voting system. I can't
Speaker 1: design a secure electronic voting machine. I can't do it.
Speaker 1: It can't be done. We shouldn't do it. And you'll
Speaker 1: come back to me and say, we're banking over the internet.
Speaker 1: We're doing all these other things over the Internet. Why
Speaker 1: in the world is this different? Why is it different?
Speaker 1: The short answer is that voting requires anonymity. That when
Speaker 1: you think about everything else to do in the Internet,
Speaker 1: your name is attached as an account attached. If there's
Speaker 1: a problem, you can roll it back, you can figure
Speaker 1: it out. MAF you came back to me and said,
Speaker 1: we're going to dump the secret ballots. Right, all votes
Speaker 1: are now public, right, you know, and we could decide
Speaker 1: that's a reasonable way to vote. The Switzerland voted that
Speaker 1: way for many years, the Romans voted that way for
Speaker 1: a lot of their elections. Then it's a different story.
Speaker 1: And actually I could do voting easily. I can vote
Speaker 1: by app, we can vote by Facebook. All that will
Speaker 1: work because at the end of the day you can
Speaker 1: go look online at the tally of votes, make sure
Speaker 1: your name is in the right column, and you know
Speaker 1: the votes accurate. I'm not sure to understand the fact
Speaker 1: that voting has to be we have to have a
Speaker 1: secret ballot makes the task of digital voting. You're saying
Speaker 1: very very difficult. Why exactly, I'm not following that. Why
Speaker 1: can't I have an authentication system to get into the
Speaker 1: voting booth, But then you anonymize me once I'm inside
Speaker 1: the booth and the electronic booth and record my vote.
Speaker 1: So that works great. They are systems that do that.
Speaker 1: And now the question is do we trust the computer security? Right?
Speaker 1: Are the computers that are doing this somehow magically better
Speaker 1: than other computers and they're not, so there'll be lots
Speaker 1: of ways to hack into that, just like there are
Speaker 1: lots of ways to hack into corporate networks and banking
Speaker 1: networks and all those comut to security stories we find. Now,
Speaker 1: if someone hacks into your bank and changes bank balances,
Speaker 1: you will know that, you will see that, you will
Speaker 1: go to the bank, the bank will figure it out.
Speaker 1: The difference is that in the election case, you might
Speaker 1: not know it would happen, and there's no way to
Speaker 1: recover because there is that anonymity, because there's that break
Speaker 1: between the registration right getting into the system, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: and the voting your votes anonymized. I can't have an
Speaker 1: audit system, and I can't post on a public website
Speaker 1: everybody who voted for candidate A ever and voted for
Speaker 1: candidate B. Now that's a check. You do that, and
Speaker 1: we will all though those of us who care enough
Speaker 1: of us will will look at the lists, make sure
Speaker 1: we're there, and we have very high confidence that no
Speaker 1: one's been moved without their consent. You can't do that
Speaker 1: with an anonymous ballot. So what if I just said
Speaker 1: to you, Okay, if the risk of hacking is as
Speaker 1: large as you say, it is, why don't we do
Speaker 1: away with the secret ballot? We could. Now that's a
Speaker 1: voting question, that's not I mean I'm a computer security person.
Speaker 1: That feels like a political science question. I mean, let's
Speaker 1: have experts talk about that. We can talk about some
Speaker 1: of the some of the risks. The risks are going
Speaker 1: to be coercion. So if I am in, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make this up an abusive relationship with you. You can
Speaker 1: tell me how to vote, and you can make sure
Speaker 1: I vote the way you want me to. You could
Speaker 1: buy my vote and make sure I deliver. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: we're in a world where many of us are transparent
Speaker 1: about our votes, but there is political value in the
Speaker 1: secret ballot, and that is probably a discussion we should
Speaker 1: have as a society today. So setting that aside for
Speaker 1: a vote, that's one that's one branch we could follow.
Speaker 1: And so you're saying, if we decided to do with
Speaker 1: the secret ballot, it makes the job of people like
Speaker 1: you a lot easier. Actually, it makes it trivial. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's suddenly it's solved. You download an app, you vote
Speaker 1: anyway you want, webs kiosk on Facebook, nobody cares. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how do we know when there's fraud, So is it
Speaker 1: entirely possible that a lot of the fraud that goes
Speaker 1: on because you're talking about systems like say with a
Speaker 1: touchscreen system, it's quite possible. You would never something could
Speaker 1: be hacking. You'd never know, right, And that's true in
Speaker 1: pretty much all hacking is your email hacked? Who's reading
Speaker 1: your email? You don't know? Yeah, and you know. I
Speaker 1: mean it's a famous hack against Apple Photo Archive where
Speaker 1: photographs of celebrities were stolen and then published. Were they
Speaker 1: not published, we would never know. Examples of networks, equifacts
Speaker 1: they were hacked. They figured it out like five six
Speaker 1: months later by accident. Lots of hacking in our world
Speaker 1: goes unnoticed, and the more skilled you are, the more
Speaker 1: you can cover your tracks. You talk about government hacking,
Speaker 1: I bet a lot of it goes unnoticed forever. Criminal
Speaker 1: hacking tends to be noticed because the crime is going
Speaker 1: to be financial and eventually you'll see you lost money
Speaker 1: and you'll try to figure out how. But hacking for information,
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot more that goes on at
Speaker 1: the state, the state level than we know about because
Speaker 1: it is largely done in secret. So you're talking about
Speaker 1: some of these systems, say, with the test screen system,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult, too impossible to figure out whether hacking
Speaker 1: has taken place. But are there proxies we can use?
Speaker 1: I mean, is it useful to compare electoral outcomes to
Speaker 1: poll results? And is there other ways to flag at
Speaker 1: least suspicious outcomes? There is, but you're not going to
Speaker 1: believe it, right. I mean, the problem of a voting
Speaker 1: as opposed to any other computer security mechanism is that
Speaker 1: after the fact it's partisan. You know, we can do
Speaker 1: polling and compare polling with the actual vote and stuff
Speaker 1: that didn't matter, like what color eminem we want to choose,
Speaker 1: and we can use that say oh yeah, look there's
Speaker 1: been the balance stuffing the purple eminem people organized on
Speaker 1: four chan and they have stuffed the vote. But if
Speaker 1: you do that with an actual election and you're on
Speaker 1: the losing side, how do you feel when someone says
Speaker 1: the actual vote was different than the polls, You're going
Speaker 1: to say, no, what do you mean? The actual vote
Speaker 1: is what counts the polls, don't people lied on the polls.
Speaker 1: Silent majority will have all these reasons, So scientifically we
Speaker 1: might be able to use that as evidence, but politically
Speaker 1: that will never fly as anything because it is so partisan.
Speaker 1: Is there a problem with the expectation we have that then,
Speaker 1: that the winner of election ought to be declared immediately?
Speaker 1: Should we start by abandoning that that notion? So? Yes,
Speaker 1: a slower process would enable us to do more checking
Speaker 1: before announcing anything. The American people don't like that, you
Speaker 1: know nobody, I mean, even going to sleep before knowing
Speaker 1: is bad in our system. If we could abandon the
Speaker 1: immediate knowing, the exit polls, the guessing, all of that.
Speaker 1: As an election security person, as election to reliability person,
Speaker 1: I would like that change. So it's all right, place
Speaker 1: you can have that. How long do you need for
Speaker 1: close elections? You want a little more time because you
Speaker 1: want to make sure everything's accurate in a normal election.
Speaker 1: My guess is only a few days. Because what I
Speaker 1: want to do is do automatic audits on all elections.
Speaker 1: There are systems of audits we can do where the
Speaker 1: level of audit depends on how close the election is.
Speaker 1: If the election is ninety percent to one, you have
Speaker 1: to audit one ballot, or you know, ten percent of
Speaker 1: the ballots. If it's fifty one to forty nine, you
Speaker 1: have to audit and to make this up twenty percent
Speaker 1: of the ballots. The numbers are actually actually a lot
Speaker 1: lower than that, So you know, two thousand Florida, we
Speaker 1: actually wanted a lot of time, and politically we couldn't
Speaker 1: get it because that was a badly designed ballot. So
Speaker 1: it was a slow, manual recount that was triggered. I
Speaker 1: think one of the I think the Gore team to
Speaker 1: ask for the recount according to law, so I want
Speaker 1: automatic recounts that don't have to be asked for. That
Speaker 1: we just do as a matter of course because we
Speaker 1: don't know where there's going to be problems. So it's
Speaker 1: really right now, it's going to depend on COVID. So
Speaker 1: we're going to have an election that will be a
Speaker 1: lot of mail in votes at the last minute, and
Speaker 1: some of the states say they have to be postmarked
Speaker 1: on election day, so which means what they delivered three
Speaker 1: days later and they are counted slowly after that. I
Speaker 1: worry that they will be preliminary results on election night
Speaker 1: and that the demographics of the mail the late mail
Speaker 1: in voters will be different. I don't even know how
Speaker 1: in what way, but you know, it's plausible that there'll
Speaker 1: be some demographic that waits at the last minute, and
Speaker 1: then you'll have the person who's was declared the presumptive
Speaker 1: winner on election night. Say I was robbed when two
Speaker 1: weeks later all of these mail in ballots swing the
Speaker 1: election the other way. And I don't even know which
Speaker 1: party is going to benefit. Right that it's not even
Speaker 1: obvious to me. Let's do Bruce's optimal system tell me
Speaker 1: what election, what the electoral process should look like in
Speaker 1: the United States. So this is so, I think we
Speaker 1: have a problem in that we require separate registration. I
Speaker 1: think registration should come with citizenship when you turn eighteen,
Speaker 1: and a lot of other countries do that. We have
Speaker 1: a separate registration process that has largely been a voter
Speaker 1: suppression process, and we should do away with it. So
Speaker 1: you're saying, at the age of eighteen, everyone automatically has
Speaker 1: the right to vote, and that's true, but they should
Speaker 1: all they should automatically be registered, they should have ability
Speaker 1: to vote. Yeah, how does automatic registration work in practical terms?
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. You automatically get a source
Speaker 1: security number when you're born, so maybe something's flipped when
Speaker 1: you turn eighteen. I mean I don't know how these
Speaker 1: processes work. Yeah, but I think removing that separate step
Speaker 1: will make elections better and fairer and will increase participation.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I'd like there to be. What the US
Speaker 1: doesn't have is an independent voting commission. A lot of
Speaker 1: countries have a bureaucracy that's in charge of voting. Candidate
Speaker 1: does the UK does. We have a bureaucracy in charge
Speaker 1: of the census, a similar breaucracy in charge of voting,
Speaker 1: in charge of accuracy, not partisan this, I think we'll
Speaker 1: go a long way to making this more more secure.
Speaker 1: So we should do that, and that group will be
Speaker 1: in charge of making sure these voting lists are accurate,
Speaker 1: are current, are sent to the precincts where they need
Speaker 1: to be sent. If they are problems, they can there's
Speaker 1: a helpline to figure it out. As much of this
Speaker 1: should be done with paperbackup as possible, because we all
Speaker 1: worried about computer hacking, the voting itself needs to be
Speaker 1: done on secure machines. I mentioned Minnesota optical scan of
Speaker 1: voting that is the gold standard right now and all cases,
Speaker 1: in all elections, we do an audit. The size of
Speaker 1: it depends on the margin of victory. None of what
Speaker 1: you've described is exotic or untried or a lot of
Speaker 1: times when we do these solvable podcasts, we're talking about
Speaker 1: a solution that's off on the horizon somewhere. These solusions
Speaker 1: are not off on the horizon. There some chunk of
Speaker 1: it is in the state of Minnesota. Why has it
Speaker 1: been so difficult to convince other states to put in
Speaker 1: place some of these already available voting techniques because the
Speaker 1: problems are not technical. The problems are political. If you
Speaker 1: believe that your side benefit fits from ignoring the problem,
Speaker 1: why would you spend money on the problem. I mean,
Speaker 1: voting machines are for profit enterprises in this country. There's
Speaker 1: government lobbying on spying and selling voting machines. It's not
Speaker 1: likely again getting back to a government bureaucracy in charge
Speaker 1: of accuracy, we don't have that. So if you are
Speaker 1: a company that makes touching voting machines, you're going to
Speaker 1: shove out all this kind of noise on how great
Speaker 1: your machines are, and the election officials don't know better,
Speaker 1: and they're going to buy them. After two thousand, we
Speaker 1: had to help America Vote Act, where Congress apportioned a
Speaker 1: lot of money to give to the states to improve
Speaker 1: their voting machines. A lot of those went to computerized
Speaker 1: voting machines that have been dumped since then because of
Speaker 1: security problems. So this is a very political issue. My
Speaker 1: problems are in technological that's it's not core science, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's policy and politics. Do you think there might also
Speaker 1: be a kind of implicit bias that among some people
Speaker 1: that as we move towards more digital digitalization of the system,
Speaker 1: we're making it safer. In other words, are people assuming
Speaker 1: that the application of additional technology here is what will
Speaker 1: improve things and not you're actually you're you're arguing for
Speaker 1: a return to a much more traditional way of voting.
Speaker 1: And this is how we started the podcast, Right, what's
Speaker 1: different about the risks of voting? So, yes, right, there's
Speaker 1: a belief that, you know, we're putting computers on this,
Speaker 1: Computers are good computers going to make this better, safer, faster,
Speaker 1: do all of these things, and it turns out security
Speaker 1: is uh, you know, ends up being something that's that's
Speaker 1: flowing in the other direction, and that that makes this harder.
Speaker 1: What can listeners to this podcast, what can ordinary citizens
Speaker 1: and voters do to to help advance the case of
Speaker 1: most secure elections. So there are organizations that are advocating
Speaker 1: for accurate voting, Verified Voting, dot Org, the National Electoral
Speaker 1: Defense Coalition, There's a group called True the Vote, the
Speaker 1: Brennan Center for Justice. So those are some of the
Speaker 1: organizations I support and think we all should. But if
Speaker 1: this is not a political issue, this will not change fundamentally.
Speaker 1: That is the problem. The tech is real, but the
Speaker 1: tech is solvable. We need the political will to solve it.
Speaker 1: We need the money to solve it. Bruce, thank you
Speaker 1: so much. This has been fascinating. Thank you again. Hey,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. This is fun. That was Malcolm
Speaker 1: Gladwell speaking with security technologist Brush Nier. Remember to check
Speaker 1: out our show notes for links to the suggestions our
Speaker 1: guest mate for ways that you can get involved. Solvable
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our show is
Speaker 1: produced by Camille Baptista, Senior producer Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardou
Speaker 1: is our managing producer. Our executive producer is Mia Lobell.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Heather Faine, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori and
Speaker 1: Kadija Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg.