Argentinean programmer's house raided after he found a security breach

https://twitter.com/_joac/status/617152001504378880

111 30 11 years ago

Some context: He found a security breach in the public voting system of Buenos Aires city, Argentina (elections are tomorrow). He brought it to awareness yesterday: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1807352-denuncian-un-agujero-de-s...

The tweet reads:

After finding a vulnerability in the voting system they're raiding my house, people from computer forensics.

r721• 11 years ago

Broad summary of what's been going on the last few days in Buenos Aires, Argentina (by /u/sebadoom):

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/sebadoom/f0eedcba2f39e3e0...

embik• 11 years ago

What kind of people orders such a raid? What's the mindset behind that decision? Their own team wasn't good enough to catch the breach (hell, the whole thing sounds like a train wreck) and now they try to silence people who reveal their incompetence?

jamra• 11 years ago

The same administration that just assassinated a prosecutor that had written out an arrest warrant against her.

demian3• 11 years ago

Wrong.

The federal goverment is from a different political party, they are NOT the same people that are running the local city goverment. The police that raided this guy's house was the metropolitan police (BA city police), not the federal police.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Just to add, an arrest warrant against her for aiding Iran terrorists that attacked Argentina.

If embik thinks he does not know what those people think, I guess he should turn that into a certainty from now on.

nmrm2• 11 years ago

There are a lot of examples in the US of the government harrasing citizens who report vulnerabilities. The DMCA is typically used to justify this behavior.

I'm not sure what the appropriate conclusion is here.

Semiapies• 11 years ago

If we're that charitable towards their motivations, I'd generally expect the sort of people who end up in large city administrations to do that more than not.

Another possibility is that they had arranged a good setup for vote manipulation, and someone exposed it.

MichaelCrawford3• 11 years ago

You must not know much about history.

In Argentina specifically, there was Juan Peron. The broadway play and movie "Evita" is about his wife. I once read her biography.

Some astronomers I once met were at cerro tololo inter-american observatory in chile when some heavily armed men turned up to look after the nearby radio towers.

Conspiracy theories abound with respect to JFK's assassination.

No one really believes that communists torched the Reichstag.

On December 8, 1941, the pearl harbor base commander found a letter from the US state department in his mailbox, to let him know that the japanese might give him trouble sometime soon.

"Gentlemen do not read each others' mail.". That was the stated reason that the US stopped its codebreaking work. I dont believe it really did. The best way to read a gentleman's mail is if he doesnt think he needs to encrypt it.

Josef Stalin once knocked over a bank, then gave all the loot to Lenin.

maxpupmax• 11 years ago

With all due respect... What the hell are you talking about?

threeseed2• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't you order a raid ? A security vulnerability in a voting system has been exposed.

Yes this guy may have done nothing with it but I would damn want to make 100% sure that was the case. And I would definitely want to make sure that the vulnerability wasn't recklessly revealed. This isn't like finding a browser bug we are talking about, you can radically alter the course of a nation.

demian3• 11 years ago

There are several bugs in the system reported by local engineers, like being able to add multiple votes to a sigle voter's RFID chip.

This is a scandal and a complete failure at several levels, not only for the local city goverment but for respected institutions like the University of Buenos Aires which got paid to audit the system.

And this is all happening in the same day as the America Cup (Copa America) Final between Chile and Argentina, so people are numb to most of this news.

alvare2• 11 years ago

He is accused of leaking the private information of 2000 people involved in the electoral operation.

That's why he was raided. Not because of the alleged vulneravilities he found.

wmt• 11 years ago

That would sound more reasonable, do you have a source for that or is that just heresay?

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

It was that and the WMDs in his cellar.

alvare2• 11 years ago

https://twitter.com/fraudevotar

http://justpaste.it/votarleaks6

angry_octet• 11 years ago

You don't raid someone for doing that, you raid someone to silence them, then use that as a justification.

Some people will totally accept that explanation. And some people will pretend to accept it, even though they know it is a sham.

hobarrera2• 11 years ago

He posted the same on the python argentina mailing list last night. Unbelievable; he merely published security holes on publicly available code.

Nothing wrong (nor legally, nor morally) there. It's not the first hole to get published recently either.

threeseed2• 11 years ago

It IS legally and morally wrong to reveal security holes before there has been an opportunity for it to be fixed though. Security researchers almost always do the "right thing" before potentially unleashing mayhem.

Not saying he didn't do this just that it isn't a black/white issue.

lawnchair_larry• 11 years ago

No, it is neither illegal nor immoral.

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

If it's less than 24 hours before the election, it's absolutely right to go public.

Or are you in favour of electoral fraud? Republican, perchance? Work for diebold?

Argentinean programmer's house raided after he found a security breach

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