- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
The call, an apparent imitation or digital manipulation of the president’s voice, says, “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.”
A prominent New Hampshire Democrat plans to file a complaint with the state attorney general over an apparent robocall that appears to encourage supporters of President Joe Biden not to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary.
The voice in the message is familiar — even presidential — as it’s an apparent imitation or digital manipulation of Biden’s voice.
“What a bunch of malarkey,” the voice message begins, echoing a favorite term Biden has uttered before.
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I feel like these types of things will be especially bad this year. They won’t be able to catch those responsible fast enough to prevent impact on the primaries, but they should be looking to tie these to the Republicans, and disqualify them from the actual election. We know it’s them. It’s always them.
This kind of thing should be treated as sedition because it’s a direct attempt to undermine democratic processes. People should be scared shitless to even think about fucking with an election.
Or if it’s a foreign country it should be considered an act of war just as much as an airstrike.
I don’t know about sedition, but there are already a ton of more specific laws regarding election interference. Things like deliberately telling voters the wrong date, location, or eligibility are usually covered.
The only thing new here is the highly convincing impersonation, which may (or may not) be covered by other laws.
Of note, this will almost entirely be state laws rather than federal. With a few restrictions, each state runs its own elections by its own rules. Which means the (criminal) charge in New Hampshire is different from the one in South Carolina, the one in Texas, etc. Rarely do the feds get involved.
That type of impersonation could be argued as civil fraud. Whoever did this deserves to catch RICO charges because what they’re doing is basically racketeering.
imo its all that plus counts of impersonating a public official /identity theft
Or it’s Russia.
Yeah, that’s what he said. The GOP.
Essentially the same thing.
Why is it so hard for phone companies to stop this? They explicitly allow unverified numbers to just call whoever on their networks. Is there really no way to stop number spoofing?
The same reason 5-6 model years of Hyundais are worth $0 now
It would be a minuscule cost to the company and they’re not legally required to implement it
Except due to the FCCs complete regulatory capture, the telecoms have now completely ruined voice calls as a form of communication to the extent that nobody even picks up calls on their personal lines anymore.
Remember when you could answer the phone and reasonably expect it would be relevant to your life?
Indeed. I screen every call now and check the voicemails.
The same reason 5-6 model years of Hyundais are worth $0 now
What is this referencing?
Hyundai and Kia cut costs by excluding industry standard engine immobilizers in their vehicles.
Most cars have a chip in the key, which is read by the car when you insert it into the keyhole, to verify the key is legit. Even if you cut a new copy of the key, the engine won’t start without that chip. That’s an engine immobilizer. It also prevents people from just brute-forcing the keyway into turning, with something like a screwdriver. Because again, no chip means the car won’t start.
Hyundai and Kia decided to forego these, as a cost cutting measure. And now those Hyundais and Kia’s are virtually worthless (and nearly impossible to insure,) because car thieves know how easy they are to steal. In the past few years, as the methods have gotten posted on places like YouTube and TikTok, anyone with a screwdriver can go steal a Hyundai or Kia. And theft rates have skyrocketed, to the point that some insurance companies are outright refusing to issue policies for them because they know it’ll eventually be stolen.
As for why it was referenced here, my guess is that they were making a parallel about how the technology to prevent spoofed phone numbers already exists. But the companies have decided not to implement them, as a cost-cutting (and anti-competition) measure.
Currently, some phone carriers already offer caller verification. But that only works for internal numbers. For instance, an AT&T caller dialing another AT&T phone. But the companies have refused to cooperate, and allow competitors to access their internal verification systems. So for instance, if an AT&T customer calls a T-Mobile customer, both AT&T and T-Mobile can verify internal calls. But neither company wants to play nice with the other, so they refuse to verify each others’ numbers. So when a spammer spoofs a number, any kind of verification would only be effective if the spammer has the same carrier as the target.
Wooow. Holy shit. Those car makers really fucked up. Those class action suits should have mandates to replace the cars or install immobilizers.
I think that they did. My brother in law had an affected model, and I know he brought it in to get one installed. Not sure if he went out of pocket, but pretty sure it was covered.
I’m dubious that’s all it is; for example, My '03 S10 has a purely mechanical key. In fact, if you have a GM vehicle with that little “chip” in the root of the blade…note that it’s in a symmetrical key, so it could go in either way, and it’s only got two pins. Because it’s just a resistor. The car’s security system is pretty much just an ohmmeter.
The fact that Hyundai and Kia chose not to include an industry standard anti-theft system, leading to them being piss easy to steal
I have my phone set to block all unknown number calls. I was getting around 40 calls per day.
I was getting around 40 calls per day.
How much porn did you watch? Lol
All the porn. But jokes aside, how caa watching porn make callers target you?
It’s not about porn specifically, but at one point you gave your phone number to a company. Could have been for anything, usually it’s for “verification” or 2fa on a new account on any number of types of service. Then that company turned around and sold your phone number to a data broker - or, worse, was hacked and the hacker then sold their ill gotten gains to said data broker. Who then sold that number to a different company, who then sold that number to a different company…
This is why knowing where your data gets around to is important. If your phone number can (and most assuredly does) get passed around town like a cheap hooker, imagine what kinds of transactions are being performed on, say, email addresses. Or social security numbers. Or passwords, or security question answers. Trusting the wrong data into the wrong hands, once, will mean that data is now permanently a matter of public record. Oh, Equifax leaked your phone number? Now every single illegal data broker in the entire world has a copy of that information in their database, there are 3800 additional copies in various hackers’ personal data stores, and new copies are being sold to new people every day. Whoops, now Netflix leaked your email address, hackers already have your name and phone number to link to it from Equifax, oh no, that’s a complete data profile. Someone can now just buy your data profile to either target you with ads or target you with scams, or worse. Oh no, you got got by one of the targeted scams and accidentally gave your SSN to a bad actor - well, hope you’re already on the way to the courthouse because your identity is now unusable. Whoever you were previously is now dead. You’ve just made appearances in Pripyat, Brazil, Bangladesh and 13 locations in China in the last 8 minutes and made credit card purchases at each location, your 401k is now smoke and your bank accounts are throwing the emergency halt lever. You’ll be lucky to recover anything at all after legally changing your name and SSN, which is a real bitch to do, and will only get more difficult over time as Republicans grow increasingly terrified of the existence of trans folks.
Anyway, yeah, moral of this story is, this is why some people are so vocal and up in arms about data privacy issues and laws, be careful who you give your data to because it can and will be used against you to great effect by multiple prongs of malicious actors, change your passwords frequently and for the love of god don’t give out your SSN unless it’s absolutely required and you know for a fact it’s going directly to a governmental agency.
I usually don’t go around giving my number, except to major services like Google, for MFA. I recently removed that though, I have hardware tokens… But I guess it’s too late now.
And yeha, the last place I’d put my phone number would be a porn site, so that was my surprise. I thought maybe these sites had malware that tried to gather data from insecure cookies or something, but it would be pretty weird for a service like Google to add a phone number in a insecure cookie or local storage
Blocking spoofing isn’t as simple as you might think. A LOT of legitimate phone traffic uses spoofing for VOIP calling.
In fact, back in 2005 the Madison River Telephone company (CenturyLink) tried blocking outgoing Vonage calls citing the CID spoofing, and the FCC stepped in and required that they allow it. It was the first real Net Neutrality ruling.
Oh, it’s not gonna be just robocall stuff. It’s gonna be a full-on inundation of deepfake videos, and they’re going to be pushing from one side way harder than the other.
Also, it allows you to say whatever you want and then claim it was a deep fake if someone calls you out. E.g. Roger Stone calling for the murder of Eric Stalwell and Jerry Nadler.
Or it’s North Korea.
It starts… This will be the year to decide if we can have functioning information systems and safe, democratic elections in the emerging age of easy AI manipulation.
It’s a bad sign that there are no widely, commercially available free tools (from governments or otherwise) to help us confirm the validity of these things. We likely need something as ubiquitous as “googling” to stand against the incoming avalanche of truly fake information.
There will be elections across the globe this year to truly test humanity. I’m hopeful, but I fear we aren’t close to ready. Think about what you would do if you suspected a political manipulation was AI generated today? That’s one aspect, and you’re on Lemmy so you’re likely a bit more capable with technology generally (and you probably still don’t know what to do). Now, think about your grandmother in Milwaukee… what will she do?
See when I asked my lawyer friend if we could do something like this to suppress Republican votes she said it would be multiple kinds of illegal! I guess I didn’t ask enough about “would I be caught and punished?”
These traitors should be prosecuted just like Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman did when they did the same type of traitorous bullshit.
But with actual jail this time, right?
One would dream but highly doubtful. Still having that conviction on their record is good to mark them as traitors.
According to Wikipedia they didn’t even get jail time. Weak sauce.
It’s unlikely that it’s a United States citizen making these robocalls. Anyone stupid enough to break multiple federal and state laws doing this would be indoctrinated enough to think Trump would win without their help.
My money is on foreign interference.
Meanwhile James O’Keefe is still walking free
Ironic how the reverse will never happen. Only the right-wing benefit from less people voting. It’s such a shit asymmetry.
Ironically, past examples actually give Republicans an edge when more people vote. When people who don’t normally follow or discuss politics vote, they’re more likely to vote GOP than an educated person.
But yes, a Democrat is less likely to break federal laws in general, such as a stunt like this.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
MANCHESTER, N.H. — A prominent New Hampshire Democrat plans to file a complaint with the state attorney general over an apparent robocall that appears to encourage supporters of President Joe Biden not to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary.
Biden’s name does not appear on Tuesday’s ballot, a consequence of state elections officials setting the date of the primary ahead of South Carolina’s on Feb. 3, the first sanctioned contest of the 2024 nominating race under new Democratic National Committee rules.
“I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible because this is an attack on democracy,” said Sullivan, an attorney, who believes the call could violate several laws.
She said she also plans to engage federal law enforcement in addition to the state attorney general’s office.
Sullivan served as party chair in 2002, when a so-called phone-jamming effort was carried out during a hotly contested U.S. Senate race.
The Biden campaign, which says it is not involved in the write-in effort in New Hampshire, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The original article contains 621 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is some nasty work. I didn’t factor in AI being used like this.
Nice and legal!
END ROBOCALLS
Someone should do this for Trump - his dumbass supporters would probably fall for it.
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