by William Skink

What will happen today?

In order to prepare for different scenarios, a tech firm with ties to Israeli intelligence has been running doomsday election simulations since 2016. For more on this creepy gaming out of election chaos, here’s Whitney Webb from her new site, Unlimited Hangout:

Cybereason has — with little fanfare — been promoting extreme election day scenarios since before the 2016 election. Cybereason’s first mention of these tactics appears in a September 2016 blog post written by the company’s CEO and former Israeli government contractor Lior Div — a former leader of offensive cyberattacks for the IDF’s elite Unit 8200 and a former development group leader at the controversial Israeli-American corporation Amdocs.

Div wrote that hackers may target U.S. elections by “breaking into the computers that operate traffic lighting systems and interfering with the ones around polling stations to create massive traffic jams, “hacking polling companies,” and “targeting live election coverage on cable or network television stations.” A follow-up post by Div from October 2016 added further meddling tactics such as “cut power to polling stations” and “mess with a voter’s mind.”div

Two years later, Cybereason held its first election meddling simulation, touting many of these same tactics, in Boston. The simulation focused on local and state responses to such attacks and saw Boston-based Cybereason invite Massachusetts state and local officials as well as Boston police officers and a former police commissioner to participate. “Twitter accounts spreading fake news,” “turning off a city’s closed-circuit cameras,” “hacking self-driving cars and navigation apps,” and “targeting a city’s 911 call center with a DDoS attack” were all used in the simulation, which saw Cybereason’s “ethical hackers” attempt to disrupt election day. Media coverage of the simulation at the time framed it as a necessary preparation for countering “Russian” threats to U.S. democracy. Like the more recent simulations, the mock election was canceled and voter confidence in the electoral process was devastated.

I haven’t had confidence in our electoral processes since 2000, when the Supreme Court picked our President for us.

But that won’t stop me from watching the spectacle.

To make the day extra fun, my in-laws are in town, so we’ll be watching the results with two people in their 80’s who love Trump and watch Tucker every night, and my dad, who supports Biden and watches Rachel every night.

Stay safe out there, don’t drink too much booze, and, whatever happens today, remember that you are an autonomous human being comprised of consciousness, a soul, and the free will to choose your course of action.