Tag Archives: national security

CISA Says November 3rd Election was Most Secure in American History



The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) posted a joint statement in which they declared: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history”. This should be a big relief to those who were concerned about potential security issues, or who have become convinced that the election was “rigged”.

“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes and errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised”.

The statement also pointed out: “Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.”

CISA is the nation’s risk advisor, working with partners against today’s threats and collaborating to build more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future.

The Joint Statement included people from the CISA, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) executive committee, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair, the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), the National Association of State Election Directors (NASEED), and members of the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC).

In short, this group includes people who have the job of making sure our election infrastructure is secure. Together, they have more data about this election than anyone else. Personally, I think this statement should be viewed as a major debunking of the misinformation that has been spread about this election.


Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear?



Interception of Communications Commissioner“If you’ve nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear” is often trotted out in the debate around privacy and secrecy. Superficially it seems reasonable but even with a modicum of critical thinking, the adage becomes trite and flawed. However, even if you did believe that “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” was reasonable, then the latest report from the British 2011 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner (.pdf) ought to give food for thought.

The report covers the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which includes the postal service, telephony and electronic forms of communication, and can be carried out for both law enforcement and national security purposes. There are two distinct areas, the first being the interception of communications and the second being the acquisition of communications data. Simplistically, the first area is about directly listening in on a communication and the second is about who, when and where a communication took place.

In 2011, the total number of lawful interception warrants for the UK was 2911, and this all seems quite reasonable, given the population of the UK (60-odd million). However, in amongst the successful security operations, we also find that the security and associated agencies made 42 mistakes (1.4%), usually through typographic errors. In all instances, the error was discovered before the intercept took place or else all the material associated with intercept was destroyed.

Communication data requests cover information about communications, mainly subscriber data, service use data and traffic data, rather than the content of the communication itself. There were 494 078 communication data requests in 2011, an 11% decrease on the previous year. As you might guess, there were a few errors there too, with 895 mistakes being reported. Although this represents an error rate of only 0.18%, I’m sure it will be of little comfort to the two wholly innocent individuals who were arrested by the police because of these mistakes. Again typographic errors in the transcriptions of phone numbers or IP addresses were largely to blame but of additional concern was that nearly 100 of the errors were identified by auditors and weren’t recognised at the time of the requests.

If you think that because you’ve nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear, think again. You’ve everything to fear from the transposed digit, the wrong post code look-up and the minimum-wage flunky copying and pasting from the wrong records.

Probably not what you were worried about at all.