Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections

"Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections" (2020 release; 91 min.) is a documentary that (re)examines how secure electronic voting in the US really is. As the movie opens, we are introduced to Harri Hursti, a cyber security expert from Finland who specializes in elections security: "Everything is hackable", he bluntly states (and then later proves it), despite assurances from government officials at all levels that voting in the US is "secure"... At this point we are 10 min. into the documentary.

Couple of comments: Harri Hursti is universally recognized as one the world's top experts in these matters, and in fact this movie can be seen as a sequel of sorts to the 2006 documentary "Hacking Democracy", where Hursti was seen how easily he breached a voting machine right there in front of local government officials. Get this: that very same voting machine which Hursti breached back then is still scheduled to be in use in the 2020 elections in no less than 20 US states! It simply blows the mind. The 3 remaining North American manufacturers of voting machines are shown along the way as still being way too vulnerable, and apparently having little interest in fixing the issues. Later on, the documentary looks in detail at what happened in the 2018 elections in Georgia and Alaska. You simply can't make this stuff up. Surreal doesn't even begin to describe it.

"Kill Chain: The Cyber Wars on America's Elections" premiered recently on HBO and is now available on HBO On Demand and other streaming services. I am sure that this documentary will be dismissed by a certain segment of the US population as yet more "fake news" but the facts once again are clear and get exposed by the film makers. Let this movie serve as a reminder that there is work to be done to shore up the vulnerabilities of electronic voting in the US.

Harri Hursti really does a fabulous job of illustrating how easy it is to hack into the system.

Paper ballots with your receipt needs to be the way of the future. Technology had made our lives much easier but this is a case that can distort the will of the people.

Perfect score. IMHO.

No spoilers at all. Riveting in the sense that it is absolutely enlightening. This would definitely qualify in the must see category.

Harri Hursti is extremely qualified on the subject and lays everything out so anyone could understand.

Extremely recommended.

For those wondering how in the world the 2020 election could simultaneously be heralded "the most secure in US history" by election officials, and called "the greatest theft in the history of America" well then "Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections" (2020) is for you.

Harri Hursti is from Finland, and to establish his credibility we take a look at the Russia / Finland border and see a few of his childhood records establishing his rock-solid security and computer expertise. The highlight of this well-produced documentary was a recent Defcon hacker's conference, where one of the machines revealed a Windows XP login accessed remotely and hacked into.

Not unexpectedly a number of parties declined to be interviewed for obvious reasons - the software is proprietary, the hardware had all kinds of ports to connect into, they travel to an eBay reseller in Ohio who has stacks of Dominion Systems machines from 2002 readily for sale, still with voting records from 2012 in them.

Is there a Venezuelan connection to Dominion? Servers in Barcelona and Frankfurt? Data on flash drives that get 'lost'? I was told there was an air gap, that these machines are not connected to the Internet. Who knows, it really doesn't matter - these voting machines are hopelessly compromised in their current state.

All you have to do is watch this and see for yourself how compromised our voting system in the United States is at present.

This sequel or follow up to Hacking Democracy (documentary from 2006) is not being taken seriously enough. All discussions in American politics repeat every 2 or so year, just changing sides depending who won and who lost.

This documentary captures how easy it is to manipulate the votes pretty well. As technology moved forward, so did the security holes. It is inconceivable to have a voting machine that serves as a black box, that is relying on external data input while having data processing inside or even data link for updates that connects to intranet of some sort.

I am glad my country is using good old fashion paper thrown into a sealed box and people count it at the end of the voting day.