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The Guardian reports the Obama administration says goodbye to ‘war on terror’. The war on terror is over.
A message sent recently to senior Pentagon staff explains that “this administration prefers to avoid using the term Long War or Global War On Terror (Gwot) … please pass this on to your speechwriters”. Instead, they have been asked to use a bureaucratic phrase that could hardly be further from the fiery rhetoric of the months immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The global war on terror is dead; long live “overseas contingency operations”.
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McClatchy reports Most electronic voting isn’t secure, CIA expert says. “The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries’ use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines’ vulnerability to tampering.”
A presentation made by a CIA cybersecurity to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission “could provide disturbing lessons for the United States” where use of electronic voting is spreading. “Steve Stigall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections”.
Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.
“You heard the old adage ‘follow the money,’ ” Stigall said, according to a transcript of his hour-long presentation… “I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to … make bad things happen.”
Four at Four continues with news of the dollar fallar and U.S. economy, Iran and Obama, and Afghanistan.