Bruce Schneier wrote:

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms and Source Code in C

His monthly newsletter had this snippet precipitated by this blog post:

Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I think we just won the Crypto War. A very important part of the US government is prioritizing security over surveillance.

An important quote from this blog post:

Democracies depend on civic infrastructure. These organizations, whether the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Council on Foreign Relations, or Sierra Club, serve as intermediaries between the people and those who govern, providing information and insight on a wide variety of issues.

Today, slashdot had a blurb on the stolen CIA CherryBlossom tool for compromising our home and small office routers.  Slashdot summarizes the tool’s capabilities:

The tool can sniff, log, and redirect the user’s Internet traffic, open a VPN to the victim’s local network, execute actions based on predefined rules, alert operators when the victim becomes active, and more.

At best, to get the Senate to use Signal and, possibly, get our Intelligence agency putting a smidgen of focus on security, we had to suffer the subjugation of our ‘civic infrastructure’ to a foreign state.  At worst, our ‘civic infrastructure’ is unrecoverable.

This is the subtle stuff.  We should protect the thought-makers and messengers from distortion.

However, there are basic problems.  For example, as Bruce Schneier and others have pointed out, we need machine printed, voter verified ballots.

I believe that there is a foundational issue.  Stepping all the way back, the whole point of election process is to measure  the will of the electorate.  The whole point of government is governing.  Our parties, elections, and politicians don’t do this for a whole host of reasons.  Our primary process leading to 17 GOP candidates is a disaster.  Our “increased transparency, everyone is covered but 23 Million people, all done out in the open in a closed room, thoughtfully with no thought, ACA replacement bill is a disaster.

As demonstrated in 2015 , 2016, and, now, in 2017, this mess is susceptible to easy and continuous manipulation by foreign entities.