Saturday, October 25, 2008

Learn About The Candidates Through Public Records

Learn About The Candidates Through Public Records October 10th, 2008 ·

With two presidential debates and the one and only vice presidential debate complete, are you satisfied with the information provided by the candidates? It has been a truly long and historic campaign season, but there is still a lot to know before November 4th.

As everyone is probably quite aware of at this point, the economy is in the dumps, billions of dollars are being spent on two wars, and the health care and educational systems are not up to the high standards worthy of a leading nation. So, this election could be one of the most important decisions of this generation.

One way to know where the candidates stands is by reviewing their policies and plans, which are often available on the candidates' web pages. However, if you want to dig a little deeper, looking into the past of the candidates may provide even more insight.John McCain, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all been under a pretty tight microscope, but sometimes knowing about someone's past and present lives can provide a glimpse into the type of person they are. I've found the public records are a great way to find out additional information about the candidates for president and vice president.

One of the great things about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is that certain records are required to be made accessible by the general public. Through public records, you can find information as basic as contact information and as politically engaging as campaign finance reports.

Below is a list of some great resources available through public records:

Contact Information: Search government databases to find contact information for any office. You can use this to access web pages or perhaps put in a call to a political office. For example here you can send an email to Senator Joe Biden.

Campaign Finance Reports: Campaign finance reports address what avenues candidates receive donations from. You can view the names of contributors, dates of contributions, and amount. Campaign finance reports also show expenditures from a campaign.

Court Records: Are any of the candidates involved in litigation or were they involved in litigation in the past? Most court records are public records, and, where available, online searches can be performed by name.

Land Records: These public records allow you to view information about land or property owned by a candidate (or any other person of interest). You can often find out mortgage, owner, and property tax information.

The Free Public Records Directory provides access to all these public records, and more. You can choose the state where a candidate resides or is currently holding office (i.e.: Arizona, Alaska, Delaware, or Illinois), and then choose from a list of public records categories to search.

http://publicrecords.onlinesearches.com/public-records-blog/2008/10/10/learn-about-the-candidates-through-public-records/

Friday, October 24, 2008

Social Security: John McCain's Alternate Universe

In the Social Security portion of John McCain's interview with Wolf Blitzer. And two key points stood out. First, McCain fabricated an alternative history of the 2005 Social Security battle in order to create a new tax talking points. According to McCain, and he repeated this again and again, "the [Social Security] talks broke down because the Democrats insisted as a precondition that we raise taxes." That's very weird. First, there were no Social Security talks. And the Democrats didn't make any demands to raise taxes. They didn't even propose raising taxes. As many of you know, I followed that debate extremely closely. And McCain just made this stuff out of whole cloth. Really bizarre. Second, Blitzer asked if McCain still would have favored President Bush's privatization plan, as he did in 2005, that we see how volatile the stock market it is. McCain repeatedly refused to answer the question and instead repeated the tax precondition fib. The key point -- after standing behind privatization as recently as a few weeks ago, now McCain refuses to say he still supports it.

The Electronic Voting Machine Glitches Begin - The Board Blog - NYTimes.com

The Electronic Voting Machine Glitches Begin - The Board Blog - NYTimes.com

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"Voters in West Virginia, which is conducting early voting, are complaining that ES & S voting machines recorded votes for Democratic candidates as votes for Republicans.

Calvin Thomas of Ripley, a retired factory worker, said that when he tried to vote for Barack Obama, it registered the vote for John McCain. He said his daughter had the same problem.

They got an election worker to fix their ballots, but Mr. Thomas said he was worried other voters might not notice the problem.

In Tennessee, the problem seems to be the reverse. At least three voters complained that ES & S voting machines registered their votes for Mr. McCain as votes for Mr. Obama.

“Vote flipping,” as this glitch is known, is an acknowledged problem with electronic voting machines. It’s also pretty scary for anyone who cares about democracy.

West Virginia’s secretary of state asked localities to “recalibrate” their machines, and said the problem was then solved.

We believe the problem will be solved when voting is no longer done on electronic voting machines.

We favor paper ballots, counted by an optical scan reader. And when the paper ballots are counted, if the total is different from what the optical scan reader reports, the paper ballots’ total should be the official election result.

We also encourage voters to pay extra attention if they are voting on electronic machines."

http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/the-electronic-voting-machine-glitches-begin/?8ty&emc=ty

2008 Voter Information

3008 Voter Info, Google Maps

Find your voting location and more. Just enter your home address and click the ‘Search’ button.

“ Developed with state and local election officials and the Voting Information Project.
In conjunction with the League of Women Voters.”

'Block the Vote' Tactics Go Online This Election - Desktop Security News Analysis - Dark Reading - Sent Using Google Toolbar

'Block the Vote' Tactics Go Online This Election - Desktop Security News Analysis - Dark Reading

OCTOBER 22, 2008 Voter suppression and deception tactics could go online in the final days or hours of this hotly contested Presidential election season -- including spoofing voting and campaign Websites, fake voice-call blasts via VOIP, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks on legitimate polling Websites -- according to a new report released this week.

There already have been online attempts to disrupt the election activity of specific blocks of voters, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center's (EPIC) E-Deceptive Campaign Practices Report. Phony emails were sent to Florida voters stating that they would be unable to vote if their ID didn't match a state database; robo-calls went to women voters in North Carolina with false information about their voter registration status; and fake emails were sent to voters in Maryland saying they would be barred from voting if their home was under foreclosure.

Voter suppression campaigns traditionally have used misleading telephone calls, direct mail, and mass literature drops designed to confuse or inhibit voters from casting their ballots. Typical tricks include spreading phony information or rumors about polling times, the election date, voter-identification rules, or voter eligibility. But with voters using the Internet more for researching and supporting their voting decisions and logistics, the threat of online deception campaigns against voters has become very real this year -- using email, instant messaging, VOIP, and cell phones in an attempt to rapidly and widely spread misinformation to voters and to disrupt the election process, according to the EPIC report.

Worries over voter suppression have intensified as voter registration numbers have hit near-record marks for this election. And online deceptive tactics will be tougher to identify and stop than traditional ground-game methods. "Prevention of electronic deceptive practices will be as difficult, or more so, than attempts to prevent those launched by deceptive land-line telephone calls, direct mail, or knock and drop campaign efforts," the report says. "The challenge of stopping electronic deceptive campaign practices are difficult because the source of the attack can be from any location around the globe, the launch of an attack can be timed to begin within hours of an election; and tracing the source of the attack can be time consuming and not yield actionable results."

Unscrupulous people can easily "profile" voters using widely available information on the Internet and use that in their targeted attacks, the report says. "In the context of deceptive election practices 'spoofing,' 'phishing,' 'pharming,' 'denial of service,' and 'social engineering' are tactics that can be used to deceive voters. In addition, 'rumor mongering' can also impact voter participation," the report says. Bruce Schneier, a co-contributor to the report, says he doesn't expect election officials to do much about these threats because they are still relatively new on the election scene, and there's not much they can do about them in some cases, anyway.

"Basically, the moral is that dropping the cost of communication down to free means that both good and bad communication is much cheaper. We know this is true for commercial email: spam. This is also true for deceptive voting suppression practices," says Schneier, who is chief security technology officer at BT.

Here's a look at the types of unsavory tactics that could be deployed online: A state election board's Website could be spoofed, for instance, with purposely deceptive information on polling-place locations, times, and voter registration rules.

Phishing emails could be pushed out to voters, offering phony information on polling sites, voter records, voter registration, and voter registration status in an effort to confuse or scare away voters, for instance.

Pharming emails could use hijacked domain names such as "Get Out the Vote," according to the report, as a way to redirect voters to fraudulent sites.

DOS attacks could be launched on voter information sites or voter help hotlines in order to disrupt the process.

"Rumor-mongering" efforts could be launched that seed fake stories through blogs about election delays or cancellations "due to an emergency." Poll workers could be targeted by social engineering tactics that result in delays in poll-location openings or other disruptions

A "Google bomb" could be set to boost a Web page ranking with phony links.

The EPIC report also provides recommendations for election officials and voters in how to look out for these scams and prevent themselves from falling victim to them. The report was issued in conjunction with a legal and policy report on these online voter suppression threats that EPIC co-authored with Common Cause and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=166495&f_src=drweekly