The New Yorker Radio Hour - Is Voting Safe?

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

For democracy to function, we have to trust and accept the results of elections. But that trust is increasingly difficult to maintain in a world where malicious actors like the G.R.U., the Russian intelligence agency, have been actively probing our election systems for technological vulnerabilities. Sue Halpern, who reports on election security, spoke with the researcher Logan Lamb, who found a massive amount of information from the Georgia election system sitting unsecured on the Internet. The information included election officials’ passwords and the names and addresses of voters, and Lamb made the discovery during the time that (according to the Mueller investigation) Russian hackers were probing the system. Georgia is one of a number of states that do not use any paper backup for their balloting, so suspected hacking of voting machines or vote tabulators can be nearly impossible to prove. On top of this, new restrictive voting laws purge voters who, for instance, haven’t voted in the last few elections, so hackers can disenfranchise voters by deleting or changing information in the databases—without tampering with the tallied votes. Susan Greenhalgh of the National Election Defense Coalition tells Halpern that while some states are inclined to resist federal assistance in their election operations, they are poorly equipped to fight cyber-battles on their own. Plus, the story of explorer Henry Worsley, who set out at fifty-five ski to ski alone across Antarctica, hauling more than three hundred pounds of gear and posting an audio diary by satellite phone. New Yorker staff writer David Grann spoke with Worsley’s widow, Joanna, about the painful choice she made to support her husband in an endeavor that seemed fatal.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When we first began learning of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which seemed absolutely mind-boggling at the time, something that just couldn't happen. It was often said that Russia had hacked the election. We quickly learned a more specific, more accurate way of putting it. Russia had influenced the election by manipulating political messages on Facebook and so on. But they hadn't exactly gone into election computer systems and altered the results. Not exactly.

Now, if foreign agents could actually change the outcome of an election, that would be, and you can't say this lightly, an existential threat to American democracy. But what we've learned since 2016 is, if somebody really did want to hack the election, it wouldn't be impossible. Not at all. Sue Halpern has been writing for the New Yorker about election security, and what she's found should scare us all. Logan Lamb is a security researcher in Georgia. I'm generally a curious guy.

I enjoy the poking around part. I like to do that in my free time. In August 2016, at the height of the presidential election, he started poking around the Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems, which ran all the elections in Georgia. In the course of doing that, I did a very, very simple Google search. I said, for the site elections.kinesaw.edu, Google, please give me all of the PDF documents on this website. And generally, that turns up reports or public presentations. And this particular search didn't turn that up. Instead, I found a very curious link, and I was presented with a very long list of what appeared to be voter names in some sort of identifier next to their name.

And I immediately thought, wow, that seems a little strange. And then he crafted a simple program to download what was publicly accessible from the Georgia election website. And what he found in all of that data astonished him. These documents contained supervisor passwords to be used on election day. There were also Windows programs that are placed on electronic poll books. You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to know that supervisor passwords should absolutely not be sitting around online unprotected. Immediately, I thought to myself, wow, this doesn't look like the sort of data they would purposefully put on this web server. In total, Lamb downloaded 15 gigabytes worth of data from the Center for Election Systems.

This by itself would be a huge story. But on top of it, Lamb also found a security hole through which he could download the entire database of the state's 6.7 million registered voters. I had access to their full name, their address, birth date, last four digits of their social security number, and their driver's license number. And there were also Jim's databases. And Jim's databases are used by the Jim server, which is the central tabulator, which does the final vote count. If Logan Lamb had been a bad guy, this would have been a bonanza. The scariest scenario I can think of would be an attacker implanting malware on the programs that are placed on the electronic pole books or altering the, voter registration databases to disenfranchise voters.

An attacker could have compromised that web server and used it as a beachhead to get deeper into the Center for Election Systems Networks. This is right around the same time that the Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, rejected an offer from the Department of Homeland Security to help the state harden the election system to protect it from hackers. Because Kemp said that the system was secure the way it was and that the state didn't want any help from the federal government. It wasn't until March of 2017,

so seven months after Lamb's initial finding, that the system was finally patched. Then more information started to trickle out. The Intercept published the NSA report that had been hacked about Russian cyber attacks on election systems in the lead-up to 2017. And later, the Mueller indictment found that the Russian hackers had looked for vulnerabilities

to election servers in a number of states, including Georgia. Look, we have no idea of the Russians made alterations to Georgia's election systems in 2016. And if they did, we probably wouldn't know. But this is a critical moment. We know that foreign actors are interested in our election system, just as we head into the midterms. A few months ago, the Director of National Intelligence said, the warning lights are blinking red. Some states took this seriously.

But others seem to have left themselves wide open. We're in a new world now. We understand the states need to run elections. That's their authority, but they're not cybersecurity experts. Susan Greenhall is the policy director of the National Election Defense Coalition. So, you know, you and I met at DefCon where people were hacking lots of election machines left and right. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about some of the problems in Georgia. with their machinery and perhaps even elsewhere since the same machines are used across the country?

Sure. The machines used in Georgia are computerized touchscreen voting machines. Georgia is one of five dates that entirely has machines that don't have a paper ballot. Then there's also other machines which count paper ballots. Those are also computers. And those machines can be hacked and have digital records changed. within them. And that's why having the paper ballot is so crucial because it's that link to what the voter got to see and say that's how I voted and to be sure that that's what's counted correctly. Election security folks on the ground and people who are the vendors of these machines insist that they're not really hackable because they're not connected to the internet. And I wonder if you just explain why it is that there's this discreetable.

in the explanation for the safety of these machines. While many of the machines that you and I might interact with on Election Day at our polling location, whether it's a touchscreen voting machine or an optical scanner, may not be connected to the Internet, it has to get programming information from another machine, which is essentially desktop or regular laptop computer, that program, here are the candidates, here are the races, is how the ballot should lay out, that information has to go from that computer to the voting machine that's in the polling location by some sort of removable media. And it's well known that if the device that is doing the programming gets infected with malicious software, it can be transferred to the individual voting machines. But furthermore, there's another fact that debunks that assertion, which is that many of these machines that are in the polling location,

are equipped with wireless modems to transmit their election results back to the county headquarters on election night. And those wireless modems go over cellular networks, and those cellular networks are part of the Internet. We spend a lot of time talking about hacking voting machines or hacking vote tallies. But there's this new way of hacking an election. And it has to do with the new restrictive voter ID laws in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia that purge voters from the voting rolls who haven't voted in previous elections or whose names don't precisely match the name on the voter registration database. Personally, this has been a concern for me because on Election Day in 2016,

people were showing up to vote in Durham County, North Carolina, and their names weren't on the voter rolls. In Durham County, they use electronic poll books. And people were showing up and they were being told you're at the wrong polling location, or you've already voted during early voting, or you already voted absentee, or your name is in here, or your address has been changed. The vendor for the electronic poll books was a vendor. named VR Systems. Now, VR Systems had been targeted by a Russian intelligence spearfishing attack, and the state board of elections did their own investigation, as did the county. The county report has been made public. It wasn't very in-depth that didn't consider a cyber

attack and concluded that it was poll worker error or malfunctions. But I think that's an question as to what happened in North Carolina on Election Day. We heard earlier in the year that $380 million was being released to the states for election security. Can you talk about that? Like, is that going to make a big difference in the midterms in 2020 at all? So there was $380 million was appropriated under the Health America Vote Act, 2002. So there were no specific security strings put on it. You have to do this or you have to do that with the money. And there's a lot of states are using that money to good effect to try to bulk up their security profile. But it would be really useful to have some federal legislation to move the states to those remedies that we know are so essential to securing our elections. Are you worried about the kind of legitimacy of our election system and even, you know, broader than that, our democracy?

I worry that people will try to undermine the credibility of it. And the best way to counter that is if we have systems that produce evidence of the election results, which is accomplished with paper ballots and doing a post-election audit. there's a term for evidence-based elections, and that's what we want to see, evidence-based elections. So the Trump administration has made it clear that they're actively not interested in a legislative fix, and the midterms are just a few weeks away. So the states are basically on their own, and it's hard to imagine election officials actually having a line of defense against cyber attacks by Russian intelligence agents or other malicious actors. But if we don't do something about this as a country, we're putting our democracy at risk. Sue Halpern is a contributor to the New Yorker, and she spoke with Susan Greenhall of the National Election Defense Coalition, and with Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity researcher.

Next week, our coverage of the midterm elections continues with staff writer Andrew Morrance, who's going to report on the campaigns of the far-right white supremacist candidates. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Underway at last, about 100 miles from the Antarctic landmass. And having sorted out my sledge, taking a bearing south, I was underway by mid-afternoon. In 2015, a British Army veteran name Henry Worsley set out to become the first person to cross Antarctica on foot, alone and unaided. Portugal miles. I'm in great spirit. It's so wonderful to be back on the snow, heading south. Good night. Worsley went on skis, pulling a sled loaded with more than 300 pounds of equipment.

He would pass the South Pole and then continue on to the other side of Antarctica. For that moment, on the side of the airplane that has just dropped you off at your starpoint. The Guiling Continent will strip you bear. It was as difficult a journey as a human being could voluntarily undertake. Staff writer David Grant, who's just written a book about Henry Worsley, brings us the story. Henry had been to the South Pole twice before, but this would be his first solo expedition. And it was also longer than his other expeditions and more dangerous than any other expedition he had ever attempted. Henry was a meticulous planner, ruthlessly whittling down all his equipment to the bare essentials.

most important was his satellite phone, which would allow him to stay in contact with ALE, Antarctic logistics and expeditions, a company that helped get polar explorers on and off the continent. It's 16 January. Each night, after a long trek, he would call ALE, give them his medical condition and his coordinates. If he was ever in trouble,

he could call for what he referred to as the most expensive taxi ride in the world, which would be a rescue plane to pull him out. You and Andrew? He also called a friend in London so he could record an audio diary of his day, which could then be posted on his website. And it updated listeners about what he was going through,

what he was eating, what he was feeling. He was on the most of the day whilst wave after wave of low cloud cast intriguing bands of shadow and light that raced across the surface. Well, he was incredibly good-looking. Henry met his wife Joanne at a party in London in 1989. Most of my friends were in the art world, and we all thought that someone in the Special Forces was very, very glamorous. And actually, I like adventurous people.

I think it's great talking to people who are adventurers. He had recently completed his selection course for the Special Air Service, or SAS, a legendary elite commando unit. In many ways, he and Joanna were opposites. She hates the cold. She could think of any more dreadful place in the world than Antarctica. Yet for all their differences, they shared a similar sensibility.

He really was a true romantic. He loved poetry. He loved art. He did tapestry. He stitched the most. wonderful tapestry of two sledges going across the snow. He loved the history of all these old explorers, and he glamorized their lives at his head.

Three stars steps over crevasses, two soft snow, enchanting blizzard, until eventually on the first amount. Henry worshipped Ernest Shackleton, who in many ways was a failure as an explorer, on his first expedition that he commanded himself, he set out to reach the South Pole with three other men. They got within 97 miles, nautical miles of the pole, but he feared that if he kept going,

his men who were already fading would not make it back. Those 14 men who were my comrades, who regardless of self, and so he made a decision that always astonished Henry Worsley. He decided to turn back. And on his sense, he said, we have achieved the men. And on his other most famous expedition, Shackleton had wanted to walk across Antarctica. He thought it was the last great prize to be achieved.

But before he even reached Antarctica, his ship, the endurance, got frozen in the ice. And Shackleton found him and all his men marooned on an ice flow more than 800 miles from the closest island with any contact with civilization. What made it so amazing was he was able to guide all the men in his immediate party and get them back all home alive. Well, yes, I was very interested as a child. Photographs of the endurance story absolutely captivated me. He started reading more of the diaries and the accounts that they wrote about those expeditions. He began to burn with this very peculiar ambition with very few sure,

which was to kind of suffer these miseries and become a polar explorer. And the motto that he lived by was Shackleton's family motto, which was by endurance we conquer. I should have heard warning bells when he came back from a trip to South Georgia just after I first met him and was incredibly excited

because he had managed to sleep beside Shackleton's grave. It wasn't until when he was about 40, that he started really talking about wanting to do an expedition and follow in Shirkleton's footsteps. So by the time Henry was talking about doing his first expedition, he had two children, Max and Alicia. Initially, when he decided he wanted to do something that, you know, how many people say suddenly, wait a second, I want to go walk to the South Pole, you know, his kids were a little bit bewildered. But Joanna was very supportive. Both of us were huge believers in trying to fulfil

dreams. A lot of the time, marriage stops you from fulfilling your own individual dreams because you feel you'll have to get permission from the other person. And I felt that through my 20s, I had fulfilled a lot of my dreams. I'd had a lot of fun. and he went into the army when he was 18, and I felt that it was his turn, really. So for his third trip, he wanted to walk across Antarctica to fulfill the goal that his hero, Shackton, was not able to achieve, but he wanted to do it alone.

Completely up to me. At the moment, I'm up at 7.30, on the trail at 9 a.m. Each day was similar. I mean, Henry would get up at early in the... the morning, pack up his sled. This usually took about an hour. His harness would be connected to the sled, and he would begin to haul it, not unlike a mule. Well, I've been skiing for 90 minutes, and then taking a five-minute break. And he would walk with his skis burning as much as 8,000 calories in a day?

I've been craving food, fish pie, brown bread, double cream, steak and chips, more chips, smoke salmon, big potato, eggs, rice pudding. He would do this Perkulean task and challenge day after day. There was something almost primal about it. Ah, just can't wait. His singular purpose became to just make his mileage. He had to achieve so many miles a day if he was to ultimately accomplish his goal.

9.4 nautical miles today. There's a lot of it was hard. Good evening, everybody. So in sum, a tough day. A 9.7 nautical miles were hard one. I traveled a bit longer today, just over 11 nautical miles at this early stage. Everybody, day 21, 10.3 nautical miles was a disappointment. But it's 14 nautical miles is all I can do at the moment in a 12-hour day.

He would track for 14, 15, sometimes 16 hours across an alien landscape. It's covered with a sheet of ice. It's pock with crevasses. A whiteout with just enough visibility to see the horizon. greeted me this morning. It was a very tough day with many pauses for intake of breath, leaning forward on my ski sticks, head dropped.

At 7pm, I checked my mileage covered during the day, and it was 11. 0.7. At 8pm, I checked again was 12.9. Not enough. I talk to him a lot. Well, he was out there on

a satellite phone, he found it much harder than other expeditions. And at least if you're with other people, you can take turns to be at the front. Whereas if you're the lead skier for a thousand miles, he found it cripplingly hard. He felt the constant strain of making his mileage so that he could reach the end point of the expedition before the end of the month of January, because in February begins the winter season in Antarctica, where the temperature drops even further. It can reach minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Even ALE shuts down then. And at that point, there would be no exit. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew serve your turn long after they are gone,

and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the will which says to them, Many of you will of course recognise those lines by Roger Kipling. I'm getting more feeble and more empty, but I still seem to have the will, which says to my heart and nerves and sinews. I listened to his blogs every day, and they were pretty good. They were pretty upbeat.

But I was just very concerned. It was a thousand miles on his own. He was older. He was 55 when he set out instead of 40. She could hear him growing more tired, and she wondered what she should do. He worried constantly, constantly, that he was being delayed.

I was in a terrible position as to whether to say, Henry, stop, just listen for a minute. You are not going to make that. the end. You cannot make the end. Or say, you'll do it, darling. It's a really difficult one. I chose to say, I'm sure you'll be fine. Last night, a bad stomach. By now, his entire body was in agony. His back throbbed. All his muscles ate. He was suffering from the early signs of frostbite, especially in his thumb, which he struck.

He had lost more than 40 pounds. He was so tired that one day during a snack break, he fell asleep while sitting on his sled in the middle of a whiteout. Rest up. But you have to listen to your body sometimes. You feel much better. He kept a diary, a personal diary. This one he didn't broadcast. One evening he wrote, legs are stick thin and arms puny. Andy, just to let you know, I'm...

I'm putting into next hours at the moment, so my briefs will come, but then maybe much shorter. It's now nine o'clock, then I'm being off another couple of hours. It was just really not right. There was something really not right about it then. His voice, his despair. He cried quite a lot. He never cried. The details day 66, 17 jam, and troubled 16 hours.

In order to keep track, I must now do 16 vertical miles per day. This makes for a very long 16 hour day. So that's what I have to do, or do it I will. As long today, this evening, I got 142 vertical miles at the finish line. The next day, day 67, his journal entry is short, and his writing is, increasingly difficult to read. He wrote, Mixed bag,

white out, soft snow, painful while afraid of stomach, worried about time and distance. On day 68, he didn't record a message for his listeners. It's all become quite a more deal

in the moment. No narrate is. Could he just explain that time has caught up? Thank you, the next day on day 69, He scribbled in his diary, awful, had to stop after five hours, totally exhausted, feeling terrible, very deplorable, rested rest of day and into following morning, just want it all to end in a good way.

He was unable to move, really, at that stage. We had been on the phone nonstop for two days. Me, very hysterical. begging him to pull out and him just asking me to be patient. Henry throughout his life, especially whenever he was in danger and he was in more danger now than he'd ever been in his life, he would always ask himself, what would Shacks do? What would Shackleton do? And he had always sought, by endurance we conquer, was the message of Shackleton, that you could always prevail through force of mind. But the thing that set Shackleton apart from so many other explorers who went to their polar grave is that he acknowledged

his human limitations and the limitations of his men and he turned back. That was the thing about Shackleton. Henry was 900 miles into his 1,000 mile journey when he rang ALE and called for the most

expensive taxi ride in the world. Then he composed a final public message. My journey is at a minute of time spent 70 days, all alone in a place I love. They will heal over time, and I'll come to terms of the disappointment. Henry was resigning off, journey's end, all due later. Ellie arrived later that day, and Henry walked to the plane on his own volition.

He was flown to Western Antarctica, to Ellie Base Camp, and there he called Joanna. It was such a relief for me, I can't tell you. He was with doctors, and he said to me, I'm fine. I'm going to stay here for a few days and just build up my strength. I'm having a cup of tea and a biscuit, and I'm going to be fine. But his condition continued to deteriorate,

and he was flown overnight to a hospital in southern Chile, where they discovered he had paratinitis, which is an infection in the abdomen lining. When Joanna Hurdy had been taken to a hospital, she hurried to get on a plane. Shortly after she landed in Chile, she received an update that Henry's liver had failed. Shortly after that, she heard that his kidney had failed. And before she could get to the hospital, she learned that Henry had died. The news of Henry's death was greeted in England with an outpouring of emotion.

He was healed as an inspiration. a polar hero, much like the heroes that he had revered growing up. Hundreds of people went to Henry's funeral, including the top military brass, as well as Prince William. In December of 2017, nearly two years after Henry died, Joanna, Max, and Alicia set off for the island of South Georgia, which was where Shackleton was buried, and which Henry himself has visited many years ago. And they carried with him Henry's ashes. It's an extraordinary little bay And we had a wonderful service there

And we all poured whiskey onto Shackleton's grave They then began to climb up an icy mountain slope And where the earth was flat They knelt down And buried Henry's ashes David Grant's book about Henry Worsley's journey The White Darkness comes out later this month Joanna and Henry Worsley's son Max

told his mother that he wanted one day to follow in his father's footsteps and go on an expedition to the Antarctic. I knew when Henry died that it would only be a matter of time before. Mack said he wanted to do one. And when he told me, yes, I can't say my heart didn't sink slightly, but Henry's death has not made me lose that really strong feeling.

of people must fulfill dreams. I know he'll do one, Max, but I'm going to support him, determined to support him. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on The New Yorker Radio Hour this week, and until next time, stay in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio.

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