>This Cybersecurity Agency Is Supposed to Protect U.S. Elections. Officials Fear It’s Been Compromised by Trump.>A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.>The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. >The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.>“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”>The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.>In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs. https://www.propublica.org/article/cisa-election-security-donald-trumpso, drumpf can't hack the election machines because he laid off all the people capable of it. ironic.
>>544621354At this point if Trump complains about election fraud he has no one to blame but himself for not taking measures to prevent it while having a majority in Congress and the Senate. There's only so many times you can feel bad for someone who has the power to prevent something bad that happens but just doesn't for some reason
>>544621354I'm more concerned that the agency responsible for ensuring the security of those machines are so put off by the idea of attempting to hack them. A big part of cybersecurity is testing systems for vulnerabilities so they can be fixed. If they weren't trying to find the weaknesses in those machines, somebody else probably was.
