Earlier this month, hactivist group Anonymous announced (PDF) that it helped put President Barack Obama back into office for another 4-year term by preventing Republican activist and Fox News anchor Karl Rove from electronically stealing votes from Obama supporters. The group claims that Rove somehow laid tunnels through voter tracking software that would have switched votes from Obama over to Romney in at least three states.
"We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule Of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way," the group said. "After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl's operation and even that of his ORCA."
Anonymous said that Rove "left the barn doors wide open", meaning the digital tunnels the Fox News anchor had supposedly established were left unsecured, granting any hacker easy access into the voter tracking system. Thus the group created what it called The Great Oz, a targeted password protected firewall to keep additional hackers, including Karl Rove, out.
"We placed this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destinations that Karl's not-so-smart worker bees planned to use on election night," they wrote. "We noticed that these tunnels were strategically placed to allow for tunnel rats to race to the server sewers from three different states. Ah yes, Karl tried to make it appear that there were more than three but we quickly saw the folly of his ploy."
Anonymous said that once the firewall was established, Karl's "speared ORCA whale was beached", as his team of supposed hackers, obviously hired to alter voting in Romney's favor, tried to penetrate the firewall and failed exactly 105 times.
"We have a warning for Karl," the group said. "Sail again at your peril. We may just put all the evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London."
The announcement claims that Rove's ORCA was discovered at 10am EST on November 6, and then speared by The Great Oz later on at 8pm EST. The group also hints to previously stolen elections which "resulted in terrible destruction across the globe", thus provoking the group into following Rove's data trail. The Examiner also points out that Ohio suffered server problems on November 6 at around 11pm, mirroring an identical situation in Ohio that took place in 2004.
While we won't jump into politics, the claim made by Anonymous poses a good question: can the system used to track votes be fully trusted in an age where servers and firewalls are breached seemingly every week, exposing sensitive data owned by companies and individuals? And if the Anonymous story is true, then how did Rove get into the system and install his pipeline? Did someone give him access or was this an actual hack?
Something tells us that we'll find out soon enough.
