#but now i dont do as much since david is actively in charge
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Can someone take Christian's phone away cos he's been spamming me with voice notes of him drunk and saying shit about me putting more effort into being a comedian online than a good pack beta and it's hitting too close to home :(
#like god forbid a guy is responsible and funny right?#...right?#oh god maybe he's right#i mean it's not like i neglect my responsibilities#I'm always there for everyone and any last minute stuff david needs im there#and especially after gabe passed i was bending in all directions trying to keep everything in check as best i couls#while giving him the space to grieve if he needed it#but now i dont do as much since david is actively in charge#ok time to play halo and ignore my brain 🖖#asher talks#redacted asmr#redacted audio#redactedverse
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so i’ve been meaning to write about this for almost a week now since it happened early tuesday morning, but i’ve been burying myself in hyperfixation hell to distract from the utter shock & devastation of it. but i owe my friends on main to talk about it bc i know you guys care about me & my little family.
tw for animal death
my rat patrick passed away extremely suddenly & unexpectedly in the middle of the night between monday & tuesday. he was euthanized at the ER & went peacefully. i wasn’t with him during the actual moment (protocol with small animals is different because they use a different method) but i gave him a lot of love right before they took him back.
both rats were completely FINE early monday. they were active & behaving normally, like little scamps. i came in late that night to check them before bed. david was his normal self, climbing up the cage bars to come see me. patrick, however, was curled up in a little ball, fur all puffed out, eyes squinted: classic sick rat pose. i picked him up & he was awake & responsive, but didn’t squirm like he normally would. his breathing was extremely labored. to me it seemed like an upper respiratory infection, but it’s unusual for them to come on so suddenly -- usually you’ll see mild symptoms building up over the course of maybe a week before it gets this bad (i would’ve definitely begun treatment well before he had reached the state he was in). URIs can usually be treated with simple antibiotics/anti-inflammatories, which needs to be supplemented with a probiotic bc rats are hindgut fermentors who need the beneficial bacteria to digest. but i knew this was bad enough that he needed to go to the ER bc he needed oxygen.
took both rats with me to help reduce the stress for them. this was about 3am. the person who opened the door for me was someone i know from school, of course, bc there’s literally nowhere in town i can go without someone i know working there. it’s fine though bc she was kind of a calming presence & also they can tell the doctor im a tech so they dont dumb it down for me. they took him back right away & took vitals; breathing was labored like i said but he was also hypothermic with a temp of 96; normal is 100-102.5, same as a dog or cat. they put him in an incubator with heat & oxygen. took x-rays, found fluid in the lungs but also AROUND the lungs, known as pleural effusion.
it was at this point that i knew it was not a simple URI but something really really bad. i associate pleural effusion with heart disease; fluid builds up in the institial spaces when blood isn’t being pumped properly. the dr said the fluid could either be pus from infection, blood from trauma, or free fluid (water basically) from a cardiac abnormality, likely congenital given his age. the only way to know for sure was a thoracentesis (chest tap) for $2,000, which didn’t guarantee anything except diagnosis of the type of fluid, & could also cause further damage. just sending him home on antibiotics wasn’t going to work unless we knew it was an infection & could jeopardize his health even further. she also revealed that she didn’t want to do outpatient bc she really didn’t think he’d survive very long outside of the oxygen cage. i was there for several hours just trying to come to a decision. ultimately i chose to let him go. he was only 3 months old.
i elected to have a necropsy performed on site free of charge (as opposed to sending it out to the big lab for more precise diagnosis). i had to call the vet 4 times to finally get ahold of the attending doctor to get the report; the 4th time i called i sobbed on the phone to the receptionist. waiting was the worst fucking part. finally got to talk to her yesterday. the ER vet’s best guess was a congenital heart defect; however the vet who did the necropsy found that it was in fact a severe infection. i can’t help blaming myself & wondering if he could’ve been saved if i’d just taken him home on the antibiotic meds, or if it could’ve been prevented if i’d taken better care of him.
i’ve been a complete wreck since then, breaking down in sobs a lot. i didn’t sleep for 4 days. but the absolute worst part of all this is david. rats are social animals; they CANNOT live alone. human companionship isn’t enough. now i put him in his carrier & set it out on the couch or bed with a towel down so he can hang out with me for 6-8 hours a day. but he’s too nervous to come out of the carrier (patrick was always the investigative one who’d let david know when it was safe). he mostly sleeps all day. he is not eating much if anything & i’m trying to keep track of any weight loss, though he does seem to eat a bit with the emergency nutrical smeared on his kibble.
so now i’m at a crossroads: i either get another rat, which i’m not totally sure i want to do, or re-home him. the necropsy results help me determine that, because they’re most likely littermates so if patrick had a heart defect david could too.
again, i’ve been in stasis the last 5 days but now i have to make a tangible plan. at this point i’m leaning towards getting a second rat; david & i have bonded so much over this experience that i don’t want to give him away & really, 2 rats aren’t much more work than one. i might go back to the reptile store where they’re from to see if the owner (who i know) will just give me another one with good temperament.
but first david needs a vet appointment to see if he has any evidence of infection setting in, or if he should have prophylactic antibiotics. the cage & room need a deep clean. technically i could get a new rat right now since i’d want to quarantine both of them for 2 weeks, but unfortch i’m flying to fucking portland again next friday. i need to find where to board him.
sorry this is so long but i’ve really been Processing it all. i’ve spent all week in shock. for the first 2 days i couldn’t look at david without breaking down in full-on sobs. patrick was only 3 months. he was doing so well & becoming a big boy. i’m heartbroken. but i’m determined to still give david a good life.
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Is car insurance you buy online instant cover?
Is car insurance you buy online instant cover?
Hi, I m interested in buying a car at 4pm after a viewing. I would obviously have to set the insurance to start on today s date but does it happen instantly or does it not activate for hours/days? Just being careful because I dont want to be stopped! It s with Igo insurance btw thanks
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Hi, I m interested in buying a car at 4pm after a viewing. I would obviously have to set the insurance to start on today s date but does it happen instantly or does it not activate for hours/days? Just being careful because I dont want to be stopped! It s with Igo insurance btw thanks
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Hi, I m interested in buying a car at 4pm after a viewing. I would obviously have to set the insurance to start on today s date but does it happen instantly or does it not activate for hours/days? Just being careful because I dont want to be stopped! It s with Igo insurance btw thanks
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The midterms are already hacked. You just don't know it yet.
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The midterms are already hacked. You just don't know it yet.
One evening last May in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the night of the local primary election, Dave Ball, the assistant IT director for Knox County, settled into the Naugahyde chair of his dusty home office and punched away at his desktop computer. Ball’s IT staff had finished a 14-hour day, running dress rehearsals to prepare for the ritual chaos of election night.
In a few minutes, at exactly 8 pm, the county’s incoming precinct results would become visible to the public online. Curious, Ball typed in the address for the Knox County election website.
At 7:53, the website abruptly crashed. Staring back at Ball was a proxy error notice, a gray message plastered against a screen of purgatorial white. It read simply, “Service Unavailable.” Across East Tennessee, thousands of Knox County residents who eagerly awaited the results saw the same error message — including at the late-night election parties for various county candidates, where supporters gathered around computers at Knoxville’s Crowne Plaza Hotel and the nearby Clarion Inn and Suites.
Ball was scowling at the screen when the phone on his table buzzed. It was a message from a staffer, still on duty at the IT department: “We’ve got a problem here,” it read. “Looks like a DDOS.” Ball still remembers his next, involuntary exclamation: “Oh, shit.”
Technicians recognized the attack: a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, in which a server is overwhelmed by a crushing wave of requests, slowing it to a halt. Over at the county’s IT center, “the error logs were coming so fast that you couldn’t even see what anything said,” recalled Ball.
One county technician, dumbfounded by the whoosh of code rocketing across the screen, somberly took out his phone and began to film it. The assault was being launched from 65 countries, a legion of zombie computers pressed into service by the attack’s architects. Finally, the barrage intensified so much that after 15 minutes, the server succumbed and crashed.
Ball was now besieged by callers — local politicos, voters, county staff. One of them was Cliff Rodgers, the Knox County administrator of elections, who was deliberating what he should tell the local media. “I’ve got three TV crews filming me. I’ve never had three TV crews at one time,” Rodgers said, recounting how the chaos unspooled.
Rodgers would later explain to the media that the online precinct tally is unofficial: Attacking it can’t change the vote count, any more than hacking basketball scores on YahooSports.com can change the actual winner of the NBA finals. But it was natural for voters to wonder if the integrity of the vote itself had come under threat: “It’s the first question they asked me,” Rodgers said.
After an hour, Ball’s team managed to bring the server back to life; finally, the results became visible. But then the attack came roaring back; throughout the night, Ball’s team would battle it to the hilt. It wasn’t until next morning, as IT staff began combing through server logs, that they discovered the true purpose of the attack: The DDOS, and the all-hands effort required to fight it, had been a diversion.
Long before election night, attackers had uncovered a vulnerability in Knox’s website — “loosely written code,” Ball called it — and they timed the onslaught perfectly so they could exploit it during the scramble.
Like burglars who pull the fire alarm and, in the ensuing chaos, ransack the cash register, the hackers entered through a hole of their own creation.
Like burglars who pull the fire alarm and, in the ensuing chaos, ransack the cash register, the hackers entered through a hole of their own creation, and briefly probed the county’s internal database.
Within days, Knox hired a third-party security consultant, called Sword and Shield, to conduct a forensic analysis. Their report, which was shared with Vox and reviewed by cybersecurity experts, confirmed that no data was stolen during the attack. But among the various data sets on offer that night, one had controlled the website that ran the precinct tally. That software presented the attackers, whoever they were, with a chance to meddle with the preliminary results or, worse, to announce a false winner, at least temporarily.
Such a tactic has been attempted at least once before, by a Kremlin-affiliated hacking group in 2014. Sword and Shield’s report found that the DDOS attacks came from 65 countries. But it traced the malicious probe to just two: the United Kingdom and Ukraine. The latter has been a redoubt of Russian-affiliated hackers-for-hire, what the New York Times’s David Sanger has called “Putin’s petri dish” and Radio Free Europe calls “ground zero on the front lines of the global cyberwar.”
A staffer confirmed to Vox that the episode is currently under investigation by the FBI. “It’s no longer theoretical,” Rodgers said. “And if they can do this in little old Knox County, they can do it anywhere.”
“It’s every county versus the FSB”
What happened in Knox County last spring provided apparent confirmation of what leaders in the intelligence community have warned for months: that the successful interference campaign in the 2016 elections — an event that the Senate Intelligence Committee this year called “an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure” — is being reprised in the 2018 midterms, and will continue for the foreseeable future.
“2016 certainly could have been a lot worse,” warns former CIA Director John Brennan, who played a leading role in identifying and thwarting Russian meddling efforts in the last presidential election. “It should be seen as a wake-up call,” he went on. “We are really flirting with disaster if we don’t come to terms with this.”
With the midterms two weeks away, news of electoral cyberattacks has begun to appear with growing frequency. In 2018, at least a dozen races for the House and Senate, mostly Democrats, have been the public targets of malicious cyber campaigns, in a variety of attacks that suggests the breadth of the threat: Campaigns have been besieged by network penetration attempts, spearphishing campaigns, dummy websites, email hacking, and at least one near-miss attempt to rob a Senate campaign of untold thousands of dollars.
“The Russians will attempt, with cyberattacks and with information operations, to go after us again,” said Eric Rosenbach, the former Pentagon chief of staff and so-called cyber czar, now at the Harvard Belfer Center, when I talked to him this summer. In fact, he added, “They’re doing it right now.”
Last week, the Department of Justice unsealed a criminal charge against a Russian national in St. Petersburg for interfering in the 2018 midterms. The charges detail an ongoing Russian-backed information operations campaign, called Project Lakhta, with a budget of around $12 million in 2017 and, this year, around $10 million from January through June alone. Lakhta was detailed in an earlier indictment brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for its activity in 2016. “This case serves as a stark reminder to all Americans: Our foreign adversaries continue their efforts to interfere in our democracy,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray as he announced the charges.
Intelligence officials, cyber experts, and political campaigns have long been bracing for the possibility that these attacks could escalate through November 6. Election offices and campaigns are far from the only targets: On social media, the country’s largest tech titans have beaten back disinformation efforts. This includes Twitter — which this summer quietly began to delete millions of bot accounts — and Facebook, which this year has deactivated more than 650 accounts related to disinformation efforts backed by Russia and Iran (and recently announced news of a major data breach affecting 50 million users).
In August, Microsoft announced that it had detected sophisticated spearphishing campaigns orchestrated against two conservative American think tanks critical of the Kremlin and, later, against three congressional candidates that included at least one US senator. In late September, Google informed an unknown number of senators and Senate staff that their personal email accounts had been targeted by foreign hackers.
Even the more banal rituals of US politics have come into the crosshairs. In May, a live debate in a California House primary race ended in embarrassment when unidentified hackers brought down the live stream and began to air video porn.
With the midterm election weeks away, the central question is how much better-prepared the country’s election infrastructure is to repel these attacks than it was in 2016. Vox spent six months speaking with more than 100 people in the world of elections — officials in the federal government, the intelligence community, election advocacy, state and local election offices, private vendors, academic researchers, and campaigns. Their verdict is sobering: Since 2016, the country’s election infrastructure has improved, but not by much, and things are going to get worse before they get better.
More importantly, the people who safeguard our elections want Americans to reconcile with a harder truth: The way we experience electoral politics is undergoing a sea change, from the ballots we cast to the outcomes we read about to the way we process our most personal decisions.
From now on, these officials say, each aspect of elections is a national security target — and they will be for the next few decades, so we’d better get used to it now. “This is the challenge for the 21st century,” said Brennan. “And how we’re going to deal with it is going to make the difference between some smooth sailing or some very, very stormy seas.”
The country’s election vulnerability falls into three broad camps: 1) the targeting of individual campaigns, which are susceptible to email theft and other meddling; 2) the hacking of our national discourse, or “information operations,” which are the propaganda efforts designed to sow discord; and perhaps most dangerously, 3) the technology itself that underlies the country’s election infrastructure.
In the past two years, federal and state officials have scrambled to harden a system that is almost perfectly vulnerable to the kinds of meddling and mischief on offer from Russian (or other) adversaries. One reason for this vulnerability: The basic configuration of American elections dates to 1890 — a chaotic ritual designed, literally, for another century.
The basic configuration of American elections dates to 1890 — a chaotic ritual designed, literally, for another century
We might also blame the Constitution, which concocted an election system administered entirely by the states — a privilege they still guard fiercely. But even state-run elections are a misnomer; today, much of the country’s elections are overseen by counties, townships, and precincts.
In a way, the United States this November won’t have one midterm election, or even 50, but a number closer to 10,000.
It’s these local officials, in Knox County and elsewhere — and not the NSA, FBI, or DHS —who are standing foursquare against cyberattackers this November. It’s as if America’s most ancient civilian office, the local election clerk, has become saddled with new and alien responsibilities tantamount to a military contractor.
“We are at a fundamental disadvantage because it’s not a fair fight,” says a big tech security expert, who spoke on background in order to speak frankly about election vulnerabilities. “It’s now every county versus the FSB,” he adds, referencing the acronym of Russia’s version of the CIA.
Not only are our election guardians merely outmatched, but the system they guard is also rickety. Intelligence officials from the Obama administration believe the public continues to have a dim understanding of the vastness of the attack in the last election. In the final months of 2016, more than 1,000 government officials from across the intelligence branches and executive agencies were mobilized to defend against Russian intervention, according to former officials.
The result was the most comprehensive assessment of the American voting system since George W. Bush versus Al Gore in 2000 — and the discovery of a litany of vulnerabilities that, years later, some officials still describe as shocking.
Leading officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have suggested that Russian adversaries aren’t targeting the midterms with the same “scale and scope” as in 2016. In a sense, this is true: By this time two years ago, FBI officials had already pried Russian-affiliated malware out of DNC servers, while emails stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign were leaking at a steady clip. Officials also stress that there is no evidence — in 2016 or 2018 — that the rigging of actual ballot numbers has been the intended goal of meddling efforts.
But this is also cold comfort. “Vote flipping is not where the big threat is,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the White House cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama administration. “The big threat is in activities that would disrupt the election in some ways and cast doubt in Americans’ minds about the validity of the outcome.”
If 2018 hasn’t yet played out as chaotically as 2016, that still allows for the critical days leading up to Election Day, and the possibility for so-called Zero Day vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of yet, a warning sounded by DHS Undersecretary Chris Krebs. “What might they be doing? Might they be waiting for 2020?” Krebs said at a press conference last week. “Or might they have other plans that they could trigger in the intervening two and a half weeks?”
Even with comparatively less activity than in 2016, Democratic Party officials are bracing for the worst. “My stress level goes up every single day as I watch the countdown to the election because if something happened with three days out, that could literally slay everything,” said Raffi Krikorian, the Democratic National Committee’s chief security officer. “We’re sleeping worse and worse at night.”
That is largely why Knox County has caught the attention of the intelligence community: It may hint at what could come on Election Day. Several cybersecurity professionals pointed out that Tennessee’s reporting system is like any other in the country, unregulated equipment comprised simply of network switches and internet cables. And Knox County, if anything — with its large budget and sizable IT staff — is better defended than most county election staffs will be this November.
One person who expressed concern was Anthony Ferrante, now global head of the cybersecurity practice at the Washington-based FTI Consulting, and who oversaw the elections portfolio at the National Security Council in 2016.
“There’s nothing to prevent what happened in Tennessee from happening at the national level,” said Ferrante.
“Their job is tough … and getting tougher every day”
A few days after the attack in east Tennessee, state officials placed a phone call to the office of Matt Masterson, the director of the department’s newly created federal Election Task Force (ETF).
When DHS received word of the attack, Masterson organized a conference call between county and state officials across Tennessee. The FBI joined the call, as did DHS staff from the ETF and the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD).
The group settled on a course of action: The FBI would open an investigation in Tennessee. DHS, in turn, would send its Hunt and Incident Response Team to Knox County — the government’s top civilian cyber-SWAT unit — to assess the damage and, as Masterson put it, “to provide additional analysis beyond what [Knox] had done.” He spoke with practiced caution; the discussions are still not public. But, he added confidently, “This was how it’s supposed to work.”
Such a scene would have been difficult to imagine in 2016, when DHS officials, caught flat-footed as they scrambled to notify state officials of an impending attack, often called the wrong offices. The Knox debrief was later included in the DHS’s regular election security meetings — “syncs” in Fed parlance — which have convened every week inside the bowels of the federal government since January 2017.
That month, in the final days of the Obama administration, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing DHS secretary, wrote a memorandum “for immediate release” that designated the country’s elections as “critical infrastructure.”
The Critical Infrastructure Act was forged in the months after 9/11 and eventually designated 16 sectors of American life — from Wall Street to nuclear reactors — as worthy of privileged federal protection from outside attack. Johnson’s memorandum added elections to this list, just days before the Trump administration took office.
Johnson’s memorandum is the reason Masterson’s position exists at the ETF — plus an alphabet soup of other federal subgroups, all created under the “CI [critical infrastructure] designation,” agencies with names like the Government Coordinating Council, the Sector Coordinating Council, and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). The federal government had decided to approach defending elections they same way it defends hospitals, dams, and energy utilities: by deploying extensive monitoring technologies and circulating information about threats as fast as possible.
Masterson’s office sits on the seventh floor of a nondescript DHS building in Arlington, Virginia, with sweeping views of the Potomac River and the Jefferson Memorial. “The threat environment has absolutely changed as a result of 2016 — the idea that sophisticated actors are targeting election systems,” said Masterson.
At 39, he has messily boyish hair, broad shoulders, and a lopsided grin. Over and over, he adamantly channeled a message of sympathy for state election officials. “Every election official is getting asked, ‘What have you done since 2016 to improve election security?’” he said. “Their job is tough, and it’s evolving and getting tougher every day.”
If Masterson sounded at times like a therapist for the woes of state election officials, it’s because, in some measure, that’s what he does. His job is to coach state officials through the regulatory tentacles of safeguarding a national security objective, something they’re still learning as they go. “Our focus on the task force is geared toward helping elections infrastructure,” he said, which means “working with state and local officials to make sure they have the support they need to protect their systems.”
Much of the DHS strategy is shaped by preventing what happened in 2016. Masterson had a front-row seat to the attacks on election infrastructure when he served on the federal Election Assistance Commission. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s official declassified summary of the attacks, 21 states saw their voter registration systems probed — including Illinois, where hackers made off with information on 90,000 voters, and California, where some primary voters found their registrations altered, an attack now associated with Russian-backed efforts. The report concludes that in those cases, “cyber actors were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data.”
On Election Day 2016 in North Carolina, voters in blue-leaning precincts were turned away by the e-pollbook system, the digital check-in devices that have increasingly replaced old-fashioned voter rolls in the past few years. (Jurisdictions in 34 states used them in 2016.)
Hacking was never proven, in part because county officials rebuffed the FBI’s offer to conduct a forensic analysis. But months later, internal NSA documents revealed that the e-pollbook system, used in North Carolina and seven other states, was the target of Russian cyberattacks. According to senior Obama administration officials, at least two other private election technology vendors were also targeted. They remain unnamed. Software glitches were also reported on Election Day in the most populous counties in Georgia, Arizona, and Virginia.
Public websites, like Knox County’s, also operated suspiciously in 2016. On the night of Florida’s August primary, several malfunctions caused county websites to appear erratically: In Leon County, online precinct results were delayed and then fluctuated wildly. In Broward County, the results displayed 30 minutes before polls closed (a malfunction officials attributed to an employee pressing a button prematurely). In total, eight counties in Florida are known to have been targeted by hacking attempts affiliated with Russian hackers; an indictment brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges Russian hackers targeted the websites of “certain counties in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida.” According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, website attacks were as widespread as six states, typically using a simple technique called an SQL injection.
Not even Masterson’s agency was spared: Soon after the election, the Election Assistance Commission discovered that more than 100 login credentials had been stolen and put up for auction on the dark web.
Masterson isn’t an expert on cybersecurity but on state elections. It’s a recognition of how vital DHS views cooperation with state and local jurisdictions. “We recognize that it can’t be just incumbent on ‘Cheryl in Jackson County, Ohio,’ to fight the Russians,” Masterson said sympathetically. The paradox, though, is that “neither can it be incumbent on the feds. It’s the state and locals who run elections.”
And because the federal government can’t mandate security procedures, Masterson’s mission is largely to persuade state officials of the importance of securing their own systems.
Because the federal government can’t mandate security procedures, DHS’s mission is largely to persuade state officials of the importance of securing their own systems
His first weapon may sound dubious to anyone who has worked in government: meetings. Masterson estimates he’s had dozens of confabs with state officials. In these settings, state officials learn and relearn the importance of good cybersecurity posture, such as asset management, access control, and two-factor authentication.
In the second effort, the federal government has coaxed states and counties into adopting its defensive technologies, a treasure chest of security offerings, mostly free of charge. On the menu: about 20 technologies, services, and exercises, offering a kind of federal “geek squad” at the beck and call of the 50 states.
These services include remote cyber-hygiene scans, penetration tests, and risk-and-vulnerability assessments — all of which poke and prod, in various methods, at the strength of the networks and servers inside states and counties. According to Masterson’s figures, 21 states, 13 counties, and one election technology company will have undergone onsite risk-and-vulnerability assessments by Election Day 2018, a marked increase from a lonely one, Pennsylvania, in 2016.
The number of remote hygiene scans is larger still: The networks of 37 states, 88 counties, and eight private election companies are receiving the ongoing scans. (DHS wouldn’t confirm which ones.)
Federal security clearances are also forthcoming, which allow state election officials to be briefed more quickly on classified intelligence. (DHS has 150 clearances; as of mid-September, 100 had been granted.) And the department has invited state election officials to join in various cyberwar-game exercises.
In August, officials from 44 states (and a few election companies) beamed into Washington for three days of role-playing exercises on spearphishing attacks, social media manipulation, and, tellingly, DDOS attacks on state websites.
The DHS’s prized pig is the “Albert” sensor, an ungainly gray box that attaches itself, koala-like, to a server rack and monitors incoming online traffic in real time — then sends alerts to a team of analysts sitting in the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) facility in Albany, New York.
Forty-one states had installed Alberts into their election-related IT infrastructure as of mid-September. Sixty-eight counties had had one installed, too. Masterson and DHS officials tell Vox that 1,300 local jurisdictions and all 50 state governments are participants in its continuous threat-sharing program with EI-ISAC.
Yet these figures also show the vast extent of the challenge. If 21 states receive risk-and-vulnerability assessments, that means by Election Day, the majority won’t. Eighty-eight counties receiving remote hygiene scans means that roughly 2,900 aren’t. And boasting of 1,300 local jurisdictions that have signed on for federal monitoring also means that roughly nine out of 10 of these localities in the US have opted out of a free, vital program.
Masterson pointed out that the federal government is just in the early stages of a massive reinvestment in taxpayer dollars. And because of constitutional limits, he noted, the feds can’t wage these battles for local governments. “All the election officials I’ve talked to are taking this seriously,” he said. “They recognize, ‘I may not have wanted to be an IT manager. But I am.’ That should encourage all of us.” In a follow-up email, he described the election system’s readiness and resilience, compared to 2016, as “night and day.”
Masterson may well be right. But there remains the more worrisome question, one that cyber experts outside the federal government are raising loudly: Will any of this work?
“We’re still on year zero”
Many cybersecurity researchers and engineers remain doubtful of success, at least for the 2018 elections. The security expert at a big tech corporation, who spoke on background in order to speak frankly about election vulnerabilities, put it this way: “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the Pentagon’s [security measures], elections have probably moved from a 2 to a 3.”
Most election cybersecurity experts who spoke with Vox shared this prognosis. Alex Stamos, a former chief information security officer at Facebook who now teaches cybersecurity at Stanford, said, “We’re still on year zero. And we should be on year two.”
These experts acknowledge that the election system has improved. But their reasons for pessimism are just as numerous. They laid out a number of scenarios that could exploit vulnerable election infrastructure: names deleted from voter registration databases; e-pollbooks that send voters to the wrong precinct; malware that corrupts ballot-definition files for machines or software that governs vote tabulation, before it’s installed in various counties and precincts; or corrupted public-facing websites to announce a false winner on election night.
Much of these vulnerabilities can be traced to the fairly recent history of the country’s slapdash election infrastructure. That system was built, largely, by the country’s private elections industry.
Perhaps nowhere in American life is a private industry’s role so critical, charged with defending a core national security objective, yet so dimly understood by its own government.
These private companies “represent an enticing target [f]or malicious cyber actors,” according to the Senate Intelligence report. Yet the report admits that state and federal authorities continue to “have very little insight into the cybersecurity practices of many of these vendors.” Rosenbach, the former Pentagon cyber czar, largely agreed. “The cybersecurity mechanisms in place for a lot of the election software vendors are just not clear,” he said.
Today, the American elections industry today is dominated by three companies: Dominion, Hart InterCivic, and, the largest, Election Systems and Software (ES&S). If you voted in the past 10 years, the chances are good that you used these machines (92 percent of voters do), or the myriad supportive technology required to stage an election.
Today’s election system has its roots in 2002, with the Help America Vote Act, passed after Bush v. Gore. HAVA did some good, like forming the Election Assistance Commission. But on the whole, HAVA was the Johnny Appleseed of mediocre security practices, encouraging states to adopt insecure products from largely unregulated companies.
Much of the criticism has been directed at digital voting machines, called DREs. But election offices have become increasingly digital in other, less obvious ways: Adopting e-pollbooks; hauling voter registration information into state-run or third-party databases; proffering all-in-one election management suites, which program the machines and tabulate the outcomes; and building internet-based services for voters, like the precinct tally program in Knox County.
All of these are potential vectors of attack, according to experts. Daniel, the former White House cybersecurity coordinator, summed up the era of digital expansionism: “If you bring a process out of that analog space and into the digital space, you end up getting a set of vulnerabilities that you never realized you had before.”
The testing protocols for these machines, administered by the EAC, have long been considered weak, with scant focus on security and little visibility from the public. (One machine that came out of this process, built by Diebold, infamously was found to have a hard-coded encryption key identical to every machine, a basic security flaw.)
Nearly all of the machines in use today underwent these lab tests, which are paid for by the companies that manufacture the machines, whose compliance standards were last updated in 2005. “There wasn’t a lot going on in there,” said one insider familiar with the process, who spoke anonymously to discuss the testing protocol, which is not supposed to be public. “The voting systems that came out of that process were not secure.” And the other key parts of election infrastructure the Russians targeted in 2016 — voter registration databases, e-pollbook machines and software, privately built election websites — are exempt from lab testing entirely.
For 15 years, an informal corps of computer scientists did nearly anything they could to warn the public about the vulnerability of these systems. In some ways, Russian interference in 2016 was a version of the catastrophe these security engineers had predicted.
In response, the major companies have taken two defensive measures. The first is to insist their products are “air-gapped,” or not connected to the internet, making it difficult for them to be hacked. This is true, but only in the best-case scenario, assuming that thousands of local clerks and technicians have never once accidentally plugged in an ethernet cable or network jack.
But other experts say this insistence overlooks the sophistication of nation-state attackers, who can find other creative methods for intrusion — infected USB drives, modem access, remote-access software — or, of course, infiltrating the company networks themselves, engineering direct upload malware through regular software updates.
The companies’ second measure has been to close ranks, resisting independent research into their machines. Public security audits of election technology are rare; the last major ones, commissioned by California and Ohio in 2007, were scathing. And the companies have often seemed committed to avoiding them, with one even threatening Princeton University researchers with lawsuits.
(Companies like Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, not only tolerate white-hat hackers but pay them handsomely to find flaws in their products, typically as part of so-called “bug bounties.”)
Tension between the industry and the security community reached a boiling point this August during Def Con, the famous hacking conference in Las Vegas. At Def Con’s Voting Village, cybersecurity experts put various models of voting equipment on public display. There, participants found critical software vulnerabilities in voting machines.
At Def Con, hackers unleashed on voting technology had a field day: rigging digital voting machines, swapping voter registration rolls, and exploiting critical software bugs
Others swapped new programming into an old Diebold e-pollbook, erasing voters from the rolls, while children as young as 11 hacked the mock-up election websites of 13 secretaries of state.
Among 31 digital voting machines on display, some were out of date. But one, the ES&S M650, had suffered a serious vulnerability in Ohio’s 2007 public review; 11 years later, it still demonstrated the same error. (The M650 was used in 371 counties across 26 states in 2016.)
The event infuriated election vendors and state officials, who pointed out, correctly, that Russians don’t enjoy boundless physical access to their machines.
But Def Con succeeded in attracting the attention of several senators, who wrote to ES&S to inquire about the “unprecedented security risks” on display. In a public statement, Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) office called it “unacceptable that ES&S continues to dismiss the very real security concerns that Def Con raised.” In response, ES&S suggested the real threat to elections was Def Con itself — for allowing “foreign intelligence operatives” potential access to the machines.
“That’s a pretty clear sign these companies are not taking the threat seriously enough,” said Stamos, the former chief information security officer at Facebook.
The public focus on the big companies misses another side of the elections industry: so-called third-party vendors, scattered across the country, which manufacture other kinds of election infrastructure and present their own vulnerabilities.
It was one of these smaller companies — VR Systems, based in Tallahassee — that manufactured North Carolina’s malfunctioning e-pollbooks and Florida’s erratic voter websites.
Last year, the Intercept leaked an internal NSA intelligence review that described an advanced persistent threat, probably the GRU — Russian military intelligence units — that had “executed cyber espionage operations” against VR Systems and 122 election officials.
VR Systems COO Ben Martin publicly denied the company was compromised. But an indictment brought by special counsel Mueller this summer appeared to lay out in even more explicit terms the hacking described by the leaked NSA document — which definitively stated Russian attackers “hacked into the computers” of a company matching the description of VR Systems (which the indictment calls “Vendor 1”). In August, a retired county supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, told the Associated Press and other newspapers that he had received a briefing in 2016 from the FBI and DHS, alerting all 67 Florida counties that a vendor had been penetrated by a foreign actor. “Everybody knew they were talking about the GRU and VR Systems,” the supervisor said.
Had North Carolina officials requested the FBI’s forensic analysis, we might know definitively whether Russian intelligence services were responsible for the e-pollbook snafu. (As for the website malfunctions, which occurred the same month the Mueller indictment alleges the hacking of “Vendor 1” occurred, Florida officials have publicly insisted their systems were not compromised.) Today, the 122 election officials who were targeted in 2016 still have not been named. But their collective footprint could be large: VR Systems has contracts in California, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, and Illinois.
More importantly, VR Systems offers a lesson about the vast latticework of products and services that these little-known third-party vendors provide, often across state lines, from purveying e-pollbook software and absentee ballots to configuring registration databases to servicing the machines and software before Election Day. In Michigan, for example, two small vendor outfits, Election Source and GBS, service and program election equipment in 62 counties, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
Because of the growing demand for e-pollbooks, GBS has a beta product in development, called ValidVoter, currently used in one county and set for rollout next year. One afternoon, on a whim, I asked Matthew Bernhard, a security researcher at the University of Michigan, to take a look at ValidVoter’s security posture. In less than 10 minutes, Bernhard discovered two Google-indexed, back-end credential portals for GBS, which he said should have been hidden from public view, hosted on servers with two vulnerabilities that required patches. When Bernhard alerted the company, they promptly took the portals down. (A GBS representative said the portal, no longer in use, was inadvertently left up by a third-party developer, and that “there was no ‘real’ data” accessible in the site save for “early development test data.”)
The federal government doesn’t publicly track or monitor these smaller companies. Asked for a definitive list of private voting assistance entities, what they administer, and where, DHS and the EAC couldn’t provide one.
“If you want to attack many counties in Michigan all at once, the easiest thing to do is to go to one of these small firms,” said Alex Halderman, a professor at the University of Michigan, one of the country’s leading researchers on election cybersecurity. Compared to foreign adversaries who “specialize in penetrating some of the world’s most well-protected systems,” said Halderman, the security capabilities of election companies are like “night and day.”
Representatives from ES&S say they are taking security more seriously. In April, the company hired Chris Wlaschin, formerly the chief information security officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, to lead its security operations.
“When it comes to cyber, we’ve absolutely, absolutely, upped our game,” Wlaschin said. He confirmed ES&S networks are receiving DHS cyber-hygiene scans, with another one scheduled before the election that will examine the company’s voter registration databases.
Asked about the country’s weak testing protocols, Wlaschin was surprisingly deferential. “I think that criticism is fair,” he said, before adding that ES&S is considering its own bug-bounty program in the future — which, if true, would signal a milestone in vendor openness. “The vendor community is embracing many of the tenets of cybersecurity improvements,” Wlaschin said. “We’re probably not moving as fast as some folks would like us to. But we are moving in that direction.”
Other companies, though, seem not to have changed tune much. Representatives from the election company Hart InterCivic repeated the mantras that have so irked security experts. “We go through the most rigorous testing of any part of the election infrastructure,” said Hart vice president Peter Lichtenheld, adding that their products are “air-gapped from the internet, so we are the most secure part” of the industry.
The company said it has someone overseeing security measures, but declined to make them available for comment. (Most companies declined to speak to Vox, or at much length. A Dominion representative sent a statement by email, which read in part, “Dominion has been actively laying the groundwork for security-focused collaboration at all levels — with new hires, with intelligence partners, with state and local customers, with white hat hackers and third-party service providers who share our forward-leaning approach.” A representative from VR Systems pointed me to the company’s online “Questions and Answers” about security.)
“None of us are sitting here saying, ‘Oh, gee, you idiots, why did you build these insecure machines?’ We know exactly why,” said Jake Braun, a former White House liaison to the DHS, who organized the Def Con event. “They built them to the specifications that were written, which didn’t say you need to make them hack-proof from Russian hackers. It said, ‘Build me cheap machines that will accurately count votes.’ That’s what they did.”
“They built them to the specifications that were written, which didn’t say you need to make them hack-proof from Russian hackers”
“It’s not their fault the machines are insecure,” Braun continued. “What’s their fault is that they’re saying they’re secure, which is not true.”
Election companies tend to get harsh press. But the public should look harder at the incentives created for them by allowing a private and unregulated industry to manage this fundamental democratic act. According to a groundbreaking report by the Wharton School, the revenue footprint of the entire US elections industry is less than $350 million — smaller, for instance, than a single construction company in Dallas, Texas.
What this means, in practice, is that the industry has little capital to invest in research and development, tech talent, or security. Two of the three largest vendors, ES&S and Hart, are owned by private equity companies whose agendas are unclear; Dominion’s headquarters isn’t even American, but Canadian.
And though the companies face virtually no federal security regulations, they are hugely regulated at the state and local levels, building machines that have to comply with local ordinances that can vary widely. With a fixed number of clients, the prospect of losing a single county can be substantial: Earlier this year, when Cook County, Illinois, decided to switch its technology from ES&S to Dominion, ES&S sued, choosing to spend its money not on better products, but on lawyers.
One of the authors of the Wharton study, Matthew Caulfield, a PhD student there, was not surprised. “In light of the slim profit margins and long-term contracts,” he said, “it’s likely more profitable to fight over territory like Cook County now, than to innovate on security and hope to win them back next round.”
The consequences of this unregulated, for-profit system can touch the absurd. This year, FBI agents briefed Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on some disturbing information about ByteGrid, a third-party vendor that hosts Maryland’s voter registration database, election management system, online ballot delivery system, and election-night results website.
Unbeknownst to Maryland officials, ByteGrid had been purchased two years earlier by a Russian fund manager whose largest investor is Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who in turn has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. (A Maryland election official tells Vox the FBI “had no evidence of a breach or fraudulent transactions.)
The federal government has taken some steps to secure parts of the private election sector. One is the Sector Coordinating Council, a roundtable of 24 election companies, whose executive committee meets every two weeks to receive security briefings and discuss benchmarks. Masterson said that eight of those 24 companies have begun receiving cyber-hygiene scans, and one received a risk-and-vulnerability assessment (which includes penetration testing) this year.
When I pointed out this good news to Halderman, the cybersecurity expert, he countered with an unsettling point: Earlier this year, DHS officials announced that Russian hackers had successfully burrowed into the networks of several of the country’s largest energy utility companies, a penetration so thorough that Russian hackers could “have thrown switches,” but they didn’t, according to one DHS official. Those utilities, also designated as critical infrastructure since 2003, have received the same protocol of scans and tests that state election offices have crammed into the past 18 months. The hackers jumped these supposedly “air-gapped” networks with the same method experts fear could be applied to elections: by penetrating the smaller vendors that serviced the air-gapped technology.
This is the kind of attack that Halderman worries we might not discover until Election Day, whether in 2018 or beyond. Many of the vulnerabilities election vendors have patched were previously unknown to them, instead pointed out by others. Earlier this year, security consultants flagged a “Client Web Portal” page for Dominion Voting that lacked SSL encryption. And last year, ES&S unwittingly exposed data for roughly 1.8 million Illinois voters on an Amazon server it controlled, a breach that included ES&S employee’s passwords — encrypted, but potentially crackable by an advanced adversary.
“It’s likely that many election-related systems already have been compromised by sophisticated attackers and we just haven’t noticed yet,” said Halderman. “If there’s going to be an attack in 2018 by a nation-state threat, they probably have already broken into the relevant systems. And they’re waiting.”
“100 percent, it’s happening now”
Earlier this year, the campaign staffers of Linda Coleman, a congressional candidate in North Carolina, noticed something unusual: They couldn’t consistently get their website, LinaColemanForCongress.com, to appear at the top of the Google search rankings. Instead, a different website with a similar name, LindaColemanForNC.com, jockeyed for viewership. When the campaign hired a consultant to investigate, they found the website registration was Russian.
“The worst part of it is, we don’t even know what to prepare for,” said Coleman of the fake website. “You never know what people are going to do with that information.”
Another congressional candidate running in Alabama, Tabitha Isner, alerted the FBI to a brute-force entry attempt, an inelegant but sometimes effective attack that runs thousands of password combinations to access a network. The FBI confirmed to her that the attempts came from Russia.
“I would have assumed there would have been a more coordinated effort to address these potential security breaches,” Isner said recently. “We’re on our own out here in the Wild West.”
Coleman and Isner are part of at least a dozen races that have been targeted in 2018, in some form or another. In one case, Hans Keirstead, a Democratic primary challenger in California, reported that cyberattackers had attempted a brute-force penetration and successfully hacked his private email using a spearphishing campaign. Two other congressional races in California were targeted, according to public reports.
In July, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri saw her Senate staff targeted with a sophisticated spearphishing campaign, in which staffers were directed to a look-alike web page, complete with the US Senate seal, designed to steal usernames and passwords. McCaskill is one of three midterm election candidates that Microsoft identified as targets of the attack, which they link to the Russian state hacking group Fancy Bear.
Earlier this year, Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen told the FBI his campaign was the target of an effort designed to steal campaign funds by someone posing in an email as a trusted media buyer. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania also reported being the recipients of spearphishing attempts this year. (Neither is up for reelection this cycle.)
In September, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced that Google had notified an unknown number of Senate offices of email intrusion attempts on personal email that likely came from nation-state attackers.
Besides campaigns and incumbents, other aspects of the party apparatus have been targeted, too. In the spring, Emily’s List, the fundraising group for Democratic women, discovered a fake Facebook account set up in its name. In March, Democratic Party officials announced that they had halted an attack that made use of the email of a former employee.
And a party official tells Vox that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s new social media monitoring division has identified more than 2,200 Twitter handles it believes are targeting campaigns. The party official also shared with Vox internal monitoring reports indicating a high volume of malicious Twitter handles targeting two swing races key to Democratic efforts to retake the House.
The Democratic Party official shared with Vox internal monitoring reports indicating a high volume of malicious Twitter handles targeting two key swing races
“We do believe certain campaigns have already been targeted. We can’t say from who, or what,” the Democratic Party official tells Vox, speaking on background to share the internal data. “But the risk is real.”
The Democratic Party takes information operations seriously, including on Twitter. One example from 2016 suggests why: a fake Twitter account called “Tennessee Republicans,” using the handle @TEN_GOP, which attracted more than 140,000 followers. It circulated divisive content that defended WikiLeaks’ interference in the election; advocated for the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey; and, of course, vocally discredited allegations of Russian meddling.
The account was spotted by the real Tennessee Republican Party, which urged Twitter to purge the account three times. But it managed to fool a number of prominent influencers: People magazine, former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Nicki Minaj, James Woods, Anne Coulter, and MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who each retweeted content from the account.
In total, Twitter believes 50,000 impostor accounts were active in 2016, while Facebook estimates disinformation efforts reached 126 million users. This year, two-thirds of Americans will get some of their news from social media.
“This should be a wake-up call to every campaign,” said Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “100 percent, it’s happening right now.” He added another prediction: “You’re going to start to see [hacking] more evenly on both political parties.”
Since 2016, Mook has largely left politics behind to pursue a different calling: election security. Last year, he and Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, both joined the Harvard Belfer Center to help direct its ongoing initiative, Defending Digital Democracy, before the midterms. The project’s goal is to harden individual campaigns and local election offices — two different operations, Mook said, that are stuck in the same predicament: underfunded, overstressed, prone to mistakes, and squarely in the crosshairs of a sophisticated threat.
Mook and Rhoades explained all this while they sat in the lobby of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last March. There, the Belfer Center was hosting the largest election security conference to date: 120 state election officials had flown in from 38 states. They now mingled with a who’s who of election security: Rosenbach, the former cyber czar, and Ashton Carter, the former secretary of defense, both at Belfer; cybersecurity experts like Michael Sulmeyer and Bruce Schneier; EAC chair Thomas Hicks; and then-Facebook CSO Alex Stamos and Google CSO Heather Adkins.
“The voting systems in the US are a more complex system that even Google has,” Adkins told election officials in one security seminar. Local election officials, she went on, “have, literally, the hardest job in the world.”
The simulations stress-tested local officials’ responses in real time to the worst crises imaginable on Election Day 2018
The conference was convened as a series of trainings for local officials and planned by dozens of Harvard Kennedy School students, including a small corps of Army and NSA officers on leave from active duty. The simulations stress-tested local officials’ responses in real time to the worst crises imaginable on Election Day 2018: a hacked voter registration database, with thousands of voter names altered; a DDOS attack that crashes an election information website; malicious robocalls, directing voters to a false precinct location.
Belfer also trained local officials on handling social media disinformation efforts. In one mock scenario, a viral Facebook post claiming that Latino voters were barred from voting was sent from a fake account mimicking the regional American Civil Liberties Union office. In another simulation, a state governor’s email was hacked, followed by the Twitter account of the secretary of state, whose handle blasted tweets that declared the election for a false winner.
To simulate the scrutiny of local media, Belfer brought in real reporter from the Financial Times, who dragged leery officials before a camera in the hallway, where their answers were broadcast live on a projection screen hanging in the ballroom. (“How much harder are you going to make it for people to vote?” the reporter asked one beleaguered official, Jen Morrell of Colorado, who looked squeamishly at the microphone jabbing toward her collar.)
This year, state officials received a boost in the area they need it most: money. In June, Congress authorized $380 million to be distributed among all 50 states for election upgrades. According to the EAC, which has disbursed the funds, the largest portion will go toward cybersecurity improvements in 38 states: better training for officials, new software, more IT personnel and cybersecurity experts. (Other funds will go to upgrades for voting machine and voter registration systems.)
This year, jurisdictions in Illinois, California, and Florida are experimenting with on-site “cyber navigators” to monitor any irregularities. In Orange County, California, election officials have partnered with the CalTech Political Science Department, which will monitor the servers and networks of election offices up through Election Day.
(Orange County has installed its own Albert sensor on its voter registration system and received DHS-sponsored risk-and-vulnerability assessments, according to Neal Kelley, the registrar of voters.)
The political parties are making improvements, too. The DNC has made Wickr, a secure messaging platform, available to all its campaigns. And this year, the DCCC has employed a corps of paid activists, so-called “Battle Station Organizers,” and dispatched them to swing races around the country.
The organizers identify negative social media posts, flag potential foreign disinformation efforts, and, in the words of one party official, “flood the zone” with positive social media content. In some cases, the party has also quietly paid good-guy hackers to infiltrate its own networks.
An attack this summer on the DNC’s coveted voter file turned out to be a false alarm, hackers working at the direction of the Michigan Democratic Party to find vulnerabilities. To oversee its security, the DNC hired Raffi Krikorian and Bob Lord, two security officers with sterling Silicon Valley credentials.
Krikorian and Lord have worked at breakneck pace to overhaul DNC security in two years: achieving perfect network visibility, rotating passwords, mandating use of two-factor authentication and the secure-messaging platform Signal. “We managed to get [DNC Chair] Tom Perez to stand up in front of the entire staff and say, ‘If you’re going to talk to me, you have to use Signal,” Krikorian said.
When the DNC’s new CEO, Seema Nanda, arrived for her first day at work this summer, Krikorian’s team spearphished her entire staff. “This is an arms race,” Krikorian said. “The best thing you can do is prepare for the worst.”
But among campaigns and election offices, the same problem prevails: foot-dragging. Even with the $380 million in hand, most of these funds won’t be spent in time for the midterms — it’s simply too late. (North Carolina, for instance, won’t fully upgrade its voter registration system until 2019.)
Even with the $380 million in hand, most of these funds won’t be spent in time for the midterms — it’s simply too late
A recent study by ProPublica found that among the election offices overseeing 40 congressional toss-up races, only a third used two-factor authentication to secure their passwords.
Campaigns are in even worse shape — what Mook calls the “soft underbelly” of election security. According to an analysis from BuzzFeed, most congressional candidates have not adopted Wickr, while a late September report from McClatchy found that only six campaigns in the entire country had spent more than $1,000 on cybersecurity.
“It’s not like we’re a big corporation that can simply make a mandate from the CTO’s office,” said Krikorian. At the same time, “We have a target on our backs the size of a multinational corporation. The things we’re up against are insane,” he continued. “That makes me feel good about the national party, but feel nervous about the system overall.”
When Tabitha Isner, the Alabama congressional candidate, approached the FBI following the attempted hack, the response was meager: A DCCC official got on the phone to tell her about Wickr, and then sent a brochure about good cybersecurity practices. In the end, she spent $500 for an upgraded security package, and that was it. “We can’t afford the kind of software we would need, and we can’t afford to hire a cybersecurity expert,” she said.
When I asked Coleman, the candidate in North Carolina, if her campaign was using Wickr or anything like it, she said no: Her campaign office has five staff who work on fold-out plastic tables. An IT security consultant was not in the budget for her either. “We’re doing the best with what we have,” Coleman told me.
The big tech companies have tried to offer their own solutions. Jigsaw, a Google-affiliated outfit, offers campaigns and election offices a suite of security services — such as Project Shield, which can prevent DDOS attacks. Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program offers similar services.
Harvard’s Belfer Center, however, has a decidedly low-tech solution to the cost problem: two comprehensive handbooks, one for campaigns and another for election officials. The goal, according to Mook, is to make those groups “as secure as possible for as cheap as possible.”
Few of the suggestions involve better technology. Instead, most are cultural steps toward better cyber-hygiene, like choosing strong passwords, using two-factor authentication, and emphasizing vigilance.
This emphasis on culture over technology found wide appeal among officials at the Belfer hacking simulation. One state election official in attendance, Eric Spencer, the director of elections for Arizona, spoke proudly about a new statewide requirement: Any USB thumb drive must be brand new, come fresh out of the packaging, be opened inside the office, and be used only once, before being tossed in the garbage — a protocol similar to the Pentagon’s. Compared to three years ago, Spencer said, cybersecurity “is the No. 1 thing I think about.”
That our salvation will come in the form of culture and handbooks, not gadgets or more secure voting infrastructure, can seem underwhelming. During one conversation I had with Masterson, he began talking enthusiastically of a “product” the Election Task Force had built, custom-designed for election officials in Iowa. A malware scanning system? Proprietary software? “We can show you a picture of it,” Masterson told me. “It’s a big poster.”
The poster, which will hang on the walls of dozens of Iowa election offices, includes phone numbers to call in an emergency, reminders about “risks and mitigations,” and a checklist of good practices.
The tech evangelists I spoke with scoffed at Masterson’s efforts. But Mook raised a sharper question: What if a poster, in some cases, is all we need? Of all Belfer’s security recommendations, he said, “The first one is taking responsibility for the problem and creating a culture in your campaign of security.”
To revisit the hacking of the DNC and DCCC is to read through a litany of cultural failures: alarms not raised, phony emails clicked, warnings ignored, meetings not held. If such a poster had existed when he was campaign director, Mook said, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails still might be secure, and Clinton might be president.
Today, in fact, such a poster does exist inside the headquarters of both the DNC and the DCCC. It reminds employees about the dangers of communicating over email and other security hazards.
In both offices, it hangs in a place that is unlikely to be ignored: in bathroom stalls and above the urinals.
“We shouldn’t be waiting for the big boom”
The next 10 years of election cybersecurity will play out as the resolution of several dichotomies: states versus the federal government, and who should secure what systems; technological solutions versus cultural ones; and elusive but much-needed consensus between Democrats and Republicans.
“I have long been calling for an independent commission, akin to the 9/11 Commission,” said former CIA Director John Brennan. “I still think that we, as a country, have not come to grips with the magnitude of the challenge and the problem and the complexity of it.”
“Unfortunately,” he went on, “the partisan animus that exists right now in Washington, and the political infighting that’s going on, has really frustrated our country’s ability to come together and to deal with what is, I think, the defining challenge of the 21st century.”
At least in terms of funding, Brennan is right. Since 9/11, the country spent more than $100 billion securing about 5,000 airports. With 10,000 separate electoral jurisdictions in the US, the number of potential election targets is far greater, and the money allocated so far, $380 million, is a decimal of a percentage point in comparison.
This year, House Democrats called for $1.4 billion of federal investment in elections. Braun, of Def Con, said even those figures are paltry: “We need support for a bill, to the tune of $5 billion, to dramatically overhaul the election infrastructure in the country.”
That kind of consensus is unlikely to come soon. When senators this summer tried to pass an additional $250 million for states in time for the midterms, the amendment was blocked by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, calling it a potential new “entitlement.” And a proposed ceasefire between the DCCC and NRCC, pledging not to use hacked materials in campaign ads, collapsed when Republicans dropped out of the talks.
Democrats and Republicans — in both the House and Senate — this year introduced nearly a dozen bipartisan bills and measures to secure the country’s election systems
However, Democrats and Republicans — in both the House and Senate — this year introduced nearly a dozen bipartisan bills and measures to secure the country’s election systems. One is Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) PAVE Act, which would mandate paper ballots and “risk-limiting” audits for all federal elections, as a backstop for ensuring that all outcomes are accurate. Another, the DETER Act, would mandate sanctions on Russia in the event of further meddling.
A bevy of House bills also propose support for more paper backups, increased coordination between DHS and campaigns, creating a national “bug bounty” for election infrastructure, or new EAC guidelines and cybersecurity grants. Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland have asked the Treasury Department to examine foreign investment in election companies, inspired by the Maryland ByteGrid fiasco.
And a new bill, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, would cement the role of DHS in defending IT infrastructure, including elections. It recently passed the Senate.
But the most prominent of these efforts is the Senate’s Secure Elections Act, sponsored by Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). The bill would grant security clearances to each state’s top election official, create a technical advisory board to proliferate best practices in cybersecurity, and require states to conduct manual, paper-based election audits.
This summer, the bill seemed like a sure bet for passage. Then in mid-August, the markup for the bill was abruptly canceled, with little explanation.
The mystery was solved when it was announced that the shelving of the Secure Elections Act came at the behest of the White House. “We cannot support legislation” that “moves power or funding from the states to Washington,” the White House announced in a statement. No particular objections to the bill were identified.
Former intelligence officials have given the White House mixed marks on election security. For all of President Donald Trump’s “deep state” misgivings, it’s the federal bureaucracy and law enforcement agencies, from DHS to the FBI to US Cyber Command, that have performed most admirably, even with little visible support from the president.
Nor has the administration been entirely silent: Earlier this year, National Security Adviser John Bolton told his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, that the United States “wouldn’t tolerate meddling in 2018,” a threat that appeared to grow teeth in September when the White House announced the threat of sanctions to anyone who meddles with elections on US soil.
On the other hand, the administration’s own words have repeatedly undercut these efforts on the world stage, whether in the president’s remarks in Helsinki, favoring Putin’s denials over the conclusions of his own intelligence branches, or new talking points from the White House arguing that the real threat in the 2018 midterms comes from China (a belief that holds little currency among cybersecurity experts).
More consequential are the White House’s lesser-known administrative moves. In the past two years, the administration has eliminated three vital positions in cyberdefense: cybersecurity coordinators at the State Department and Homeland Security Council, and, most critically, its White House cybersecurity coordinator.
The moves have baffled members of Congress and former intelligence officials. “The reason those positions were so important is because they could focus on this 24/7,” said Nick Shapiro, a former senior CIA official. “You’re not going to find anyone who knows anything about this stuff who doesn’t think those positions were a vital necessity.”
Fully staffed cyberdefenses and threats of sanctions, though, won’t alone answer the tectonic questions about the future of election security. In a landmark report issued in September, the National Academy of Sciences put forward a series of proposals for the future of voting. The working group, co-chaired by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, proposed 54 recommendations, many of which would entail a more active role for the federal government. These included a federal mandate for vendors to report intrusions or technology failures to DHS and submit to regular technology audits; a national backup of voter registration data; paper trails for all voting machines; strong cybersecurity requirements in the EAC’s laboratory testing; and expanding those tests to include the things that Russian hackers targeted in 2016, such as e-pollbooks and voter registration databases.
Even as they brace for the midterms, cybersecurity leaders have begun to look ahead to 2020 —this year, the damage is already done
How these advancements will come about, exactly, remains a wide-open debate. “There needs to be some unprecedented partnership between public and private sector,” former CIA Director Brennan offered. “We shouldn’t be waiting for the 9/11 equivalent, that big boom, to take the steps necessary to prevent a recurrence.”
Even as they brace for the midterms, cybersecurity leaders have already begun to look ahead to 2020, as if to hint they are ready to yield the battle, but not the war.
“A large-scale concerted effort across the board that also involves setting international norms — yes, that’s going to be unrealistic in 50-something days,” said Krikorian when we spoke in September. The country, he said, “needs more staffing, we need more resources, we need more training, two years before 2020. But even that’s going to be rough in my opinion.”
For Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief information security officer, it’s the Knox County attack that encapsulates all that still unnerves him. “That’s one of my big fears for 2018, in that we haven’t done anything to prevent that,” he said. “There’ve been very few changes that [have] given support for local election authorities to stop that kind of attack.”
Instead, Stamos offered a sobering thought: It’s time to start planning for 2020.
For 2018, he said, “It is much too late.”
Benjamin Wofford is a staff writer at Washingtonian magazine and a contributing editor at Politico.
CREDITS Editor: Ben Pauker Copy editors: Bridgett Henwood, Tanya Pai Illustrations: Alicia Tatone, Javier Zarracina
Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18001684/2018-midterms-hacked-russia-election-security-voting
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One evening last May in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the night of the local primary election, Dave Ball, the assistant IT director for Knox County, settled into the Naugahyde chair of his dusty home office and punched away at his desktop computer. Ball’s IT staff had finished a 14-hour day, running dress rehearsals to prepare for the ritual chaos of election night.
In a few minutes, at exactly 8 pm, the county’s incoming precinct results would become visible to the public online. Curious, Ball typed in the address for the Knox County election website.
At 7:53, the website abruptly crashed. Staring back at Ball was a proxy error notice, a gray message plastered against a screen of purgatorial white. It read simply, “Service Unavailable.” Across East Tennessee, thousands of Knox County residents who eagerly awaited the results saw the same error message — including at the late-night election parties for various county candidates, where supporters gathered around computers at Knoxville’s Crowne Plaza Hotel and the nearby Clarion Inn and Suites.
Ball was scowling at the screen when the phone on his table buzzed. It was a message from a staffer, still on duty at the IT department: “We’ve got a problem here,” it read. “Looks like a DDOS.” Ball still remembers his next, involuntary exclamation: “Oh, shit.”
Technicians recognized the attack: a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, in which a server is overwhelmed by a crushing wave of requests, slowing it to a halt. Over at the county’s IT center, “the error logs were coming so fast that you couldn’t even see what anything said,” recalled Ball.
One county technician, dumbfounded by the whoosh of code rocketing across the screen, somberly took out his phone and began to film it. The assault was being launched from 65 countries, a legion of zombie computers pressed into service by the attack’s architects. Finally, the barrage intensified so much that after 15 minutes, the server succumbed and crashed.
Ball was now besieged by callers — local politicos, voters, county staff. One of them was Cliff Rodgers, the Knox County administrator of elections, who was deliberating what he should tell the local media. “I’ve got three TV crews filming me. I’ve never had three TV crews at one time,” Rodgers said, recounting how the chaos unspooled.
Rodgers would later explain to the media that the online precinct tally is unofficial: Attacking it can’t change the vote count, any more than hacking basketball scores on YahooSports.com can change the actual winner of the NBA finals. But it was natural for voters to wonder if the integrity of the vote itself had come under threat: “It’s the first question they asked me,” Rodgers said.
After an hour, Ball’s team managed to bring the server back to life; finally, the results became visible. But then the attack came roaring back; throughout the night, Ball’s team would battle it to the hilt. It wasn’t until next morning, as IT staff began combing through server logs, that they discovered the true purpose of the attack: The DDOS, and the all-hands effort required to fight it, had been a diversion.
Long before election night, attackers had uncovered a vulnerability in Knox’s website — “loosely written code,” Ball called it — and they timed the onslaught perfectly so they could exploit it during the scramble.
Like burglars who pull the fire alarm and, in the ensuing chaos, ransack the cash register, the hackers entered through a hole of their own creation.
Like burglars who pull the fire alarm and, in the ensuing chaos, ransack the cash register, the hackers entered through a hole of their own creation, and briefly probed the county’s internal database.
Within days, Knox hired a third-party security consultant, called Sword and Shield, to conduct a forensic analysis. Their report, which was shared with Vox and reviewed by cybersecurity experts, confirmed that no data was stolen during the attack. But among the various data sets on offer that night, one had controlled the website that ran the precinct tally. That software presented the attackers, whoever they were, with a chance to meddle with the preliminary results or, worse, to announce a false winner, at least temporarily.
Such a tactic has been attempted at least once before, by a Kremlin-affiliated hacking group in 2014. Sword and Shield’s report found that the DDOS attacks came from 65 countries. But it traced the malicious probe to just two: the United Kingdom and Ukraine. The latter has been a redoubt of Russian-affiliated hackers-for-hire, what the New York Times’s David Sanger has called “Putin’s petri dish” and Radio Free Europe calls “ground zero on the front lines of the global cyberwar.”
A staffer confirmed to Vox that the episode is currently under investigation by the FBI. “It’s no longer theoretical,” Rodgers said. “And if they can do this in little old Knox County, they can do it anywhere.”
“It’s every county versus the FSB”
What happened in Knox County last spring provided apparent confirmation of what leaders in the intelligence community have warned for months: that the successful interference campaign in the 2016 elections — an event that the Senate Intelligence Committee this year called “an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure” — is being reprised in the 2018 midterms, and will continue for the foreseeable future.
“2016 certainly could have been a lot worse,” warns former CIA Director John Brennan, who played a leading role in identifying and thwarting Russian meddling efforts in the last presidential election. “It should be seen as a wake-up call,” he went on. “We are really flirting with disaster if we don’t come to terms with this.”
With the midterms two weeks away, news of electoral cyberattacks has begun to appear with growing frequency. In 2018, at least a dozen races for the House and Senate, mostly Democrats, have been the public targets of malicious cyber campaigns, in a variety of attacks that suggests the breadth of the threat: Campaigns have been besieged by network penetration attempts, spearphishing campaigns, dummy websites, email hacking, and at least one near-miss attempt to rob a Senate campaign of untold thousands of dollars.
“The Russians will attempt, with cyberattacks and with information operations, to go after us again,” said Eric Rosenbach, the former Pentagon chief of staff and so-called cyber czar, now at the Harvard Belfer Center, when I talked to him this summer. In fact, he added, “They’re doing it right now.”
Last week, the Department of Justice unsealed a criminal charge against a Russian national in St. Petersburg for interfering in the 2018 midterms. The charges detail an ongoing Russian-backed information operations campaign, called Project Lakhta, with a budget of around $12 million in 2017 and, this year, around $10 million from January through June alone. Lakhta was detailed in an earlier indictment brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for its activity in 2016. “This case serves as a stark reminder to all Americans: Our foreign adversaries continue their efforts to interfere in our democracy,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray as he announced the charges.
Intelligence officials, cyber experts, and political campaigns have long been bracing for the possibility that these attacks could escalate through November 6. Election offices and campaigns are far from the only targets: On social media, the country’s largest tech titans have beaten back disinformation efforts. This includes Twitter — which this summer quietly began to delete millions of bot accounts — and Facebook, which this year has deactivated more than 650 accounts related to disinformation efforts backed by Russia and Iran (and recently announced news of a major data breach affecting 50 million users).
In August, Microsoft announced that it had detected sophisticated spearphishing campaigns orchestrated against two conservative American think tanks critical of the Kremlin and, later, against three congressional candidates that included at least one US senator. In late September, Google informed an unknown number of senators and Senate staff that their personal email accounts had been targeted by foreign hackers.
Even the more banal rituals of US politics have come into the crosshairs. In May, a live debate in a California House primary race ended in embarrassment when unidentified hackers brought down the live stream and began to air video porn.
Are we better prepared now than in 2016?
With the midterm election weeks away, the central question is how much better-prepared the country’s election infrastructure is to repel these attacks than it was in 2016. Vox spent six months speaking with more than 100 people in the world of elections — officials in the federal government, the intelligence community, election advocacy, state and local election offices, private vendors, academic researchers, and campaigns. Their verdict is sobering: Since 2016, the country’s election infrastructure has improved, but not by much, and things are going to get worse before they get better.
More importantly, the people who safeguard our elections want Americans to reconcile with a harder truth: The way we experience electoral politics is undergoing a sea change, from the ballots we cast to the outcomes we read about to the way we process our most personal decisions.
From now on, these officials say, each aspect of elections is a national security target — and they will be for the next few decades, so we’d better get used to it now. “This is the challenge for the 21st century,” said Brennan. “And how we’re going to deal with it is going to make the difference between some smooth sailing or some very, very stormy seas.”
The country’s election vulnerability falls into three broad camps: 1) the targeting of individual campaigns, which are susceptible to email theft and other meddling; 2) the hacking of our national discourse, or “information operations,” which are the propaganda efforts designed to sow discord; and perhaps most dangerously, 3) the technology itself that underlies the country’s election infrastructure.
In the past two years, federal and state officials have scrambled to harden a system that is almost perfectly vulnerable to the kinds of meddling and mischief on offer from Russian (or other) adversaries. One reason for this vulnerability: The basic configuration of American elections dates to 1890 — a chaotic ritual designed, literally, for another century.
The basic configuration of American elections dates to 1890 — a chaotic ritual designed, literally, for another century.
We might also blame the Constitution, which concocted an election system administered entirely by the states — a privilege they still guard fiercely. But even state-run elections are a misnomer; today, much of the country’s elections are overseen by counties, townships, and precincts.
In a way, the United States this November won’t have one midterm election, or even 50, but a number closer to 10,000.
It’s these local officials, in Knox County and elsewhere — and not the NSA, FBI, or DHS —who are standing foursquare against cyberattackers this November. It’s as if America’s most ancient civilian office, the local election clerk, has become saddled with new and alien responsibilities tantamount to a military contractor.
“We are at a fundamental disadvantage because it’s not a fair fight,” says a big tech security expert, who spoke on background in order to speak frankly about election vulnerabilities. “It’s now every county versus the FSB,” he adds, referencing the acronym of Russia’s version of the CIA.
Not only are our election guardians merely outmatched, but the system they guard is also rickety. Intelligence officials from the Obama administration believe the public continues to have a dim understanding of the vastness of the attack in the last election. In the final months of 2016, more than 1,000 government officials from across the intelligence branches and executive agencies were mobilized to defend against Russian intervention, according to former officials.
The result was the most comprehensive assessment of the American voting system since George W. Bush versus Al Gore in 2000 — and the discovery of a litany of vulnerabilities that, years later, some officials still describe as shocking.
Leading officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have suggested that Russian adversaries aren’t targeting the midterms with the same “scale and scope” as in 2016. In a sense, this is true: By this time two years ago, FBI officials had already pried Russian-affiliated malware out of DNC servers, while emails stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign were leaking at a steady clip. Officials also stress that there is no evidence — in 2016 or 2018 — that the rigging of actual ballot numbers has been the intended goal of meddling efforts.
But this is also cold comfort. “Vote flipping is not where the big threat is,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the White House cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama administration. “The big threat is in activities that would disrupt the election in some ways and cast doubt in Americans’ minds about the validity of the outcome.”
If 2018 hasn’t yet played out as chaotically as 2016, that still allows for the critical days leading up to Election Day, and the possibility for so-called Zero Day vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of yet, a warning sounded by DHS Undersecretary Chris Krebs. “What might they be doing? Might they be waiting for 2020?” Krebs said at a press conference last week. “Or might they have other plans that they could trigger in the intervening two and a half weeks?”
Even with comparatively less activity than in 2016, Democratic Party officials are bracing for the worst. “My stress level goes up every single day as I watch the countdown to the election because if something happened with three days out, that could literally slay everything,” said Raffi Krikorian, the Democratic National Committee’s chief security officer. “We’re sleeping worse and worse at night.”
That is largely why Knox County has caught the attention of the intelligence community: It may hint at what could come on Election Day. Several cybersecurity professionals pointed out that Tennessee’s reporting system is like any other in the country, unregulated equipment comprised simply of network switches and internet cables. And Knox County, if anything — with its large budget and sizable IT staff — is better defended than most county election staffs will be this November.
One person who expressed concern was Anthony Ferrante, now global head of the cybersecurity practice at the Washington-based FTI Consulting, and who oversaw the elections portfolio at the National Security Council in 2016.
“There’s nothing to prevent what happened in Tennessee from happening at the national level,” said Ferrante.
“Their job is tough … and getting tougher every day”
A few days after the attack in east Tennessee, state officials placed a phone call to the office of Matt Masterson, the director of the department’s newly created federal Election Task Force (ETF).
When DHS received word of the attack, Masterson organized a conference call between county and state officials across Tennessee. The FBI joined the call, as did DHS staff from the ETF and the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD).
The group settled on a course of action: The FBI would open an investigation in Tennessee. DHS, in turn, would send its Hunt and Incident Response Team to Knox County — the government’s top civilian cyber-SWAT unit — to assess the damage and, as Masterson put it, “to provide additional analysis beyond what [Knox] had done.” He spoke with practiced caution; the discussions are still not public. But, he added confidently, “This was how it’s supposed to work.”
Such a scene would have been difficult to imagine in 2016, when DHS officials, caught flat-footed as they scrambled to notify state officials of an impending attack, often called the wrong offices. The Knox debrief was later included in the DHS’s regular election security meetings — “syncs” in Fed parlance — which have convened every week inside the bowels of the federal government since January 2017.
That month, in the final days of the Obama administration, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing DHS secretary, wrote a memorandum “for immediate release” that designated the country’s elections as “critical infrastructure.”
The Critical Infrastructure Act was forged in the months after 9/11 and eventually designated 16 sectors of American life — from Wall Street to nuclear reactors — as worthy of privileged federal protection from outside attack. Johnson’s memorandum added elections to this list, just days before the Trump administration took office.
Johnson’s memorandum is the reason Masterson’s position exists at the ETF — plus an alphabet soup of other federal subgroups, all created under the “CI [critical infrastructure] designation,” agencies with names like the Government Coordinating Council, the Sector Coordinating Council, and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). The federal government had decided to approach defending elections they same way it defends hospitals, dams, and energy utilities: by deploying extensive monitoring technologies and circulating information about threats as fast as possible.
Masterson’s office sits on the seventh floor of a nondescript DHS building in Arlington, Virginia, with sweeping views of the Potomac River and the Jefferson Memorial. “The threat environment has absolutely changed as a result of 2016 — the idea that sophisticated actors are targeting election systems,” said Masterson.
At 39, he has messily boyish hair, broad shoulders, and a lopsided grin. Over and over, he adamantly channeled a message of sympathy for state election officials. “Every election official is getting asked, ‘What have you done since 2016 to improve election security?’” he said. “Their job is tough, and it’s evolving and getting tougher every day.”
If Masterson sounded at times like a therapist for the woes of state election officials, it’s because, in some measure, that’s what he does. His job is to coach state officials through the regulatory tentacles of safeguarding a national security objective, something they’re still learning as they go. “Our focus on the task force is geared toward helping elections infrastructure,” he said, which means “working with state and local officials to make sure they have the support they need to protect their systems.”
The target landscape is huge
Much of the DHS strategy is shaped by preventing what happened in 2016. Masterson had a front-row seat to the attacks on election infrastructure when he served on the federal Election Assistance Commission. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s official declassified summary of the attacks, 21 states saw their voter registration systems probed — including Illinois, where hackers made off with information on 90,000 voters, and California, where some primary voters found their registrations altered, an attack now associated with Russian-backed efforts. The report concludes that in those cases, “cyber actors were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data.”
On Election Day 2016 in North Carolina, voters in blue-leaning precincts were turned away by the e-pollbook system, the digital check-in devices that have increasingly replaced old-fashioned voter rolls in the past few years. (Jurisdictions in 34 states used them in 2016.)
Hacking was never proven, in part because county officials rebuffed the FBI’s offer to conduct a forensic analysis. But months later, internal NSA documents revealed that the e-pollbook system, used in North Carolina and seven other states, was the target of Russian cyberattacks. According to senior Obama administration officials, at least two other private election technology vendors were also targeted. They remain unnamed. Software glitches were also reported on Election Day in the most populous counties in Georgia, Arizona, and Virginia.
Public websites, like Knox County’s, also operated suspiciously in 2016. On the night of Florida’s August primary, several malfunctions caused county websites to appear erratically: In Leon County, online precinct results were delayed and then fluctuated wildly. In Broward County, the results displayed 30 minutes before polls closed (a malfunction officials attributed to an employee pressing a button prematurely). In total, eight counties in Florida are known to have been targeted by hacking attempts affiliated with Russian hackers; an indictment brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges Russian hackers targeted the websites of “certain counties in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida.” According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, website attacks were as widespread as six states, typically using a simple technique called an SQL injection.
Not even Masterson’s agency was spared: Soon after the election, the Election Assistance Commission discovered that more than 100 login credentials had been stolen and put up for auction on the dark web.
Masterson isn’t an expert on cybersecurity, but on state elections. It’s a recognition of how vital DHS views cooperation with state and local jurisdictions. “We recognize that it can’t be just incumbent on ‘Cheryl in Jackson County, Ohio,’ to fight the Russians,” Masterson said sympathetically. The paradox, though, is that “neither can it be incumbent on the feds. It’s the state and locals who run elections.”
And because the federal government can’t mandate security procedures, Masterson’s mission is largely to persuade state officials of the importance of securing their own systems.
Because the federal government can’t mandate security procedures, DHS’s mission is largely to persuade state officials of the importance of securing their own systems.
His first weapon may sound dubious to anyone who has worked in government: meetings. Masterson estimates he’s had dozens of confabs with state officials. In these settings, state officials learn and relearn the importance of good cybersecurity posture, such as asset management, access control, and two-factor authentication.
In the second effort, the federal government has coaxed states and counties into adopting its defensive technologies, a treasure chest of security offerings, mostly free of charge. On the menu: about 20 technologies, services, and exercises, offering a kind of federal “geek squad” at the beck and call of the 50 states.
These services include remote cyber-hygiene scans, penetration tests, and risk-and-vulnerability assessments — all of which poke and prod, in various methods, at the strength of the networks and servers inside states and counties. According to Masterson’s figures, 21 states, 13 counties, and one election technology company will have undergone onsite risk-and-vulnerability assessments by Election Day 2018, a marked increase from a lonely one, Pennsylvania, in 2016.
The number of remote hygiene scans is larger still: The networks of 37 states, 88 counties, and eight private election companies are receiving the ongoing scans. (DHS wouldn’t confirm which ones.)
Federal security clearances are also forthcoming, which allow state election officials to be briefed more quickly on classified intelligence. (DHS has promised 150 clearances; as of mid-September, 100 had been granted.) And the department has invited state election officials to join in various cyberwar-game exercises.
In August, officials from 44 states (and a few election companies) beamed into Washington for three days of role-playing exercises on spearphishing attacks, social media manipulation, and, tellingly, DDOS attacks on state websites.
The DHS’s prized pig is the “Albert” sensor, an ungainly gray box that attaches itself, koala-like, to a server rack and monitors incoming online traffic in real time — then sends alerts to a team of analysts sitting in the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) facility in Albany, New York.
Forty-one states had installed Alberts into their election-related IT infrastructure as of mid-September. Sixty-eight counties had had one installed, too. Masterson and DHS officials tell Vox that 1,300 local jurisdictions and all 50 state governments are participants in its continuous threat-sharing program with EI-ISAC.
Yet these figures also show the vast extent of the challenge. If 21 states receive risk-and-vulnerability assessments, that means by Election Day, the majority won’t. Eighty-eight counties receiving remote hygiene scans means that roughly 2,900 aren’t. And boasting of 1,300 local jurisdictions that have signed on for federal monitoring also means that roughly nine out of 10 of these localities in the US have opted out of a free, vital program.
Masterson pointed out that the federal government is just in the early stages of a massive reinvestment in taxpayer dollars. And because of constitutional limits, he noted, the feds can’t wage these battles for local governments. “All the election officials I’ve talked to are taking this seriously,” he said. “They recognize, ‘I may not have wanted to be an IT manager. But I am.’ That should encourage all of us.” In a follow-up email, he described the election system’s readiness and resilience, compared to 2016, as “night and day.”
Masterson may well be right. But there remains the more worrisome question, one that cyber experts outside the federal government are raising loudly: Will any of this work?
“We’re still on year zero”
Many cybersecurity researchers and engineers remain doubtful of success, at least for the 2018 elections. The security expert at a big tech corporation, who spoke on background in order to speak frankly about election vulnerabilities, put it this way: “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the Pentagon’s [security measures], elections have probably moved from a 2 to a 3.”
Most election cybersecurity experts who spoke with Vox shared this prognosis. Alex Stamos, a former chief information security officer at Facebook who now teaches cybersecurity at Stanford, said, “We’re still on year zero. And we should be on year two.”
These experts acknowledge that the election system has improved. But their reasons for pessimism are just as numerous. They laid out a number of scenarios that could exploit vulnerable election infrastructure: names deleted from voter registration databases; e-pollbooks that send voters to the wrong precinct; malware that corrupts ballot-definition files for machines or software that governs vote tabulation, before it’s installed in various counties and precincts; or corrupted public-facing websites to announce a false winner on election night.
Much of these vulnerabilities can be traced to the fairly recent history of the country’s slapdash election infrastructure. That system was built, largely, by the country’s private elections industry.
Perhaps nowhere in American life is a private industry’s role so critical, charged with defending a core national security objective, yet so dimly understood by its own government.
These private companies “represent an enticing target [f]or malicious cyber actors,” according to the Senate Intelligence report. Yet the report admits that state and federal authorities continue to “have very little insight into the cybersecurity practices of many of these vendors.” Rosenbach, the former Pentagon cyber czar, largely agreed. “The cybersecurity mechanisms in place for a lot of the election software vendors are just not clear,” he said.
America’s voting system is run by a handful of private companies
Today, the American elections industry today is dominated by three companies: Dominion, Hart InterCivic, and, the largest, Election Systems and Software (ES&S). If you voted in the past 10 years, the chances are good that you used these machines (92 percent of voters do), or the myriad supportive technology required to stage an election.
Today’s election system has its roots in 2002, with the Help America Vote Act, passed after Bush v. Gore. HAVA did some good, like forming the Election Assistance Commission. But on the whole, HAVA was the Johnny Appleseed of mediocre security practices, encouraging states to adopt insecure products from largely unregulated companies.
Much of the criticism has been directed at digital voting machines, called DREs. But election offices have become increasingly digital in other, less obvious ways: Adopting e-pollbooks; hauling voter registration information into state-run or third-party databases; proffering all-in-one election management suites, which program the machines and tabulate the outcomes; and building internet-based services for voters, like the precinct tally program in Knox County.
All of these are potential vectors of attack, according to experts. Daniel, the former White House cybersecurity coordinator, summed up the era of digital expansionism: “If you bring a process out of that analog space and into the digital space, you end up getting a set of vulnerabilities that you never realized you had before.”
The testing protocols for these machines, administered by the EAC, have long been considered weak, with scant focus on security and little visibility from the public. (One machine that came out of this process, built by Diebold, infamously was found to have a hard-coded encryption key identical to every machine, a basic security flaw.)
Nearly all of the machines in use today underwent these lab tests, which are paid for by the companies that manufacture the machines, whose compliance standards were last updated in 2005. “There wasn’t a lot going on in there,” said one insider familiar with the process, who spoke anonymously to discuss the testing protocol, which is not supposed to be public. “The voting systems that came out of that process were not secure.” And the other key parts of election infrastructure the Russians targeted in 2016 — voter registration databases, e-pollbook machines and software, privately built election websites — are exempt from lab testing entirely.
For 15 years, an informal corps of computer scientists did nearly anything they could to warn the public about the vulnerability of these systems. In some ways, Russian interference in 2016 was a version of the catastrophe these security engineers had predicted.
In response, the major companies have taken two defensive measures. The first is to insist their products are “air-gapped,” or not connected to the internet, making it difficult for them to be hacked. This is true, but only in the best-case scenario, assuming that thousands of local clerks and technicians have never once accidentally plugged in an ethernet cable or network jack.
But other experts say this insistence overlooks the sophistication of nation-state attackers, who can find other creative methods for intrusion — infected USB drives, modem access, remote-access software — or, of course, infiltrating the company networks themselves, engineering direct upload malware through regular software updates.
The companies’ second measure has been to close ranks, resisting independent research into their machines. Public security audits of election technology are rare; the last major ones, commissioned by California and Ohio in 2007, were scathing. And the companies have often seemed committed to avoiding them, with one even threatening Princeton University researchers with lawsuits.
(Companies like Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, not only tolerate white-hat hackers but pay them handsomely to find flaws in their products, typically as part of so-called “bug bounties.”)
Tension between the industry and the security community reached a boiling point this August during Def Con, the famous hacking conference in Las Vegas. At Def Con’s Voting Village, cybersecurity experts put various models of voting equipment on public display. There, participants found critical software vulnerabilities in voting machines.
At Def Con, hackers unleashed on voting technology had a field day: rigging digital voting machines, swapping voter registration rolls, and exploiting critical software bugs.
Others swapped new programming into an old Diebold e-pollbook, erasing voters from the rolls, while children as young as 11 hacked the mock-up election websites of 13 secretaries of state.
Among 31 digital voting machines on display, some were out of date. But one, the ES&S M650, had suffered a serious vulnerability in Ohio’s 2007 public review; 11 years later, it still demonstrated the same error. (The M650 was used in 371 counties across 26 states in 2016.)
The event infuriated election vendors and state officials, who pointed out, correctly, that Russians don’t enjoy boundless physical access to their machines.
But Def Con succeeded in attracting the attention of several senators, who wrote to ES&S to inquire about the “unprecedented security risks” on display. In a public statement, Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) office called it “unacceptable that ES&S continues to dismiss the very real security concerns that Def Con raised.” In response, ES&S suggested the real threat to elections was Def Con itself — for allowing “foreign intelligence operatives” potential access to the machines.
“That’s a pretty clear sign these companies are not taking the threat seriously enough,” said Stamos, the former chief information security officer at Facebook.
Small, third-party vendors play an outsized role in US voting
The public focus on the big companies misses another side of the elections industry: so-called third-party vendors, scattered across the country, which manufacture other kinds of election infrastructure and present their own vulnerabilities.
It was one of these smaller companies — VR Systems, based in Tallahassee — that manufactured North Carolina’s malfunctioning e-pollbooks and Florida’s erratic voter websites.
Last year, the Intercept leaked an internal NSA intelligence review that described an advanced persistent threat, probably the GRU — Russian military intelligence units — that had “executed cyber espionage operations” against VR Systems and 122 election officials.
VR Systems COO Ben Martin publicly denied the company was compromised. But an indictment brought by special counsel Mueller this summer appeared to lay out in even more explicit terms the hacking described by the leaked NSA document — which definitively stated Russian attackers “hacked into the computers” of a company matching the description of VR Systems (which the indictment calls “Vendor 1”). In August, a retired county supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, told the Associated Press and other newspapers that he had received a briefing in 2016 from the FBI and DHS, alerting all 67 Florida counties that a vendor had been penetrated by a foreign actor. “Everybody knew they were talking about the GRU and VR Systems,” the supervisor said.
Had North Carolina officials requested the FBI’s forensic analysis, we might know definitively whether Russian intelligence services were responsible for the e-pollbook snafu. (As for the website malfunctions, which occurred the same month the Mueller indictment alleges the hacking of “Vendor 1” occurred, Florida officials have publicly insisted their systems were not compromised.) Today, the 122 election officials who were targeted in 2016 still have not been named. But their collective footprint could be large: VR Systems has contracts in California, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, and Illinois.
More importantly, VR Systems offers a lesson about the vast latticework of products and services that these little-known third-party vendors provide, often across state lines, from purveying e-pollbook software and absentee ballots to configuring registration databases to servicing the machines and software before Election Day. In Michigan, for example, two small vendor outfits, Election Source and GBS, service and program election equipment in 62 counties, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
Because of the growing demand for e-pollbooks, GBS has a beta product in development, called ValidVoter, currently used in one county and set for rollout next year. One afternoon, on a whim, I asked Matthew Bernhard, a security researcher at the University of Michigan, to take a look at ValidVoter’s security posture. In less than 10 minutes, Bernhard discovered two Google-indexed, back-end credential portals for GBS, which he said should have been hidden from public view, hosted on servers with two vulnerabilities that required patches. When Bernhard alerted the company, they promptly took the portals down. (A GBS representative said the portal, no longer in use, was inadvertently left up by a third-party developer, and that “there was no ‘real’ data” accessible in the site save for “early development test data.”)
When it comes to security, the inmates are running the asylum
The federal government doesn’t publicly track or monitor these smaller companies. Asked for a definitive list of private voting assistance entities, what they administer, and where, DHS and the EAC couldn’t provide one.
“If you want to attack many counties in Michigan all at once, the easiest thing to do is to go to one of these small firms,” said Alex Halderman, a professor at the University of Michigan, one of the country’s leading researchers on election cybersecurity. Compared to foreign adversaries who “specialize in penetrating some of the world’s most well-protected systems,” said Halderman, the security capabilities of election companies are like “night and day.”
Representatives from ES&S say they are taking security more seriously. In April, the company hired Chris Wlaschin, formerly the chief information security officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, to lead its security operations.
“When it comes to cyber, we’ve absolutely, absolutely, upped our game,” Wlaschin said. He confirmed ES&S networks are receiving DHS cyber-hygiene scans, with another one scheduled before the election that will examine the company’s voter registration databases.
Asked about the country’s weak testing protocols, Wlaschin was surprisingly deferential. “I think that criticism is fair,” he said, before adding that ES&S is considering its own bug-bounty program in the future — which, if true, would signal a milestone in vendor openness. “The vendor community is embracing many of the tenets of cybersecurity improvements,” Wlaschin said. “We’re probably not moving as fast as some folks would like us to. But we are moving in that direction.”
Preparing for the enemy of yesterday
Other companies, though, seem not to have changed tune much. Representatives from the election company Hart InterCivic repeated the mantras that have so irked security experts. “We go through the most rigorous testing of any part of the election infrastructure,” said Hart vice president Peter Lichtenheld, adding that their products are “air-gapped from the internet, so we are the most secure part” of the industry.
The company said it has someone overseeing security measures, but declined to make them available for comment. (Most companies declined to speak to Vox, or at much length. A Dominion representative sent a statement by email, which read in part, “Dominion has been actively laying the groundwork for security-focused collaboration at all levels — with new hires, with intelligence partners, with state and local customers, with white hat hackers and third-party service providers who share our forward-leaning approach.” A representative from VR Systems pointed me to the company’s online “Questions and Answers” about security.)
“None of us are sitting here saying, ‘Oh, gee, you idiots, why did you build these insecure machines?’ We know exactly why,” said Jake Braun, a former White House liaison to the DHS, who organized the Def Con event. “They built them to the specifications that were written, which didn’t say you need to make them hack-proof from Russian hackers. It said, ‘Build me cheap machines that will accurately count votes.’ That’s what they did.”
“They built them to the specifications that were written, which didn’t say you need to make them hack-proof from Russian hackers.”
“It’s not their fault the machines are insecure,” Braun continued. “What’s their fault is that they’re saying they’re secure, which is not true.”
Election companies tend to get harsh press. But the public should look harder at the incentives created for them by allowing a private and unregulated industry to manage this fundamental democratic act. According to a groundbreaking report by the Wharton School, the revenue footprint of the entire US elections industry is less than $350 million — smaller, for instance, than a single construction company in Dallas, Texas.
What this means, in practice, is that the industry has little capital to invest in research and development, tech talent, or security. Two of the three largest vendors, ES&S and Hart, are owned by private equity companies whose agendas are unclear; Dominion’s headquarters isn’t even American, but Canadian.
And though the companies face virtually no federal security regulations, they are hugely regulated at the state and local levels, building machines that have to comply with local ordinances that can vary widely. With a fixed number of clients, the prospect of losing a single county can be substantial: Earlier this year, when Cook County, Illinois, decided to switch its technology from ES&S to Dominion, ES&S sued, choosing to spend its money not on better products, but on lawyers.
One of the authors of the Wharton study, Matthew Caulfield, a PhD student there, was not surprised. “In light of the slim profit margins and long-term contracts,” he said, “it’s likely more profitable to fight over territory like Cook County now, than to innovate on security and hope to win them back next round.”
The consequences of this unregulated, for-profit system can touch the absurd. This year, FBI agents briefed Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on some disturbing information about ByteGrid, a third-party vendor that hosts Maryland’s voter registration database, election management system, online ballot delivery system, and election-night results website.
Unbeknownst to Maryland officials, ByteGrid had been purchased two years earlier by a Russian fund manager whose largest investor is Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who in turn has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. (A Maryland election official tells Vox the FBI “had no evidence of a breach or fraudulent transactions.)
The feds are, belatedly, upping their game
The federal government has taken some steps to secure parts of the private election sector. One is the Sector Coordinating Council, a roundtable of 24 election companies, whose executive committee meets every two weeks to receive security briefings and discuss benchmarks. Masterson said that eight of those 24 companies have begun receiving cyber-hygiene scans, and one received a risk-and-vulnerability assessment (which includes penetration testing) this year.
When I pointed out this good news to Halderman, the cybersecurity expert, he countered with an unsettling point: Earlier this year, DHS officials announced that Russian hackers had successfully burrowed into the networks of several of the country’s largest energy utility companies, a penetration so thorough that Russian hackers could “have thrown switches,” but they didn’t, according to one DHS official. Those utilities, also designated as critical infrastructure since 2003, have received the same protocol of scans and tests that state election offices have crammed into the past 18 months. The hackers jumped these supposedly “air-gapped” networks with the same method experts fear could be applied to elections: by penetrating the smaller vendors that serviced the air-gapped technology.
This is the kind of attack that Halderman worries we might not discover until Election Day, whether in 2018 or beyond. Many of the vulnerabilities election vendors have patched were previously unknown to them, instead pointed out by others. Earlier this year, security consultants flagged a “Client Web Portal” page for Dominion Voting that lacked SSL encryption. And last year, ES&S unwittingly exposed data for roughly 1.8 million Illinois voters on an Amazon server it controlled, a breach that included ES&S employee’s passwords — encrypted, but potentially crackable by an advanced adversary.
“It’s likely that many election-related systems already have been compromised by sophisticated attackers and we just haven’t noticed yet,” said Halderman. “If there’s going to be an attack in 2018 by a nation-state threat, they probably have already broken into the relevant systems. And they’re waiting.”
“100 percent, it’s happening now”
Earlier this year, the campaign staffers of Linda Coleman, a congressional candidate in North Carolina, noticed something unusual: They couldn’t consistently get their website, LinaColemanForCongress.com, to appear at the top of the Google search rankings. Instead, a different website with a similar name, LindaColemanForNC.com, jockeyed for viewership. When the campaign hired a consultant to investigate, they found the website registration was Russian.
“The worst part of it is, we don’t even know what to prepare for,” said Coleman of the fake website. “You never know what people are going to do with that information.”
Another congressional candidate running in Alabama, Tabitha Isner, alerted the FBI to a brute-force entry attempt, an inelegant but sometimes effective attack that runs thousands of password combinations to access a network. The FBI confirmed to her that the attempts came from Russia.
“I would have assumed there would have been a more coordinated effort to address these potential security breaches,” Isner said recently. “We’re on our own out here in the Wild West.”
Coleman and Isner are part of at least a dozen races that have been targeted in 2018, in some form or another. In one case, Hans Keirstead, a Democratic primary challenger in California, reported that cyberattackers had attempted a brute-force penetration and successfully hacked his private email using a spearphishing campaign. Two other congressional races in California were targeted, according to public reports.
In July, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri saw her Senate staff targeted with a sophisticated spearphishing campaign, in which staffers were directed to a look-alike web page, complete with the US Senate seal, designed to steal usernames and passwords. McCaskill is one of three midterm election candidates that Microsoft identified as targets of the attack, which they link to the Russian state hacking group Fancy Bear.
Earlier this year, Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen told the FBI his campaign was the target of an effort designed to steal campaign funds by someone posing in an email as a trusted media buyer. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania also reported being the recipients of spearphishing attempts this year. (Neither is up for reelection this cycle.)
In September, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced that Google had notified an unknown number of Senate offices of email intrusion attempts on personal email that likely came from nation-state attackers.
Besides campaigns and incumbents, other aspects of the party apparatus have been targeted, too. In the spring, Emily’s List, the fundraising group for Democratic women, discovered a fake Facebook account set up in its name. In March, Democratic Party officials announced that they had halted an attack that made use of the email of a former employee.
And a party official tells Vox that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s new social media monitoring division has identified more than 2,200 Twitter handles it believes are targeting campaigns. The party official also shared with Vox internal monitoring reports indicating a high volume of malicious Twitter handles targeting two swing races key to Democratic efforts to retake the House.
The Democratic Party official shared with Vox internal monitoring reports indicating a high volume of malicious Twitter handles targeting two key swing races.
“We do believe certain campaigns have already been targeted. We can’t say from who, or what,” the Democratic Party official tells Vox, speaking on background to share the internal data. “But the risk is real.”
The Democratic Party takes information operations seriously, including on Twitter. One example from 2016 suggests why: a fake Twitter account called “Tennessee Republicans,” using the handle @TEN_GOP, which attracted more than 140,000 followers. It circulated divisive content that defended WikiLeaks’ interference in the election; advocated for the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey; and, of course, vocally discredited allegations of Russian meddling.
The account was spotted by the real Tennessee Republican Party, which urged Twitter to purge the account three times. But it managed to fool a number of prominent influencers: People magazine, former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Nicki Minaj, James Woods, Anne Coulter, and MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who each retweeted content from the account.
In total, Twitter believes 50,000 impostor accounts were active in 2016, while Facebook estimates disinformation efforts reached 126 million users. This year, two-thirds of Americans will get some of their news from social media.
War games are prepping state and local officials for battle
“This should be a wake-up call to every campaign,” said Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “100 percent, it’s happening right now.” He added another prediction: “You’re going to start to see [hacking] more evenly on both political parties.”
Since 2016, Mook has largely left politics behind to pursue a different calling: election security. Last year, he and Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, both joined the Harvard Belfer Center to help direct its ongoing initiative, Defending Digital Democracy, before the midterms. The project’s goal is to harden individual campaigns and local election offices — two different operations, Mook said, that are stuck in the same predicament: underfunded, overstressed, prone to mistakes, and squarely in the crosshairs of a sophisticated threat.
Mook and Rhoades explained all this while they sat in the lobby of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last March. There, the Belfer Center was hosting the largest election security conference to date: 120 state election officials had flown in from 38 states. They now mingled with a who’s-who of election security: Rosenbach, the former cyber czar, and Ashton Carter, the former secretary of defense, both at Belfer; cybersecurity experts like Michael Sulmeyer and Bruce Schneier; EAC chair Thomas Hicks; and then-Facebook CSO Alex Stamos and Google CSO Heather Adkins.
“The voting systems in the US are a more complex system that even Google has,” Adkins told election officials in one security seminar. Local election officials, she went on, “have, literally, the hardest job in the world.”
The simulations stress-tested local officials’ responses in real time to the worst crises imaginable on Election Day 2018.
The conference was convened as a series of trainings for local officials and planned by dozens of Harvard Kennedy School students, including a small corps of Army and NSA officers on leave from active duty. The simulations stress-tested local officials’ responses in real time to the worst crises imaginable on Election Day 2018: a hacked voter registration database, with thousands of voter names altered; a DDOS attack that crashes an election information website; malicious robocalls, directing voters to a false precinct location.
Belfer also trained local officials on handling social media disinformation efforts. In one mock scenario, a viral Facebook post claiming that Latino voters were barred from voting was sent from a fake account mimicking the regional American Civil Liberties Union office. In another simulation, a state governor’s email was hacked, followed by the Twitter account of the secretary of state, whose handle blasted tweets that declared the election for a false winner.
To simulate the scrutiny of local media, Belfer brought in real reporter from the Financial Times, who dragged leery officials before a camera in the hallway, where their answers were broadcast live on a projection screen hanging in the ballroom. (“How much harder are you going to make it for people to vote?” the reporter asked one beleaguered official, Jen Morrell of Colorado, who looked squeamishly at the microphone jabbing toward her collar.)
Why can’t we afford to secure our elections?
This year, state officials received a boost in the area they need it most: money. In June, Congress authorized $380 million to be distributed among all 50 states for election upgrades. According to the EAC, which has disbursed the funds, the largest portion will go toward cybersecurity improvements in 38 states: better training for officials, new software, more IT personnel and cybersecurity experts. (Other funds will go to upgrades for voting machine and voter registration systems.)
This year, jurisdictions in Illinois, California, and Florida are experimenting with on-site “cyber navigators” to monitor any irregularities. In Orange County, California, election officials have partnered with the CalTech Political Science Department, which will monitor the servers and networks of election offices up through Election Day.
(Orange County has installed its own Albert sensor on its voter registration system and received DHS-sponsored risk-and-vulnerability assessments, according to Neal Kelley, the registrar of voters.)
The political parties are making improvements, too. The DNC has made Wickr, a secure messaging platform, available to all its campaigns. And this year, the DCCC has employed a corps of paid activists, so-called “Battle Station Organizers,” and dispatched them to swing races around the country.
The organizers identify negative social media posts, flag potential foreign disinformation efforts, and, in the words of one party official, “flood the zone” with positive social media content. In some cases, the party has also quietly paid good-guy hackers to infiltrate its own networks.
An attack this summer on the DNC’s coveted voter file turned out to be a false alarm, hackers working at the direction of the Michigan Democratic Party to find vulnerabilities. To oversee its security, the DNC hired Raffi Krikorian and Bob Lord, two security officers with sterling Silicon Valley credentials.
Krikorian and Lord have worked at breakneck pace to overhaul DNC security in two years: achieving perfect network visibility, rotating passwords, mandating use of two-factor authentication and the secure-messaging platform Signal. “We managed to get [DNC Chair] Tom Perez to stand up in front of the entire staff and say, ‘If you’re going to talk to me, you have to use Signal,” Krikorian said.
When the DNC’s new CEO, Seema Nanda, arrived for her first day at work this summer, Krikorian’s team spearphished her entire staff. “This is an arms race,” Krikorian said. “The best thing you can do is prepare for the worst.”
But among campaigns and election offices, the same problem prevails: foot-dragging. Even with the $380 million in hand, most of these funds won’t be spent in time for the midterms — it’s simply too late. (North Carolina, for instance, won’t fully upgrade its voter registration system until 2019.)
Even with the $380 million in hand, most of these funds won’t be spent in time for the midterms — it’s simply too late.
A recent study by ProPublica found that among the election offices overseeing 40 congressional toss-up races, only a third used two-factor authentication to secure their passwords.
Campaigns are in even worse shape — what Mook calls the “soft underbelly” of election security. According to an analysis from BuzzFeed, most congressional candidates have not adopted Wickr, while a late September report from McClatchy found that only six campaigns in the entire country had spent more than $1,000 on cybersecurity.
“It’s not like we’re a big corporation that can simply make a mandate from the CTO’s office,” said Krikorian. At the same time, “We have a target on our backs the size of a multinational corporation. The things we’re up against are insane,” he continued. “That makes me feel good about the national party, but feel nervous about the system overall.”
When Tabitha Isner, the Alabama congressional candidate, approached the FBI following the attempted hack, the response was meager: A DCCC official got on the phone to tell her about Wickr, and then sent a brochure about good cybersecurity practices. In the end, she spent $500 for an upgraded security package, and that was it. “We can’t afford the kind of software we would need, and we can’t afford to hire a cybersecurity expert,” she said.
When I asked Coleman, the candidate in North Carolina, if her campaign was using Wickr or anything like it, she said no: Her campaign office has five staff who work on fold-out plastic tables. An IT security consultant was not in the budget for her either. “We’re doing the best with what we have,” Coleman told me.
The big tech companies have tried to offer their own solutions. Jigsaw, a Google-affiliated outfit, offers campaigns and election offices a suite of security services — such as Project Shield, which can prevent DDOS attacks. Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program offers similar services.
Harvard’s Belfer Center, however, has a decidedly low-tech solution to the cost problem: two comprehensive handbooks, one for campaigns and another for election officials. The goal, according to Mook, is to make those groups “as secure as possible for as cheap as possible.”
Few of the suggestions involve better technology. Instead, most are cultural steps toward better cyber-hygiene, like choosing strong passwords, using two-factor authentication, and emphasizing vigilance.
This emphasis on culture over technology found wide appeal among officials at the Belfer hacking simulation. One state election official in attendance, Eric Spencer, the director of elections for Arizona, spoke proudly about a new statewide requirement: Any USB thumb drive must be brand new, come fresh out of the packaging, be opened inside the office, and be used only once, before being tossed in the garbage — a protocol similar to the Pentagon’s. Compared to three years ago, Spencer said, cybersecurity “is the No. 1 thing I think about.”
That our salvation will come in the form of culture and handbooks, not gadgets or more secure voting infrastructure, can seem underwhelming. During one conversation I had with Masterson, he began talking enthusiastically of a “product” the Election Task Force had built, custom-designed for election officials in Iowa. A malware scanning system? Proprietary software? “We can show you a picture of it,” Masterson told me. “It’s a big poster.”
The poster, which will hang on the walls of dozens of Iowa election offices, includes phone numbers to call in an emergency, reminders about “risks and mitigations,” and a checklist of good practices.
The tech evangelists I spoke with scoffed at Masterson’s efforts. But Mook raised a sharper question: What if a poster, in some cases, is all we need? Of all Belfer’s security recommendations, he said, “The first one is taking responsibility for the problem and creating a culture in your campaign of security.”
To revisit the hacking of the DNC and DCCC is to read through a litany of cultural failures: alarms not raised, phony emails clicked, warnings ignored, meetings not held. If such a poster had existed when he was campaign director, Mook said, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails still might be secure, and Clinton might be president.
Today, in fact, such a poster does exist inside the headquarters of both the DNC and the DCCC. It reminds employees about the dangers of communicating over email and other security hazards.
In both offices, it hangs in a place that is unlikely to be ignored: in bathroom stalls and above the urinals.
“We shouldn’t be waiting for the big boom”
The next 10 years of election cybersecurity will play out as the resolution of several dichotomies: states versus the federal government, and who should secure what systems; technological solutions versus cultural ones; and elusive but much-needed consensus between Democrats and Republicans.
“I have long been calling for an independent commission, akin to the 9/11 Commission,” said former CIA Director John Brennan. “I still think that we, as a country, have not come to grips with the magnitude of the challenge and the problem and the complexity of it.”
“Unfortunately,” he went on, “the partisan animus that exists right now in Washington, and the political infighting that’s going on, has really frustrated our country’s ability to come together and to deal with what is, I think, the defining challenge of the 21st century.”
At least in terms of funding, Brennan is right. Since 9/11, the country spent more than $100 billion securing about 5,000 airports. With 10,000 separate electoral jurisdictions in the US, the number of potential election targets is far greater, and the money allocated so far, $380 million, is a decimal of a percentage point in comparison.
This year, House Democrats called for $1.4 billion of federal investment in elections. Braun, of Def Con, said even those figures are paltry: “We need support for a bill, to the tune of $5 billion, to dramatically overhaul the election infrastructure in the country.”
That kind of consensus is unlikely to come soon. When senators this summer tried to pass an additional $250 million for states in time for the midterms, the amendment was blocked by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, calling it a potential new “entitlement.” And a proposed ceasefire between the DCCC and NRCC, pledging not to use hacked materials in campaign ads, collapsed when Republicans dropped out of the talks.
Democrats and Republicans — in both the House and Senate — this year introduced nearly a dozen bipartisan bills and measures to secure the country’s election systems.
However, Democrats and Republicans — in both the House and Senate — this year introduced nearly a dozen bipartisan bills and measures to secure the country’s election systems. One is Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) PAVE Act, which would mandate paper ballots and “risk-limiting” audits for all federal elections, as a backstop for ensuring that all outcomes are accurate. Another, the DETER Act, would mandate sanctions on Russia in the event of further meddling.
A bevy of House bills also propose support for more paper backups, increased coordination between DHS and campaigns, creating a national “bug bounty” for election infrastructure, or new EAC guidelines and cybersecurity grants. Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland have asked the Treasury Department to examine foreign investment in election companies, inspired by the Maryland ByteGrid fiasco.
And a new bill, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, would cement the role of DHS in defending IT infrastructure, including elections. It recently passed the Senate.
But the most prominent of these efforts is the Senate’s Secure Elections Act, sponsored by Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). The bill would grant security clearances to each state’s top election official, create a technical advisory board to proliferate best practices in cybersecurity, and require states to conduct manual, paper-based election audits.
This summer, the bill seemed like a sure bet for passage. Then in mid-August, the markup for the bill was abruptly canceled, with little explanation.
The mystery was solved when it was announced that the shelving of the Secure Elections Act came at the behest of the White House. “We cannot support legislation” that “moves power or funding from the states to Washington,” the White House announced in a statement. No particular objections to the bill were identified.
The White House has actively hurt election security
Former intelligence officials have given the White House mixed marks on election security. For all of President Donald Trump’s “deep state” misgivings, it’s the federal bureaucracy and law enforcement agencies, from DHS to the FBI to US Cyber Command, that have performed most admirably, even with little visible support from the president.
Nor has the administration been entirely silent: Earlier this year, National Security Adviser John Bolton told his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, that the United States “wouldn’t tolerate meddling in 2018,” a threat that appeared to grow teeth in September when the White House announced the threat of sanctions to anyone who meddles with elections on US soil.
On the other hand, the administration’s own words have repeatedly undercut these efforts on the world stage, whether in the president’s remarks in Helsinki, favoring Putin’s denials over the conclusions of his own intelligence branches, or new talking points from the White House arguing that the real threat in the 2018 midterms comes from China (a belief that holds little currency among cybersecurity experts).
More consequential are the White House’s lesser-known administrative moves. In the past two years, the administration has eliminated three vital positions in cyberdefense: cybersecurity coordinators at the State Department and Homeland Security Council, and, most critically, its White House cybersecurity coordinator.
The moves have baffled members of Congress and former intelligence officials. “The reason those positions were so important is because they could focus on this 24/7,” said Nick Shapiro, a former senior CIA official. “You’re not going to find anyone who knows anything about this stuff who doesn’t think those positions were a vital necessity.”
Fully staffed cyberdefenses and threats of sanctions, though, won’t alone answer the tectonic questions about the future of election security. In a landmark report issued in September, the National Academy of Sciences put forward a series of proposals for the future of voting. The working group, co-chaired by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, proposed 54 recommendations, many of which would entail a more active role for the federal government. These included a federal mandate for vendors to report intrusions or technology failures to DHS and submit to regular technology audits; a national backup of voter registration data; paper trails for all voting machines; strong cybersecurity requirements in the EAC’s laboratory testing; and expanding those tests to include the things that Russian hackers targeted in 2016, such as e-pollbooks and voter registration databases.
Even as they brace for the midterms, cybersecurity leaders have begun to look ahead to 2020 —this year, the damage is already done.
How these advancements will come about, exactly, remains a wide-open debate. “There needs to be some unprecedented partnership between public and private sector,” former CIA Director Brennan offered. “We shouldn’t be waiting for the 9/11 equivalent, that big boom, to take the steps necessary to prevent a recurrence.”
Even as they brace for the midterms, cybersecurity leaders have already begun to look ahead to 2020, as if to hint they are ready to yield the battle, but not the war.
“A large-scale concerted effort across the board that also involves setting international norms — yes, that’s going to be unrealistic in 50-something days,” said Krikorian when we spoke in September. The country, he said, “needs more staffing, we need more resources, we need more training, two years before 2020. But even that’s going to be rough in my opinion.”
For Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief information security officer, it’s the Knox County attack that encapsulates all that still unnerves him. “That’s one of my big fears for 2018, in that we haven’t done anything to prevent that,” he said. “There’ve been very few changes that [have] given support for local election authorities to stop that kind of attack.”
Instead, Stamos offered a sobering thought: It’s time to start planning for 2020.
For 2018, he said, “It is much too late.”
Benjamin Wofford is a staff writer at Washingtonian Magazine, and a contributing editor at Politico.
Original Source -> The midterms are already hacked. You just don’t know it yet.
via The Conservative Brief
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Registering a car and car insurance?
So I just got my license last wednesday and idk which step comes first. Do I register the car first or do I buy insurance first?
reliant general insurance quote
reliant general insurance quote
How to get a cheaper insurance premium?
In the UK am i able to put down a much lower value than the actual value of my car just so that i can get a lower insurance premium? Given my situation i would much rather pay for a new car if i crashed or pay for repairs myself if anything went wrong.
My wife is pregnant. Due date: 9/10/09. Our COBRA health insurance expires on 7/18/09. What to do?
Our insurance expires before the due date. NO PROBLEM. We're getting a HIPAA guarantee issue plan. Here's the question: Our insurance expires on the 18th, but HMO's don't start until the 1st of the month. This would leave a 2 week gap where we wouldn't have coverage. We can't start a HIPAA HMO on July 1, because you have to expire all 18months of COBRA before you're eligible for a HIPAA guarantee issue plan. Chances are it'd be ok waiting until 8/1 to begin our new HIPAA plan, but if my wife went into early labor, it would be a very, very bad situation. PPO's start on the 1st, and sometimes the 15th. Same problem. What should we do? We'd prefer to not have a gap in our coverage.""
How is my motorcycle insurance so CHEAP?
Okay so im looking into buying a motorcycle this summer. Ill be turning 18, and have always wanted a bike. So i was looking at how much insurance would cost me for it because i hear that its expensive and im a full time student and work minimum wage job, so its not like i have money just to shoot out my *** for fun. I was looking at progressive, because they show instant online quotes so i dont have to actually call in and give my real name and social security # and stuff like that. So i go onto progressive's, and enter all my real info like age and stuff(but lie about my actual address and name and email cause i dont want constant ads and spam). And i got cheaper than expected quotes.....So i put in, 2009 Kawasaki Ninja 250r. Male. Turning 18 in july. Put in that i have motorcycle endorsement and taken safety course(i havent yet, but i will by the time i actually own a bike and have to buy insurance for real). No accidents or tickets. 0 years riding experience(although i ran multiple quotes and noticed price drops by $29 for a 12month policy if youve had even 1 year of riding experience, which is nice). And i got a quote for $285 12month policy. For Bodily Injury & Property Damage 50/100/25. Underinsured Motorist Bodily Injury 25/50. $100 deductible on comprehensive for bike(again i ran multiple quotes, and changing the deductible amount on comprehensive only saves a few bucks). $500 deductible for collision(this deductible amount changes your rate incredibly). No other coverage. Got quoted $285...seems kinda cheap to me considering im so young? Not complaining that i save money....just wondering if this sounds normal? Random insurance question, lets say im riding my bike and going at a good speed, say 45+mph. Then fall and completely eat ****. I injure and damage only myself and my bike. Lets say my bike needs some repairs or maybe even replacing, and my leg is broken or something like that. Will any insurance cover any costs since it was my fault to my own personal injury? Is this when health insurance kicks in for medical bills? And would motorcycle insurance pay for any of this? If so, which kind? Like comprehensive, collision, liability, under-insured motorist? Because i have no idea. This next part might be a little hard to understand, so ill try my best. But i ran multiple quotes and changed the age i said i was, for instance, i put in my real birthday on one July 1996, than i put July 1995 on another just to see how much the rate goes for a 18yr old, because once i actually get the bike i will be 18. The quote where i put my real birthday and said i was 17, got quoted $285, the quote where i said i was already 18, got quoted $319.....how is that possible that i get a $34 cheaper quote for being younger??? I feel like someone at progressive online site is trolling me and getting my hopes up now, just to see me go ape **** when i actually go get a real quote. Thanks!""
""If you crashed your car into someones, how much would insurance pay out?""
Assuming the cost is 18,000, most of it being for injuries the other party claims to have (<1000 bucks in damage). How much would insurance pay and how much would i have to pay? No damage to my own car. No need for insurance after this because I dont think im going to drive again after hearing the cost. I cant call the insurance company unforunately. Do you think I would have to pay all of it? I had full coverage.""
Riding a 49cc scooter in NY without insurance?
can you register a 49cc scooter with the dmv without having insurance for it first? and what are the fines if i get pulled over riding the scooter without insurance? the cheapest insurance i can get is with progressive and it's 531$ a year! thats too much!
Maternity Insurance?
Does anyone know of a good insurance company with maternity insurance? I'm not pregnant yet, but me and my husband are talking about starting to try, and need to get insurance first. I would like to find a company with very little or no waiting period. Any suggestions?""
Why are these insurance policies so different??
I'm currently insured on Yes insurance for a 1.1 litre peugeot 206... I want to change to a 1.8 ford focus and after ringing up the insurers, they claimed it would be an additional 700 on top of my current policy. (if i took out a new policy, it'd be 1800) I then got a whole new quote for elephant.co.uk, who quoted me 900 from new. both are on thid party fire and theft, and both have exactly the same details. Why the 1000 difference?? even on my current insurer who i have been with for 3 months already? thanks""
I NEED CAR INSURANCE.?
I am looking for car insurance for an 18 year old boy. Everything is so expensive. Does anyone recommend anything? I live in the New York area.
What kind of insurance plan covers theft of a vehicle?
I live in Los Angeles and I will soon be getting a 2005 Subaru sti i have been saving up for, but there's a lot of stolen cars in my area so I wated to know what insurance is good and cheap and that covers if my vehicle gets stolen. (I know that if it covers a stolen vehicle it's not going to be so cheap but 20 dollar a month less wownt hurt lol) (I've had my license for 1 year and 1/2 I'm 5 moths from being 18, so I'm still a minor. I've gotten 1 speeding ticket but has been taken care of in traffic school). thanks in Advance.""
How much insurance should I have on my car?
1999 Toyota Camry, 90K miles, excellent driving record, car is paid for. How much insurance should I have on it now?""
Saving on insurance...own or finance?
What is cheaper to insure a car that is being financed or a car that is owned? I haven't decided how to pay for my new car and since I am getting 0% it wouldn't cost more to finance, I do have the cash to buy it. I am just trying to see ways to lower insurance. If you know of any other ways to lower insurance I will take that advice too. Thanks""
Would teen car insurance be expensive for a 2007 honda civic hybrid?
I am a new driver with good grades and took drivers ed. Will the year of the car affect my insurance rates? Would another car be cheaper? Would being on my parents policy be less as opposed to having my own?
Affordable car insurance for poor driving record?
About a year ago when I was in college I got cited for driving without insurance twice. Two years ago I have had my license suspended for minor traffic offenses. Recently, I decided to take a safe driver's course because when I originally started driving nobody ever taught me how. I am not required to have sr-22 insurance but I am wondering if that would be better than paying $450 which I am paying for Gieco. I am looking for someone in a SIMILAR situation or has USEFUL answers. If your answer is move to different state , you just have to deal with it , or shop around that doesn't help me.""
What can I get for medical insurance?
Im 26 and collecting unemployment. I currently have no medical insurance. What can I get for medical until I get another job?
How much will my insurace cost i'm 17.?
This summer I'm going to be getting a audi a5 2010 as a gift but how much will the insurance cost if i join my parents plan with 3 car? Im 17 in New York and they have All State
Will my insurance go up?
I live in California. Here, the driver is responsible for the ticket and not the owner. My bf is 19 and im 18, and he drives very well but does have license because he uses his bike. He drove my car and got two tickets because he did not have his headlights on and a misdemeanor for an unlicensed driver. I read that my bf will have to pay $25 if he gets his license before court and $230 for no light. I was wondering will my insurance go up? and will my dad be notified?""
Looking for car insurance in NY?
I am going to look around for quotes because I'm looking for a new car insurance plan. But honestly I don't really know what's out there besides Geico and State Farm. What other places should I look into? Thanks so much.
Do I have to have car insurance?
I'm 18, and I'm getting my first car that I'm paying for in two weeks (2006 Ford Mustang). Unfortunately, I don't think my mom will put me on her insurance. I don't have enough money to pay for my own insurance. My mom told me its illegal to drive around without insurance (Is this true? And how would police know?) Also, what would happen if I got into a car accident with damage to both cars and I was at fault?""
I have just passed my test and i have been looking for car insurances and i added my partner as a named driver?
I have been looking at car insurances and i added my partner as a named driver and she only have a provisional license and it has come out 600 pound cheaper, every thing is correct on the quote, does anyone know why this is.""
General Liability insurance?
How much will General liability insurance cost for my company? We have been incorporated for 2 years, with no claims against us. We are a parking revenue and security company. I have called dozens of brokers. i just need a ball park so I can tell if i am being ripped off. We have insurance now but feel it may be to high. Please advise""
Does Auto insurance go down automatically after the age of 25?
if I drive and small and cheap car...
Is there affordable health insurance for pregnant teen girls?
i need any kind of reliable resources. please help.
Can I ride my motorcycle with just a bill of sale and insurance?
Hey I just bought a 2004 r6 and I live in georgia. I bought it from alabama and the old owner is mailing me the title in a couplle of weeks but I'm wondering, if I have a bill of sale and proof of insurance can I go ahead and ride the bike??""
Looking for health insurance for my parents who were deemed 'high risk' and have been rejected several times.
My dad is self-employed, so no company insurance plan, and my mom does not work. They are both considered 'high risk' because of health problems and having to take several prescription medications. They have been rejected a few times, one was Blue Cross Blue Shield and I don't know the others. I'm very concerned for their health and want to find something to help them. My dad makes enough money to not qualify him for anything for low income families. Does anyone know about any affordable health insurance companies that accept 'high risk' people? Or insurance for the self employed? Thanks!""
Just started boxing.. health insurance?
I am 21 and just started boxing again.. I know the basics and i can take a punch... but i am a little nervous about getting my nose or jaw broken.. even with headgear on... what is ...show more
reliant general insurance quote
reliant general insurance quote
In Southern California where is the best place to get a perscription with out insurance?
I have Strep throat and need Medication!
Am I eligible for unemployment insurance in Alaska if I am a full-time student?
Am I eligible for unemployment insurance in Alaska if I am a full-time student?
What is the average homeowners insurance cost of a 1000 sq ft condo?
What is the average homeowners insurance cost of a 1000 sq ft condo?
""On average, how much does home owners insurance cost?""
I'm filling out somethings for a project for one of my classes. I do not at all need this number to be accurate, I am not going to go and speak with an insurance agent, I just need a number that is about what I would be paying forinsurance if I bought a house.""
Can i get Health New England Insurance in other states?
I'm thinking about moving to Virginia to be with my boyfriend once I graduate but i was wondering about my heath insurance... I have Health New England from my father, do they only provide it in New England... since it is called 'Health New England' or would i still be able to have it when i went to Virginia??""
How much does the average person pay for health and dental insurance monthly?
How much does the average person pay for health and dental insurance monthly?
Car insurance for a non working vehicle?
My car needed a major repair last fall. I work from home and have been trying to pay off student loans so I decided to do without a car for 6 months since I live in a convenient location- I just received my tax return and can afford the major repair. I stopped my car insurance while I wasn't driving since it was $125/mo and I now need to start it back up. I am switching companies since I really didn't like mine- I just got to the questions about insurance lapse does this apply to me since my car wasn't working? I haven't returned my form yet. I hope I didn't screw this up, a friend just told me I should have possibly kept a storage coverage that my rates might skyrocket. It's an older car with no loan attached. I live in MN, perfect driving record, was with the same company for 25 years and had never missed a payment. If it is considered a lapse is there a way to get around it legally like giving/selling my car to my boyfriend and then listing me as a driver so I can use it when needed? We don't live together but he did most of the driving when we did use it- it's not worth much, maybe a few thousand dollars at most- maybe I'd be better off selling my car and getting a new (used) one so I don't have to explain a gap? Thanks.""
Which Local Car Insurance has best price in Las Vegas?
I have done my research but would like to know which local car insurance has the best deals? Thanks you for your time.
Are insurance companies to blame for high medical cost?
I know there are other factors such as smokers/obese people, lawsuits, and people who don't pay their bills. But i'm wondering if insurance companies are one of the biggest reasons to blame for the ridiculously high cost of medical services and equipment? The reason I wonder is because the prices of medical care are so ridiculously high, but it seems like doctors can simply charge any price they want, no matter how ridiculous, because the insurance company will simply pay it. Unlike if someone was actually paying out of pocket and would actually say your out of your mind for charging that much, you won't get my business . I mean, seriously, even if doctors charged $70 per hour, thats still a high wage for them, and it wouldn't be too unreasonable for an hour of medical work, yet I hear of doctors performing various simple procedures that take like 5-15 minutes and charging hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars. Same thing with medical equipment. It seems any device classified as a piece of medical equipment sells for 10 times what it should reasonably cost to make it. Any level headed person would say they are insane for charging that much. But insurance companies simply pay it, and pass the cost on to the people. Making it so the people are basically getting ripped off through no choice of their own. And making it so people who don't have insurance simply cannot afford to have any care. PS: Another example of medical equipment. Just look at a hoverround wheelchair I've seen the retail price on those be over $9000, just for a middle class one. For a freaking electric wheelchair, that isn't even very great quality since they break down alot. You can purchase a brand new kia or hyundai car for like $7000-$9000. Ridiculous.""
Car insurance - My car is totalled - what now?
my car is totaled according to the insurace company. It is the other person at fault so their insurance is dealing with it. I feel as if I'm getting the runaround a bit. How will they determine a fair value of the car and what if I don't agree with what they offer? They have also given me a rental which they tell me I must return once the agreement is made and I will be out of town and cannot return it for a week. They said I have to pay for the rental of the days I am gone!!!!!! Do I have to agree to their terms or how do I go about handling this situation? HELP i don't like dealing with this stuff but I don't want to be screwed over Thanks
What would my insurance be if i got a crotch rocket?
im 17 and have my license for a car. i was thinking about getting my motorcycle license. what i want to know is, how much would the insurance be if i bought a crotch rocket? yes, i know how to ride one.""
I have a question about health insurance?
if a contact is lost will health insurance get you another pair
Will CT speeding ticket effect my NY insurance?
I have recently received an out-of-state speeding ticket in CT, and the state's policy is that if you just pay the ticket (pleading no contest) there will not be any points added to your license. The policy for my home state, New York, is that the state does not record out of state moving violations such as this one. My question is that if I were to just pay the ticket so I wouldn't receive points, would my insurance company in NY still be able to raise my rates for this? Would they even find out? Anyone with a simalar experience between these two states would be extremely helpful""
Do i need to list the second driver on my insurance policy?
If they aren't registerd to the vehicle but drive it often do they need to be on the policy at all? Im paying way too much with two currently...
Will homeowners insurance pay for a stolen bike?
Will homeowners insurance pay for a stolen bike?
Car insurance quotes online?
Where can i find good companies info on quotes in online
I've just bought a car and am going to drive it home. Can I get done for driving without insurance?
I was wondering if it would be an offence to drive a car without insurance after buying it as I will sort out all the insurance stuff once I get home.
A 125cc Scooter in California?
I want to get a 125cc scooter just because it does use a lot of gas. In California, does a 125cc scooter need a license plate? Do I need to buy an insurance? Do I need a driver license? Do I have to ride on the bike lane? or I can ride as a car? How do I make a left turn? How do I park my scooter? park it as a car (occupy a car parking spot)? It's in California. Thank you very much""
How do I get Car insurance before i get my Drivers License?
I'm under 18 and im getting ready to get my provisional drivers License. They said i need proof of insurance to get my license. But how do i get insurance if i dont have a car? I know people usually are supposed to be added to their parents insurance policy to take care of this, but my parents dont have drive or have insurance........ What do i do? Ive heard that i should get an uncle or grandparent to add me to their policy, but is that true? Help me out... thanks""
I have full coverage insurance n my car was stolen n impounded should yhe insurance pay inpound fees?
I have full coverage insurance n my car was stolen n impounded should yhe insurance pay inpound fees?
Honda city - 4 wheeler insurance -?
for a new honda city 2012 model, what will be the yearly insurance for it. for 31 yr old with 2 yrs of 4 wheeler driving record how to shop for cheap 4 wheeler insurance...and what to look for while buying it this is in chennai -""
Car insurance questions please help?
my husband's car has been in the shop for a week i have been driving him back and forth to work when i can and he has been asking friends for rides when i am working yesterday i was in a car accident, someone u-turned into me, i can no longer take him to work obviously because my car is now getting repaired, his friends are tired of making the drive (it is about 20 miles one way) they keep offering him their cars saying because he is an insured driver and their cars are insured that it is fine for him to drive it I don't buy this because when we were shopping for car insurance the people made it clear to me the only person aloud to drive his vehicle was him even though I was insured with a different company under my mother's name what is the truth concerning insured drivers on separate policies driving other insured vehicles that their name is not on the policy""
Can having your car insurance cancelled lower your credit score?
My friend had his car insurance cancelled because his wife had a few wrecks in a few years and then a DUI. They were on the same policy. Last month is when they were told their car insurance would be cancelled. Last month Equifax dropped his credit score 100points (don't know about hers). They only reason he knew about the credit score drop was because his one and only credit card had the limit lowered 75% The only thing he can think of that changed was the car insurance. Could cancelled car insurance affect your credit?
What is a good dental insurance provider for a 22 yr old male in S. Illinois?
I live in Carbondale, Illinois. I live on my own. Work and go to school. I pay my own bills and tuition. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't have alot of extra money. All 4 of my wisdom teeth need to come out. And im looking for a simple, effective, and affordable insurance plan.""
Going on parents car insurance!?
Hi i am enquiring here, I have my driving test in 2 weeks 7th July, and i am looking around for cars and while i am getting quotes for car insurance they are quite dear at 19 even with a small engined car, i was wondering can i go on my parents insurance which i know can cut the cost quite a lot, but can i use my own car and add the car and me as the main driver of that car and it still stay relatively cheap? i have read up on the illegal action know as ''fronting'' and i want to avoid that happening but don't want to be forced onto my own insurance and be spending hundreds of pounds a month? any help or advice would be appreciated""
reliant general insurance quote
reliant general insurance quote
Cheapest Auto Insurance in Ca.?
Would you recommend me the cheapest auto insurance?
What is car insurance for a first time driver?
Okay i am 18 and have never had my license before and am going to be getting it at the end of this month...soon we are going to start getting insurace quotes for my car, we have been talking about what would be the best way to go about getting the cheapest insurance...so would it be best to put the car in my name but then just be added to my parents insurance and have me as the primary driver OR would it make a difference if we put the car in one of my parents name and then had me listed as the secondary driver for the car ? OR maybe you know a better way to go about this please give me all the advice you know about this! thanks""
Can I drive my parents car without insurance?
Can I drive my parents car without insurance, the car is insured under my parents name, ( we live at the same address) and also can I drive someone elses car without insurance with his or her permission""
What used 4 door sedans are cheap on insurance?
Im 18 years old, turning 19 in december and need a car for college, what would be a good 4 door sedan, 4 cylinder, that is good on gas, cheap on insurance and cheap on repairs, reliable. What would be a good first car? Im not staying and living at the campus, im coming back home everyday.""
""1994 Mazda MX-3, How much would insurance cost for it!?""
So I got a 94 Mazda mx-3 car, and I live in Calgary AB. And i'm 16, could anybody give me a estimate on how much registration, insurance, ect, would cost?""
How much do you pay for health insurance and who do you have?
People keep saying that Romney care made insurance affordable in MA. If health insurance in MA is cheap compared to other states I'm wondering how much you pay and where do you live? I live in MA and I pay $14K a year for Tufts. BCBS of MA wanted nearly $20K.
What UK car insurance companies will consider my Canadian driving experience?
I recently exchanged my Canadian driving license for a full UK license but insurance quotes are so high because most companies only consider that I haven't had my full license for more than a year (in fact I have had a full Canadian license for 8 years). The insurance companies also don't seem to consider that I have had no claims on my Canadian insurance for 8 years. Does anyone know of a UK car insurance provider that will consider foreign driving experience in their quotes?
I just got my license and have no insurance..?
no car yet but will soon have one...what do you recommend?what will be cheaper to get my own insurance or be put on my parents...
Auto Insurance?
I have a 1981 Chevy Silverado that I have poured money into over the years. I was wanting to full coverage seeing as how much money I have put into it. These trucks are very common so they aren't worth a lot. I'd say the going rate for a nice specimen would be $3,500 in my area. I have somewhere around $10,000-$12,000 invested in mine. Can I have it insured for what I have in it or just what its worth? I've never had full coverage insurance so I have no idea. Thanks for any input.""
""I hit my friends car, they dont have insurance?""
I accidentally hit my friends car with my truck and it's pretty damaged. I apologized and said id call the insurance company. They said no because 1. The car.is up for repossession and 2. Because they don't have car.insurance! They supposedly went and got a quote to fix it and it's $1,200. They want me to GIVE them $1,200! I refuse because this is why I have insurance. What do I do?""
Car Insurance and clueless teenagers?
Considering the kind of questions we are getting by 16 year olds regarding car insurance we could safely assume that they aren't ready to drive at all! Maybe raise the minimum age to 18? Might even save a few lives!
All young adults pay attention...what's the cheapest yet best car insurance you have found?
I'm 19, dad wants me to buy my own car get my own insurance etc. Any pointers?""
Is there a way I can drop my car insurance since I am not using my car?
I have not used my car in a few months but still have insurance on it. I still want to keep my vehicle though, but just have it in the garage. Can I drop my insurance? My biggest fear is that once I cancel it and want to start driving my car again I will have higher rates? Is there any way I can avoid this???""
Car insurance for men and women?
I passed my test Feb 2011 I've never had a car due to high insurance, so I did i check and went through a quote and mine came out at 3500 for a one liter x reg then I went back thrpugh and.just changed mr to miss and it went down almost 2000 then changed the date to a women just passing her test and it came out at 2600 why's it so high for men, and wasn't it ment to be changing to male and female having the same insurance?""
Help with getting car insurance in NY?
I really need to get a car, just got my drivers license but the insurance companies are trying to charge me over 600 a month. I have heard about people getting their insurance in maryland and other close by states, will i be able to do that? or anything ? oh and i'm 22 btw""
Do I need to buy auto insurance for my used car dealership?
We are just starting out and wonder if our personal car insurance would cover test drives, or our driving the vehicles. It is a sole proprietorship.""
Car insurance for 17year old help?
basically i want online to see how much it cost to insure a 1.2 corsa but everytime i go on insurance sites i get quotes around the price range of 6000 but my friend got his corsa insured for around 1 grand and he is the same age as me, he now drives a ford focus which is a 1.6 but he pays 1.6grand so i was wondering why, what am i doing wrong? do i have to call the up to get a cheaper quote because no matter what i input on insurance site to make it cheaper it still ends up come up around 6grand.""
2 speeding tickets in 1 days! USAA insurance. Help Please!?
Ok, so as the title says, i got 2 speeding tickets in 1 day. Yes that was stupid, i know. I am really worried. one is a $205 fine, the other $110 both for speeding 15 mph over. I think it is possible to get defensive driving with one of the tickets because my last ticket was around 2 years ago. Thats the other thing. 2 yrs ago i got in a wreck, my fault and a ticket too + defensive driving. so with all that taken into account. do you think i will get dropped from USAA insurance or how much do you think my rates will rise? Thanks for the help!""
How much does high risk auto insurance cost?
How much does high risk auto insurance cost?
Should I buy a 600cc or a 1000cc super sport motorcycle?
I am a fairly experienced rider, I have been riding dirt bikes since I can remember; I also have had my motorcycle licenses at age 15 and now I am now 17 years old. I have put over 10,000 on my kawasaki ninja 250r so this isn't for my first bike it is a step up because me and my dad both believe it is time. I have been looking at ZX6r's and r6's a lot but my real question is if I buy a 600cc bike will I regret it and wish I would have bought a ZX10r or a r10? Will I eventually feel like the 600 bike it's enough? Oh and I am looking to get a bike and keep it so that it will last me though senior year of high school and all of collage. I have looked at all different types of Motorcycles and the super sports have been my favorite by far. Any other information about the 600cc or 1000cc bikes and y'all's opinions on them and which ones you all personally like will be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much for your time for answering!""
What is the average cost for small business health insurance with less then 15 employee ?
What is the average cost for small business health insurance with less then 15 employee ?
First traffic violation. How much will it affect my insurance?
So today I got my first traffic violation after 9 years of driving. I am 25 and have been driving since I was 16. I stopped to far in a stop sign and passed the line. How much will the ticket cost? I live in CA. How badly will this affect my auto insurance? Right now I pay $150 every 6 months for liablity coverage.
How much should it cost to insure a new teen driver?
I'm 16 and my parents just put me on their insurance. I have 2000 escort and I have the basic liability coverage. I have got the good student discount too. The total came to be about $53 dollars. Is that about the average? My parents originally said it would be about $100 dollars.
Do you have health insurance?
If you dont then why ?
Insurance cost on 95 jeep wrangler?
Insurance cost on 95 jeep wrangler?
reliant general insurance quote
reliant general insurance quote
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Temporary car insurance in uk?
"Temporary car insurance in uk?
can you get short term car insurance in the uk for like say a few months??? reason being is i have my everyday car but... have my toy i would like to use maybe few months of a year.
BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://freecarinsurance.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr
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Anyone know of affordable dental insurance for western Ky? ?
i need to have dental work done, but no insurance.""
I have a 19 y\r girl who needs insurance (hasnt found job as no ones hiring here). Not in school. i need names?
We moved to Al to a smallnd no ones hiring and she isnt in college because we cant afford it. So turning 19 means shes no longer under hubbys ins. So we need affordable monthly payments for her to be able to go to dr, hospital etc...without us paying a LOT a month. I would like some insurance company names to check them out""
What would be my car insurance quote?
I tried to do an online quote but it said I have to be 18. I am 17 years old. I live in Maryland and I am in 11th grade. The car is Used 2005 Chrysler Sebring Touring fully paid for. I am not going to get the insurance until the August of 2011. I am a C average student. I'm moving out of my parents place next school year. I have never had a car before (no accidents, no DWI, etc..) I am not a part of any organization. Can someone do an estimate quote for me? Because I have no idea. I figured it'd be somewhere near 300. Thankss.""
Failure to provide proof of insurance.?
I got a ticket for failing to provide my insurance card to the officer. I had an insurance card, but it was expired. He told me to fight it in court and it will most likely be dropped. If it gets dropped, does it still appear as a conviction on my driving record. What are the impacts on my insurance rates if it does appear as a conviction?""
Cheap florida health insurance?
my wife and i want to have a child but cannot afford to pay for the complete doctors visit and all.. we do not qualify for medicaid what insurance that is affordable can we use?
I have a question about business insurance?
I just received the Insurance Premium Quote and General Commercial Liability from this Insurance company. In the last page they claim that their company is not licensed by the state of California (nonadmitted or surplus line). It says: The Insurer is not subject to the financial solvency regulation and enforcement which applies to California Licensed Insurers. The Insurer does not participate in any of the insurance guaranteed funds created by California Law. Therefore these funds can not pay your claims or protect your assets if the insurer becomes insolvent and is unable to make payments as promised . So I checked the www.insurance.ca.gov and this guys are there, as active. However, should I trust them? What this notice exactly mean?""
How much would insurance cost for a mazda rx7 as a young dirver?
i was thinking of getting a mazda rx7 for my first car. i know its a twin turbo which make it faster but , and im sure everybody heard this b4 but i wont b speeding in the car i realy just like the look and my parents friend is selling his so it is more handy.. im from ireland. can anybody tell me how much would it cost me and any way of getting cheaper insurance. thanks""
How much more is car insurance on sports cars vs regular cars for younger divers?
im kinda just looking for a general answer like 25% more or 50% more.... eg if it was a basic ford mustang how much more does insurance cost for that if im 20yrs old?
Which is life insurance company is number one position?
Which is life insurance company is number one position?
Which is the best travelers insurance? Orbitz.com Access America travelers insurance?
I am looking through buying tickets through Orbitz.com (from LA to Berlin) and they are offering travelers insurance through Access America for $45. Any other suggestions?
Why do Liberals want to be force to pay Health care Insurance?
why can't some people work harder and pay for their own health care insurance? There are some people who are driving without car insurance.... So I don't think there is such thing as affordable health insurance
Car Insurance Premium Refund?
Hi, I paid around 1080 in February for my car insurance for the year, I am looking at possibly selling my car to a friend, I know I can cancel my policy at any time but I am not sure if I do, how much of a refund I will get, it says something about 90% of the cost of the cover being charged since its over 5 months, does anyone know how these things work or how much roughly I would be looking at getting back. There has been no accidents or claims. Cheers""
Car accident! they didnt have insurance! what cam i do?
last monday i was on a car accident,,,,(t-bone colission) it was there fault...i had a green light...she turned left at a red!.....but they dont have insurance...i need money to fix my car.....what can i do....? they told me thy were going to get my car fixed,,,but now they dont want to pay....and the even want to sew me! the police officer told me that i had to sew them cuz they didnt have insurance! what could happen in court!? what are the chances that theyll pay for my car!!? i live in texas....thanks""
Drive new car on an old insurance policy?
Hi all, I have got fully comp insurance on my car, but I have just sold it. Now I have bought a new one can I drive my new car on my insurance policy without changing it and be covered third party? If the answer is yes will it cause any problems for the person I have just sold my old car to?""
(for people in america) how much does the average 17-18 year old pay for insurance?
im from ireland and was just wondering approx
""About health insurance plans in the state of NY, which one covers alot?
And for a decent/reasonable price ? Are there any plans that offer members the option of playing annually versus monthly ? Do you know of any Medicaid manged program care ?
Go auto insurance company?
i am looking for some cheap car insurance company and i have found go auto insurance to be the cheapest so far with what i need. has anyone heard of this insurance company? and if so, good or bad?""
Why is car insurance so high for young drivers?
I am 18 and currently on my fathers motor trade insurance. This covers me for anything upto 1600cc for social and domestic, you are actually having a laugh 1600cc is a joke! I can drive anything for business purposes. Recently rang the insurance to see if they would insure me on an IVECO DAILY 2.8 turbo diesel, as i was delivering some furniture to my grand parents in malta, about 1000 miles away from the uk, 2000 mile round trip. The answer i got was a blatant no, i didn't even get chance to say .8, anyway i was so pissed off i did the trip. didn't have one accident what so ever, not even a near miss when i drove to malta there and back. explain why they wouldn't insure me i really don't understand. My dads friend who is 53 years old was born not to drive a car, he has an accident atleast once a week because he mentally switches off when he drives. He drove down to germany any rolled his car times on the autobahn and i didn't have a crash or a near miss once in a 3.5 ton van, where is the common sense surely they should coin the people who litterally can't drive?""
""I want to trade my car in. I have no GAP Insurance, where can I get it?
I got a used 2007 Dodge Caliber SXT rom Drivetime (rip off) in March of this year. I knew nothing about financing a car or anything. Now I want to trade the car in at a new lot for a ...show more
Car insurance?
there are 5 people in our family and we all have vehicles of our own and pay for separate insurance but somtimes we might need to use each others cars/vans for what ever reason is there an insurance that we could get that would allow us to drive each others cars.
How to check a car has insurance or not?
All the information I know: car plate number, vehicle identification number and a expired Progressive insurance policy number. Can I still check my car current insurance online?""
Where i can get very cheapest motorcycle insurance?
i bay a motorcycle and my dad don't agree to give some money for my insurence
Auto Insurance question...?
If my teen neighbor (with a licence)borrowed my car and he/she wrecked it, would my insurance cover it? If so, why do teens that are driving, have a licence, have to be covered on parents insurance if they are driving their parents car? Isn't the car already covered by insurance? Why do I have to pay insurance on my teen and not my neighbor?""
Why can you 16 years old own cars in America?
Hello, So when I'm watching MTV or whatever television program here in the Netherlands I'm noticing that so many 16 year old drive a car. But where do you guys get the money from? Because a really crappy cheap car cost about 1000 euro's and than you need to pay a 390 euro (507 dollars) a month. I'm 16 too and with my 40 hours of work in a month I make 200 euro (260 dollars), so I can't afford a car now. (at least not paying every single month 390 euros) Nevertheless in the Netherlands you must be 18 years old to drive a car, but even when I'm 18 I think I won't make a 390 euro a month (only for my car). So do your parents pay? Don't you have to pay taxes or whatever? Thanks. David Calculation: Cheap car = 1000 euro Good cheap car = 3000 euro Average insurance 18 year old = 100 euro a month Can't find translation but road taxes = 80 euro a month cost of maintance = 80 euro a month Average driving 1000km a month with 7/100L = 70 * 1,80= 126 euro We pay 1.80 euro a liter (benzine) = 1 gallon = 3,8L = 6,84 euro's = 8,9 dollar per gallon so: 390 euro = 507 dollars a month""
What is the cheapest auto insurance company for someone who has 3 minor speeding tickets?
Need to know this ASAP as current policy will expire end of Aug. 2007. Thanks all! ;)
Temporary car insurance in uk?
can you get short term car insurance in the uk for like say a few months??? reason being is i have my everyday car but... have my toy i would like to use maybe few months of a year.
What is the average cost of replacing a water heater? Which would you choose insurance payment or heater?
My water heater needs to be replaced (electric) I have a warranty insurance that will replace it however there are a few non covered costs - the pan, the permit, some other part, it will cost me $512.00. They have given me the option to cash out which means they cut me a check and I try to figure it out on my own. Problem is the cashout amount is unknown and it will take up to two weeks for me to find out what the amount is before i can even decide - two weeks without a hot shower is HELL! But I'm not sure what to do. What would you do? Can anyone guess as to what amount they MIGHT give me? The insurance company is American Home Shield. ANY advice will help. I'm a new home owner and don't know a thing about house stuff! Thanks!""
Nice cars with out the insurance?
first off what is the difference between a normal cars insurance and a luxurery car like a ferrari.second, i have $100,000 and im looking for a nice fast car, but i dont want to buy a ferrari or sumthing cuz of the insurance is a lot higher i heard. i was even thinking about buying a 2009 ford f150 and souping it up with rims and everything but i'd rather a car thats really nice. does anybody have any ideas for a nice fast car with normal insurance?""
CLASSIC MINI!!! How much does insurance cost for a 17 year old female?
About to buy a classic mini as my first car and wanted to know how much other peoples insurance has cost. Im female thanks
Can anyone sugest a inexpensive private health insurance plan with low deductible and co pay.?
The insurance I have now is with golden rule through united healthcare my copay is 35$ and deductible is 5,000.""
Insurance for unregistered cars?
I have a few unregistered cars in a garage- one is a show car that I trailer to shows, 2 are just cars I love but I dont drive, and 1 is a race car I occaisonally race. These cars are covered by insurance when I trailer them (add-on policy to trailer insurance), and the race car is covered when i race it (Race insurance with the group I work with)... however, I realize none of them are insured while they sit in my garage against damage or theft. What kind of insurance do I get just to protect these cars while they are sitting on my property? Thanks!""
Car insurance questions?
okay im 19 livin in MICHIGAN. My driving record sucks, (2) accidents i got rear ended, (3) speeding tickets a total of 7 points license is restricted till jan, 2012. I want a car but its around 600-900$ a MONTH to insure me, 99 dodge neon to a 2010 mustang gt all the same price a month depends what insurance company. i cant be on my parents insurance because they excluded off their policy. I allso live in a apartment, so is it possible to buy a insurance policy in my moms name with her correct sos number and drivers license number and lie and say she lives with me in my appartment and put me as a secondary driver. but the car ill be fiancing so i need full coverage and the car is in my name . My questions are (A) my mom uses lifelock will she find out that i opened a policy in her name. (B) will the insurance company find out about that my mom doesnt live their or would they find out at all. AND MY MOM LIVES AT A ANOTHER ADDRESS. (C) is it legal to own and fiance a car thatS in my name but insurance is not ill be listed as a seconday driver under my mom . (d) my mom WOULD NOT KNOW IM DOING THIS. I KNOW THATS FRAUD BUT U GOT TO DO WHAT U GOTTA DO how would anyone know what im doing and find out about it""
How much would insurance be on a Mustang GT for a 16 year old driver?
Please give me a price range. Not any comments like a lot or to much. Please give me a price range. Many thanks.
Individual health insurance?
DOes anyone have or know of any good individual policies? Im currently self employed and need health insurance. Looking for the best and cheapest!
""For a new driver 21 or younger, how much did your monthly car insurance decrease every six months? Every year?""
If you are 21 or younger, and pay for your own car insurance. If you have not had any accidents, or ticket violations applied to your driver's license....How much did your monthly car insurance decrease each year? What was your monthly payment from 16-21 years of age if you did NOT drive a sports car? Please list the state you reside in, and whether you live in the city or suburbs. Thanks.""
Responsible Insurance company won't pay up.?
Long story short. Not my fault. The guy backed into my car. It was parked to sell it. So no insurance policy on it. My BF and I were sitting in the car out of the rain writting out a new for sale sign. The car vibrated like crazy when we drove it to move it back to my place. The guys insurance company didn't even check the alignment or add it to the estimate. The other estimates don't even include the alignment. There could be more damage. I decided to get cash to another car. I have not signed anything yet or recived the check. My car is worth about 2K. It wouldn't be worth it to fix it. Insurance Company $1013.76 Auto Body Shop $1162.00 Ford Dealership $1284.90 Les Schwab Alignment $90.00 361.14 difference. I asked to raise their quote. The Insurance company said no. If I had go to an auto body repair shop of my choice with 1013.76 they would call and ask for them to kick down more money. I am going to notify the insurance company that in writting that I am taking them to small claims court. Any ideas on the letter that I submitt? My BF and I were injured. The medical people are refusing to bill the insurance company responsible. They wanted me to pay up front and get rembursed later or have some other insurance cover it. I didn't want to wait. I used my work health insurance. So they are getting the bill. Any way I can get the Car insurance company billed?
Is this considered Expensive Health Insurance????
This is my firsft full time job with insurance out of college now. I was wondering if you thought it was expensive since I am new to this. It is 186 a month and I make 2200 a month. It does seem pretty good though, is this decent insurance?... No deductible. Doctors visits: 100% paid after a $30 dollar co-pay for physicians and $45 for a specialist 100% paid rehab services (phys. therapy, chiropractic visits) after 30 dollar co-pay, for a max of 60 visits a year 1 eye exam every 2 years, 100% paid after a 30 dollar co pay Dental: no deductible or co-pay, 100% paid for preventative services (exam, xrays, fluoride). 90% paid for basic services (filiings). The max they pay per year is 1,000""
Another car insurance question to British drivers!?
My brother's car was written off yesterday [was the other party's fault]. He was told today the car wasn't redeemable so that's that! So he is waiting to see how much they are going to pay him for the loss, but the question is does he have to keep paying full comprehensive insurance when he no longer has a car to drive? Can he now pay a reduced rate until the insurance is sorted out? It seems unfair to continue paying out for fully comp insurance when there is no car to insure!""
What's the best option for changing cars and insurance?
Ok so I got my Service/MOT, Insurance and Road tax at the end of the month, I've been driving for 1 year now and touch wood I wont crash by the end of the month to get my 1st year no claims. I currently have a Renault clio 1.2 However in about 6 months I would like to change to a Audi A3 1.6 as my insurance will be cheaper with the 1 year no claims. (Had to get a 1.2 for the 1st year as Insurance would be crazy) I am currently getting quotes from Admiral and Diamond insurance for a annual fee of about 670 or Monthly installments that come to 1000, so Ideally I will just pay the full year off. But as I said in 6 months ill change cars and by the time Ill sell and buy a new car there could be 2 months where I'm not even driving, and don't want to pay for insurance for not even driving about. I can't find on these dam insurance sites about if i can put my insurance on hold (Admiral). Not sure if I will get charged if I put it on hold or not, as all these insurance company's are very sligh. and Should I pay the Road tax for the whole year or just the 6 months? Also what's the best place to buy/sell cars? ebay / auto trader? (I bought mine from the Motorline Renault garage)""
What do you wish your insurance agent would do for you?
Aside from the impossible, what do you wish your insurance agent would offer, help with, take care of for you or do differently?""
Are there any good temporary car insurance companies in america?
Are there any good temporary car insurance companies in america?
I'm have been paying for a car and insurance for 3 years but the car is not under my name and that person report a car stolen what can i do?
ai'm paying the car and insurance for 3 years and that person report the car that i have stolen the car only way to store what can i do
No license/expired registration/insurance in full effect and new title...? In NY.?
License expired 6 months ago and I have kept up with insurance even though my vehicle just sits in a garage. I'm in NYC and in college so there is no reason for me to drive for the past 2 years. My insurance company renews the policy every 6 months and my insurance rate is still that of Upstate NY where it is at least $1,600 cheaper. NYC is $600 more and I was told that I would have to cover my brother who is under 25 (not allowed to drive my car nor want to) just because we share the same address. My insurance company seems to be using my last registered address so I have been too afraid to renew registration and notify my insurance company of updated address. Recently I got around to changing the title to make it legit; the vehicle was what I won in my divorce settlement. Vehicle is also completely paid for and completely mine. Question is, with the title now under my name, do I need to register it right away? Would my rates automatically go up (they will use new NYC address on title)? Do I need to notify my insurance company of the changes if I am not driving the vehicle for the next 5 months? Will they even know?? I ask these questions because I am a full-time student who do not work so I can't really afford the extra costs in insurance. I hope to get a job in May '10 right after I graduate with my Bachelors and move to NJ where I hope to live and work. At that point, I would care less about how much they want to charge me. I am just concerned about the ramifications of not updating address or registering the vehicle for another 5-6 months. Thank you!!""
Insurance for bmw 328i for a 16 year old?
Can anyone tell me an estimate of how much insurance would be for a 16 year old female for a 2011 or 2012 BMW 328i? I get all A's and B's ( i heard that you get a small discount on insurance for good grades). thank you!
Is it worth getting motorcycle insurance?
Im about to buy a Drz400sm with a loan. I like to know snice I have a loan should I get insurance coverage on it and what type of coverage like theft for sure im getting it if I do buy insurance. What other coverage should I get for it. I just turn 18 with a super clean driving history and Im planning to take a motorcycle safety course so how much will you believe insurance will coast me on the drz400sm. What are some cheap insurance companies too by the way?
Where is the best place for a teenager to get car insurance?
Im an 18 year old male and will be getting a 2005 Nissan Altima. What would be good insurance for me? I need cheap insurance and I have good grades so I might qualify for a discount.
Cheap health insurance that will cover dental?
I need some help. I can no longer work at one of my jobs and my new job wont provide insurance since it is part-time I need help and scared that i cant afford anything. i already cant afford student loans. is there any cheap insurance packages i can get in ct?
Whats the cheapest car insurance for 17yr old girl?
Whats the cheapest car insurance for 17yr old girl?
Health insurance......?
Im applying for the health connect in missouri and they asked me to call two different insurance company for quotes. My coworker said to call like prudential and allstate but i thought they only sale care,home,life insurance. do they sell health insurance too? i called but they dont work on saturdays so i just wanna know if they do or what other places i can call.""
125cc bike or scooter Under 500 and LOW INSURANCE?
Hi im looking to by a bike or scooter that is 125cc for under 500 And has low insurance All suggestions helpfull
What are some good insurance companies to contract with as an independent broker?
What are some good insurance companies to contract with as an independent broker?
Temporary car insurance in uk?
can you get short term car insurance in the uk for like say a few months??? reason being is i have my everyday car but... have my toy i would like to use maybe few months of a year.
Why do insurance companys ask how much you paid for your car?
When they don't want to pay that amount out ! Although you pay that premium.
Law in regards to company cars and insurance...please help?
I was hired at a company but instructed that I could not drive the company cars nor my own car during work hours because I have had my license suspended in the past due to parking tickets (alot of them, a long time ago) My license is fine now. I have never had anything more than parking tix on my record. I want to apply for another job within the company but it would require driving. I am willing to drive my own car...for insurance purposes is there a waiver or something I can sign which would let me drive my own car on the job which would relieve them of any liablility should an accident occur?""
New driver and car insurance.?
I'm 15 and I turn 16 on dec 27 and I already have a car and I've seen a lot of car insurance companies commercials but I don't know which one is best. They say they offer great stuff but I don't know which one to go with. Please help me because I want to have my car protected I just don't know which car insurance company is the best one out there. Thanks for helping <{ *__*}>
Is it cheaper to be provisionally insured first?
My test is booked in a few weeks, would it be cheaper, to get insured provisionally for less, then pay extra when (if) i pass to be a 'full licence holder' or would it be more expensive, because initially i was planning on getting the insurance once i'd passed, but then the insurance company suggested getting insured provisionally, then paying extra for the full licence insurance, which option would be cheapest? or would i really not save an awful lot anyway""
""Open container citation, will my insurance go up?""
i got cited for an open container while parked in my car, im 18, and im in california, and my insurance is all state, how much will it go up??and how much will i be fined for an open container?""
How much is car insurance for a 19 year old female in south carolina?
How much is car insurance for a 19 year old female in south carolina?
Cheap 17 Year old car insurance?
I have just passed my driving test and can't find affordable car insurance. I would not be the main driver of the car as I would use it less than my parents, yet I cannot find a quote cheaper than 3000 on my 2004 Fiat Punto 1.2L Petrol.""
Cheapest way to get car insurance!?
I recently just passed my driving test and a know car insurance isnt cheap. The cheapest i have been quoted is a little under 5000 on a 1.2 Vauxhal Corsa. I know there is a way if you make one of your parents the main driver on your car and you are a named driver but by doing that its illegal (if you are really the main driver) and if you crash they will not cover you. Is there any other way which isnt illegal to get cheap insurance!? Even anything under 3000 would be defined as cheap for me!
Auto insurance filing question in WA?
About 5 months ago, my vehicle was hit in a parking lot leaving a big dent on the driver's side. The person who hit the car was kind enough to stay and contact his insurance company to file a claim. His insurance company appraised the damage, sent me a check, and told me it's mine to do with as I wish (I could keep it or use it for repairs). I decided to keep it and not repair my vehicle. Now, I'm looking at selling my car but I would like to repair it first to increase its value. Could I file a claim with my own insurance company since it was not my fault? Would I have to pay the deductible? The deductible is about $500 and the estimated damages from the previous appraisal was at $2500.""
Should i get home insurance as a home owner or a rental ?
i own a house and i rent out part of it . i pay about 925 per year. i am moving out of state should i switch to rental property rather then owner occupied insurance ? which one is better or cheaper
What is the usually price range for sports bike insurance?
I'm turning 19 in july and want to start riding. I live in california. so what do you guys think the price may be?
Insurance cost?
i'm 17 years old, my car is toyota celica v4, 2 doors. can anybody tell me how much my car insurance cost, no need exactly but close to""
How much does your insurance go up after getting a underage?
does anyone know how much the rates will go up? I didn't have my license when i received the underage and i still don't. I've never drove a vehicle. i don't have my license yet and im most likely not going to because my parents have told me the car insurance goes up now. I've looked online and it says that rates can double or triple. thank you for your answers.
Who has the cheapest auto insurance in California?
I have a second car that has been inop and I want to sell. I only need insurance for about a month.
Will insurance cover a salvage car?
I need to know cuz im buying a car. what insurance company will cover it. and will it be expensive??
""Life Insurance -- Is a 78 year old woman too old to get life insurance? If not, who are the better providers?""
I've made preliminary inquiries to get life insurance for a 78 year-old female, however, I get the standard response of no because of her age and the fact that she has been hospitalized in the last year and has pre-existing conditions (COPD, high blood pressure, arhythmia). My sense, however, is that there may be life insurance companies out there with more accomodating terms for senior citizens. If you know of any such companies, or are experienced enough in life insurance to give a definitive no- it's not possible response, please let me know. What are our alternatives, if any?""
Homeower CAR INSURANCE.?
Thank you ahead for answer my question. I live in MA, I'm a homeowner of a 3 units property in Boston. When I bought that house, my insurance agent for my AUTO said that I have to ...show more""
California people! who knows about teenage insurance prices?
I am moving from nc to california. i pay $150 every month for my insurance and i am 18. soon to be 19, iv been insured sense Nov 2010 any ideas on how much it would be for me in Cali? thanks :)""
Insurance after you buy your car?
I'm picking up a new car I just bought from a dealership tomorrow, how does insurance work? I have insurance at the moment for the car I am driving but not the new one I am buying. help :)""
Estimate how much car insurance would cost?
16 year old guy, with a 2001 Ford F250 Supercab, 160,000 miles. How much do you think insurance would cost per month?""
Affordable Health Insurance in California?
I'm really sick and I went to the doctor's office yesterday to see what I had. I was under Medical but the doctor said he couldn't see me because I had to pay $795 dollars monthly for them to see. I don't understand why I would pay so much, I'm 20 years old, a single mother, and a full-time student. I work too, but my income is less than $1200 monthly. Has this happened to anyone? My baby is still covered by medical but I would like to find an affordable health insurance for the two of us... does anyone know of one? thank you [:""
Will simply getting an STI test raise insurance rates?
I was wondering if any doctors or insurance professionals know as fact if insurance rates will increase if someone goes to their primary care physician to get an STI screening, even if they test negative for everything.""
Cheapest Car Insurance Nineteen Year Old?
So im nineteen and am hoping to pass my test friday, i have been looking on comparison websites and cant find any quotes for a low litre car under lets say 2500. I was just wondering if anyone out there knows of any specific insurers which could offer a much better deal, i would be very very grateful""
How much is insurance?
What can i expect to pay for liability insurance I I live in California, ride a '78 Kawasaki KZ650 SR, I'm 18, and I just got my license? I need just the minimum amount of coverage. I don't need exact prices, just a general idea of cost.""
What is the average cost of health insurance for an infant/family plan?
What is the average cost of health insurance for an infant/family plan?
Temporary car insurance in uk?
can you get short term car insurance in the uk for like say a few months??? reason being is i have my everyday car but... have my toy i would like to use maybe few months of a year.
Need help with my car insurance?
I will be driving for a year this august and i'm currently paying 105 a month for my current insurance. All the quotes im receiving at the moment are alot higher then i'm already paying but i'm sure it will go down once i've been driving exactly 1 year. Will i get a 1 year No claims discount automatically on the date i finish my current insurer? then just set my new insurance to start the day after?
In Pennsylvania do you need motorcycle insurance with just a learner's permit?
I am about to get my motorcycle permit in Pennsylvania and I was wondering if I needed to get insured to ride with just a permit.
Need advice on good medical insurance company?
Wanting to purchase medical insurance for a family member. Looking for a very good company who could provide major medical insurance with at least a $2,500.00 deductible. Just mainly looking for some basic coverage. Thank you for whatever advice you can give me.""
How would the insurance companies treat mounting a smaller sized engine inside a sport model car?
If i were to for example, mount a 1.4 vauxhall astra engine inside a GSI model car, would the insurers treat it as a 1.4 vehicles insurance rate?""
How much would a used VW beetle run me up? What about insurance?
I am going to be 17 this november and I'm working this summer to save up for a car, a beetle preferably. I'd like it in a pastel green or blue....convertible maybe :P I'd like it used because the new beetles are ugly. Stick shift is okay. How much would it cost me....if it was say, 10 years old or less AND used....convertible and non-convertable...and how much would insurance be in the state of NJ? I got an A on my written test in drivers ed so i think that might be a discount. Also, what is the gas mileage...on a stick and a no stick. Thanks! :)""
How do i get cheap car insurance?
im 19 and sont want 2 pay loads 4 car insurance
Motorcycle insurance in ontario?
Im 21 years old and im looking for cheap motorcycle insurance in ontario. Any suggestions?
How would insurance be on these cars?
first of all plz dont tell me call insurance or that im to young and dont need these cars and should get a camry. i just turned 17 and just got a job at In n Out and by my senior year in highschool which is after this summer i want to get a car and my parents would help me but everytime i ask them they say dont talk about it untill you have 2500$-_- so i was just wondering how much is insurance on these cars i have in mind, first, nissan 350z(any year) honda s2000(any year) mazda miata(1998-2004) and last a scion tc (2004-2008) the car will be under MY MOMS name and i will be put as an additional driver but not main driver or however you put it. can i just have the price ranges it doesnt have to be exact, if it help i live in califronia Orange county anaheim thanks guys""
Cheap Car Insurance For 17 Year Olds Male ?
Hello .. am trying to get insured on a corsa 1.2 sxi and i am 17 years old .. ive been on go compare, moneysupermarket etc and they want 4045 grand a year with pass plus :/ can anyone help me out and get me a list of cheap insurance companys :)""
Dad wont pay for insurance?
I went to school today to get my parking permit and I needed a couple of things including a copy of my insurance and my registration. The problem was that my name wasn't written on the insurance card but Im still insured under my dads name. I told him about it and he called the school, after that he called me and told me not to talk to the people that were in charge of giving out the permits because my name wasn't under the policy it was just that car that was under it and who ever drove it was covered. He also said that he doesn't want to pay 1400 to add me on the insurance even though he makes 6000 a mont, and the last thing i want to do is park my car in the neighborhood next to the school if i did that there would be no point in getting a car. I need help what should i do this is stressing me out!""
""If a teenager gets into a car accident, how long until their insurance rate goes back down?""
One of my friends was recently involved in a car crash which I believe he was at fault at. The other car didn't sustain much damage, but his car took quite a beating. He's only 17, and he's basically in a shell shock right now since it was his first accident. He told me that he feels really guilty about the fact that his insurance his gonna spike up (State Farm) and he feels so bad for the fact his dad is gonna be having to pay for it. So my question is..will his insurance always be that high for the rest of his driving life until he's old? Or will it steadily go back down?""
Would a Hyundai Genesis coupe be considered...?
a sports car by insurance companies? If i were to get a sports car the insurance company would raise the costs because i am not married or at the legal age. So would my insurance go higher if i got the lowest model Genesis coupe?
Short term car insurance for driving abroad???? (in france)?
I am 19 years old and heading to france for the day, the yearly car insurance I already have does not cover me abroad, so I need to get insurance for the day. I have looked online but most companies only insure people who are 23 years old+""
Teen Driving Insurance?
I am wondering how much the type of car will affect the price of car insurance for a 16 year old. Which if the following cars will the insurance cost the most? and the least? 00 BMW 323ci, 04 Mazda 3s, 2001 audi a4 1.8t, 04 acura rsx base, 04 mitsubishi eclipse gs""
Health & dental insurance?
who has the best health & dental insurance for a small business of less than 10 people?
Old car insurance help?
just bought a new car and part exchanged my old one but the old one still had some months of insurance, can i get my money back for the un-used months? this ill help fund the new car's insurance""
What are the best car insurances in Dallas ?
I recently moved to Dallas and now need a new insurance.
""Car insurance, Comparison Websites and Credit checks?""
Car insurance renewal time, now need to shop around for the best deal available to me. Firstly though, Do car insurers check your credit rating and leave search footprints on your report? Also, do price comparison websites for insurance also check your rating? Also, where would be the cheapest place around for a 23 male, to get insurance. Thank you""
Can I get refunded 7 years of premiums on a Life insurance policy with a Total Disability Rider?
I need to know if I can get reimbursed for the premiums I paid. I own the policy and didnt know it had a waiver of premiums rider due to total disability. The insured has been totally disabled due to a stroke since 2001 and has been on social security disability since that time.. Please help because I think American General is trying to give me the runaround. This is a term life insurance policy
Health Insurance for my mother in law(senior person)?
I need your help regarding the insurance coverage. Here is my story? My mother in law works at a grocery retailer and gets medical insurance coverage from the employer. She wants to quit because the job is physically challenging and she wants to take care of our baby. She is 62. But we are worried because we don't know where she will get medical insurance? 1. My insurance comes from the employer. Can I put her under my insurance plan? 2. Is there any special(affordable) type of insurance plan we can purchase? I believe this is a very common situation. If you are in the same situation, please help.""
Car or 125cc motorcycle for 17 year old?
So I turn 17 soon and I was wondering whether to get a car or a 125. The main downside to getting a car is the driving lessons, it will probably end up costing 1000+ in just driving lessons/tests and is likely to take ages to past where as it takes a day to do the CBT to ride a bike. I am not interested in people saying Don't get a motorbike they're deathtraps! . So what should I do?""
What's the minimum auto insurance coverage I should have in california?
I'm not talking about the minimum required by law, but what's a good idea to have? Is 100/300/50 BIPD overkill? Are we just throwing our money away?""
If I'm on someone else car insurance am I liable?
My old boy friend put me on his car insurance so I could drive his car. We are no longer together. If he gets in an accident could I get sued? He has nothing, but I do.""
""Does anyone realize that by making health insurance mandatory, your insurance premiums will skyrocket?""
just like car insurance premiums have? And when premiums skyrocket, everyone will be moving to the cheaper government run policy. If the government really cared and wanted to bring costs down, they would get out of bed with the specdial interest groups such as malpractice lawyers and PHARMA and reform these things.""
If car insurance companies are giving you quotes that you did not request - Is this a sign of identity theft?
I've gotten like, 4 quotes all from different insurance companies saying Your quote is ready. They think I did request these! I didn't. Is this identity theft or just spam? What else could it be? My family said they didn't request this information either. Thanks in advance!!""
Temporary car insurance in uk?
can you get short term car insurance in the uk for like say a few months??? reason being is i have my everyday car but... have my toy i would like to use maybe few months of a year.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/car-insurance-joshua-mccormick"
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The dangerous fantasy behind Trump’s normalisation
Boris Johnson has urged people to snarl out of the doom and gloomines. Yet such a situation is not normal. Persuasion ourselves the president-elect doesnt symbolize everything he says is a fantasize that stops us learning Trumpism for the barbarism it is
It was David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who crystallised developments in the situation into a chilling shard, in accordance with the US presidential election result. Speaking on CNN, he said: When I listen to Conrad Black describe Donald Trump, I ponder Im hallucinating. When I listen him described as not sexist , not racist , not playing on white-hot fears , not energizing hate, when hes described in a kind of normalised acces, as someone in absolute owned of program lore, as someone whos somehow in the acceptable series of rhetoric, I reckon Im hallucinating. And I dread for home countries, and I dont think its unreasonable to do so. I accept the results of our poll, of course I do. At the same season, I feel Vladimir Putin played a distinct persona in this election, and thats outrageous. And weve normalised it already. You would think that Mitt Romney had won.
Hillary Clintons assent speech interred the tomahawk, on the basis that the quiet send of superpower a principle Trump explicitly accepted before the election would like to request that the society give him an open head and the chance to lead. Obama was warmer still: We are now all rooting for his success in marrying and guiding the country. The peaceful modulation of power is one of the specific characteristics of our republic. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world We have to remember that were actually all on one team.
The logic is that Democrat are, by definition, true-life devotees in democracy: theyre not the privilege. They dont is making an effort to charge or recount or rerun an election. That principle placeds off a series of replies suggested by reason and biography: if consenting Trumps leadership is the democratic way, then any American patriot should line up behind him. Other leaders of democratic societies should furnish him partnership and backing. The combat has been prevailed, and the only next theatre for a body politic is reconciliation.
Trump and Obama have good discussion at White House
Yet this situation is not ordinary or, if you prefer that in social media expressions, #notnormal. When girls are lining up for long-term contraception in a piteou, pragmatic farewell to their reproduction freedom; when the chief strategist accuses of permitting racism and antisemitism; when the vice-president-elect signed legislation necessary maidens to hold and pay for burials for miscarried foetuses; when the president-elect has pledged to deport three million immigrants; when he has at least 12 allegations regarding sex misconduct superb against him; when he has announced cabinet ministers that includes his own three children: this examines nothing like a democracy. It examines nothing like reconciliation. It seems despotic, inflammatory, extreme and murderous: it appears, in short, precisely as Trump promised it would look, as he campaigned on a pledge to jail his opposing. His adversaries react that he maybe doesnt mean what he says, a position for which there is precisely no evidence. Their desire to normalise has come up with them in the fantastical nation of viewing the forthcoming presidency as there is a desire to it, and not as it plainly is.
Normalising is not Nigel Farage frolicking in a golden elevation with Donald Trump: Farage was a man of the same stamp all along. The knowledge that his hyperbole was always so flaccid, so shifty, so euphemistic by comparison with Trumps doesnt excuse it any more than British decay is apologized when, compared with the USs, the summing-ups are always so paltry.
Boris Johnson: snap out of doom and gloom. Image: Zuma Wire/ Rex/ Shutterstock
But Boris Johnson, foreign ministers, telling EU captains to click out of the doom and mist, announcing Trump a dealmaker, someone with whom we can do business, telling us to see this is an opportunity: that is normalising. Gaze on the bright side, liberals. The sheer fatuousness of Johnsons speech, the absence of any recognizable values, or a backbone to place behind them, heightens in me an unfathomable, hot, eye-pricking feel of having been betrayed. How was it possible for Johnson to disappoint, after his delinquent and self-serving summertime? Its like discovering that a neighbor, after a long party-wall spat, has browsed you to the Stasi. I knew he was a jerking; I never realised he despised our shared humanity.
Normalising is not Marine Le Pen, up with the lark to hail the brand-new dictatorship of which she hopes to be the next beneficiary. But it is Theresa May waiting anxiously by the phone to assure Trump she would be his special relation; it is also a single column inch devoted to wondering how this affects our Brexit negotiating position. When you have a prime minister who will not raise a peep in defence of propriety, you are in a new world. Its data cannot be fed into age-old formulas.
Normalising is not the Ku Klux Klan taking a rosy-cheeked look of the Trump presidency, it is CNN questioning uncritically, contacting out for that judgment. It is currently in the process of pattern a gag out of the Breitbart headline, Would you preferably your child had feminism or cancer ?, issued under the inhuman chairmanship of manager strategist Stephen Bannon. I want to see the absurdity of it, but it is not amusing. Bannons ilk checks a woman on a quest for glory and equality and was intended to irradiate it out of her. Its like living in a John Wyndham novel.
Normalising is not anything the rightwing fanatics do, and they do not try: they dont look for acceptable labels for themselves. It is the mainstream that twists itself into conciliatory pretzel knots find nicer words for totalitarian, such as alt-right.
Democrats try to find the demerit within themselves: request not whether a racist dislikes; ask what induced the racist so indignant in the first place. Once we have found the right is part of the liberal elite to pin it on, the hate maybe wont racket so frightening.
All this has a few beginnings: there is straightforward dismissal, the first phase of heartbreak. Trump cant lies in the fact that bad, because that would simply be too bad. There is a sense that the far right doesnt precisely ignore liberal sensibilities, it actively takes nourishment from our anguish. The US journalist Wajahat Ali, writing the day after research results, described his conversation with his father: Please be careful if Trump prevails, his supporters will feel very energised. This was assumes out by the spike in racist and sexist hate crimes in the US, and resonates here in Britain, too.
Golden future? When Nigel fulfilled Donald. Picture: Nigel Farage/ PA
Racists are energised by the victory of racists, and announcing them racist simply rams that win residence. A year ago, to be antisemitic would have necessitated exclusion from public life, and now it amounts to fitness for high-pitched power. Every day you reassert a fundamental significance of humanity, you demonstrate a inexpensive, disdainful thrill to the person who reached it necessary for you to say it. You cannot shame a white supremacist; unaccountably, you feel the pity yourself when you try. The indict is so extreme, if they dont accept, then you are required to hysterical. There is an underlying truism, here, that the act of debating introduces its own legitimacy. If we are really going to go back to square one and have to explain why grabbing a woman by the pussy is a violation of her human dignity, or why you cant injunction an entire religion from your coasts, where does that discontinue? What field have you relinquished just by allowing the question? It is genuinely hard to say.
The hard right does not accept argumentation as a route to a shared truism; it is simply not how they are wired. They take a judgment; you take a consider; their view electorally dominates, you shut up. Expiration of, as they ever say on Facebook. You merely dont get onto, do you? You LOST. That is the authoritarian style. It is hard to escape a pragmatic conclusion that verbal duel is pointless, but it is also wrong; the following objectives now is not exhortation. I dont contemplate anybody is going to unearth any concealed finesse or rapport in the person or persons of vice-president-elect Mike Pence. The aims of moving these fundamental polemics is solidarity with one another, lest, in the stillnes, we lose our bearings.
As to the drop-off into leftwing in-fighting, so confusing from the task of trenchantly opposing a tyrant, it has the same motorist: if you are fighting to reach a consensus, nonetheless bitterly, you can only do so with people who will move. You cannot discuss climate change issues with a person who contemplates all scientists are crooked; you cannot consider abortion with people who conceive wives as chattel to begin with; its meritless. And hitherto to fight with one another is not neutral, it does more than just pass the time. It composes incorrect equivalence or, worse, a hierarchy that has its arse on downwards. If we speak about Hillary Clintons corporate cosiness and not Trumps endorsement by the KKK, “you think youre” unavoidably putting one above the other.
Stephen Bannon and the alt-right in the White House
What does non-normalising look like? Bernie Sanders told the Today programme today that it would be billions of beings coming together to defend the organizations and the legal rules. This is specific to the US, plainly there isnt much point in millions of non-Americans coming together, for all that the brand-new toxicity of the USs political culture concerns us all, essentially and theoretically. And its reactive, since the Trump presidency will choose the sites of the conflict. Yet there is intend and hope in recollecting, as the American Civil Liberties Union has, that the president is not pope; that there is a physique and a initiate of laws; that supreme court adjudicates can bend whichever way they will, but there are only so many ways and means of interpreting a constitution founded on the universal area of human rights; and that millions of people can and will oppose their traducement with the support of the ages.
A protester in Chicago with a clear message. Picture: Kamil Krzaczynski/ Reuters
The American columnist Masha Gessen, who has wasted the majority of members of their own lives living in dictatorships, gives her six rules for surviving under one, and they read as a direct accusation of the political answer so far. First, conceive the tyrant: if he says he will evict you, he means to. When you claim “he il be” exaggerating, you reflect nothing but your own are looking forward to rationalise. Relatedly, dont be fooled by tiny clues of normality, the curious moderate placed in this or that orientation, a peremptory call for peace.
Dispiritingly, convention No 3 is: Universities will not save you. The only meaningful mode to marry that and Sanderss call is to assume that institutions are as strong as the peoples of the territories ready to defend them. Rule No 4 is: Be outraged. Wherever you are in the world, however insignificant you think yourself, each time you shrug, caper, look on the bright side or do a Boris Johnson, you do grave sin to the people in the tyrants pipeline of ardour. Rule No 5: Dont shape endangers. This is to been set aside the grease of the modern political process. Politics cannot be the art of the possible when the impossible has already happened. No 6 is: Recollect the future. Trump cannot last for ever.
I would contribute a seventh, which is to remember the past: whether its globalisation or those who are left behind, whether its economic stagnation or the long, flogging tail of the financial clang, we should, as we clamber over one another to be modern in our interpretings, recollect there is nothing new about this history. It is the oldest in the world: nebulous rancours held chassis and intensity by the rhetoric of unabashed hatred. You cannot find common case on the plight of the low-waged; navigate your own style through the submerge of secular stagnation, and epithet Trumpism for the barbarism that it is.
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Episode 3 - “Weak trust is better than rivalry!” - Crow
This tribe swap is insane! I'm just lucky to be the separated one with the idol in his pocket to use when necessary. These Odawa members might not be trusted, and I need to make sure that I don't get put on the bottom.
I'm glad that Bodhi talked to me. It shows that there might be something there and maybe I am not in such trouble in the beginning.
I am talking to Dana and Carson and I am praying one of them asks for an alliance. I would like to work with Carson and Dana and maybe Bodhi but none of those other Odawa members. I don't think i can trust them as much after those votes.
Right now I realize that I have no alliances in this tribe, and all I had is the Gallaghers. I can meet up with them at my own time at shoreline but I need to build some trust with Dana, Carson, and Luke to have some chance of opposition, because there is no chance us original Meskwaki and Wyandot would be safe otherwise.
I am trying to give Dana bait, but I think I will have to make this chat myself in order to make it a thing.
Then I ask if I can make the alliance chat, and Dana responds after all that time. Come on. XD
When Dana says she can't vote next vote, I froze. We had the majority and now it crumbled right in front of us. I don't want to have to use an idol to assume the majority, but it scares me.
I know that I have the power to completely change this tribe but I don't know if it is too early. But I picked David Wright as my player to represent me for a reason. I am loyal to the people I am with and I can't lose my allies. It's going to be a very difficult decision when tribal quickly approaches, and it will lead the way for my game, and possibly others.
When I heard Luke say "I have the idol" I nearly crapped my pants in joy. I really was conflicted about whether or not to tell people I had the idol, and I see Luke has one. It's really making my day!
Right now I am a bit nervous about the vote because I am scared it might be a tie. I hope this vote goes our way though, because if one of us is out, even if 4 of us voted against someone with us, those 4 would be screwed later on.
i want to flip on my old tribe soooo bad. i dont trust anyone there as i feel they are all complete sheeps (mearl and crow). i love them personally but they would betray me if offered a better deal. dan and I aren't close haha. i have to get some connections with the vets asap!!
Tribe swap! Whaddaya know! The split was......good and bad? I hope us former Meskwaki aren't targeted for having 4 of us, but hey, my alliance with Dan/Matt will help me here. PLUS I HAVE KYLE which means I didn't make a fatal error making a good alliance with him early (phew!) <3 Little scared that this might turn into a numbers scramble though....4 returnees, 4 Meskwaki, 1 Odawa, with 1 person on the clear bottom of both former Wyandot and Meskwaki here.....mess!
With the number of advantages/idols in this game (and the fact that I have none), I need to make sure my name is in NOBODY's thoughts as a vote because we've seen how one vote was still too many for Andreas....and if I go out, I sure as hell don't wanna go out like that!
So I asked Scott for an alliance privately.....and I'm doing it for me, not my whole tribal alliance. I don't like the numbers on the tribe because with Kyle knowingly at the bottom with a 4-4-1 split, I could VERY easily end up in the minority. Plus, I didn't really get to pick to work with my former tribe, it was just assumed, so I'm hoping that in branching out, I'll get defined as my own player and not just some former Meskwaki mafia member ready to take a bullet for the family...
YAS! We won! I somehow was the 3rd strongest (including Andreas) out of everyone which is bittersweet.....hopefully no one looks too deep into the scores or else I might develop a target. Anywho, I'm glad to be one of the last four people to attend TC! It gives me an advantage because I can keep my cards hidden for longer. Right now, without votes to go off of - people have to take my word for face-value, and that's actually a good thing considering I have conflicting alliances already...;) Weak trust is better than rivalry!
"Ew AP, I try to avoid those classes tbh lmao" I've taken 9 AP classes and have a rather nice score on both the ACT and SAT. My point? Not to brag or anything (hehe) But to show that everything I say has a purpose. I don't need the intellectual stigma to stick to me because that's instantly associated with someone like Cochran which turns me into a target!
I AM DEAD. I JUST WANT THE HOSTS TO KNOW THAT. ALSO REALLY STRAND CARSON AND I HERE ON MESKWAKI ALONE- RUDE.
I just exiled myself for a clue to the immunity idol that I most likely won't find because I'm garbage at finding them. I gave my cult alliance half of the clue in good faith- hopefully that will make them want to keep me around. I'm going to try to get them to add an additional member- hopefully Bodhi because I like him so that we'll still have majority in the next tribal council. Also i didn't give them the other half of the clue- because I want to keep some sort of advantage for myself- but my plan is if they somehow find out I have another part of the clue, then i'll tell them I got that while I was exiled as some form of reward. Importantly, I'm leaving out where I searched in hopes that none of them will make this same move I have- and I think my odds are pretty good. Also I have to find some way to tell my tribe that i'm exiled without causing suspicion..so that'll be fun.
This tribe is such a massive culture shock honestly, on Odawa the official tribe chat wasn't that active until after tribal was posted and even then most things happened afaik on the Odawa majority alliance with the most boring name in history's chat. I feel pretty damn shook being the only Odawa on here and admitedly I've been slumping in the social part (aka the most important one) but I really need to step it up here especially on a bigger tribe
How I'm bouta be http://68.media.tumblr.com/19a93d31ca6d8a001a346ef9ccf151db/tumblr_o6pkqvpFBQ1twwci1o1_1280.jpg
I deadass typed OwO unironically what is wrong wi th me
Back in another game I played, there was a weak, physically inept player than just always managed to avoid elimination despite nearly always being the target, due to being in numerous alliances at once, and stupid ass people voted strong players out over himself. Come merge he would make insane idol plays and manage to take out all the large threats while keeping himself off the radar. He made finals but lost, but the VL flew into a rage. God I wish that were me....
TRIBE SWAP!!!!!! Ok, so we ended up with 3 former Meskaakaikaikaia, 2 returnees, and everyone from my tribe except Scott RIP 😥. Right now, the plan I to stick together and try to pull one or two of the other newbies in to take out the returnees. Oh yeah, and we voted out Matt BYE FELICIA
Grrrrrrrrr, we lost. I'm not mad about that, I'm mad that my alliance wants to get Adam out. I want to get Carson out. I want to get him out because A: He is a returnee B: He did the worst in challenges & C: He will probally align with Andreas. So I am suuuuuuuppppppeeeeerrrr pissed. I want CARSON GONE. Everyone is voting for Adam tomorrow. I might throw my vote to Carson just in case Adam has an idol
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This swap is dangerous for some of my allies. I am very confident that I will make it out alive, just because there's no good reason for anyone to target me, but I'm not as confident that Kage will. I'm setting him up as a nice big target, and I have been since the beginning, so I wouldn't be so surprised if he were to be taken out now. I don't have any desire to vote Kage out, but if others do, I can join in. He'll bring me as far as he can, and I don't mind that one bit. He thinks he's in charge, so I'll let him stay there until the time is right. His gameplay is so erratic that I don't really think that he has a chance to win. Even if he gets to the end, there's this whole smear campaign from the kind folks over at redemption, which essentially sets him up as the villain. In reality he's fun to be around, but when he votes people out, he gets VERY rude. He gave Matt and Ashton fake advantages, and expects them to be gracious now that they're out? I don't think so buddy. As far as new allies, I really like Dana and Carson. I get along just fine with Eric, Adam, and Luke. I think I'll be very alright in this swap! Aidan is still my number one, but past that, I don't really care who I vote with. As long as I can trust that they'll keep me around until later, I don't quite mind.
So somehow Kage has come into power yet again on this new tribe! First on Odawa, he makes every decision, and we all go with him. Now here, because of Dana being sent to exile, it's an 8 person tribal council, and the 4 Odawa here are staying strong, and we've also included 3 non Odawa in the plan to eliminate Adam. Tonight, Adam is probably going, but there is a slight chance that the other 4 don't want to be on the bottom of this tribe, and they're just playing us, planning to take Kage out with an idol, or maybe forcing a rock draw. If there's the threat of going to rocks this early, I might have to flip on Kage. I don't want him out, because he is a PHENOMENAL shield, one of the best possible, but I also don't want a 1/6 chance of myself going home third. I have confidence that if I were to flip in the case of a tie, taking Kage out, I'd be fairly safe after that point. I have good connections with Aidan, Christian, Dana, Carson, Eric, and Luke. The only person on this tribe that I can't see myself working with is Adam, and that is exactly why I got Kage to target him. I'm not too firmly in any alliance at this point. There's the Odawa 5, the cross tribal alliance with Kage, Crow, Eric, and myself, and there's a bunch of openings with the other folks on my tribe. I'm only dedicated to sticking with Aidan, because we are such similar people. But I'm not entirely sure if I want to go to the end with him. I also don't plan to flip on Kage unless I need to in order to stick in the game. He is a shield and a goat in one, why would I ever get rid of that? Some people would look at going to two tribal councils early in the game as a curse, but I think it's quite the contrary. Hell, looking back, I probably should've thrown those challenges entirely! I was careful not to be too helpful on either, which probably was outright better than throwing, because it doesn't put a target on me, but I had absolutely no reason to want to win those challenges if the swap was going to be like this, with two equally sized tribes, this early in the game. Going to tribal council builds a large amount of trust, and if I had not gone to any tribals, I doubt I would trust Kage and Christian this much at all. I'd also have the chance to be on a tribe with a Matt or an Ashton, who are both great people, but neither of them felt like people I could put my trust in. Kage did a great job eliminating all of the obvious strategists, aside from himself, so now I don't think anyone from Odawa will flip on me any time soon. The other two tribes barely have any trust in each other. The other newbie tribe never went to tribal, and while people definitely talked, no one knows who is on their side and who is against them. The returnee tribe had a unanimous vote with an idol play. They only voted who they did because of inactivity, so they clearly weren't completely in the thick of the strategy. I'm definitely not laying as low as I want to be, but I don't think that I'm too noticeable as a threat. I might be the second biggest visible threat on Odawa, but that's probably not true. I'm not at all worried for Scott. He's on a tribe with 4 people from each of the other two starting tribes, so he's in the perfect spot to align with one of those two, and cruise for a bit. If he gets voted out, it's because he's playing poorly. I'd vote out a returnee in his position, but I trust that he'll play smart.
I HAVEN’T DONE A CONFESSIONAL IN SO LONG WHOOPS SO ANYWAY HERES WHATS HAPPENED SINCE I LAST DID THIS BASICALLY, WE WENT TO TRIBAL AGAIN (BIG SURPRISE) AND VOTED OUT MATT. IT WAS HIGHKEY SO BEAUTIFUL BC BODHI AND SCOTT BOTH PLAYED FAKE ADVANTAGES OR IDOLS, GIVING US OUT REP AS THE FAKE IDOL TRIBE, AS WELL AS INTRODUCING THE WORLD TO THE BEAUTY THAT IS THE IMMUNITY SNATCHER. SO IT ALL GOES TO PLAN, AND WE’RE ALL CHILLING IN THE CHAT, KAGE INSULTING BOTH THE HOSTS THE FUCKING DUMBASS, AND THEN WE GET THIS EXCHANGE: [00:40:40] kage hamilton: Plz forgive and give me free advantage? [00:41:10] Isaiah (Great Lakes Host): Lol, you'll get something alright AND THEN I GET FUCKING KICKED FROM THE CHAT?? SO IM SITTING THERE CONFUSED OUT OF MY GODAMN MIND, WHEN IM ADDED TO ANOTHER TRIBAL CHAT- MESKWAKI!! AND IM SHOOK BECAUSE IT’S A FUCKING SWAP??! BUT WE CAME OUT OF THIS SO WELL TBH, 4/5 ODAWA REMEBERS ARE TOGETHER ON MESKWAKI AND WE ONLY NEED ONE MORE TO AVE MAJORITY AGAIN. IN THE TIBE WE’VE GOT ME, OBVIOUSLY, THEN MY BOIS BODHI KAGE AND CHRISTIAN FROM ODAWA, CARSON AND DANA FROM THE RETURNEE TRIBE, AND THEN ADAM, LUKE AND ERIC THE OG FROM MESKWAKI. I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT IT EVER SINCE WE MERGED, AND I THINK CARSON AND DANA MIGT BE OUT BEST SHOT AT AN ALLIANCE. THEY’RE TOTALLY ISOLATED ON THE TRIBE, SO EVEN IF THEY FLIPED ON US AFTER WE GO TO TRIBAL FOR THE FIRST TIME, THEY’D ONLY MANAGE TO MAKE IT EQUAL, AND I THINK THEY’RE PROBABLY THE BIGGEST THREATS HERE, AND YOU KNOW WHA THEY SAY- KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE AND YOUR EMEMIES WITHIN FIRING RANGE OF YOUR PRIMARY FIREARM (IM SORRY FOR THE RVB QUOTE LMAO) I MEAN, DANA ALMOST WON HER SEASON, SO SHE KNOW WHAT SHES DOING, AND SOMEONE THAT KNOWS OW TO DO THAT IS DEFINATLY SOMEONE I WANT ON MY SIDE WE’VE ALSO GOT A CHALLENGE AND IM SCREAMING BECAUSE I CAN’T SPELL OR TYPE SO MY SCORE IS GOING TO BE SHIT BUT HOPEFULLY I CAN FINNALLY WIN A CHALLENGE IN THIS GAME, AMIRITE? *SLIDES AUSTIN AND ISAIAH TWENTY DOLLARS* I ENDED UP SUMBITTING A SCORE OF 2568, WHICH I THINK IS OKAY?? BUT THEN AGAIN ANDREAS GOT LIKE 24K ON LAKE REDEMPTION SO I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE WHATS A DECENT SCORE ANY MORE. ALL THAT’S LEFT TO DO NOW IT WAIT, AND SCREAM INTERNALLY.
Just once I would really love to not go to tribal. Oh well, back to pre-tribal hell it is.
Hey you guys, its me. Its Andreas, and welcome to my episodial confessional. So I won the duel. I'd love to say im surprised, but once again I misted another newbie into not doing well. MY EFFECT HUH ?? So I dont have much to say, besides that I hope Kage comes here so I can show him who the worse player is, and then my homeboy Carson can be safe. Also, I found an idol clue and its so much effing searching. That can literally choke. Not much is happening on Lake Redemption. Im getting to meet everyone which is nice. I hope im not here for long, otherwise ill cry.
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So fuckity fuck fuck fuck. WHY DO I NEVER WIN CHALLENGES? IT'S THE DAY I WAS PUSHED OUT OF A VAGINA, WHY DOESN'T THAT MEAN ANYTHING????????? anyways, oh well. tribal again. i'm used to it. i don't trust kage. i don't really trust anyone on my tribe. I feel like everyone is playing super hard and trying to have 324934 different alliances and i'm just a fat squirrel eating whatever pieces of food they drop for me. ugh. good luck self. I do have a solution though, because I know how Dana got to get exiled, and I know that's exactly what I'm doing to myself if i get through this.
um heyyy its (week?) 3 idk we're about to have the third tribal. we lost immunity after the swap and ive been swapfucked before so i really didnt want to be swapfucked again but guess what! i did nothing and apparently kage and bodhi are already gunning for me.................... WHY they literally gave me a valid reason for carson to be voted out and are voting ME out for what reason?? idk. anyway im in an alliance with eric luke carson and dana (who cant vote) and ive been talking to aidan and hes super cool so i should be okay? i think? the only person on my tribe i 100% trust is luke. i wish dan was here. he formed the alliance between he luke and i :( eric luke and carson want to get out kage but idc who it is as long as its not me. luke said we might go to rocks... UGHHH why is this happening.
Okay so we won again and I still haven't been to tribal *dab* so that's lit. I'm glad I'm not going to tribal because I've made virtually no connections on my new tribe. I plan on being loyal to crow and Matt. We pulled in Kyle for a number (I know gross but hey whatevs) and I think we have stoner and maybe Seth (honestly unsure if there is actually a Seth in this game I just can't think of his name rn) but yeah. I'm just pretending to like Korean dramas so roxy likes me.
This just in his name is Scott not Seth. Huh.
Ok so Dana being at exile has caused this tribal council to go to shit. The vote would have been an easy 5-4 with an Odawa member leaving, but now our numbers are tied. I don't think we're going to rocks, but its now a possibility. I'm extremely worried about that. The Odawa members think we're all voting for Adam, which is not the case. From everything I've heard, Kage was running the show there, and now trying to do the same here. That doesn't fly with me, which is why he will be getting four votes tonight. Kage leaving also frees up Bodhi, who Dana and I could use as a vote if needed. By sending Kage home, I'm left with a lot of options. Even if they get pissed that I lied to them about voting Adam, I have an excuse. They told Adam, Andreas, and Dana that I was the backup incase Adam had an idol. So what else am I supposed to do? However, finding out that Luke had an idol was very comforting! Because! There! Was! No! Point! Worrying! About! Any! Of! It! I wish he would have said something earlier because i almost went to Christian to flip since Andreas told me he was on the bottom. That would have ruined everything because Christian isn't ready to flip. Anyways, all we need to do now is play the idol on Adam, and Kage leaves 4-0. If they throw votes at someone else, you'll be seeing me sliding into Christian's pms to flip him to our side during the tiebreaker.
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How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
Christian Urban waves his hands to make a point, then looks at his nails and cracks wise about needing a manicure. He regularly touches his chin and his knees as he talks. There's nothing terribly unusual about this, but for the fact Urban is at the wheel of a 40-ton semi rolling down the I-15 highway outside Las Vegasat 60 mph, and he's not steering. Or even paying much attention.
The truck is called Inspiration. It's a tech-filled version of a Freightliner rig and the worlds first licensed self-driving semi. Urban is among dozens of engineers who spent six months frantically preparing the truck for its spectacular introduction in Nevada this week. What's really surprising isn't that his hands are off the wheel, but that they're not wiping away tears of joy and waving wildly at passing cars.
Christian Urban, a Daimler engineer, calmly lets the 40-ton Inspiration pilot itself down the I-15 at 60 mph. Alex Davies/WIRED
Daimler, which owns Freightliner and built this robo-rig, oscillates between boasting about the Inspiration (it rented Hoover Dam and threw down for a record-setting light show for the truck's debut) and downplaying its significance. As amazing as this thing is-it's a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works-company execs say it won't can't change lanes on its own, it won't be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.
Be that as it may, the Inspiration is a big step forward on the path toward the day when our vehicles drive themselves.
The discussion of autonomous technology usually centers on cars, because that's where many people will realize the benefits of improved safety, better fuel economy, and more free time. Most of the major automakers, plus tech giants like Google, are working on the hardware and software that will let regular drivers catch up on Facebook during their commute instead of holding onto the wheel and operating the pedals. Trucks aren't flashy, but they're critical to the economy.
You don't need an especially advanced autonomous system to make a dent in the crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people on US roads in 2012, about 90 percent of those were caused by driver error. Even a system that works only on the highway-where the technology's already developed and where trucks spend the vast majority of their time-can be a huge help.
The large freight carriers have already started the transition, equipping their fleets with active safety features like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings. The economic case for these technologies, the building blocks for autonomy, is clear. “Commercial vehicles are a safety issue,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Groups North America automotive division. “And therefore anything that can get commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value.” And the carriers wants more of it.
20 Years, 6 Months In the Making
Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades. Much of the technology in the Inspiration-the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture-has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.
Mercedes first equipped passenger cars with radars before Y2K and is now talking about a future in which driving is an option and front seats swivel to face the rear passengers. This year, Daimler started selling a “Detroit Assurance” package that outfits trucks with adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, and lane departure warning.
The blue lighting theme that marks the truck as autonomous is a subtle touch in the camera displays that could one day replace the side view mirror. Daimler
Work on the Inspiration, which upgrades that system by allowing the truck to steer and control its speed autonomously, started just six months ago. The team was mostly based at Daimler Trucks North America's HQ in Portland, Oregon, with some extra hands in Germany.
The Freightliner Inspiration is a limited take on autonomy. The system will kick in only once the truck's on the highway and up to speed, and then it will maintain a safe distance from other vehicles and stay in its lane. It wont change lanes to pass slower vehicles on its own. If it truck encounters a situation it cant confidently handle, like heavy snow or faded lane lines, it will alert the human that its time for him to take over.
The mechanical side of the project was relatively straightforward, largely because the company's done so much of this work before. Trucks demand different actuators (the hardware that lets the computer physically tap into the steering, acceleration, and brakes), but it's all “well understood,” says Dr. Wilfried Achenbach, senior VP of engineering and technology. Power, for example, is delivered by a pneumatic unit, so Daimler cooked up magnetically activated valves that block or supply air pressure as needed. The sensors used on passenger cars, however, were up to grade: Achenbach points out Mercedes sells cars for use on the Autobahn, where cars going 125 mph requirethe same kind of stopping distance as a tractor trailer.
Daimler engineer David Overton lays out wiring to enable Inspiration's autonomous mode. Daimler
The electrical architecture underpinning the Inspiration is like a central hub with satellites, Achenbach says: The systems (speed control, lane keeping) work on their own, but there's a central device that sees what each part is doing and makes high-level decisions (like when it's time to tell the human driver to take control). That central system has been developed (Daimler's keeping quiet on the details of how it works, exactly) but Daimler's engineers have to lower its cost and shrink its size before it's ready for market. It's similar to what Audi calls the zFAS (for zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergert), a system that brings data from disparate systems into one place, like the human brain.
Looking at the Inspiration, it's hard to spot the things that make it different from every other truck hauling pallets. The radars in the front of the cab are hard to spot; the windshield-mounted camera doesn't draw attention. A stereoscopic camera mounted in the upper part of the windshield reads lane lines. Short and long range radars, built into the grille just above the license plate, scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because theyre not needed. Theres no vehicle-to-vehicle communication and no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of the ones developed for use in Mercedes-Benzs autonomous passenger cars.
The most obvious difference is the suite of blue LEDs the team installed around the vehicle, just like the ones in Mercedes' futuristic F 015 self-driving concept car. They're in the grille and the headlights, and in the screens for the cameras that could one day replace the side mirrors that create drag and aggravate every auto aerodynamicist on the planet. Inside, there are a few more subtle changes. The floor is wood. The back of the cab, usually used for sleeping, is all white and leather seating, specially outfitted to coddle attendees at the debut for test drives.
The UI
The most significant visible alteration inside the Inspiration is the red button that reads “HWP,” lodged between the controls for the lights and the air conditioning. It's the switch that enables Highway Pilot, Daimler's name for the system that keeps the truck rolling at a steady speed, at a safe distance from other vehicles, and in its lane.
Going autonomous is a two-step process: Enable HWP, then once the truck is on the highway and cruising, turn on cruise control. From there, the truck's in charge-until it hits rough weather, loses sight of a lane line, needs to pass another vehicle, or get off the highway.
Daimler
Those are the times when the human has to takeover, which means the system has to be made to make sure he knows to grab the wheel. For its A7 autonomous prototype, Audi based that process on focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US, creating a UI design that's both simple and sleek.
When the truck's out of its league, the driver hears a harsh beep, and the dashboard flashes an alert to give him a few seconds to take over. If the human doesn't respond (maybe he's dozed off) the truck comes to a controlled stop. As Daimler develops the Inspiration for commercial use, it will develop the system much more, along with plenty of testing to make sure drivers respond well. But here, it opted to keep things simple. “It was a six-month program,” says Steve Nadig, chief engineer on the project. “Beeping works.”
Testing
To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own. The team spun the odometer using two of the trucks, plus a testing mule (a non-fancy version with the same tech), on a test track in Germany and on quiet public roads in Nevada. Like with the UI, there's a lot more testing to do before it's ready to sell this system to the public. That means driving in extreme temperatures, slogging through rain and snow, for hundreds of thousands of miles, searching for and fixing any flaws they find.
Daimler
But even at this early stage, the system shows a lot of promise for transforming the trucking industry. Daimler can't spend enough time saying it has no interest in getting rid of the driver (We dont want to get rid of drivers, says Sven Ennerst, head of Daimler Trucks development department). Its focus is on making driving easier, safer, and more efficient. It ran a small study (16 drivers on a test track) to see how this autonomous system affects drivers. EEG readings showed they were 25 percent less tired than they were when they had to steer themselves.
That's an advantage in and of itself, since drivers will be more aware when they do have to take the wheel. But it has serious potential: Right now, a truck driver can stay on the road for only 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. That's a major pain given the major shortage of truck drivers in the US right now, which is only getting worse. In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, US carriers listed hours-of-service rules as their top concern. If Daimler can guarantee drivers are less tired when using its autonomous system, regulators might be willing to ease those rules. “Then we come very fast to a business case for our customers,” says Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America.
Those customers are very much interested in this system, according to Daimler. That's no surprise: Making driving a job for the computer can reduce accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and maybe keep trucks on the road for longer, says Nol Perry, an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics. “They all love this.”
The driver shortage is restricting demand for new trucks by 50,000 to 60,000 units, Daum says. That financial incentive is at the heart of this technology program: Teach the truck to drive itself, and Daimler doesn't just have a superior product-it has a product that increases demand.
"Why do I need Inbound Marketing ?" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-i-need-inbound-marketing-misty-lawson on @LinkedIn
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How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
Christian Urban waves his hands to make a point, then looks at his nails and cracks wise about needing a manicure. He regularly touches his chin and his knees as he talks. There's nothing terribly unusual about this, but for the fact Urban is at the wheel of a 40-ton semi rolling down the I-15 highway outside Las Vegasat 60 mph, and he's not steering. Or even paying much attention.
The truck is called Inspiration. It's a tech-filled version of a Freightliner rig and the worlds first licensed self-driving semi. Urban is among dozens of engineers who spent six months frantically preparing the truck for its spectacular introduction in Nevada this week. What's really surprising isn't that his hands are off the wheel, but that they're not wiping away tears of joy and waving wildly at passing cars.
Christian Urban, a Daimler engineer, calmly lets the 40-ton Inspiration pilot itself down the I-15 at 60 mph. Alex Davies/WIRED
Daimler, which owns Freightliner and built this robo-rig, oscillates between boasting about the Inspiration (it rented Hoover Dam and threw down for a record-setting light show for the truck's debut) and downplaying its significance. As amazing as this thing is-it's a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works-company execs say it won't can't change lanes on its own, it won't be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.
Be that as it may, the Inspiration is a big step forward on the path toward the day when our vehicles drive themselves.
The discussion of autonomous technology usually centers on cars, because that's where many people will realize the benefits of improved safety, better fuel economy, and more free time. Most of the major automakers, plus tech giants like Google, are working on the hardware and software that will let regular drivers catch up on Facebook during their commute instead of holding onto the wheel and operating the pedals. Trucks aren't flashy, but they're critical to the economy.
You don't need an especially advanced autonomous system to make a dent in the crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people on US roads in 2012, about 90 percent of those were caused by driver error. Even a system that works only on the highway-where the technology's already developed and where trucks spend the vast majority of their time-can be a huge help.
The large freight carriers have already started the transition, equipping their fleets with active safety features like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings. The economic case for these technologies, the building blocks for autonomy, is clear. “Commercial vehicles are a safety issue,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Groups North America automotive division. “And therefore anything that can get commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value.” And the carriers wants more of it.
20 Years, 6 Months In the Making
Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades. Much of the technology in the Inspiration-the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture-has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.
Mercedes first equipped passenger cars with radars before Y2K and is now talking about a future in which driving is an option and front seats swivel to face the rear passengers. This year, Daimler started selling a “Detroit Assurance” package that outfits trucks with adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, and lane departure warning.
The blue lighting theme that marks the truck as autonomous is a subtle touch in the camera displays that could one day replace the side view mirror. Daimler
Work on the Inspiration, which upgrades that system by allowing the truck to steer and control its speed autonomously, started just six months ago. The team was mostly based at Daimler Trucks North America's HQ in Portland, Oregon, with some extra hands in Germany.
The Freightliner Inspiration is a limited take on autonomy. The system will kick in only once the truck's on the highway and up to speed, and then it will maintain a safe distance from other vehicles and stay in its lane. It wont change lanes to pass slower vehicles on its own. If it truck encounters a situation it cant confidently handle, like heavy snow or faded lane lines, it will alert the human that its time for him to take over.
The mechanical side of the project was relatively straightforward, largely because the company's done so much of this work before. Trucks demand different actuators (the hardware that lets the computer physically tap into the steering, acceleration, and brakes), but it's all “well understood,” says Dr. Wilfried Achenbach, senior VP of engineering and technology. Power, for example, is delivered by a pneumatic unit, so Daimler cooked up magnetically activated valves that block or supply air pressure as needed. The sensors used on passenger cars, however, were up to grade: Achenbach points out Mercedes sells cars for use on the Autobahn, where cars going 125 mph requirethe same kind of stopping distance as a tractor trailer.
Daimler engineer David Overton lays out wiring to enable Inspiration's autonomous mode. Daimler
The electrical architecture underpinning the Inspiration is like a central hub with satellites, Achenbach says: The systems (speed control, lane keeping) work on their own, but there's a central device that sees what each part is doing and makes high-level decisions (like when it's time to tell the human driver to take control). That central system has been developed (Daimler's keeping quiet on the details of how it works, exactly) but Daimler's engineers have to lower its cost and shrink its size before it's ready for market. It's similar to what Audi calls the zFAS (for zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergert), a system that brings data from disparate systems into one place, like the human brain.
Looking at the Inspiration, it's hard to spot the things that make it different from every other truck hauling pallets. The radars in the front of the cab are hard to spot; the windshield-mounted camera doesn't draw attention. A stereoscopic camera mounted in the upper part of the windshield reads lane lines. Short and long range radars, built into the grille just above the license plate, scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because theyre not needed. Theres no vehicle-to-vehicle communication and no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of the ones developed for use in Mercedes-Benzs autonomous passenger cars.
The most obvious difference is the suite of blue LEDs the team installed around the vehicle, just like the ones in Mercedes' futuristic F 015 self-driving concept car. They're in the grille and the headlights, and in the screens for the cameras that could one day replace the side mirrors that create drag and aggravate every auto aerodynamicist on the planet. Inside, there are a few more subtle changes. The floor is wood. The back of the cab, usually used for sleeping, is all white and leather seating, specially outfitted to coddle attendees at the debut for test drives.
The UI
The most significant visible alteration inside the Inspiration is the red button that reads “HWP,” lodged between the controls for the lights and the air conditioning. It's the switch that enables Highway Pilot, Daimler's name for the system that keeps the truck rolling at a steady speed, at a safe distance from other vehicles, and in its lane.
Going autonomous is a two-step process: Enable HWP, then once the truck is on the highway and cruising, turn on cruise control. From there, the truck's in charge-until it hits rough weather, loses sight of a lane line, needs to pass another vehicle, or get off the highway.
Daimler
Those are the times when the human has to takeover, which means the system has to be made to make sure he knows to grab the wheel. For its A7 autonomous prototype, Audi based that process on focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US, creating a UI design that's both simple and sleek.
When the truck's out of its league, the driver hears a harsh beep, and the dashboard flashes an alert to give him a few seconds to take over. If the human doesn't respond (maybe he's dozed off) the truck comes to a controlled stop. As Daimler develops the Inspiration for commercial use, it will develop the system much more, along with plenty of testing to make sure drivers respond well. But here, it opted to keep things simple. “It was a six-month program,” says Steve Nadig, chief engineer on the project. “Beeping works.”
Testing
To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own. The team spun the odometer using two of the trucks, plus a testing mule (a non-fancy version with the same tech), on a test track in Germany and on quiet public roads in Nevada. Like with the UI, there's a lot more testing to do before it's ready to sell this system to the public. That means driving in extreme temperatures, slogging through rain and snow, for hundreds of thousands of miles, searching for and fixing any flaws they find.
Daimler
But even at this early stage, the system shows a lot of promise for transforming the trucking industry. Daimler can't spend enough time saying it has no interest in getting rid of the driver (We dont want to get rid of drivers, says Sven Ennerst, head of Daimler Trucks development department). Its focus is on making driving easier, safer, and more efficient. It ran a small study (16 drivers on a test track) to see how this autonomous system affects drivers. EEG readings showed they were 25 percent less tired than they were when they had to steer themselves.
That's an advantage in and of itself, since drivers will be more aware when they do have to take the wheel. But it has serious potential: Right now, a truck driver can stay on the road for only 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. That's a major pain given the major shortage of truck drivers in the US right now, which is only getting worse. In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, US carriers listed hours-of-service rules as their top concern. If Daimler can guarantee drivers are less tired when using its autonomous system, regulators might be willing to ease those rules. “Then we come very fast to a business case for our customers,” says Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America.
Those customers are very much interested in this system, according to Daimler. That's no surprise: Making driving a job for the computer can reduce accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and maybe keep trucks on the road for longer, says Nol Perry, an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics. “They all love this.”
The driver shortage is restricting demand for new trucks by 50,000 to 60,000 units, Daum says. That financial incentive is at the heart of this technology program: Teach the truck to drive itself, and Daimler doesn't just have a superior product-it has a product that increases demand.
"Why do I need Inbound Marketing ?" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-i-need-inbound-marketing-misty-lawson on @LinkedIn
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How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
Christian Urban waves his hands to make a point, then looks at his nails and cracks wise about needing a manicure. He regularly touches his chin and his knees as he talks. There's nothing terribly unusual about this, but for the fact Urban is at the wheel of a 40-ton semi rolling down the I-15 highway outside Las Vegasat 60 mph, and he's not steering. Or even paying much attention.
The truck is called Inspiration. It's a tech-filled version of a Freightliner rig and the worlds first licensed self-driving semi. Urban is among dozens of engineers who spent six months frantically preparing the truck for its spectacular introduction in Nevada this week. What's really surprising isn't that his hands are off the wheel, but that they're not wiping away tears of joy and waving wildly at passing cars.
Christian Urban, a Daimler engineer, calmly lets the 40-ton Inspiration pilot itself down the I-15 at 60 mph. Alex Davies/WIRED
Daimler, which owns Freightliner and built this robo-rig, oscillates between boasting about the Inspiration (it rented Hoover Dam and threw down for a record-setting light show for the truck's debut) and downplaying its significance. As amazing as this thing is-it's a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works-company execs say it won't can't change lanes on its own, it won't be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.
Be that as it may, the Inspiration is a big step forward on the path toward the day when our vehicles drive themselves.
The discussion of autonomous technology usually centers on cars, because that's where many people will realize the benefits of improved safety, better fuel economy, and more free time. Most of the major automakers, plus tech giants like Google, are working on the hardware and software that will let regular drivers catch up on Facebook during their commute instead of holding onto the wheel and operating the pedals. Trucks aren't flashy, but they're critical to the economy.
You don't need an especially advanced autonomous system to make a dent in the crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people on US roads in 2012, about 90 percent of those were caused by driver error. Even a system that works only on the highway-where the technology's already developed and where trucks spend the vast majority of their time-can be a huge help.
The large freight carriers have already started the transition, equipping their fleets with active safety features like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings. The economic case for these technologies, the building blocks for autonomy, is clear. “Commercial vehicles are a safety issue,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Groups North America automotive division. “And therefore anything that can get commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value.” And the carriers wants more of it.
20 Years, 6 Months In the Making
Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades. Much of the technology in the Inspiration-the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture-has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.
Mercedes first equipped passenger cars with radars before Y2K and is now talking about a future in which driving is an option and front seats swivel to face the rear passengers. This year, Daimler started selling a “Detroit Assurance” package that outfits trucks with adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, and lane departure warning.
The blue lighting theme that marks the truck as autonomous is a subtle touch in the camera displays that could one day replace the side view mirror. Daimler
Work on the Inspiration, which upgrades that system by allowing the truck to steer and control its speed autonomously, started just six months ago. The team was mostly based at Daimler Trucks North America's HQ in Portland, Oregon, with some extra hands in Germany.
The Freightliner Inspiration is a limited take on autonomy. The system will kick in only once the truck's on the highway and up to speed, and then it will maintain a safe distance from other vehicles and stay in its lane. It wont change lanes to pass slower vehicles on its own. If it truck encounters a situation it cant confidently handle, like heavy snow or faded lane lines, it will alert the human that its time for him to take over.
The mechanical side of the project was relatively straightforward, largely because the company's done so much of this work before. Trucks demand different actuators (the hardware that lets the computer physically tap into the steering, acceleration, and brakes), but it's all “well understood,” says Dr. Wilfried Achenbach, senior VP of engineering and technology. Power, for example, is delivered by a pneumatic unit, so Daimler cooked up magnetically activated valves that block or supply air pressure as needed. The sensors used on passenger cars, however, were up to grade: Achenbach points out Mercedes sells cars for use on the Autobahn, where cars going 125 mph requirethe same kind of stopping distance as a tractor trailer.
Daimler engineer David Overton lays out wiring to enable Inspiration's autonomous mode. Daimler
The electrical architecture underpinning the Inspiration is like a central hub with satellites, Achenbach says: The systems (speed control, lane keeping) work on their own, but there's a central device that sees what each part is doing and makes high-level decisions (like when it's time to tell the human driver to take control). That central system has been developed (Daimler's keeping quiet on the details of how it works, exactly) but Daimler's engineers have to lower its cost and shrink its size before it's ready for market. It's similar to what Audi calls the zFAS (for zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergert), a system that brings data from disparate systems into one place, like the human brain.
Looking at the Inspiration, it's hard to spot the things that make it different from every other truck hauling pallets. The radars in the front of the cab are hard to spot; the windshield-mounted camera doesn't draw attention. A stereoscopic camera mounted in the upper part of the windshield reads lane lines. Short and long range radars, built into the grille just above the license plate, scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because theyre not needed. Theres no vehicle-to-vehicle communication and no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of the ones developed for use in Mercedes-Benzs autonomous passenger cars.
The most obvious difference is the suite of blue LEDs the team installed around the vehicle, just like the ones in Mercedes' futuristic F 015 self-driving concept car. They're in the grille and the headlights, and in the screens for the cameras that could one day replace the side mirrors that create drag and aggravate every auto aerodynamicist on the planet. Inside, there are a few more subtle changes. The floor is wood. The back of the cab, usually used for sleeping, is all white and leather seating, specially outfitted to coddle attendees at the debut for test drives.
The UI
The most significant visible alteration inside the Inspiration is the red button that reads “HWP,” lodged between the controls for the lights and the air conditioning. It's the switch that enables Highway Pilot, Daimler's name for the system that keeps the truck rolling at a steady speed, at a safe distance from other vehicles, and in its lane.
Going autonomous is a two-step process: Enable HWP, then once the truck is on the highway and cruising, turn on cruise control. From there, the truck's in charge-until it hits rough weather, loses sight of a lane line, needs to pass another vehicle, or get off the highway.
Daimler
Those are the times when the human has to takeover, which means the system has to be made to make sure he knows to grab the wheel. For its A7 autonomous prototype, Audi based that process on focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US, creating a UI design that's both simple and sleek.
When the truck's out of its league, the driver hears a harsh beep, and the dashboard flashes an alert to give him a few seconds to take over. If the human doesn't respond (maybe he's dozed off) the truck comes to a controlled stop. As Daimler develops the Inspiration for commercial use, it will develop the system much more, along with plenty of testing to make sure drivers respond well. But here, it opted to keep things simple. “It was a six-month program,” says Steve Nadig, chief engineer on the project. “Beeping works.”
Testing
To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own. The team spun the odometer using two of the trucks, plus a testing mule (a non-fancy version with the same tech), on a test track in Germany and on quiet public roads in Nevada. Like with the UI, there's a lot more testing to do before it's ready to sell this system to the public. That means driving in extreme temperatures, slogging through rain and snow, for hundreds of thousands of miles, searching for and fixing any flaws they find.
Daimler
But even at this early stage, the system shows a lot of promise for transforming the trucking industry. Daimler can't spend enough time saying it has no interest in getting rid of the driver (We dont want to get rid of drivers, says Sven Ennerst, head of Daimler Trucks development department). Its focus is on making driving easier, safer, and more efficient. It ran a small study (16 drivers on a test track) to see how this autonomous system affects drivers. EEG readings showed they were 25 percent less tired than they were when they had to steer themselves.
That's an advantage in and of itself, since drivers will be more aware when they do have to take the wheel. But it has serious potential: Right now, a truck driver can stay on the road for only 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. That's a major pain given the major shortage of truck drivers in the US right now, which is only getting worse. In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, US carriers listed hours-of-service rules as their top concern. If Daimler can guarantee drivers are less tired when using its autonomous system, regulators might be willing to ease those rules. “Then we come very fast to a business case for our customers,” says Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America.
Those customers are very much interested in this system, according to Daimler. That's no surprise: Making driving a job for the computer can reduce accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and maybe keep trucks on the road for longer, says Nol Perry, an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics. “They all love this.”
The driver shortage is restricting demand for new trucks by 50,000 to 60,000 units, Daum says. That financial incentive is at the heart of this technology program: Teach the truck to drive itself, and Daimler doesn't just have a superior product-it has a product that increases demand.
"Why do I need Inbound Marketing ?" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-i-need-inbound-marketing-misty-lawson on @LinkedIn
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How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
Christian Urban waves his hands to make a point, then looks at his nails and cracks wise about needing a manicure. He regularly touches his chin and his knees as he talks. There's nothing terribly unusual about this, but for the fact Urban is at the wheel of a 40-ton semi rolling down the I-15 highway outside Las Vegasat 60 mph, and he's not steering. Or even paying much attention.
The truck is called Inspiration. It's a tech-filled version of a Freightliner rig and the worlds first licensed self-driving semi. Urban is among dozens of engineers who spent six months frantically preparing the truck for its spectacular introduction in Nevada this week. What's really surprising isn't that his hands are off the wheel, but that they're not wiping away tears of joy and waving wildly at passing cars.
Christian Urban, a Daimler engineer, calmly lets the 40-ton Inspiration pilot itself down the I-15 at 60 mph. Alex Davies/WIRED
Daimler, which owns Freightliner and built this robo-rig, oscillates between boasting about the Inspiration (it rented Hoover Dam and threw down for a record-setting light show for the truck's debut) and downplaying its significance. As amazing as this thing is-it's a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works-company execs say it won't can't change lanes on its own, it won't be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.
Be that as it may, the Inspiration is a big step forward on the path toward the day when our vehicles drive themselves.
The discussion of autonomous technology usually centers on cars, because that's where many people will realize the benefits of improved safety, better fuel economy, and more free time. Most of the major automakers, plus tech giants like Google, are working on the hardware and software that will let regular drivers catch up on Facebook during their commute instead of holding onto the wheel and operating the pedals. Trucks aren't flashy, but they're critical to the economy.
You don't need an especially advanced autonomous system to make a dent in the crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people on US roads in 2012, about 90 percent of those were caused by driver error. Even a system that works only on the highway-where the technology's already developed and where trucks spend the vast majority of their time-can be a huge help.
The large freight carriers have already started the transition, equipping their fleets with active safety features like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings. The economic case for these technologies, the building blocks for autonomy, is clear. “Commercial vehicles are a safety issue,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Groups North America automotive division. “And therefore anything that can get commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value.” And the carriers wants more of it.
20 Years, 6 Months In the Making
Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades. Much of the technology in the Inspiration-the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture-has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.
Mercedes first equipped passenger cars with radars before Y2K and is now talking about a future in which driving is an option and front seats swivel to face the rear passengers. This year, Daimler started selling a “Detroit Assurance” package that outfits trucks with adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, and lane departure warning.
The blue lighting theme that marks the truck as autonomous is a subtle touch in the camera displays that could one day replace the side view mirror. Daimler
Work on the Inspiration, which upgrades that system by allowing the truck to steer and control its speed autonomously, started just six months ago. The team was mostly based at Daimler Trucks North America's HQ in Portland, Oregon, with some extra hands in Germany.
The Freightliner Inspiration is a limited take on autonomy. The system will kick in only once the truck's on the highway and up to speed, and then it will maintain a safe distance from other vehicles and stay in its lane. It wont change lanes to pass slower vehicles on its own. If it truck encounters a situation it cant confidently handle, like heavy snow or faded lane lines, it will alert the human that its time for him to take over.
The mechanical side of the project was relatively straightforward, largely because the company's done so much of this work before. Trucks demand different actuators (the hardware that lets the computer physically tap into the steering, acceleration, and brakes), but it's all “well understood,” says Dr. Wilfried Achenbach, senior VP of engineering and technology. Power, for example, is delivered by a pneumatic unit, so Daimler cooked up magnetically activated valves that block or supply air pressure as needed. The sensors used on passenger cars, however, were up to grade: Achenbach points out Mercedes sells cars for use on the Autobahn, where cars going 125 mph requirethe same kind of stopping distance as a tractor trailer.
Daimler engineer David Overton lays out wiring to enable Inspiration's autonomous mode. Daimler
The electrical architecture underpinning the Inspiration is like a central hub with satellites, Achenbach says: The systems (speed control, lane keeping) work on their own, but there's a central device that sees what each part is doing and makes high-level decisions (like when it's time to tell the human driver to take control). That central system has been developed (Daimler's keeping quiet on the details of how it works, exactly) but Daimler's engineers have to lower its cost and shrink its size before it's ready for market. It's similar to what Audi calls the zFAS (for zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergert), a system that brings data from disparate systems into one place, like the human brain.
Looking at the Inspiration, it's hard to spot the things that make it different from every other truck hauling pallets. The radars in the front of the cab are hard to spot; the windshield-mounted camera doesn't draw attention. A stereoscopic camera mounted in the upper part of the windshield reads lane lines. Short and long range radars, built into the grille just above the license plate, scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because theyre not needed. Theres no vehicle-to-vehicle communication and no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of the ones developed for use in Mercedes-Benzs autonomous passenger cars.
The most obvious difference is the suite of blue LEDs the team installed around the vehicle, just like the ones in Mercedes' futuristic F 015 self-driving concept car. They're in the grille and the headlights, and in the screens for the cameras that could one day replace the side mirrors that create drag and aggravate every auto aerodynamicist on the planet. Inside, there are a few more subtle changes. The floor is wood. The back of the cab, usually used for sleeping, is all white and leather seating, specially outfitted to coddle attendees at the debut for test drives.
The UI
The most significant visible alteration inside the Inspiration is the red button that reads “HWP,” lodged between the controls for the lights and the air conditioning. It's the switch that enables Highway Pilot, Daimler's name for the system that keeps the truck rolling at a steady speed, at a safe distance from other vehicles, and in its lane.
Going autonomous is a two-step process: Enable HWP, then once the truck is on the highway and cruising, turn on cruise control. From there, the truck's in charge-until it hits rough weather, loses sight of a lane line, needs to pass another vehicle, or get off the highway.
Daimler
Those are the times when the human has to takeover, which means the system has to be made to make sure he knows to grab the wheel. For its A7 autonomous prototype, Audi based that process on focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US, creating a UI design that's both simple and sleek.
When the truck's out of its league, the driver hears a harsh beep, and the dashboard flashes an alert to give him a few seconds to take over. If the human doesn't respond (maybe he's dozed off) the truck comes to a controlled stop. As Daimler develops the Inspiration for commercial use, it will develop the system much more, along with plenty of testing to make sure drivers respond well. But here, it opted to keep things simple. “It was a six-month program,” says Steve Nadig, chief engineer on the project. “Beeping works.”
Testing
To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own. The team spun the odometer using two of the trucks, plus a testing mule (a non-fancy version with the same tech), on a test track in Germany and on quiet public roads in Nevada. Like with the UI, there's a lot more testing to do before it's ready to sell this system to the public. That means driving in extreme temperatures, slogging through rain and snow, for hundreds of thousands of miles, searching for and fixing any flaws they find.
Daimler
But even at this early stage, the system shows a lot of promise for transforming the trucking industry. Daimler can't spend enough time saying it has no interest in getting rid of the driver (We dont want to get rid of drivers, says Sven Ennerst, head of Daimler Trucks development department). Its focus is on making driving easier, safer, and more efficient. It ran a small study (16 drivers on a test track) to see how this autonomous system affects drivers. EEG readings showed they were 25 percent less tired than they were when they had to steer themselves.
That's an advantage in and of itself, since drivers will be more aware when they do have to take the wheel. But it has serious potential: Right now, a truck driver can stay on the road for only 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. That's a major pain given the major shortage of truck drivers in the US right now, which is only getting worse. In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, US carriers listed hours-of-service rules as their top concern. If Daimler can guarantee drivers are less tired when using its autonomous system, regulators might be willing to ease those rules. “Then we come very fast to a business case for our customers,” says Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America.
Those customers are very much interested in this system, according to Daimler. That's no surprise: Making driving a job for the computer can reduce accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and maybe keep trucks on the road for longer, says Nol Perry, an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics. “They all love this.”
The driver shortage is restricting demand for new trucks by 50,000 to 60,000 units, Daum says. That financial incentive is at the heart of this technology program: Teach the truck to drive itself, and Daimler doesn't just have a superior product-it has a product that increases demand.
"Why do I need Inbound Marketing ?" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-i-need-inbound-marketing-misty-lawson on @LinkedIn
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Text
How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
Christian Urban waves his hands to make a point, then looks at his nails and cracks wise about needing a manicure. He regularly touches his chin and his knees as he talks. There's nothing terribly unusual about this, but for the fact Urban is at the wheel of a 40-ton semi rolling down the I-15 highway outside Las Vegasat 60 mph, and he's not steering. Or even paying much attention.
The truck is called Inspiration. It's a tech-filled version of a Freightliner rig and the worlds first licensed self-driving semi. Urban is among dozens of engineers who spent six months frantically preparing the truck for its spectacular introduction in Nevada this week. What's really surprising isn't that his hands are off the wheel, but that they're not wiping away tears of joy and waving wildly at passing cars.
Christian Urban, a Daimler engineer, calmly lets the 40-ton Inspiration pilot itself down the I-15 at 60 mph. Alex Davies/WIRED
Daimler, which owns Freightliner and built this robo-rig, oscillates between boasting about the Inspiration (it rented Hoover Dam and threw down for a record-setting light show for the truck's debut) and downplaying its significance. As amazing as this thing is-it's a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works-company execs say it won't can't change lanes on its own, it won't be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.
Be that as it may, the Inspiration is a big step forward on the path toward the day when our vehicles drive themselves.
The discussion of autonomous technology usually centers on cars, because that's where many people will realize the benefits of improved safety, better fuel economy, and more free time. Most of the major automakers, plus tech giants like Google, are working on the hardware and software that will let regular drivers catch up on Facebook during their commute instead of holding onto the wheel and operating the pedals. Trucks aren't flashy, but they're critical to the economy.
You don't need an especially advanced autonomous system to make a dent in the crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people on US roads in 2012, about 90 percent of those were caused by driver error. Even a system that works only on the highway-where the technology's already developed and where trucks spend the vast majority of their time-can be a huge help.
The large freight carriers have already started the transition, equipping their fleets with active safety features like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings. The economic case for these technologies, the building blocks for autonomy, is clear. “Commercial vehicles are a safety issue,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Groups North America automotive division. “And therefore anything that can get commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value.” And the carriers wants more of it.
20 Years, 6 Months In the Making
Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades. Much of the technology in the Inspiration-the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture-has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.
Mercedes first equipped passenger cars with radars before Y2K and is now talking about a future in which driving is an option and front seats swivel to face the rear passengers. This year, Daimler started selling a “Detroit Assurance” package that outfits trucks with adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, and lane departure warning.
The blue lighting theme that marks the truck as autonomous is a subtle touch in the camera displays that could one day replace the side view mirror. Daimler
Work on the Inspiration, which upgrades that system by allowing the truck to steer and control its speed autonomously, started just six months ago. The team was mostly based at Daimler Trucks North America's HQ in Portland, Oregon, with some extra hands in Germany.
The Freightliner Inspiration is a limited take on autonomy. The system will kick in only once the truck's on the highway and up to speed, and then it will maintain a safe distance from other vehicles and stay in its lane. It wont change lanes to pass slower vehicles on its own. If it truck encounters a situation it cant confidently handle, like heavy snow or faded lane lines, it will alert the human that its time for him to take over.
The mechanical side of the project was relatively straightforward, largely because the company's done so much of this work before. Trucks demand different actuators (the hardware that lets the computer physically tap into the steering, acceleration, and brakes), but it's all “well understood,” says Dr. Wilfried Achenbach, senior VP of engineering and technology. Power, for example, is delivered by a pneumatic unit, so Daimler cooked up magnetically activated valves that block or supply air pressure as needed. The sensors used on passenger cars, however, were up to grade: Achenbach points out Mercedes sells cars for use on the Autobahn, where cars going 125 mph requirethe same kind of stopping distance as a tractor trailer.
Daimler engineer David Overton lays out wiring to enable Inspiration's autonomous mode. Daimler
The electrical architecture underpinning the Inspiration is like a central hub with satellites, Achenbach says: The systems (speed control, lane keeping) work on their own, but there's a central device that sees what each part is doing and makes high-level decisions (like when it's time to tell the human driver to take control). That central system has been developed (Daimler's keeping quiet on the details of how it works, exactly) but Daimler's engineers have to lower its cost and shrink its size before it's ready for market. It's similar to what Audi calls the zFAS (for zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergert), a system that brings data from disparate systems into one place, like the human brain.
Looking at the Inspiration, it's hard to spot the things that make it different from every other truck hauling pallets. The radars in the front of the cab are hard to spot; the windshield-mounted camera doesn't draw attention. A stereoscopic camera mounted in the upper part of the windshield reads lane lines. Short and long range radars, built into the grille just above the license plate, scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because theyre not needed. Theres no vehicle-to-vehicle communication and no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of the ones developed for use in Mercedes-Benzs autonomous passenger cars.
The most obvious difference is the suite of blue LEDs the team installed around the vehicle, just like the ones in Mercedes' futuristic F 015 self-driving concept car. They're in the grille and the headlights, and in the screens for the cameras that could one day replace the side mirrors that create drag and aggravate every auto aerodynamicist on the planet. Inside, there are a few more subtle changes. The floor is wood. The back of the cab, usually used for sleeping, is all white and leather seating, specially outfitted to coddle attendees at the debut for test drives.
The UI
The most significant visible alteration inside the Inspiration is the red button that reads “HWP,” lodged between the controls for the lights and the air conditioning. It's the switch that enables Highway Pilot, Daimler's name for the system that keeps the truck rolling at a steady speed, at a safe distance from other vehicles, and in its lane.
Going autonomous is a two-step process: Enable HWP, then once the truck is on the highway and cruising, turn on cruise control. From there, the truck's in charge-until it hits rough weather, loses sight of a lane line, needs to pass another vehicle, or get off the highway.
Daimler
Those are the times when the human has to takeover, which means the system has to be made to make sure he knows to grab the wheel. For its A7 autonomous prototype, Audi based that process on focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US, creating a UI design that's both simple and sleek.
When the truck's out of its league, the driver hears a harsh beep, and the dashboard flashes an alert to give him a few seconds to take over. If the human doesn't respond (maybe he's dozed off) the truck comes to a controlled stop. As Daimler develops the Inspiration for commercial use, it will develop the system much more, along with plenty of testing to make sure drivers respond well. But here, it opted to keep things simple. “It was a six-month program,” says Steve Nadig, chief engineer on the project. “Beeping works.”
Testing
To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own. The team spun the odometer using two of the trucks, plus a testing mule (a non-fancy version with the same tech), on a test track in Germany and on quiet public roads in Nevada. Like with the UI, there's a lot more testing to do before it's ready to sell this system to the public. That means driving in extreme temperatures, slogging through rain and snow, for hundreds of thousands of miles, searching for and fixing any flaws they find.
Daimler
But even at this early stage, the system shows a lot of promise for transforming the trucking industry. Daimler can't spend enough time saying it has no interest in getting rid of the driver (We dont want to get rid of drivers, says Sven Ennerst, head of Daimler Trucks development department). Its focus is on making driving easier, safer, and more efficient. It ran a small study (16 drivers on a test track) to see how this autonomous system affects drivers. EEG readings showed they were 25 percent less tired than they were when they had to steer themselves.
That's an advantage in and of itself, since drivers will be more aware when they do have to take the wheel. But it has serious potential: Right now, a truck driver can stay on the road for only 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. That's a major pain given the major shortage of truck drivers in the US right now, which is only getting worse. In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, US carriers listed hours-of-service rules as their top concern. If Daimler can guarantee drivers are less tired when using its autonomous system, regulators might be willing to ease those rules. “Then we come very fast to a business case for our customers,” says Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America.
Those customers are very much interested in this system, according to Daimler. That's no surprise: Making driving a job for the computer can reduce accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and maybe keep trucks on the road for longer, says Nol Perry, an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics. “They all love this.”
The driver shortage is restricting demand for new trucks by 50,000 to 60,000 units, Daum says. That financial incentive is at the heart of this technology program: Teach the truck to drive itself, and Daimler doesn't just have a superior product-it has a product that increases demand.
"Why do I need Inbound Marketing ?" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-i-need-inbound-marketing-misty-lawson on @LinkedIn
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Text
How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
Christian Urban waves his hands to make a point, then looks at his nails and cracks wise about needing a manicure. He regularly touches his chin and his knees as he talks. There’s nothing terribly unusual about this, but for the fact Urban is at the wheel of a 40-ton semi rolling down the I-15 highway outside Las Vegasat 60 mph, and he’s not steering. Or even paying much attention.
The truck is called Inspiration. It’s a tech-filled version of a Freightliner rig and the worlds first licensed self-driving semi. Urban is among dozens of engineers who spent six months frantically preparing the truck for its spectacular introduction in Nevada this week. What’s really surprising isn’t that his hands are off the wheel, but that they’re not wiping away tears of joy and waving wildly at passing cars.
Christian Urban, a Daimler engineer, calmly lets the 40-ton Inspiration pilot itself down the I-15 at 60 mph. Alex Davies/WIRED
Daimler, which owns Freightliner and built this robo-rig, oscillates between boasting about the Inspiration (it rented Hoover Dam and threw down for a record-setting light show for the truck’s debut) and downplaying its significance. As amazing as this thing is—it’s a fully autonomous 18-wheeler that works—company execs say it won’t can’t change lanes on its own, it won’t be market-ready for a decade, and could never replace human drivers.
Be that as it may, the Inspiration is a big step forward on the path toward the day when our vehicles drive themselves.
The discussion of autonomous technology usually centers on cars, because that’s where many people will realize the benefits of improved safety, better fuel economy, and more free time. Most of the major automakers, plus tech giants like Google, are working on the hardware and software that will let regular drivers catch up on Facebook during their commute instead of holding onto the wheel and operating the pedals. Trucks aren’t flashy, but they’re critical to the economy.
You don’t need an especially advanced autonomous system to make a dent in the crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people on US roads in 2012, about 90 percent of those were caused by driver error. Even a system that works only on the highway—where the technology’s already developed and where trucks spend the vast majority of their time—can be a huge help.
The large freight carriers have already started the transition, equipping their fleets with active safety features like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings. The economic case for these technologies, the building blocks for autonomy, is clear. “Commercial vehicles are a safety issue,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Groups North America automotive division. “And therefore anything that can get commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value.” And the carriers wants more of it.
20 Years, 6 Months In the Making
Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, has been working on autonomous driving for two decades. Much of the technology in the Inspiration—the radars and cameras, the computing power and electrical architecture—has a long track record of commercial use in active safety features like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control.
Mercedes first equipped passenger cars with radars before Y2K and is now talking about a future in which driving is an option and front seats swivel to face the rear passengers. This year, Daimler started selling a “Detroit Assurance” package that outfits trucks with adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, and lane departure warning.
The blue lighting theme that marks the truck as autonomous is a subtle touch in the camera displays that could one day replace the side view mirror. Daimler
Work on the Inspiration, which upgrades that system by allowing the truck to steer and control its speed autonomously, started just six months ago. The team was mostly based at Daimler Trucks North America’s HQ in Portland, Oregon, with some extra hands in Germany.
The Freightliner Inspiration is a limited take on autonomy. The system will kick in only once the truck’s on the highway and up to speed, and then it will maintain a safe distance from other vehicles and stay in its lane. It wont change lanes to pass slower vehicles on its own. If it truck encounters a situation it cant confidently handle, like heavy snow or faded lane lines, it will alert the human that its time for him to take over.
The mechanical side of the project was relatively straightforward, largely because the company’s done so much of this work before. Trucks demand different actuators (the hardware that lets the computer physically tap into the steering, acceleration, and brakes), but it’s all “well understood,” says Dr. Wilfried Achenbach, senior VP of engineering and technology. Power, for example, is delivered by a pneumatic unit, so Daimler cooked up magnetically activated valves that block or supply air pressure as needed. The sensors used on passenger cars, however, were up to grade: Achenbach points out Mercedes sells cars for use on the Autobahn, where cars going 125 mph requirethe same kind of stopping distance as a tractor trailer.
Daimler engineer David Overton lays out wiring to enable Inspiration’s autonomous mode. Daimler
The electrical architecture underpinning the Inspiration is like a central hub with satellites, Achenbach says: The systems (speed control, lane keeping) work on their own, but there’s a central device that sees what each part is doing and makes high-level decisions (like when it’s time to tell the human driver to take control). That central system has been developed (Daimler’s keeping quiet on the details of how it works, exactly) but Daimler’s engineers have to lower its cost and shrink its size before it’s ready for market. It’s similar to what Audi calls the zFAS (for zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergert), a system that brings data from disparate systems into one place, like the human brain.
Looking at the Inspiration, it’s hard to spot the things that make it different from every other truck hauling pallets. The radars in the front of the cab are hard to spot; the windshield-mounted camera doesn’t draw attention. A stereoscopic camera mounted in the upper part of the windshield reads lane lines. Short and long range radars, built into the grille just above the license plate, scan the road up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because theyre not needed. Theres no vehicle-to-vehicle communication and no LIDaR. The software algorithms are adjusted versions of the ones developed for use in Mercedes-Benzs autonomous passenger cars.
The most obvious difference is the suite of blue LEDs the team installed around the vehicle, just like the ones in Mercedes’ futuristic F 015 self-driving concept car. They’re in the grille and the headlights, and in the screens for the cameras that could one day replace the side mirrors that create drag and aggravate every auto aerodynamicist on the planet. Inside, there are a few more subtle changes. The floor is wood. The back of the cab, usually used for sleeping, is all white and leather seating, specially outfitted to coddle attendees at the debut for test drives.
The UI
The most significant visible alteration inside the Inspiration is the red button that reads “HWP,” lodged between the controls for the lights and the air conditioning. It’s the switch that enables Highway Pilot, Daimler’s name for the system that keeps the truck rolling at a steady speed, at a safe distance from other vehicles, and in its lane.
Going autonomous is a two-step process: Enable HWP, then once the truck is on the highway and cruising, turn on cruise control. From there, the truck’s in charge—until it hits rough weather, loses sight of a lane line, needs to pass another vehicle, or get off the highway.
Daimler
Those are the times when the human has to takeover, which means the system has to be made to make sure he knows to grab the wheel. For its A7 autonomous prototype, Audi based that process on focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US, creating a UI design that’s both simple and sleek.
When the truck’s out of its league, the driver hears a harsh beep, and the dashboard flashes an alert to give him a few seconds to take over. If the human doesn’t respond (maybe he’s dozed off) the truck comes to a controlled stop. As Daimler develops the Inspiration for commercial use, it will develop the system much more, along with plenty of testing to make sure drivers respond well. But here, it opted to keep things simple. “It was a six-month program,” says Steve Nadig, chief engineer on the project. “Beeping works.”
Testing
To earn the autonomous vehicle license plate from Nevada, Daimler needed to prove the system could safely cover 10,000 miles on its own. The team spun the odometer using two of the trucks, plus a testing mule (a non-fancy version with the same tech), on a test track in Germany and on quiet public roads in Nevada. Like with the UI, there’s a lot more testing to do before it’s ready to sell this system to the public. That means driving in extreme temperatures, slogging through rain and snow, for hundreds of thousands of miles, searching for and fixing any flaws they find.
Daimler
But even at this early stage, the system shows a lot of promise for transforming the trucking industry. Daimler can’t spend enough time saying it has no interest in getting rid of the driver (We dont want to get rid of drivers, says Sven Ennerst, head of Daimler Trucks development department). Its focus is on making driving easier, safer, and more efficient. It ran a small study (16 drivers on a test track) to see how this autonomous system affects drivers. EEG readings showed they were 25 percent less tired than they were when they had to steer themselves.
That’s an advantage in and of itself, since drivers will be more aware when they do have to take the wheel. But it has serious potential: Right now, a truck driver can stay on the road for only 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. That’s a major pain given the major shortage of truck drivers in the US right now, which is only getting worse. In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, US carriers listed hours-of-service rules as their top concern. If Daimler can guarantee drivers are less tired when using its autonomous system, regulators might be willing to ease those rules. “Then we come very fast to a business case for our customers,” says Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America.
Those customers are very much interested in this system, according to Daimler. That’s no surprise: Making driving a job for the computer can reduce accidents, improve fuel efficiency, and maybe keep trucks on the road for longer, says Nol Perry, an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics. “They all love this.”
The driver shortage is restricting demand for new trucks by 50,000 to 60,000 units, Daum says. That financial incentive is at the heart of this technology program: Teach the truck to drive itself, and Daimler doesn’t just have a superior product—it has a product that increases demand.
Read more: http://bit.ly/2iqG0J4
from How Daimler Built the Worlds First Self-Driving Semi
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John Mitchell preserves it real as US Eagles face Italy team missing Parisse and more
Ex-All Blacks coach says Americans have an opportunity to beat first tier-one crew but counselings careful over impact of Super and PRO Rugby players
The US Eagles play their first summer Test on Saturday, looking for a first triumph against countries around the world from the first tier of world rugby union.
The game against Italy tier-two Russia follow next week is head manager John Mitchells firstly on American grime. Italy, incumbents of the Six Nations wooden spoon, will be playing their second activity under Conor OShea. The Irishman, who oversaw a 30 -2 4 defeat in Argentina last weekend, has left the hugely experienced forwards Sergio Parisse, Martin Castrogiovanni and Alessandro Zanni at home.
Definitely we have an opportunity, said Mitchell on Friday, having advanced with his team to the Avaya Stadium in San Jose. Whether we can do enough to acquire is dependent on what weve done in camp, on the impact of the bench. Its about putting on the t-shirt, forming consistency and creating prevailing renditions.
Mitchell is a former All Blacks pate coach-and-four who has worked in England, Australia and South Africa. His first five plays in charge of the USA came in the first Americas Rugby Championship, in February and March. The Eagle started with a 35 -3 5 attract with an Argentina XV, followed up with acquires over Canada and Chile, then suffered astonish wins in Brazil and Uruguay.
The ARC units ran widely, and the men who await the Azurri are far removed from those flogs in Barueri and Montevideo. They will be captained by the large-scale Newcastle back-rower Todd Clever, who will become the joint-most-capped Eagle, and guided from fly-half by AJ MacGinty, fresh from acquiring the Pro1 2 with Connacht.
There is also Super Rugby experience: hustler James Hilterbrand of the Waratahs and two flankers, Andrew Durutalo of the Sunwolves and, on the bench, Tony Lamborn of the Hurricanes. Mitchell accepts such strength, though he also voices an interesting memorandum of careful.
Our biggest challenge, he says, is that a lot of our overseas participates, many of them including Hilterbrand and Lamborn are merely stockpiles in those cultures. So they are yet to learn how to sustain durable executions week in, week out.
You do notice that sometimes in their concentration degrees when preparing, so thats certain challenges for us too, trying to keep those actors on task. Its surely their intention to do so, but why i am terrace musicians it creates a different psychology.
Thretton Palamo takes on the Samoa defence at the World Cup, with AJ MacGinty in backing. Photo: Charlie Crowhurst/ Getty Images
Mitchells arrival in the US was delayed by lineage affairs, and he did not select the ARC squad. Accordingly, he determines the Italy game as the first real objection in which Ive had an influence on selection in collaboration with my staff, though at the end of the day Im the convener and Ive had a big influence on it.
While some leading player are with the Eagles sevens crew, preparing for the Rio Olympics, a large Eagles Elite Training Squad has be gradually whittled down, subjected to exacting standards of fitness. Thanks in part to the advent of PRO Rugby, simply two of the match-day 23 New York Athletic Club lock Nate Brakeley and reserve back-rower Harry Higgins, from Old Blue in the same city do not presently pay a full-time living from rugby. This is unprecedented for a US squad, but Mitchell makes an interesting point.
One thing that has been a little disappointing and see, he says, is some of the PRO Rugby participates in the team that were on the ARC tour have actually come[ into camp] in worse surrounding than they were in ARC, which scares me.
It is a possibility[ they are not used to] the week in, week out schedule,[ but] I visualize PRO Rugby has to look moving forward at how they support the athlete around persuasivenes and conditioning. And too education around nutrition. Its one thing having a professional contract, but are those homes catering for all facets of professionalism?
There are those working in US rugby who will merrily say off the record that Italy can definitely be beaten. On the record, Mitchells realism is comprehensible , not least because he was formed in the toughest rugby person on land. A midweek All Black as a participate, he launched a coaching occupation in which the toughest jolt, a World cup finals semi-final demolish by Australia, is now 13 times in the past. Since then he has are going through downs as well as ups.
So have the Eagles. They have pushed the Maori, attracted 61,500 to watch the All Blacks and led Scotland at half-time. There ought to have disappointments too. In 2012, Italy left Houston with a 30 -1 0 prevail. In 2013 and 2014, Ireland and Scotland also prevailed in Texas. The 2015 World cup finals began with hope of progress, exclusively for Japan to glint instead.
Also, in most recent years there have been three or more summertime Exams in which to blood players and work towards the next World Cup. This time, after Scotland chose to go to Japan, there are only two. After Russia, the Eagles must wait to face the Maori in Chicago in November, on the undercard to the All Blacks versus Ireland.
Mitchell in 2003. Photo: David Rogers/ Getty Images
But nothing is ever easy in international rugby and it will not be so against an Italian team also looking to affect a brand-new coach. In May, after selecting his first touring party, OShea had texts for his new actors who are able to evenly apply to those now answering to Mitchell.
I dont think its about winning mentality, he said. Its about not accepting demolish. The best actors are the people who can cope with trouble, whove come back from misery, who are never ready to accept second. Its about how you greeting when things are tough.
In particular, concepts will be tough without Parisse, a mighty No8 who has acquired 119 caps in 14 times. Asked about ways to exploit any Italian shortcomings that may result, Mitchell is acknowledged that he and his tutors have studied them in Six Nations thoroughly and thought they might administer their musicians. Again, though, he lends academic qualifications.
Were in a similar place in a manner that is with some actors in the Olympic sevens force and with Samu Manoa staying with Toulon. In such status, you look to develop depth. So the focus will be very much on ourselves.
USA : Holder; Ngwenya, Palamo, S Suniula, Scully; MacGinty, Augspurger; Lamositele, Hilterbrand, Baumann, Brakeley, Peterson, Duratalo, Clever( capt ), Dolan. Replacements : Taufetee, Tarr, MacLellan, Higgins, Lamborn, Tomasin, London, Teo. Italy : McLean; Sarto, Campagnaro, Castello, Odiete; Canna, Gori( capt ), Lovotti, Gega, Cittadini, Geldenhuys, Fuser, Barbieri, Favaro, Van Schalkwyk. Permutation : Fabiani, Panico, Ceccarelli, Bernabo, Mbanda, Palazzani, Allan, Venditti. Referee : M van der Westhuizen( South Africa ).
TV : The Rugby Channel, 9pm ET; Replay: CBS Sports Network, Sunday, 9pm ET
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