Overheard: “I know what would be fun: let’s crank up forces acting on US government and simultaneously remove the controls that dampen the growth of destructive vibrations just to see what happens.”

Sometimes you don’t need to run the experiment.

t.co/EuS4pml5u6

curling v. raffensperger order 3-31-25

7/Ruling here: www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

6/What does it all mean?
✅ Lawsuit changed the system
❌ But lost in court
⚖️ Why? No proven injury = no case
Lesson: legal wins aren’t the only wins.
Sometimes pressure works.
#SeriousElections

5/Trouble is: GA Sec of State did not ask for funding to eliminate QR codes

2/Plaintiffs showed real cyber risks—confirmed by DHS. One expert even hacked a voting machine with a pen and USB.

But the court said: No proven harm = no standing.
Legal theory wins, not security.
#SeriousElections #ElectionSecurity #CurlingvRaffensperger

1/🚨 BIG RULING IN GA VOTING MACHINE LAWSUIT

A judge dismissed the challenge to Georgia’s QR-code voting machines—not because they’re secure, but because no one could prove legal harm.

QR codes stay (for now). The lawsuit lost—but still helped change the law.

#VotingRights #SeriousElections

4/After trial ended, GA passed a law eliminating QR codes in ballots by 2026.

The thing plaintiffs wanted? It’s happening.
The lawsuit lost in court—won in policy.
#SeriousElections #Democracy #GApol

3/Standing = courts only act on concrete harm.
Being worried or prepared isn’t enough.
Even flawed systems survive if no one can show injury.
That’s the law—even when it feels backward.
#SeriousElections #VotingRights #LegalTheory

‘They Will Label Us as Spies’: The Afghan Students Abandoned by America Students at the American University of Afghanistan in Qatar fear having to return to their Taliban-ruled homeland after aid and visa cutoffs by the Trump administration.

Well this is enough to break your heart: “Trump complains Americans left valuable equipment behind when they left Afghanistan…Well he’s about to leave another valuable investment behind: our minds, paid for by the American people.” |Afghan Students Abandoned
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/w...

Big day for the WITAOD movement

For a bunch of guys obsessed with showing street cred, this has to be the most embarrassing unforced error in memory. Chainsaw Al's destructive legacy was a colossal series of train wrecks. Chainsaw Elon is heading down that path with arrogance and ignorance. Why haven't sane R's stepped in

How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy The operation was driven with a frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies.

Dems stunned only bc they treated threat warnings from election security experts w derision.
“Mr. Musk’s stealth approach stunned both Democrats and civil servants. Failing to imagine an incursion from inside the bureaucracy, they were caught essentially defenseless.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/u...

#SeriousElections Insider attacks now launched in full view.

DOGE technologists Edward Coristine—the 19-year-old known online as “Big Balls”—and Kyle Schutt are now listed as staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure …
CISA helps state and local election offices assess vulnerabilities.

Apple Pulls Encrypted iCloud Security Feature in UK Amid Government Backdoor Demands Apple has withdrawn its Advanced Data Protection iCloud feature from the United Kingdom following government demands for backdoor access to encrypted...

Apple has officially pulled E2EE backup in the UK in response to a secret (leaked) order.

This will make users less secure, chill business adoption of E2EE, and embolden other governments that do not respect the rule of law to do the same.

Awful news.

www.macrumors.com/2025/02/21/a...

“[DOGE] has trained its initial attention on executing Musk’s belief that by controlling the computers, one could control the entire federal bureaucracy.”
My biggest fear is these guys are coders & Easter eggs will remain undetected.

This Is What Happens When the DOGE Guys Take Over - The Atlantic

Long-running challenge to constutionality of touchscren voting machine filed when GA scrapped Diebold touchscreen machines, declared unconstitutional by the same federal judge. Action then switched to Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) that GA wanted instead. #SeriousElections bsky.app/profile/demi...

Enjoying the Pinnacle of Power, Musk Holds Court on Trump’s Stage The president let the spotlight in the Oval Office go to his billionaire friend/budget slasher, who cited blank checks and 150-year-old Social Security beneficiaries to justify purging the federal wor...

DANGER!
Hidden from view: DOGE will replace “inefficient systems” with opaque, untrustworthy software written by unaccountable entities. This is Madison’s nightmare scenario for empowering factions. Just look at election systems and HAVA to see where it’s heading. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/u...

Opinion | The Dangerous A.I. Nonsense That Trump and Biden Fell For This is not a Sputnik moment. It’s way past that.

“The real lesson of DeepSeek is that America’s approach to A.I. regulations was nonsense. It was never going to be possible to contain the spread of this powerful emergent technology.That was a self-serving fiction, foisted by an industry to kneecap competitors.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/o...

Brilliant: what is the most successful venture capital firm in history? Founded in 1776 by General Partners Washington, Jefferson, Madison, headquartered in a Beaux Arts corporate campus in DC, this firm is the world’s premier funder of technological and commercial innovation. Let’s not break it.

Cybersecurity Panel: Is Smart Technology Increasing Your Risk for Cyber Attacks? Cybersecurity issues extend far beyond phishing attacks. As smart technology continues to grow and improve business operations, daily activities, and education, it also presents significant risks to o...

Recently our very own Associate Professor Saman Zonouz was a part of a panel on whether smart #technology increases the risk of #cyberattacks!

Interested in learning more?
lnkd.in/gMJ3iEJZ #togetherwecompute

My talk about the roots of distrust in American elections posted today: scp.cc.gatech.edu/richard-demi...
I hope you find it provocative and relevant to the times we are living through. #SeriousElections

An Unbound Trump Pushes an Improbable Plan for Gaza Once a critic of nation building, the president now envisions taking over a Middle East enclave, driving out its Palestinian population and transforming it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Transform Gaza to Riviera? Sure thing. DJT even has the plans. All he has to do is use his Sharpie to cross out “Atlantic City” and replace with “Gaza.” Didn’t that turn out well?

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/u...

2 insurrections, same President.

How Trump won Georgia: Vote records show GOP more unified than Democrats in 2024 Republican voters in Georgia overwhelming lined up behind Donald Trump, while Democratic voters were more divided in last fall's election, according to new election records.

Powerful. Thank you. Matches our lived experience here in GA where DPG gave up on holding Harris voters. See AJC survey for more evidence.

www.ajc.com/politics/how...

The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups.

The Democrats Show Why They Lost At a meeting of the DNC, the party seemed to be at pains to demonstrate that it learned nothing from its 2024 defeat.

DNC meetings include multiple shrieking interruptions, and affirmation that its strategy had been sound. The good news for those preferring a viable alternative to the current personality cult is it has little power.

https ://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-meeting/681548/

This Asteroid Probably Won’t Hit Earth—But We May Need to Assume It Will The possibility of the asteroid 2024 YR4 impacting our planet might not be ruled out until 2028, raising the prospect we’ll need to prepare for the worst

Here’s something to take your mind off important matters like who got snubbed in the Oscar nominations. Maybe we should make sure DJT doesn’t accidentally fire scientists tracking Asteroid 2024 YR24 which may be on a collision path with earth.
#Science
www.scientificamerican.com/article/will...

It’s been a year since closing arguments in Curling v Raffensperger challenging the constitutionality of mandatory use Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) in GA; case resting in
part on lack of accountability as shown below. Still no decision but I will post trial hilites in coming days #SeriousElections

Gordon Bell Sadly Gordon Bell died May 17 at the age of 89, see this. Bell died in Coronado, California from pneumonia. He was a true visionary in the world of computing who helped design some of the first min…

Deepseek breakthrough (www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJvS...) impressive (ref groupthink rampant in SiValley) but it should not be a thunderbolt to anyone familiar with late Gordon Bell’s law predicting efficiency gains by interleaving hw advances and sw innovation. #Science

rjlipton.com/2024/07/08/g...

Welcome to the party SCP!