Most Recent Posts

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday spoke with officials in China about data security and privacy. This meeting comes on the heels of a reported attack against users of Apple's iCloud service in China. Hackers allegedly were able to get hold of users' data by intercepting traffic on the Internet. They did not break into Apple servers.

The attack coincided with the launch in China of the new iPhone 6. As for the perpetrator: A nonprofit watchdog called GreatFire.org alleges the Chinese government was behind it. China denies that. And Apple, in a statement, does not name a culprit.

The attack has a name: man in the middle.

"Imagine someone running a post office and they're managing all of the letters that go in and out of that post office," says Zackary Allen, lead researcher at the security firm ZeroFox. "A man-in the-middle attack is someone ... taking over one of those post offices. And they can take your envelopes that you're sending out to your family or your friends and put them somewhere else. ...

"Or they can open up the letter, change it, reseal it and then send it back out," he says.

And the sender wouldn't have a clue.

The end goal could be to steal information or to change information. The perpetrator could be one person or many people.

All Tech Considered

Apple Says iOS Encryption Protects Privacy; FBI Raises Crime Fears

The Two-Way

In China, Anger At U.S. Hacking Charges — And Claims Of Hypocrisy

All Tech Considered

With Tech Outsourcing, The Internet Can Be 'A Scary Place'

"We've seen criminal organizations; we've seen disgruntled employees. It can also be nation-state actors," Allen says.

The attack is really different from, say, a virus that gets into a single document. It's more sophisticated.

The Internet is a bunch of interconnected routers. With man in the middle, the attacker takes over a router and can watch all the traffic — text messages, emails, iCloud logins — to decide what's worth stealing.

"These routers help get you from where you are to a destination," Allen says. "If you manage to compromise one of those routers, any traffic that flows through that, you control."

Apple's new iPhone is in fact more secure than previous ones. The physical hardware itself is harder to hack into. So these kinds of attacks that target weak links in the transfer of data on the cloud will become more common, experts say.

Apple is advising concerned customers to read the warnings that pop up in Web browsers — so if you see a strange request for permission or a certificate at the iCloud login, don't just click OK.

icloud

China

iPhone

On the first day for in-person early voting in Illinois, President Obama went to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center to cast his ballot.

"I'm so glad I can early vote here," he told the elections worker checking him in.

Early voting is something Democrats have used to their advantage in recent elections. And it's likely not a coincidence that Obama chose to vote in person, with cameras rolling and clicking, rather than quietly dropping an absentee ballot in the mail.

Obama isn't the only one who voted Monday. Republican Rep. Tom Cotton tweeted a snapshot of his "Grandma Bryant" standing at an electronic voting machine. Cotton is running for Senate in Arkansas.

Thanks to my Grandma Bryant for getting out and casting her early vote today in Lonoke County! #ARSen #arpx pic.twitter.com/8jyzUpmKhz

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) October 20, 2014

Election Day is two weeks away, and already more than 2 million people have voted, either by mail or at in-person early voting locations. With control of the U.S. Senate resting on a handful of incredibly close races, locking in these votes early has become a key election strategy for both parties.

If you had to name a state where the battle for early votes was most intense, it would be Iowa.

In a video posted by the Iowa Democratic Party, retiring Sen. Tom Harkin casts his vote on a mail-in ballot for Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley. Braley is in a tight race against Republican Joni Ernst, who mentions early voting at nearly every campaign stop.

Iowa Democratic Party/YouTube

"Vote early, don't vote often," Ernst joked at a GOP event on the first day of early voting in the state. "But vote early. Every voice counts."

She told reporters at an event Monday that Democrats have always been good at turning out their voters. But this year, she said, Iowa Republicans are close to matching them — a major shift from past elections.

"Once they've voted, we don't have to call them anymore, we don't have to knock on their doors," Ernst said of people who vote early. "And so it does save our time and energy to really focus on those voters that maybe don't get out in these midterms."

Voters who don't usually get out in midterms are what the push for early voting is all about, for both parties. They're trying to grow the electorate and reach people who would traditionally stay home in nonpresidential election years.

"We've targeted those voters and tried to drive those voters to participate during the early vote period," says Matt Canter, deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Canter argues that Democrats are capturing new votes, while Republicans are cannibalizing votes that would have come in on Election Day anyway.

"The critical number is how many people that did not vote in 2010 and might not have voted anyway are now participating because we've connected with these people," says Canter.

Nationwide, the parties, candidates and their allies are spending tens of millions of dollars to get their voters to cast ballots early. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski says they're even trying a little peer pressure with a Facebook-based Pledge to Vote Challenge.

"We've had a lot of success in that social pressure," says Kukowski. "You don't want to be the only one to not vote, is what we're going for, and people really respond well to it."

She couldn't say how many people had signed up for the challenge so far.

University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald tracks early voting obsessively. He says from the publicly available numbers of ballots returned, it is clear more people are voting early. But it's hard to tell just who those people are, and whether they really are previously untapped votes.

"We're seeing changing strategies for the parties, and that's part of what makes it very difficult to determine which party really is winning when we look at the early vote," explains McDonald.

All he can say for sure is that the key Senate races are close.

early voting

Millions of voters — about 1 in 5 — are expected to vote absentee, or by mail, in November's midterm elections. For many voters, it's more convenient than going to the polls.

But tens of thousands of these mail-in ballots are likely to be rejected — and the voter might never know, or know why.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that in 2012 more than a quarter of a million absentee ballots were rejected.

The No. 1 reason? The ballot wasn't returned on time, which in most states is by Election Day. Sometimes it's the voter's fault. Others blame the post office.

Kim Alexander, who runs the California Voter Foundation, says this past June almost 600 absentee ballots arrived at the Santa Cruz County election office the morning after the primary. Too late to count.

"It's absolutely heartbreaking. Because the only thing worse than people not voting is people trying to vote and having their ballots go uncounted," says Alexander. "And most of these people have no idea that their ballots are not getting counted. They could be making the same mistakes over and over again."

Those mistakes are often easy to avoid. Here are some:

The voter forgets to sign the ballot, as required.

The voter sends the envelope back, but forgets to include the ballot.

The voter uses the wrong envelope.

The voter already voted in person.

The voter's signature on the ballot doesn't match the one on file.

This last mistake is a big problem, says Alexander. In California, all absentee ballot signatures are checked against the ones the election office has in its records. But many of those signatures come from the Department of Motor Vehicles, where people sign their names using a stylus on a pad, which can look a lot different than a signature written on paper.

"You also have the issue of younger people whose signatures change over time. You have older voters whose signature changes over time too," says Alexander. "And voters have no idea what image of their signature is on file."

She says it could be 10 or 15 years old. In 2012, thousands of California ballots were rejected because the signatures didn't match.

Absentee voters who are confused and vote twice is another concern.

Alysoun McLaughlin, deputy director of the Montgomery County, Md., board of elections, calls these "just in case" voters. First, they send in their absentee ballot.

"They're concerned that maybe it won't get back to us in time. So then they also go to the polls and they vote," says McLaughlin.

That vote is a provisional one, but when election officials get that second ballot in the mail, both ballots are rejected. It's illegal to vote twice — even by mistake.

Paul Gronke, who runs the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon, says he's concerned about all these lost votes.

"After the 2000 election, a lot of attention was paid in this country to voting machines to make sure that no one was denied the right to vote because of a machine that didn't function properly, or a chad that did not hang properly," Gronke says.

But absentee voting hasn't received that same attention, he says. And in a close election, those ballots could make a difference.

Gronke says it's also important to know which voters are affected the most. A study by the California Civic Engagement Project at the University of California, Davis found that absentee ballots cast by young voters or those using non-English ballots were more likely to be rejected.

And Gronke says a study he did in Florida found that lots of absentee ballots got tossed in precincts made up entirely of senior citizens.

"As many as a third of the ballots in some cases were rejected because of errors," he says.

Gronke doesn't know what those errors were, but he thinks the findings do raise questions about whether instructions on how to vote absentee are clear enough.

Election officials are doing more to try to educate voters about the rules. Their big message is to get the absentee ballot in the mail as soon as possible.

Better yet, says Alexander, they should notify voters when their ballots have been rejected and tell them why — so they don't make the same mistake twice.

Once again the U.S. Supreme Court is correcting its own record, but Wednesday marks the first time that the Court has called attention to its own mistake with a public announcement. And it was the erring justice herself, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked that the Court's public information office to announce the error.

Last Friday Ginsburg pulled an all-nighter to write a dissent from the Court's decision to allow the Texas voter ID law to go into effect while the case is on appeal. The dissent, released Saturday morning at 5 a.m., and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, listed a variety of photo ID forms not accepted for purposes of voting under the Texas law. Among those listed in the Ginsburg dissent as unacceptable was a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs photo ID.

Three days after the opinion was released, Professor Richard Hasen of the University of California, Irvine, said on his election law blog that the state does in fact accept the Veterans Affairs IDs. Upon confirmation of that fact by the Texas secretary of state's office, Ginsburg amended her opinion.

Not surprising. What was surprising is that, according to Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg, Justice Ginsburg instructed the press office to announce that the opinion had "contained an error," and that it was being corrected.

On Wednesday, the Court announced the mistake and the correction.

Law

Texas Can Enforce Voter ID Law For November Election

The Two-Way

Supreme Court Lets Texas Enforce Voter ID Law For Nov. Election

Errors of this sort are not exactly rare. In this case, it appears that Ginsburg may have gotten the Wisconsin and Texas voter ID provisions, both before the Court, mixed up.

Until the era of the blogosphere, however, this sort of mistake was the stuff of academic gossip. Now it is the stuff of academic blogs, which sometimes get picked up in the popular press. A more embarrassing mistake by Justice Antonin Scalia was caught by Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus last Spring; the error was quickly fixed, but it was not announced. Nor was another error made and corrected by Justice Elena Kagan.

Ginsburg is the first justice to call the public's attention to her own mistake.

Web Resources

Revised Dissent