The Current Election Lawsuit Explained: Whacky Statistics & Invisible Fraud

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

(Motto: “I didn't do it. I'm innocent! I want a pardon.”)

The lawsuit in brief

Washington Post articles describe the latest lawsuit to overturn the election. It was filed by republican Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. It aims to nullify all votes in GA, MI, PN and WI and award the election to the president because he won. The president is demanding all republicans in congress to join the lawsuit as a show of loyalty. So far, 17 republican state attorneys general have file briefs in support of the case. 

The statistical argument

The lawsuit differs from past failed lawsuits that have claimed widespread voter fraud and/or other problems serious enough to cause the president to lose the electoral college. One new line of argument is that (1) the odds of Biden winning WI are 1 in 1 quadrillion (1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000) and (2) the odds of Biden winning GA, MI, PN and WI are less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (<1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). The statistical argument is blithering nonsense based on smoke and mirrors. Someone just made stuff up and Paxton put it in his lawsuit.

The invisible fraud argument

The other new line of attack on the voting in GA, MI, PN and WI is that widespread fraud happened but it is not detectable because elections officials, not voters, did illegal things that hid or obscured evidence of the fraud. WaPo writes:

“Despite the chaos of election night and the days which followed, the media has consistently proclaimed that no widespread voter fraud has been proven,” the lawsuit says (and that proclamation is accurate). “But this observation misses the point. The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”  

“The unlawful actions of election officials effectively destroy the evidence by which the fraud may be detected,” it says. 

The lawsuit does not claim evidence of fraud in the vote-tabulation process but rather says, “The public record demonstrates a ballot-counting process replete with chaos, confusion, and partisan bias.”

In essence, this lawsuit abandons claims in prior lawsuits that fraud can be proven. Now, the backup legal position is that the fraud was real but was made undetectable by bad election officials. From what I recall, there was no significant chaos, confusion or partisan bias on election night or in the following days. That's what all the experts said and that is what videos that I saw showed.

Ken Paxton

Mr. Paxton is a colorful and playful character. He may be under investigation by the FBI for a slew of crimes. If so, this lawsuit is most likely a bid for a pardon from the president. Given the apparent levels of corruption among GOP politicians, maybe the other state attorneys general and republicans in congress who join this crackpot lawsuit are also looking for pardons.

Slate describes the overall high level of sleaziness of Paxton's lawsuit and his likely motive in filing it. What Slate describes as going on in Texas is just off-scale nuts:

Paxton’s suit is shot through with conspiracy theories and constitutional claims with no basis in law. Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins, who typically authors the office’s lawsuits, did not sign on to this one, nor did his deputies; instead, Paxton brought in a “special counsel” from outside the agency. His suit is so ridiculous that it led some commentators to wonder whether the attorney general might have another motive for filing it. Paxton, after all, is reportedly under investigation by the FBI for alleged bribery and abuse of office. Trump, meanwhile, has been distributing pardons to his allies like candy. Paxton’s suit makes more sense as pardon-bait than it does as a legal document. And he may need presidential clemency to escape the federal criminal charges that could be imminent. 

He also embarked upon a relentless crusade to suppress voting rights in the run-up to the 2020 election. Paxton fought to prevent young people from voting by mail, then threatened to prosecute Texans who voted absentee due to fear of COVID-19. He prevented counties from sending absentee ballot applications to all voters, prohibited any county from offering more than one ballot drop box, and unsuccessfully sought to ban drive-thru voting. No state official did more than Paxton in 2020 to restrict the franchise. It is not entirely surprising that he now asks, after the election, that SCOTUS toss out millions of ballots. 

The attorney general also has a long history of legal trouble that predates his alliance with Trump. In 2015, a Texas grand jury indicted the attorney general on charges of felony securities fraud. Paxton allegedly urged his friends to buy shares in a company without disclosing his secret commissions or registering as a securities broker with the state. He has already paid a fine for this transgression, and remains under indictment to this day. But his case has never gone to trial, in large part because his friends in the county government defunded the prosecution. Paxton’s wife, a Republican state senator, also filed legislation that would allow her husband to issue exemptions from the securities regulations he allegedly violated.

This fall, Paxton’s own staff accused him of even more serious crimes. On Oct. 1, seven senior staff members asked federal law enforcement to investigate the attorney general for “violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” The group was led by Jeff Mateer, who served as Paxton’s top assistant before resigning. Mateer has sterling GOP bona fides: In 2017, Trump nominated him to the federal bench, but he withdrew after CNN reported that he had derided transgender children as part of “Satan’s plan,” condemned same-sex marriage as “debauchery,” and endorsed “conversion therapy.” Paxton dismissed Mateer and his colleagues as “rogue employees” and fired aides who refused to resign after reporting their boss. These aides then launched a whistleblower lawsuit against the attorney general.  

Mateer’s letter did not explain the allegations against Paxton. But in a leaked text message, he told Paxton that the complaints involved his “relationship and activities with Nate Paul.” A real estate developer in Austin, Paul donated $25,000 to Paxton’s 2018 campaign. The two are, at a minimum, acquaintances: While Paxton was having an affair with an aide to a GOP state senator, he encouraged Paul to hire his mistress. (Paxton has acknowledged the affair but denied pulling strings for his mistress; Paul has denied that he hired the individual at Paxton’s request.) (emphasis added)

Gadzooks!! Something smells very fishy in GOP Texasland politics. 

American Hunger Rising

NYPD cop decides to pay for food a woman 

was caught trying to steal 

The New York Times reports:

Early in the pandemic, Joo Park noticed a worrisome shift at the market he manages near downtown Washington: At least once a day, he’d spot someone slipping a package of meat, a bag of rice or other food into a shirt or under a jacket. Diapers, shampoo and laundry detergent began disappearing in bigger numbers, too.

Since then, he said, thefts have more than doubled at Capitol Supermarket — even though he now stations more employees at the entrance, asks shoppers to leave backpacks up front and displays high-theft items like hand sanitizer and baking yeast in more conspicuous areas. Park doesn’t usually call the police, choosing instead to bar offenders from coming back.

“It’s become much harder during the pandemic,” he said. “People will say, ‘I was just hungry.’ And then what do you do?”

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

Meanwhile, an estimated 54 million Americans will struggle with hunger this year, a 45 percent increase from 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With food aid programs like SNAP and WIC being reduced, and other federal assistance on the brink of expiration, food banks and pantries are being inundated, reporting hours-long waits and lines that stretch into the thousands.

With no stimulus aid and her savings gone by May, Jean said she was out of options. So she began sneaking food into her son’s stroller at the local Walmart. She said she’d take things like ground beef, rice or potatoes but always pay for something small, like a packet of M&M’s. Each time, she’d tell herself that God would understand.

“I used to think, if I get in trouble, I’d say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I wasn’t stealing a television. I just didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t malicious. We were hungry,’ ” said Jean, 21, who asked to be identified by her middle name to discuss her situation freely. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s what I had to do.”  

But the coronavirus crisis, she said, ushered in a new level of desperation. Finding a job and child care became increasingly difficult. When money became tight, she prioritized rent and car payments over groceries. “My car, my apartment were things that could be taken from me — and then where would that leave me and my son?” she said. “This is going to sound bad, but at least I could try to get food in other ways.” 

Nearly 26 million adults — or 1 in 8 Americans — reported not having enough food to eat as of mid-November, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. That figure has climbed steadily during the pandemic, and has hit record highs since the government agency began collecting such data in 1998.

Other reports on negotiations between the McConnell and House democrats indicate that democrats have moved from asking for about $2-3 trillion in aid to about $905 billion. McConnell has gone from $500 billion to about $905. It is not clear how likely it is that the two sides will reach a compromise. Both sides blame each other for not compromising. McConnell accusing democrats of being controlled by lawyers. Democrats blame the GOP for being more interested in helping and protecting businesses against consumers, while not having much concern for unemployed workers who are in increasingly desperate straits.

So, while politicians are unable to compromise, increasing numbers of Americans are forced to resort to stealing food because they are hungry.

What an unnecessary mess. It's a disgrace. Guess I need to find a local food bank to donate money to. Since our government is broken and the GOP really does not care about human suffering, regular people have to step in and try to help. 

Fun With Computer Security: Three Levels of Hell

FireEye needs to reimagine it's security protocols 'cause 

those sneaky Russkis stole 'em

I hope this isn't TL/DR.

The first level

The New York Times reports that a top cybersecurity firm, FireEye, has been hacked, probably by the Russian government. The attack is thought to probably be in retaliation for the firm's past anti-hacking successes against businesses and governments. The NYT writes: 

WASHINGTON — For years, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has been the first call for government agencies and companies around the world who have been hacked by the most sophisticated attackers, or fear they might be.

Now it looks like the hackers — in this case, evidence points to Russia’s intelligence agencies — may be exacting their revenge.

FireEye revealed on Tuesday that its own systems were pierced by what it called “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” The company said hackers used “novel techniques” to make off with its own tool kit, which could be useful in mounting new attacks around the world.

It was a stunning theft, akin to bank robbers who, having cleaned out local vaults, then turned around and stole the F.B.I.’s investigative tools. In fact, FireEye said on Tuesday, moments after the stock market closed, that it had called in the F.B.I. 

The $3.5 billion company, which partly makes a living by identifying the culprits in some of the world’s boldest breaches — its clients have included Sony and Equifax — declined to say explicitly who was responsible. But its description, and the fact that the F.B.I. has turned the case over to its Russia specialists, left little doubt who the lead suspects were and that they were after what the company calls “Red Team tools.”

That is is just a reminder of the reality and intensity of forever cyberwar. Now Russia (or whoever hacked the company) can use the company's tools to hack everyone else. 

Being a fairly regular critic of Putin and his endless lies and kleptocratic thuggery, Dissident Politics has gone to permanent Red Alert! status. (Shields up Warf! Warf: Huh?)

The next level: This is even more disturbing 

China is reporting exciting news about a new generation of quantum computers that is fast at doing some specifically hard-wired calculations & stuff. The Chinese government has developed a new way to do quantum computing using a few photons, optical fibers and mirrors. It's almost smoke and mirrors. LiveScience reports:

A team of Chinese scientists has developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers.

In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve "quantum supremacy," the first to outperform the world's best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live Science previously reported. (IBM disputed Google's claim at the time.) The Chinese team, based primarily at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google's. [That's pretty darn fast]

Success is measured in terms of number of photons detected. Jiuzhang, which itself is an optical circuit, detected a maximum of 76 photons in one test and an average of 43 across several tests. Its calculation time to produce the list of numbers for each experimental run was about 200 seconds, while the fastest Chinese supercomputer, TaihuLight, would have taken 2.5 billion years to arrive at the same result. That suggests the quantum computer can do GBS 100 trillion times faster than a classical supercomputer.

In the future: Experts believe that quantum computers will be able to hack essentially all encryption keys in use today, making everything available to thieving hackers and hostile nations at cyberwar with any nation, group, company or person they choose to go to attack. Quantum computing technology keeps inching toward that glorious day when essentially all encryption fails and most everything encrypted becomes hackable. 

Countermeasures today: Fortunately, changes to cope are underway. Experts are working on an old technology called the sneakernet. Sneakernet is people typing on typewriters, and walking to deliver stacks of their typed papers to other people. So far, it is believed that quantum computers cannot hack that kind of a high tech, paper-based security system, which was invented whenever the typewriter was invented. Of course, burglars can still potentially hack that kind of a system.

Digression: The new Chinese computer works so fast that reality is distorted and a landscape looks like this to a human:

Well, not really. Landscapes still look like this:

Going to play Donkey Kong

(staring at that makes me dizzy - gotta stop)

The third level: This one is the worst

At present, essentially all important government, business, staches of private kiddy porn and other kinds of criminal information is maintained under some sort of encryption that cannot be hacked or decrypted** by technology in existence today. That's good, sort of, I think. Maybe.

** In this context, decrypting does not refer to stealing or otherwise removing dead bodies from a crypt. It refers to the process to of breaking encryption of electronic data or other information that makes it unreadable to anyone without a key to unlock the encryption. Applying logic, it is clear that encryption in this context does not refer to putting bodies into a crypt.[1]

Among the high jinks that modern hackers employ is a complex technique called harvesting attacks. Actually, it's a simple technique. In this method, hackers steal encrypted information, the encryption key and store it. Then they wait for quantum computers or some other new technology to develop to the point that the encryption key can be decrypted or broken. Once that happens, the thieves can read, use and/or and sell all the previously stolen content. All that data, information and naughty videos can then be sold on whatever market it can be sold on, probably the black market. Harvesting attacks have been around for years and years. Some hackers read things and gain foresight therefrom.

RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) = a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission

A well-known source to all of us, PSBE Cyber News Group, reports: 

China now joins Google in claiming ‘quantum supremacy’ with new technology, creating RSA decryption concerns.

China’s top quantum-computer researchers have reported that they have achieved quantum supremacy, i.e., the ability to perform tasks a traditional supercomputer cannot. Although an exciting development, the inevitable rise of quantum computing means security teams are nearer to facing a threat more challenging than anything previous.

Quantum computing is not there quite yet. The Chinese are no closer to being able to decrypt RSA than Google or IBM, but it is only a ‘matter of time’, predicted experts.

A harvesting attack right now could grab an RSA encryption key to be filed away until quantum computing catches up, he added.

“There is no time to waste, because of other classical security problems like harvesting attacks which occur today,” Prisco explained.

“A harvesting attack is the theft of encrypted data & the RSA encryption key used to encrypt that data. While the key cannot be hacked today with the currently available quantum computer, an adversary can steal the data & the key, store it inexpensively in memory, & decrypt the info when they have access to a more powerful quantum computer that can break the key.”

Wait! What?: If hackers have stolen massive amounts of encrypted information and in time the encryption key gets cracked, what will that mean? That will mean that highly capable criminal groups and adversary countries like Russia and China will have additional boatloads of stolen information to use for themselves and/or to use against us. The value of that could run to the hundreds of billions, or more likely trillions. In February 2018, the US Council of Economic Advisers estimated that malicious cyber activity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billionand $109 billion in 2016. Because companies tend to not be honest about their losses to cybercrooks, my estimate is that the cost was at least $200 billion for 2016.

In general, the data theft will be from advanced western democracies, which tend to have the best and most valuable technologies and secret information. Lots of data is not encrypted, so all the advanced stuff is beside the point.[2]

Footnotes: 

1. This is completely unrelated to stealing bodies from the crypt or putting them in. 

Wikipedia: Crypto Wars is an unofficial name for the U.S. and allied governments' attempts to limit the public's and foreign nations' access to cryptography strong enough to resist decryption by national intelligence agencies (especially USA's NSA). Crypto wars implicates free speech concerns and is the subject of ongoing lawsuits.

An export-restricted munition or weapon

Wikipedia's caption: Export-restricted RSA encryption source code printed on a T-shirt made the T-shirt an export-restricted munition, as a freedom of speech protest against US encryption export restrictions. (The shirt's back shows relevant clauses of the United States Bill of Rights under a 'VOID' stamp.) Changes in the export law means that it is no longer illegal to export this T-shirt from the US, or for US citizens to show it to foreigners.

2. The Varonis data security blog writes: As more and more companies experience crippling security breaches, the wave of compromised data is on the rise. Data breach statistics show that hackers are highly motivated by money to acquire data, and that personal information is a highly valued type of data to compromise. It’s also apparent that companies are still not prepared enough for breaches even though they are becoming more commonplace. In fact, the 2019 Data Risk Report found that companies still keep thousands of files unprotected and open for anyone inside the company to access.

Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker

 

UPDATED: DEC. 3, 2020

Morning Consult Political Intelligence is currently tracking the approval rating for governmental leaders in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. On a weekly basis, this page will be updated with the latest data for all 13 countries, offering real-time insight into the shifting political dynamics across the globe. Approval ratings are based on a seven-day moving average of adult residents in each country, and samples sizes vary by country.

NET APPROVAL FOR ALL LEADERS

The share of each country's residents that approve minus the share that disapprove of their respective head of state

The charts here:

https://morningconsult.com/form/global-leader-approval/