News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Illinois County Clerk Reports Cyber Attacks on Servers, Voters Asked to ‘Stay in Line’

The Champaign County Clerk’s Office said it is “is aware of connectivity issues and computer server performance being impacted. The Clerk’s Office believes these are due to cyber-attacks on the network and servers,” according to a statement posted on social media on Tuesday afternoon.

The office said its websites have been subject to distributed denial-of-service, or DDOS, attacks for the past month.
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“Election judges and staff are doing everything they can to process voters according to the requirements of election law while navigating these attacks. We appreciate your patience and commitment to our democratic process,” it said.
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Champaign County, which reliably votes in favor of Democrats, is located in central Illinois. In 2020, President Joe Biden won with about 60 percent of the vote to former President Donald Trump’s 37 percent, according to election data. The last Republican president to win the county was George H. W. Bush in 1988.

In Illinois, several important statewide races include governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. A number of House races, one U.S. Senate race, and other local races are on the ballot.

Google Is Impacting Elections by Influencing Votes on ‘Massive Scale’

Robert Epstein and his research team from the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology have been monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states. As part of the research, the team is looking into search engine results on Google and Bing, messages displayed on Google’s homepage, tweets sent by Twitter, email suppression on Gmail, auto-play videos suggested on Google-owned YouTube, and so on.

The study found over 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” that Google and other firms were using to “shift opinions and voting preferences,” Epstein wrote in a Nov. 6 article for the Daily Caller. “Ephemeral experiences” are short-lived content that immediately disappears without leaving a trace after user consumption.

The team expects such “ephemeral experiences” to number over 2.5 million by Election Day. Epstein has identified roughly a dozen new forms of online manipulation using ephemeral experiences which are almost exclusively controlled by Google and a few other tech firms.
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“Carefully crafted search suggestions that flash at you while you are typing a search term can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated,” Epstein writes.

“A single question-and-answer interaction on a digital personal assistant can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by more than 40 percent.”

Ahead of the 2022 election, “a high level of liberal bias” is being seen in Google search results in swing states like Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin, Epstein wrote. Search results from Bing did not indicate such bias.

In multiple swing states, liberal news sources make up 92 percent of auto-play videos being sent to YouTube users, which can potentially shift “hundreds of thousands of votes” on Election Day, he warned.
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He found that Google sent more voting reminders to moderates and liberals than conservatives, which Epstein calls a “brazen and powerful manipulation.”

Google also “turned off all manipulations” in the 2020 Georgia Senate races after three Republican senators sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai which discussed Epstein’s findings on manipulation. Political bias in Google search results “dropped to zero” after the letter, he pointed out.