There are several bugs in the system reported by local engineers, like being able to add multiple votes to a sigle voter's RFID chip.
This is a scandal and a complete failure at several levels, not only for the local city goverment but for respected institutions like the University of Buenos Aires which got paid to audit the system.
And this is all happening in the same day as the America Cup (Copa America) Final between Chile and Argentina, so people are numb to most of this news.
What kind of people orders such a raid? What's the mindset behind that decision? Their own team wasn't good enough to catch the breach (hell, the whole thing sounds like a train wreck) and now they try to silence people who reveal their incompetence?
If we're that charitable towards their motivations, I'd generally expect the sort of people who end up in large city administrations to do that more than not.
Another possibility is that they had arranged a good setup for vote manipulation, and someone exposed it.
The federal goverment is from a different political party, they are NOT the same people that are running the local city goverment. The police that raided this guy's house was the metropolitan police (BA city police), not the federal police.
Important correction: the "metropolitan police" is not the city police. Legally speaking, it's more of a private army that only answer to the executive branch of the city's government. Yes, it's incredibly amazing that such a thing exists.
"Police" it just a word in the name of the institution.
I, and many others have proven in public/open court, that the police/military are completely compromised around the world, and that they are not allowed to act-as or call themselves the police or military anymore.
There are a lot of examples in the US of the government harrasing citizens who report vulnerabilities. The DMCA is typically used to justify this behavior.
I'm not sure what the appropriate conclusion is here.
In Argentina specifically, there was Juan Peron. The broadway play and movie "Evita" is about his wife. I once read her biography.
Some astronomers I once met were at cerro tololo inter-american observatory in chile when some heavily armed men turned up to look after the nearby radio towers.
Conspiracy theories abound with respect to JFK's assassination.
No one really believes that communists torched the Reichstag.
On December 8, 1941, the pearl harbor base commander found a letter from the US state department in his mailbox, to let him know that the japanese might give him trouble sometime soon.
"Gentlemen do not read each others' mail.". That was the stated reason that the US stopped its codebreaking work. I dont believe it really did. The best way to read a gentleman's mail is if he doesnt think he needs to encrypt it.
Josef Stalin once knocked over a bank, then gave all the loot to Lenin.
Why wouldn't you order a raid ? A security vulnerability in a voting system has been exposed.
Yes this guy may have done nothing with it but I would damn want to make 100% sure that was the case. And I would definitely want to make sure that the vulnerability wasn't recklessly revealed. This isn't like finding a browser bug we are talking about, you can radically alter the course of a nation.
It IS legally and morally wrong to reveal security holes before there has been an opportunity for it to be fixed though. Security researchers almost always do the "right thing" before potentially unleashing mayhem.
Not saying he didn't do this just that it isn't a black/white issue.
The debate between 'responsible disclosure' and public or 'full disclosure' has been argued ad nauseum elsewhere. but it really comes down to trust.
If you don't trust the people you are responsibly disclosing to, to actually fix the problem, or worse to not sue you or attempt to get you charged as a criminal (the CFAA is particularly abusable), then full, public disclosure may be your only option to force the vendor to fix their product or service.
Remember, it's already broken, and you may not be the first person to have noticed.
The tweet reads:
After finding a vulnerability in the voting system they're raiding my house, people from computer forensics.