| I'll take your biggest question first. > In your opinion, is there a way to fix this sort of thing? Yes, it requires patient, reasonable, intelligent people operating in good faith to sacrifice personal comfort, etc. and get involved in politics. Politics is literally a zero-sum game when it comes to voting as it is currently structured in most of the United States.* But when people with the above characteristics get involved, it literally moderates the extremism that we decry. No matter the level (local, state, or federal), whether you decide to run for office, helps others run for office, get involved with a party, or find a particular issue, being involved makes a difference. You may not be able to easily quantify, but it does make an impact. You may also be bringing a critical perspective in short supply to the political process too. > On what rational grounds do you attempt to prosecute or make such things illegal? I heard four reasons for the 2017-2018 SB 315 bill. 1. To ensure the next time someone shared a vulnerability that made the state look bad, that a D.A. would have the choice to bring a criminal case (which would obviously color perception of the story).
2. To bring the law into parity with Federal criminal statutes.
3. To give the Attorney General a "tough on cyber crime" campaign plank.
4. The banks were asking for help prosecuting criminals. Here's the final text of the bill that passed the legislature, https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20172018/1.... The most relevant text are lines 12-14 and the subsection carve outs on line 16-20. For further context, voter rolls were already public information and can be acquired via a request to the SoS office. The larger red flags were the default usernames and passwords in the instructional pdfs for the election systems. Both of these symptoms (and more) spoke to a woefully underfunded or poorly run office w/r/t to IT. Getting more funds to have properly, well-secured systems takes political capital and there's not a lot of return of that type of political capital expenditure. The current SoS has an engineering background and I've been seeing much better public facing systems put in place during their tenure. *. Please, please, please can we get approval based voting? |