I've been warned by multiple people I need to have my cellphone off when I'm walking around here because there's going to be hackers who are going to be in the public Wi-Fi trying to get into whatever equipment they can. So there is going to be thousands of people poking around equipment that was purchased on eBay, purchased at government auctions to either take a shot at messing with the equipment or to take notes on the people taking a shot and messing with the equipment.Īnd these people, David, they're really good. So this weekend is the time for that poking around to happen. They don't even let those people look at it and confirm the security of the equipment. And not just, like, you or me - I'm talking about the government officials who are actually contracting these companies out. And they don't allow anyone behind the scenes to poke around and see what's actually going on. Going back to just how our voting system works - right? - private companies, not government officials are actually overseeing the equipment that we use to vote, whether it's websites, the actual voting equipment, the registration equipment. So how does it actually work? I mean, what do you actually watch as you're at this conference? GREENE: OK, a lot of confidence that they can learn a lot of important stuff there. So this has gone pretty mainstream at this point. Senator, Ron Wyden from Oregon, is actually going to be giving the keynote address. You know, the Senate intelligence committee released a report about Russian interference a couple weeks ago, and they cited work that was found at this conference last year. You know, there's pretty broad consensus that this issue - cybersecurity in voting - is something worth talking about. I mean, we're only just a couple years removed from election supervisors, people in Congress casting doubt on whether Russia was - Russian attackers were able to break into any sort of voting equipment at all and then, more broadly, whether the equipment that we were using to vote to register was vulnerable. PARKS: Well, it's really important, especially when you consider the context of how voting officials have viewed this sort of behavior in the past. GREENE: Well, so how important is this in terms of election security, getting people to try and break into voting systems so you can really understand what's vulnerable and what's not? Joining us from Las Vegas, site of the Def Con hacking conference, is NPR's Miles Parks who covers election security. They're being encouraged to do this in hopes of finding vulnerabilities ahead of the 2020 election. This weekend thousands of hackers will converge on Las Vegas to try their hand at breaking into, well, all sorts of stuff - medical devices, cars and even voting equipment.
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