Hacktivist group claims to have foiled Karl Rove's election day plans

[WhoIsNumberNone]

We Received A Letter

On November 12th, we received a letter from “The Protectors,” apparently a group of white hat cyber sleuths, mentioning our reward and stating that two months ago, they began monitoring the “digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way.”

“The Protectors” said that they had identified the digital structure of Rove’s operation and of ORCA, a Republican get out the vote software application. After finding open “doors” in the systems, they created a “password protected firewall” called “The Great Oz,” and installed it on servers that Rove planned to use on election night to re-route and change election results “from three states.”

The letter indicated that “ORCA Killer” was launched at 10am EST and “The Great Oz” at 8pm EST on November 6th. “The Protectors” watched as ORCA crashed and failed throughout Election Day. They watched as Rove’s computer techs tried 105 times to penetrate “The Great Oz” using different means and passwords.

Finally, they issued the following warning to Mr. Rove: don’t do it again or they would turn over the evidence to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

More...

[Coyotl]

1. Still BS

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021829467

[patrice]

2. That's an interesting story, but it has a Catch 22. There's no way it can be verified.

I guess such things are possible, but that's not enough and enough would consist of a level of detail that isn't possible even if it is true.

[geek tragedy]

7. If they knew that Rove was trying to tamper with results, they

could provide it.

Do they even know what ORCA was?

[patrice]

9. Just think of all of the clouds in flow-charting something like this, hacking that stuff is

theoretically possible and I bet cyber investigation and security outfits have programs that can do those tasks, but "small"guys? Even well connected small guys would likely be a threat to someone's life, literally, in the security field.

And, I know it isn't popular to say, but when something is represented by a mask, it could very well lie to you, mask on or mask off if it's the same entity, you don't know what you're getting until you get there and there ain't nowhere to get on this STORY.

And I ask you, even if "they" did do something like this, wouldn't it be the opposite of some part of "their" self-concept to go around TELLING everyone that they did?

I call tail-chasing BS.

[csziggy]

14. ORCA was the Romney campaign GOTV

But it was a complete fail:

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown
It was supposed to be a "killer app," but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done more harm to Romney's chances on Election Day—largely because of a failure to follow basic best practices for IT projects.

Called "Orca," the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado.

Instead, volunteers couldn't get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

November 08, 2012
The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA
What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:

Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.

Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP's effort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.

The entire purpose of this project was to digitize the decades-old practice of strike lists. The old way was to sit with your paper and mark off people that have voted and every hour or so, someone from the campaign would come get your list and take it back to local headquarters. Then, they'd begin contacting people that hadn't voted yet and encourage them to head to the polls. It's worked for years.

<SNIP>
So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php

[geek tragedy]

17. Seems like Romney gets credit for that fail. I give these claims the same amount

of credence appropriate for all unsubstantiated claims made by anonymous people on the Internet.

[csziggy]

19. It could have been just poorly tested, badly written software

What could give credence to the hackers' claims is this:

As the Web traffic from volunteers attempting to connect to Orca mounted, the system crashed repeatedly because of bandwidth constraints. At one point the network connection to the campaign's data center went down—apparently because the ISP shut it off. "They told us Comcast thought it was a denial of service attack and shut it down," Dittuobu recounted. &quot Centinello) was giddy about it," he added—presumably because he thought that so much traffic was sign of heavy system use.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

Denial of service attacks have been SOP for hackers for a very long time. But that is not what this hacker group claims they did, so it was probably just bad planning by the Rmoney campaign.

It could have just been incompetence by their programmers, the campaign staff, and the volunteers. I cracked up reading the description of the Ace Of Spades site guy who claims to be a web designer but who didn't know until the night before the election that many HP color inkjets will not print all black without all the ink cartridges. I'm not computer expert or anything and I've known this for over ten years!

[warrior1]

3. that's a bold statement

[liberalmuse]

4. If this is indeed what happened...

why not turn over the evidence now?

[crazylikafox]

5. Difficult to prove, but maybe just the possibility will force KKKarl to find other ways to win

elections, other than stealing them electronically.

Something didn't work as planned for him on election night. We all witnessed that with our own eyes when he melted down on live TV.

[patrice]

10. I think John Kerry in Ohio scared the shit out of trigger-man Husted et al, as in, perhaps, a murder

indictment sitting in the wings, not to mention the fact that Kerry stood with unions while he was up there, someone/thing else you DON'T want to get pissed off at you.

[crazylikafox]

11. Interesting thought. Husted wouldn't want to join Jimmy Hoffa in those concrete overshoes, would he?

Would be sweet justice, if it were true.

[patrice]

13. And what happened to Josef Yablonski? Do you suppose anyone has ever found that out, for real?

Murdered by McCarthy-ites some suggest.

[patrice]

16. But Kerry's staff would know whatever there is to know about what happened to Ken Blackwell. nt

[geek tragedy]

6. These guys bullshit like Mitt Romney does

If they had evidence that Rove as attempting to tamper with election results, they'd release it.

Instead, they're trying to take credit for the Romney campaign's incompetence.

[global1]

8. If This Is True - This Will Be The Most "Underreported" Story Of The Year......nt

[leanforward]

12. Do you think?

The white hats? This is believable. However, KKarl will never confess. But this story sounds like it was writtten for Mission Impossible. The story here is rounding up a lot of anecdotal information to be plausible. Does the Bradblog have anything to say? Similar to the analysis on 11/7 and the Ohio SoS's web site going down. My hat is off to these guys, if they interdicted messing with tabulator results. If so, it warms my heart.

Am I fanning the embers? oops sorry.

[RomneyLies]

18. Pure, unadulterated BULLSHIT

Lying liars and the lies they tell.

They are lying.

[Dubster]

20. Spam deleted by gkhouston (MIR Team)