Joe Cadillic gets so excited when someone else posts something that he’s been screaming writing about about for ages.
In August, Joe recognized that DHS offering extra security for elections by declaring the election process as “critical infrastructure” had the potential to expand DHS’s power waaaay too much.
Of course, the government sees it differently and as a Good Thing. As AP reported this past week:
Citing increasingly sophisticated cyber bad actors and an election infrastructure that’s “vital to our national interests,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is designating U.S. election systems critical infrastructure, a move that provides more federal help for state and local governments to keep their election systems safe from tampering.
“Given the vital role elections play in this country, it is clear that certain systems and assets of election infrastructure meet the definition of critical infrastructure, in fact and in law,” Johnson said in a statement Friday. He added: “Particularly in these times, this designation is simply the right and obvious thing to do.”
But what does this involve? Although it seems to give DHS more responsibility, do local election boards have any added responsibility to ensure the fairness of the election process? It turns out that entities who get tagged as “critical infrastructure – including storage facilities, polling places and vote tabulation locations, plus technology involved in the process, including voter registration databases, voting machines and other systems used to manage the election process and report and display results – don’t have to participate.
But perhaps one the most concerning parts of this all is that:
The designation allows for information to be withheld from the public when state, local and private partners meet to discuss election infrastructure security — potentially injecting secrecy into an election process that’s traditionally and expressly a transparent process. U.S. officials say such closed door conversations allow for frank discussion that would prevent bad actors from learning about vulnerabilities. DHS would also be able to grant security clearances when appropriate and provide more detailed threat information to states.
That secrecy could also be used to withhold information about absolutely shabby security or insider wrong-doing. And that’s not acceptable.
Jon Rappoport is concerned, too, as Joe was obviously delighted to read Rappoport’s opinion:
In truth, the Dept. of Homeland Security is spearheading a movement to connect, cross reference, and integrate every major apparatus of data- collection in both the private and public sectors.
This is the ongoing op.
It is not partisan. It flies the banner of no political party. It pretends to protect the citizenry.
But, in fact, it is the major long-term threat to the citizenry.
Are Joe and Jon over-reacting, or are too many of us under-reacting? And if most of us are under-reacting, there will be no way to salvage anything of our privacy soon, as DHS amasses more and more information and databases.