Whether or not foreign governments are planning on manipulating our election results in November, it’s past time we started taking the security of electronic voting seriously.
Op-ed
Even if it turns out that the FBI’s suspicions that Russian government forces are behind the hacking of the Democratic party turn out to be untrue, the fact our government is willing to publicly speculate on the possibility should be cause for some alarm. While it’s true that from a hacking sense the Democrats’ computers were probably low lying fruit and easy pickings, so are many of the voting machines that will be called into service in November’s general election.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
As development continued, refinements were naturally added that didn’t exist in other operating systems, many of which eventually ended up in other *nixes and even Windows, just as many new additions to Unix also ended up in the Linux kernel. But the original purpose was simply to build on what had gone before, not to create something radically different.
