Intellectual Property Law

From carefully targeted denial-of-service attacks to fake websites with false polling place addresses, online voter-suppression tactics could wreak unprecedented havoc on the November election, according to a new report released Monday by a group of privacy and election protection organizations.

"The unique features of the internet that enable efficient distributed communications are exactly those that make it difficult to regulate,"" concludes the 43-page study, which describes a plethora of dirty tricks that fraudsters could pull off during the final few hours of a closely fought presidential election.

• Spoofing Dirty tricksters could create phony websites that look like official government election offices' sites, but provide voters in certain counties with the wrong information. It's possible for the tricksters to game Google to make phony sites come up prominently in searches for "Florida polling locations," for example.

• Denial-of-service Crooks might launch distributed denial-of-service attacks to overwhelm important online sources of information on election day. That's effectively what Republican party operative Allen Raymond did during the 2002 phone-jamming incident when he jammed the get-out-the-vote phone lines run by the New Hampshire Democrats and some local firefighters.

• Phone blasts Political operatives could launch targeted voter-disenfranchisement campaigns using robocalls falsely informing voters that their polling location has been changed. Such trickery has surfaced in previous elections, but this time around the operatives would benefit from cheap VOIP and internet tools like the Instant Call Blast. Campaigns could be launched in seconds against thousands of voters, and with spoofed Caller ID, the culprits could make their calls appear to be coming from an official number.

• Facebook disinformation Operatives might infiltrate Facebook groups to share erroneous polling-place information with members inclined to vote for the wrong guy.

• Targeted smears Campaigns might use cutting-edge behavioral targeting techniques to advertise deceptive information to certain kind of web surfers. If profiling indicated that a voter is turned off by negative ads, for example, the voter could be served such ads under the opposition candidate's name.

• Pharming Operatives could hijack the domain names of legitimate election-related websites serving communities expected to vote for the opposition.  Visitors would be redirected to fake sites with false information, and maybe even pick up some spyware along the way.

In 2004, operatives made a number of efforts to mislead certain segments of voters. One example: The New York Times reported that fliers with official-looking letterhead appeared in predominantly black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh that said that because of unusually high voter registration, Republicans were scheduled to vote on Election Day, and Democrats were supposed vote the day after. 

Monday's report ? by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Century Foundation, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Common Cause ?  predicts the same tactics will go high-tech this year. Federal law makes deliberate misinformation campaigns a crime, with penalties for violators of up to five years of prison time and fines of up to $250,000. But prosecutions are rare, and likely to get rarer.

"The challenge of stopping electronic deceptive campaign practices are difficult because the source of the attack can be from any location around the globe, the launch of an attack can be timed to begin within hours of an election; and tracing the source of the attack can be time consuming and not yield actionable results," reads the report.

The authors urge voters to be on the lookout for high-tech sabotage, and get informed about and vote as early as possible. They suggest that election officials develop an "early warning system that is up and operational prior to the election."

Voters can use the website and call-in line of Election Protection, a national nonpartisan voter-protection coalition, to get accurate information, the authors advise.  And don't forward e-mails about voting procedures, even if they look authentic.

The comedian and activist Baratunde Thurston has already created a voter-suppression Wiki. TechPresident is working with advocacy groups and National Public Radio in a Twitter reporting experiment that can be viewed here. And Threat Level has launched a voting-problem map that lets readers report issues they experience at the polls.

See Also:

• Obama Campaign Battles Voting Misinformation Online