internet - previously touted for its potential to
democratise the political process - allows politicians
to anonymise and broaden the scope of their dirty
tricks and paves the way for new scams
Jessica Marshall
FOR more than an hour on US election day in 2002, the lines of a
"get-out-the-voters" phone campaign sponsored by the New
Hampshire Democratic Party were clogged by more than 800 prank
calls.
In the 2006 election, 14,000 Latino voters in Orange county,
California, received letters saying that it was illegal for
immigrants to vote and doing so could result in their deportation.
Shameful though these examples are, at least those responsible -
Republican party officials, consultants and campaign staff - were
traced and charged or shamed by the press. In future, however,
tracing dirty tricks and bringing perpetrators to account might
not be so easy.
The internet, touted for its potential to democratise the
political process (New Scientist , 9 March, p 28), may in fact do
the opposite. It allows people to anonymise and broaden the scope
of such dirty tricks, and paves the way for new scams, say
security experts who attended an e-crime summit at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, last week.
One trick that can be borrowed from hackers is spam email. Usually
used to hawk counterfeit goods, anonymous bulk emails could be
sent to voters giving the wrong location for a polling station,
for example, or incorrect details about who has the right to
vote. More people could be reached than with letters, and
although people don't generally fall for spam emails, in close
races it might not take many discouraged or misdirected voters to
change the outcome.
Meanwhile, telephone attacks like the New Hampshire prank calls
could be harder to trace if made using an internet phone line
instead of a landline, says Rachna Dhamija of the Harvard Center
for Research on Computation and Society. They could even be made
using a botnet - a collection of home computers that are
remote-controlled by a hacker. This would make tracing even
harder because the calls wouldn't come from a central location.
What's more, the number of calls that can be made is practically
limitless.
Internet calls might also be used to sow misinformation, "changing
the playing field" for voter-suppression tactics, says
Christopher Soghoian at Indiana University in Bloomington.
"Anonymous voter suppression is going to become a reality."
The internet also makes new kinds of scams possible. John McCain,
Republican presidential candidate hopeful, discovered this when
campaigners set up a MySpace page for him. A bug in the
programming allowed another user to add the following text:
"Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out
in full support of gay marriage... particularly marriage between
passionate females." Although people who saw this likely realised
it was a prank, it illustrates the ease with which mischievous
words can be added. More traditional media such as newspapers are
nearly impossible to deface.
Manipulation can also happen in more subtle ways. Last year,
supporters of California state's Proposition 87, an initiative
that would fund alternative energy through additional taxation,
snapped up negative-sounding domains including noon87.com and
noonprop87.org and then automatically routed visitors to a site
touting the proposition's benefits. Similarly, people have
registered hillaryclingon.com and muttromney.com . Although
merely unflattering to US presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton
and Mitt Romney, such "typo domains" could be used to spread
malicious software or take fraudulent donations, says Oliver
Friedrichs of Symantec in Mountain View, California.
Older tricks such as phishing - fraudulently obtaining personal
information via the internet - are also changing politics. In
2004, a fake website for Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry stole campaign contributions and users' debit card numbers.
Campaigns are vulnerable to such scams because domain names tend
not to be standardised - compare barackobama.com with
joinRudy2008.com - making it difficult to pick the official one.
Phishing could ultimately stop people donating online, a move
that would disproportionately affect Democrats and young people,
who are more likely than other groups to donate online.
The low probability of getting caught online combined with the
fact that anti-spam laws and "no-call" lists exempt political
messages makes the threat real. "The fact is that all of the
technology for all of these things to happen is already in
place," Soghoian says. "I'm not sure this will happen in 2008,
but it will happen."
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