This long pedantic post will not be for everybody. It is for people here who might one day want to create their own website, be it a news aggregator, a promotional page for something they are doing, or even an online store to sell stuff.
I believe it was Country star Cary Kembla who wanted to get up a page for his Music Career (I still owe him a plug in the brief and have not forgotten). Regardless, being able to publish online is an important skill in these days of information warfare. I want to do a short piece, not so much a how to, but simply a demystifier, so anyone who might be interested understands just how simple it is.
First, probably a word on strategy for this type of page, since some may want to run an aggregator. Given we are in an information war against Cabal – probably the most powerful and wealthy entity on the planet – you have to view our side as the guerillas. As in guerilla warfare, we have advantages and disadvantages. They are big and we are small, but we can adapt quickly, and exploit strengths better, and moreover, we have personality, while they are big lumbering, and exist as faceless automatons.
In ten years, RedState will be doing the exact same thing, and you won’t be able to name any of the writers, just like now. But Vox Day, Texas Arcane, and even I have a personality you know. And Vox Day has already branched out through everything from authoring, to book publishing, to comics, to book sales, to videogame production, to Infogalactic, to essentially a cable network.
Even here, I began promoting r/K. I was stupid, and my strategy was moronic by today’s standards. I thought I could let everyone know about r/K and if Gangnam Style could go viral, surely r/K could pick up in politics. I had never done this before, and obviously I knew nothing of Cabal, or how controlled the political media is. When that appeared to stall out, I segued into what I knew with psychology, and began doing periodic political blogs mixing politics, psychology, and r/K. Then I saw the surveillance, and dove into that. I realized to oppose that I needed to broaden my strategy, expand my reader base, and to do that, I needed to become more useful to people. So I pivoted again into news aggregation, and did so far more aggressively.
News aggregation is true guerilla information warfare, in that the enemy is wealthy and has resources to burn. But their strategy is saturation. They want numerous outlets, flooding the zone with places to go, to drown out the little upstarts. But that means they have to spread out their scoops, to keep all their myriad of controlled outlets equally relevant, so no one would dominate, and risk one day losing its viewership suddenly to an upstart. So even as they have resources to burn, they have to spread them out.
Once those resources were made public as stories, the fact there was a story here, and another there, became stories themselves, and they were like rifles left on the battlefield. Meaningless to something as big as Cabal’s massive army, but invaluable to a guerilla in an information war.
By forming an aggregator, it was possible to use Cabal’s very resource expenditures to create a superior product. No videos of me droning on to waste your time, no long drawn out articles which take fifteen minutes to say what could have been said in a sentence. No clickbait headlines that fail to deliver after you’ve gone to the page. No needing to visit ten websites a day to find which one Cabal put the scoop on that day. Just short headlines summarizing an article with the link so you could find it, and all on one page so you can skim through it quick for what you want.
I don’t do the news stories, Cabal does that, spending millions on comped assets all over, scouring the globe for them, and pumping Cabal’s network of sources and informants. The story I deliver is where the stories are, and I give you enough to decide if you are interested in going there to read them. That is a work product which has value, and is useful to people, and which you can’t find anywhere else. In that way, I feel like I am strengthening our movement by freeing up other people’s time to wage the wars they are waging.
Vox Day has a lot of stuff to do in the culture war – and he runs a blog on the side. If he is pressed for time, he can swing by and in 15 minutes see pretty much everything interesting on the web that day, and that frees him up to do more important stuff in publishing or Arkhaven. It is my hope lots of other people will do that. I put this shit here to be taken, so it is useful.
And best of all, I am uncomped, so I can talk about anything. You will see it all here. And I even know a little bit about science, so you can get an honest opinion in an area that is increasingly important today. All of that builds audience, which builds power, and that is how you fight in this information war. At some point the readership here will be big enough to move the needle. And then we can begin to be a real pain in the ass. But that was only possible because we were small enough to pivot in real time.
So if you ever jump in and do this, strive to be useful, and pivot until you find that usefulness. Make your time save other people time, and make their visit worthwhile. And then do it constantly, so people get in the habit of stopping by. It is a pain. You will be awful in the beginning. Everyone is because you need to learn this by doing it. But you will get better. You don’t get a vacation, because it is all you. But over time you can simulate what it costs Cabal millions of dollars to produce. I am sure it drives them nuts.
According to SimilarWeb, TheGatewayPundit generates about $10-15 million per year in revenue for 74 million pages per month, most of which I assume gets spent on the staff or overhead, if anything is believable (which is doubtful). But regardless, I think in probably a fifth the time, you are ten times as informed here, whatever it is he spends. Over time, I expect that will show in traffic, though I will be surprised if I end up with 32 million pageviews per month.
And strictly speaking I think I could do this for probably $500 per year on average, not counting computers and home hardware/internet/etc, although there would be more periodic crashes. I’ve had to buy extra features to support the traffic, but I could have done without them and just endured the down time. There are more costs in IRL security cameras, travel cameras, backup power systems, and other stuff, given the surveillance showing up in force. But still, you can do a site on a shoestring which can compete with the most impressive sites out there for a few thousand per year.
The downside is I do not think you could make a living at it. I will try at some point soon to see what revenue a site like this would get, and if we could afford employees. I don’t want to discourage people unnecessarily. But American Thinker has $15-25 million in revenue, supposedly, for 13 million pageviews.
I’ve got a 50th the page views of them by similarweb’s analysis (a fraction of what my site logs say, but whatever) (And I have probably a larger percentage of viewers because I post one page per day, so I get one visit per most viewers, whereas they post multiple articles multiple times per day, by multiple writers, and probably gets multiple hits on multiple pages from returning visitors looking for new content throughout the day).
But even as much as I personally click with the readers here, I seriously doubt I would bring in a 50th of their revenue, let alone more. A 50th of $15-25 million would be $300,000-$500,ooo, assuming I only have a 50th the readership, and I probably have a lot more.
I don’t know where their money comes from, but I do not think it would be available to you if you did this. And bear in mind, I have been at this a decade now, a lot of people heard about the site from r/K, we talk about the most interesting stuff here, and I think the brief is a high quality product. It is difficult to get enough viewers to make a living at this.
The point being, don’t quit a profitable job to do this, or think this is a better option than just about anything else for making a living. Do this to wage war with time you can spare. Don’t try to emulate these multimillionaire website operators, and think if you can break off a 100th, or a 1000th their salary you will be fine. It doesn’t work like that.
Now the nuts and bolts. I did this a little differently, and it was much more expensive, but if I were doing it today, this is how I would do it.
First decide if you need to be anonymous. Some may not, and anonymity costs a decent amount of time and money.
If you want to be truly anonymous, you can find a host which takes crypto, though that can be complex as I understand it since sometimes wallet transactions can be tracked, and you would need to know what you are doing. I don’t, so if you want to do that, you will need to do your own research.
More easily, if you require anonymity, find one of the lawyers online who sells premade corporations for a few hundred dollars.
You will need a mailing address for the corporation, so get a mailbox. It will not protect you from Cabal, but your goal here is to simply hide yourself enough that regular people can’t find you. Cabal will be hesitant to do anything if doing it will reveal somebody was spying on you illegally to find out who you were.
Then go to Bank of America (the easiest place to do this in my experience), and fill out their online forms to get a corporate bank account. You should get a debit card with that which you can use, or you can get a company credit card. Make sure your name is not on the card. Make up a company employee name if need be and put it on the card. Banks don’t care with corporate accounts.
If you really want to detach yourself from the site, get a VPN to hide where you are connecting to the site from, from the site’s logs in the event you get hacked. You will use it for a lot of different things, so keep it on. Every time you click a link, you tell the site you are heading to where you came from and your IP, so you will want to have it on all the time.
Get a cheap cell phone and plan for it, from a pay as you go cell service provider using the company card and company info. You are going to need the phone at some point to verify something. Try not to use it for anything else.
From there you will need to spend some time searching the internet and comparing hosting deals. Find a host which offers WordPress blogging software installed on their server, and make sure they throw in a domain for free. Most do.
Hosting plus domain can be as cheap as $20 dollars per year for the first year. Check what subsequent years will cost, because all hosts will jack that up for subsequent years, some more than others. $100 per year sounds about right for the shared hosting plan you are looking at. Ipage is a pretty big name, but you may find better deals elsewhere. I haven’t really been looking, and am not an expert.
Once you settle on a host, you will pay with the company card. Use the company’s data for everything they ask about you, do not use your name or your address or your phone for anything associated with the site. Get privacy features on the domain to boot, so they will hide the company in the domain records. Obviously if you don’t need all this privacy stuff, it is even simpler, but still get privacy on your domain.
Then choose your domain, which is the www.yourdomain.com address. After you choose your domain, your site will have a master page you will see when you log in with the password and username they give you for your account.
Procedures may vary from account to account, but here is what you would see at the host Ipage, and what you would do. Even if you have no idea what you are doing, follow their instructions. It will work out.
Once you click “manage your site,” you will end up on the Dashboard of WordPress which is the back end. It looks like this (click for full size) :
In that picture you can’t see the mouse because it is a screenshot, but I was mousing over “Appearance,” in the menu on the left which opens up the submenu. It will take you a week of playing with all those buttons, but you will figure it out. Your host will have set up pages explaining it all and they will offer email support as well if you have any questions, which everybody does.
As you experiment with each page, you will see how it changes your site. You will test different themes, which put different colors and text placements on your page. You can put different things in your sidebar, like I have on the right here, and you can even move the sidebar to the left, or eliminate it altogether. You can experiment with different banner images like I have above with our God Emperor and everyone else laughing at the idea of Biden-Harris. Nobody taught me this, I did it all by trial and error, and you will too. Everybody does.
Once the site looks roughly like you want it (you will change it again and again over time), you can click the “New” button at the top to post your first post. That will open the new post page, which is self explanatory:
You put your title, and you write your post. Where you want a link, you just copy the link to your clipboard, highlight the text you want to be the link, and past the address over it, and the page will automatically make it a link. Want something in blockquotes like below?
Highlight what you want in the blockquote like this text, and then click the quotation mark button above the box for the body, and it will look like this.
You will learn it quick as you do it.
If you want to sell stuff, you would then install the WooCommerce plugin by clicking the plugin button on the lefthand side, then clicking Add New, and searching for it in the search box. Click on it, click install, and it will install itself. It will then adapt WordPress to sell items. A tutorial is here when you are ready.
Taking payments is similarly simple. Open an account at GiveSendGo, and fill out the forms. Paypal is similarly simple, though less reliable if you are going to do something on the right. Use your company info, and bank account. They will give you a little paragraph of code to paste into a page on your site, and it will produce all the buttons and forms for accepting credit card donations on your site wherever you put it. They will deliver the funds to your corporate bank account, without you even doing anything.
If you want Crypto donations, that is more complicated, but in a nutshell, you need to download and install wallet software on your computer, like Electrum. Or if you want Monero, MoneroGui. Or you need to buy a hardware wallet, like Trezor or Ledger, and follow the instructions to set whatever you got up and that will get you an address, which you then post for people to send crypto to. Google the terms for more info.
A more complicated option, but much more anonymous is BTCPay software, but that will require another hosting account. Google BTCPay Lunanode for the easiest way to do that. Depending on how many different types of crypto you want to accept you want, it will range from about $10 per month to $25 or 30 for a basic setup.
Google the terms above, and you will find articles for beginners to walk you through it all of it. And you don’t really have to understand it to do it. I am just about there, and I still have only the vaguest idea how it all works. But you can, in essence, paint by the numbers by following the tutorials step by step and make what needs to happen happen, even if you don’t fully understand it.
Now there are probably free hosts out there, but you will be giving up control. Here, you will basically own your own little piece of the internet. Nobody can kick you off, save maybe the host, but that rarely happens, unless you are engaging in crimes.
Once you are set up you just have to get the word out to other people. It takes time, but if you stick with it and have a quality product over time readers will come.
The main message is anybody can do this, and it is an incredibly powerful skill. Whether you are promoting a business, or just shitposting memes, there is a reason these Cabal websites are being given millions of dollars to occupy space online. That space is valuable because it has power. Don’t be afraid to get a little for yourself.
As always you can post questions on this anywhere you want, and I will be happy to help.
AC, where I see value in your news briefs (I’ve read every one since you started) is in themes and commentary. While you occasionally get around to a story that already made the rounds on Telegram 2-3 days ago, you collect many stories together and occasionally I can get a picture of a greater theme going on. There is much value in that.
I wish I had known about some protective measures when I started my site. I took out a domain under my own name in the hopes of “branding”, but I don’t use it much. I keep getting email and phone calls from people trying to sell me web development services. When I try to engage with them, they don’t seem to understand that a personal blog doesn’t mean I want to pay people to code on it. I have a website, so obviously I have a large business and need many independent coders. Assholes. I hate people. I block calls from people not in my contacts, and ignore everything else, but occasionally things get through.
I’ve been afraid to use my site much since 2015 when “conservatives” started getting banned and deplatformed.
You can restart from scratch, divorced from your past site. I’m happy to link in and give it a boost from the beginning.
This is priceless information. Thank you.
I add that if you want a completely anonymous web site that can be run from your home computer without anyone knowing where that is I2P software has an anonymous network with a web site built in it. You just drop your website data in a folder that you specify and register the address. Of course I2P has minimal traffic so people are not going to land on it from the internet because it’s separate but it might be worth it as some sort of backup.
“…If you really want to detach yourself from the site, get a VPN to hide where you are connecting to the site from, from the site’s logs in the event you get hacked. You will use it for a lot of different things, so keep it on. Every time you click a link, you tell the site you are heading to where you came from and your IP, so you will want to have it on all the time…”
You might could use Tor for this which a pre-built Firefox browser that goes through many hops, each encrypted to reach a site. Some sites will not accept links from Tor as the Tor hops are public and they block them.
https://www.torproject.org/
Another alternative is to download a portable Firefox. By using it only for business, the only addresses in its cache will be those related to the web site or business. Of course you can set it up to “supposedly” clear these every time it closes but…who knows what they are really doing.
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
Good point.
This is not about web sites but I found an answer to something that has greatly puzzled me. Just how in the world did Putin ever get into the position he is in.
This is from Martin Armstrong who really knows a tremendous amount of stuff. The short of it is that Yeltsin was tricked into sending IMF money to banksters then blackmailed not to run for office and to put their man, Borris Berezovsky in. From the site,
“…I believe it was Hillary who turned a blind eye to the Bankers given them the nod to take over Russia. The takeover was orchestrated by Edmond Safra of Republic National Bank based upon reliable information and belief. They convinced Yeltsin to take $7 billion from the IMF loans and to wire it to Geneva via the Bank of New York. Even CNN reported on September 1st, 1999 that the money was stolen from the IMF loans.
As soon as the wire took place, Republic National Bank ran to the Department of Justice and reported that Bank of New York had just engaged in money laundering. This was laid out in the Documentary funded by the German TV Station which ended up being banned in the USA. Netflix wanted the film and then someone called them and stopped it from being viewed. It is on Amazon Prime, but only for those outside the USA.
Once Republic National Bank ran to the DOJ, that is when they blackmailed Yeltsin to not run in 2000 and appoint their buddy, Borris Berezovsky. Once Yeltsin realized he was set up by New York Bankers, he turned to Putin and made his heir in August 1999…”
Read the whole thing it covers a good deal of why Hillary is involved in trying to tie Trump to Putin and why they hate Putin. notice the Russians when they were double-crossed ended up killing all the people they could that were involved.
I’m reminded of the time that a Russian agent was kidnapped in Lebanon around the same time a General of ours was kidnapped. We wrung our hands. The Russians kidnapped the children of the kidnappers and started cutting pieces off of them and sending them to the kidnappers in the mail, They let the Russians go.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/rule-of-law/durham-is-only-scratching-the-surface-of-hillary/
Thanks for posting this.
When you cross the Russians, they get even in the most gruesome way imaginable.
There was a news story reported in the American and European media during the first Chechen war, in which the Russians finally caught a Chechen rebel who had been torturing Russian soldiers.
The Russians cut the rebel’s head off and mailed it to his mother in a gift box. This was corroborated by an author working in Chechnya after the war.
Those kind of direct actions earned the Russians much fear and respect from their foes.
What WP plug-in do you use that lets you see how often a person visits your site? I remember a few years back you shut down a troll this way, mocking him for refreshing the page frequently because he so badly wanted to see his comment published.
Or is this something WP logs already and you have to check it manually?
I don’t recall that here. If I accused somebody of refreshing the site to see their comment, I was assuming they did it. There may be a plugin for that, and somebody else had it. When you go the the plugin page and search, you are searching a sea of plugins that can do almost anything. All you have to do is click install, and it is up and running.
Plugins that have security like Scuri and Wordfence will log visits.
Thanks anon
I remember that. I think the troll came on to accuse AC if being a Qtard and AC responded very coolly, analysing the mentality of someone who feels impelled to harass others. The troll f*cked off, I got the feeling AC had blog stats showing the visitor’s clicks, and the troll was rattled.
I use a free statcounter thing on my (now defunct) WordPress blog, and it shows quite a lot about visitor activity. It wouldn’t show if someone is refreshing every few seconds but it might show e.g. 18 page views from one person in a 2 minute timeframe, from which you can guess it’s someone just refreshing the page. In some cases, they may be paid to spend time on dissident blogs and so go to defunct blogs, refresh the page 18 times, and can then report it as worktime.
What it might have been was be was coming back and posting comments every few minutes, and that was what I saw.
It’s okay if you forget. Just wanted to say that I don’t believe it was this. You had such a grasp of how frequently this person visited that it blew my mind. It has made me careful to not refresh too much in the years since, wary of arousing your suspicions.
I’ve got to admit, I don’t know if it is the vibrations/emf/high-pitched-shit, or just my brain maladapting to my main intellectual activity for several hours each day being rushing through vast streams of wholly new data and trying to tease out a brief from it while cleanly purging everything from yesterday to clear the deck, but what you say sounds so familiar, but I cannot recall it.
Interesting. A school for Truth tellers. Thanks AC.
Thank you very much for this.
You are welcome. As always, I have walked this path, so I know a bit about it. Nobody be shy with questions.
“No videos of me droning on to waste your time, no long drawn out articles which take fifteen minutes to say what could have been said in a sentence. ”
This is so important. Far, far too many people are far too verbose. There’s a few people who frequent your comments who post “comments” that are upwards of 10 paragraphs. For you guys who do this, please note that I NEVER read your comments. I scroll right by them. If you do want them read either go for brevity or at the very least have a two to three sentence summary at the top of your post explaining what kind of point you’re trying to make.
For video: way too many people just hitting record and mumbling out meandering bullshit. I don’t think that these people have any idea how challenging it is to get people to watch a 5 minute video to completion. It needs to be stellar content to hold attention of more than half of your audience that long. And these people just hit record and start meandering and babble for 30 minutes.
The heart of good writing is editing and brevity.
Guys like Sean at SGT Report and Dave at x22 can push outwards to an hour long, but both of those guys are SERIOUS professionals with high quality voices and writing skills. And even for those guys I’d recommend: keep it under 20 minutes.
Sometimes I think Cabal is hiring the video people and trying to push people to video to diminish how much truth people can run into. I have rarely seen a 30 minute video I could not condense into five or six major points, and three paragraphs.
This is not a time where you can get the truth about what is going on by seeing two significant data points in a twenty minute video a few times a day. There is so much lying, misdirecting, bad intel, and more to lead you astray you need like a few thousand datapoints over week to try and figure out which themes are popping up the most, and what is most likely right and what is wrong, and even then it is difficult to know the truth.
Oh, I’m utterly convinced that the JFK Jr people and many of the Nesara/Gesara people, as well as the people rambling about “clones”, secret arrests, nationwide underground tunnels (hint: all the human traffic is going on right in front of our faces at airports, train stations, etc.)
Post industrial Revolution everyone is pressed for time and needs something snappy. Pre industrial revolution, everyone tries to kill time. Romans and sometimes Chinese are fairly succinct, but they both got closed to IR.
As I understand it, the terse and epigrammatic quality of early Chinese writers came from the expense of the way they produced books. So they had to learn to say as much in as few words as possible.
When you think about it, it’s downright amazing that Plato’s Dialogues were as long and rich as they were. It must have been tremendously expensive to hand copy such works. And yet, in order for them to make their way to us, they must have made quite a few copies. And people must have paid a lot of money for their own.
“I don’t know where their money comes from, but I do not think it would be available to you if you did this.”
I’m quite sure if any real anti-Cabal voices started to bring in enough money to begin hiring people that they’d run into all kinds of unexpected friction.
Don’t get into this thinking you can be telling the truth and making big money.
>I don’t know where their money comes from,
—
Sure you do. It comes from ad clicks. Their paymasters set up an ad server – most of the web ad companies are already shady and secretive – and run some ads only a retard would click on. The “advertising company” claims whatever number of clicks needed to add up to the required funds, which are transferred to the host site.
There probably aren’t many levels of indirection above the ad server; mighty Google itself has crushed any attempts at accounting and transparency, and the little fish school under its penumbra. The whole subject is an “ask no questions” zone; lots of big players, and nobody wants the boat rocked.
Ad clicks, NFTs, “art”, “intellectual property”, and more are common vehicles for moving money around.
Oh, fantastic article, and thanks!
A while back i came across a website called itty.bitty.site which allows visitors to enter text or html into it, which the site then compresses into a string of characters in a url – so then if you load that url up, the site can decompress the url itself into the original text or html entered and render it as a web page.
I thought the idea was really neat for a few reasons and experimented with creating a blog based entirely on it and on link shortening websites like tinyurl. Here’s the blog post i wrote about the blog itself: https://kutt.it/kv1experimental
I used a lua script to turn markdown into html, so i just write a page in markdown, run the script, and it generates the html to dump into itty.bitty.site. At the time it turned out that I didn’t have the drive or focus to maintain a blog when other things vied for my attention and energy, so the blog has had no development beyond two posts. But maybe the idea could still be of use to someone here.
Main benefit, imo, is that once someone clicks a link to the post, everything needed to recreate the post is now contained in their browser’s history – and if they bookmark it then that’s even more secure against censorship. So the readers themselves create a decentralized backup of the site’s contents. It’s also free. It also doesn’t require much skill if you only want to do text and not html entry.
Main downsides are: requires you to run a javascript to read (and all of the risks that entails), depends on itty.bitty.site itself to host that decompression script for readers, depends on link shortener services (or a domain name service) if you want to link to other pages of the site from within the site itself (and depending on how large the text is, some link shorteners will not accept the url – tinyurl seems the most forgiving here). Also, commenting would depend on an external service, like gab or socialgalactic, etc.
That sounds absolutely brilliant.
Thank you, you made the prospect much less daunting.
This is my go to site. You and I communicated once regarding a legal matter. Maybe you recall…anyway, you do a great job, I share a lot of what I read here. You are often so far ahead of the curve most folks I share stories with cannot grasp it. I am a fairly normal patriot – support Trump, follow the news closely, trust no MSM outlet. And yet, I am not averse to wild conspiracies being true. Why? Many are. Gangstalking is real. Most people cannot see that. It is merely one thing. Many, many more that if people only knew…they would never get out of bed. I have a question: You can answer here or in an email (wdw@***********.com) – you likely have been asked this over and over. How do you support yourself and this site w/o advertising? It is one of the things I like but wonder how you do it. – thanks, Veritas
I re-read this article – mnot sure I see how you are getting paid…maybe I am obtuse. Donations? Like Weasel Zippers ? (Although Drew advertises as well)
Right now, no pay for this beyond some who stop by getting curious about the book. In the future I will try donations, and maybe even advertising, but for now it is a labor of love.
This is really needed, so thanks.
I am just a commentator, not a blogger. If I were a blogger, I would just assume I could not make money off this and post what I thought or low effort medium effectiveness things.
Regarding VPNs:
I have experience with Enterprise grade firewalls and managed VPN clients for large organizations. The level of visibility into what you do on the VPN is high. IP, Port, Protocol, Packet Capturing, Application Recognition (Next Gen Firewalls inspect the traffic to identify what it is: Bittorrent, HTTPS, etc.). Most can recognize 2000+ unique applications. With the right equipment these devices are also looking into the URLs you are visiting. Either with a firewall or a forward proxy. Then, you have the DNS logging. When you join the tunnel, it’s probably a full tunnel (tunnel) vs. a split tunnel (local and tunnel). The tunnel gives you an IP and DNS servers, so you are giving them all of the domains you are visiting.
Log data is expensive to keep, but the log data that exists can be easily correlated (Splunk/ELK,Etc.) together assuming the operator has access to the network devices.
You need to have a lot of trust in VPN provider to not be logging the data.
Also, keep in mind the VPN provider is CONCENTRATING TRAFFIC (Centralizing Power).
Recommendations:
Use Host Files / Run your own local DNS server (that doesn’t perform external queries). This has the benefit of keeping your local home network domain queries INSIDE your home network vs. being broadcast to your ISP DNS or worse Public (FREE) DNS (ie: Google DNS).
Use encrypted website traffic (preferrably TLS 1.3). Newer TLS versions use session keys vs. the static (public/private).
VPNing through another VPN is a viable alternative, or switch your provider more often.
I wrote this in November and December 2020, and tried to get this to the people I thought needed to see it. It was blocked by Cabal, and misused by them.
The patents may be hacked to change them to not match what I wrote about them, but everything I wrote was true when I wrote it.
[Edited]
I hate to be a pain, but is it possible to do this as a text file, rather than a google drive link? I don’t know enough about computers to know if this is a legit post from the real Brickbat, or some sort of hack from somebody following this site who knows there was a brickbat poster, but he hasn’t posted in a while.
It’s the same person. Here is a link to the Google Document itself: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TBvC_soqMfrsHQf_B69P8aAN_bwGVt9wzRm7LZ5q09M/edit?usp=sharing
And here it is as HTML:
Analysis of the Dominion–HSBC patents
Introduction
This document attempts to summarize each of the patents listed in the Dominion–HSBC collateral agreement, in terms that a reader who is neither skilled in the computer sciences nor experienced in studying patents can understand.
As is standard practice in discussions of patents, once a patent number has been written out in full, subsequent references will use only the last three digits. For example, Dominion’s patent US 9,870,666 would be referred to as “the ‘666 patent”.
Each patent contains both a description of an invention and a list of “claims”. The description is required by law to disclose enough information about the patented invention that a person of ordinary skill in the art can “practice” the invention, according to the inventor’s understanding of how the invention should best be practiced at the time that the patent application was filed. Each claim in the patent should contain a terse description of the essential features of the invention; an invention is “covered” by a patent if any of the claims can be construed to describe it.
Further general information about patents is provided in the “About patents” section below.
Patents can often be grouped into “patent families”, whose members all derive from a single patent application. The Dominion–HSBC list contains five patent families, listed in full in a later section.
Major findings by patent
Where the described or claimed inventions would or could violate either of the two Federal election statutes 52 USC § 20702 or 52 USC § 21081, I have noted that here, and provided an explanatory note in the section for that patent below. 52 USC § 20702 carries a criminal penalty of a fine of up to $1,000 and/or imprisonment for not more than one year. Violations of the requirements in 52 USC § 21081 may only be addressed by civil action; see 52 USC § 21111.
The patent family deriving from CA 2,466,466 contains two major features:
Each marking area on a ballot is interpreted as being in one of the three states ‘not marked’, ‘ambiguous’, or ‘marked’, with two different configurable thresholds between the three possible states. When a ballot contains one or more marking areas deemed ‘ambiguous’, that is to be reported in some way.
When a ballot is scanned, the machine’s interpretation of the ballot is to be stored as image data in the same file as the scanned image of the ballot itself, and also tabulated as a vote by incrementing a set of internal counters. Election officials are told to perform an “audit” on the machine’s tabulation of votes by looking at each ballot image file with a standard image viewer and checking that the interpretation written into the “vote stamp” matches the image of the ballot.
The “vote stamp” is not meant to be readable by other software, and the invention as described in the patent makes no provision for any audit of whether the sum of the votes represented in each ballot’s “vote stamp” are accurately represented by the values left in the internal counters at the end of the scanning process, which are reported as the official election results, and which any audit process worthy of the name should focus on.
The patent also uses the terms “audit trail”, “fingerprint”, and “watermark”, which had standard definitions in the field of computer security at the time that the original patent application was filed, as alternate names for the “vote stamp” image, which does not fit the standard definition of any of those terms.
This patent’s use of the terms “audit”, “audit trail”, “fingerprint”, and “watermark” were deceptive. In my opinion, as a person skilled in the art of computer security, these terms were deliberately chosen and misused to deceive election officials, as well as other persons concerned about the security and legitimacy of the election process.
The patent family deriving from US 8,913,787, covering “ballot adjudication”, contains one essential feature: The scanned image of a ballot on which one or more votes are chosen to be “adjudicated” is sent to one or more election officials for review; the election officials decide which selections the voter intended to choose; and then the officials’ decision is both tabulated by incrementing counters and written into the ballot image file, similarly to the “vote stamp”.
As in the ‘466 patent’s family, there is no machine-readable record of which counters were incremented for each ballot; there is no possibility to audit the counter values which are reported as the official election results.
Each ballot image file in a Federal election constitutes a “record” as defined by 52 USC § 20701. By the fundamental design of Dominion’s “adjudication” process, every person who serves as an adjudicator in a voting system covered by the ‘787 patent or its continuation, US 9,202,113, alters election records in violation of 52 USC § 20702.
The patent family deriving from US 7,111,782, covering certain Direct-Recording Electronic voting systems, contains three noteworthy features: The machine can move the printed record back and forth under a window which does not show the whole record at once, the machine can move the printed record of a vote back to the printer head to print “VOID” on it, and the machine can print an authentication code which can invalidate the voter’s ballot and cannot be checked by a human voter. Each of these features violates 52 USC § 21081; the ability to move a printed record back to the printer head also enables the machine to violate 52 USC § 20702. However, these patents’ claims are drafted broadly enough that it is possible for a machine to be covered by them without necessarily violating those statutes.
The patent US 8,844,813 covers “correction” of a voter-marked paper ballot by a ballot-scanning machine. Every machine covered by this patent violates 52 USC § 21081; if the machine contains a printer, then it is also capable of violating 52 USC § 20702.
The patent family deriving from U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/193,062 is a hodge-podge of separate features:
US 8,714,450 covers systems which print a unique “transaction code” on each ballot as it is scanned, and which refuse to count a ballot unless its transaction code can be verified with records stored in the voting machine. In theory, it may be possible for a system covered only by the independent claims of this patent to comply with Federal election laws; in practice, the system Dominion wrote this patent to cover violates 52 USC § 21081.
In addition, the patent proposes that the machine print “invalid” on ballots which it rejects; this violates 52 USC § 20702 as well.
US 8,864,026 covers various uses of two different image-processing features, with and without features that print on ballots as they are scanned. As with the ‘450 patent, this patent is broad enough to cover ballot-scanning systems which are lawful for use in Federal elections, but Dominion’s own system which this patent was meant to cover prints alterations on ballots, similarly to the ‘813 patent, in violation of 52 USC § 21081.
US 8,876,002 covers voting machines which have a “hardware interlock” which allegedly prevents network communication with the machine “while maintaining a physical network connection”. Claim 1 of this patent also requires that the machine have a wireless network interface; for a wireless interface, “maintaining a physical network connection” as described means that the radio and wireless chipset remain powered on and transmit and receive data, even while the “hardware interlock” is set to disconnect the machine from the network.
There is no legitimate reason to leave a voting machine’s wireless interface powered on and allow it to “maintain[] a physical network connection” while the machine is meant to be disconnected from networks. Given the patent’s description, I believe that the internal connection between the wireless interface chipset and the voting machine’s main processor remains operational at all times as well, even when the machine is supposed to be disconnected from the network.
An additional feature documented in this patent is capable of remotely sending a command to the voting machine to cause it to erase its “results cartridge”, potentially in violation of 52 USC § 20702.
US 8,910,865 covers the use of digital signatures printed on a ballot to determine whether it should be counted. These marks cannot be verified by the voter or by any manual audit process, in violation of 52 USC § 21081.
About the “AuditMark” feature
Dominion’s “AuditMark” feature, covered by the ‘466 and ‘787 patents and their continuations, deserves special attention. The patents refer to this “AuditMark” as the “vote stamp”, which is an image showing the ballot-counting machine’s interpretation of a ballot’s markings.
The Dominion patents declare that writing the interpretation of a ballot into the ballot image itself, in the form of image data, has the benefit that the ballot and its interpretation can be read “by any software image viewer” (e.g. US 9,870,666, column 7, lines 21 through 25). The problem with this feature is that what is written into the image is separate from any machine-readable interpretation data that could be used by subsequent processing. What the users are shown when they try to audit the ballot-counting process is entirely separate from what is actually counted.
Even though a human can read the “vote stamp” image, the vote stamp cannot easily be read by any computer program; in fact, reading this data out of the vote stamp back into a program to count the votes is a more difficult problem than reading the voter’s own markings directly out of the image of the scanned ballot.
The patents state that the ballot-counting machine increments one or more internal counters at the same time that it generates the “vote stamp”. There is no mention of storing the machine’s interpretation of a ballot in a machine-readable form embedded in or associated with each ballot file.
If Dominion’s ballot-counting machines do store each ballot’s interpretation separately in machine-readable form, then their instruction to use “any software image viewer” to verify only the “vote stamp” image leaves the machine-readable interpretation data which actually contributes to the officially tabulated vote count unaudited. If their machines do not store each ballot’s interpretation in machine-readable form, then there is no way to audit the tabulated vote count short of manually reviewing every ballot and counting the results by hand.
As a software developer, I am familiar with good programming practices, and Dominion’s “vote stamp” or “AuditMark” feature is contrary to what any honest, competent programmer would do.
To allow a critical piece of information, such as the tabulated vote count, to be easily verified, it is standard practice to store each set of values to be accumulated into the overall count in machine-readable form, and then to have the simplest possible computer program read those values and add them together.
I consider the internal, machine-readable form of each ballot’s interpretation to be a Federal election record subject to 52 USC § 20701 and § 20702 in itself. Failure to preserve this machine-readable record in its original form, or in an equivalently useful machine-readable form, should be prosecuted under 52 USC § 20702.
To prevent bugs, it is standard practice to store each piece of information in only one place whenever possible; this rule is so widely known that it has several abbreviations, including DRY (for “Don’t Repeat Yourself”) and the SPOT rule (for “Single Point Of Truth”). If a ballot’s interpretation is stored in machine-readable form associated with the individual ballot, then storing an additional copy as image data is a violation of this rule. Instructing users to “audit” an extraneous copy of this critical piece of information which cannot be used in any further processing, rather than verifying machine-readable data that would actually be used, is inexcusable.
When these violations of good programming practices are combined with Dominion’s misleading use of the terms “audit trail”, “watermark”, “audit”, and “fingerprint” to describe the “AuditMark” feature, each of which had well-established, standard definitions at the time, incompatible with what Dominion’s patents used the terms to refer to, I believe that the “AuditMark” feature was deliberately designed with the intent to deceive both election officials and the general public.
Dominion’s “AuditMark” feature as applied to their “ballot adjudication” process has the further problem that it operates by modifying the ballot image file after it is initially produced by the ballot-scanning machine. Each ballot image file is indisputably a Federal election record subject to 52 USC § 20701, and every act of ballot adjudication, by design, alters one of these records in violation of 52 USC § 20702.
About patents
U.S. statute (35 USC § 112 and § 113) requires that every (non-provisional) patent application contain the following:
A specification, containing a description of the invention, and of the “best mode … of carrying out the invention”. By statute, this must be “in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms” that any person of ordinary skill in the field can make and use the invention.
The conclusion of the specification must consist of a list of “claims”, each of which describes the new invention as distinguished from the prior art.
When one or more drawings can be useful in understanding the invention, the inventor must provide them. For computer programs and similar processes, the patent office usually requires flow charts.
In addition to these statutory parts, U.S. patent applications are required by regulation (37 CFR § 1.72) to contain the following:
A title, which must be as short and specific as possible.
An abstract, again as concise as possible, subject to the constraint that it must enable readers to quickly understand the nature of the invention.
The above parts required in a patent application are also published in the resulting patent, if one is issued.
U.S. law limits inventors to only one invention described in any patent, and only one patent covering any single invention (except for continuations and certain situations with multiple inventors). These restrictions are not regulatory or statutory, but part of the U.S. Constitution. If a patent application covers more than one invention, the USPTO is expected to require the inventor to split the application up into several ‘continuations in part’, e.g. the patent family derived from U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/193,062 (see below).
(There are also ‘provisional patent applications’, which only describe an invention for the purpose of obtaining priority. These documents can serve to establish an earlier filing date for one or more inventions, to be relied on in later non-provisional patent applications, but they do not themselves contain the claims or other information required to obtain a patent. Other countries use different terminology for this concept.)
Canadian patents are similar, but differ in formatting. While U.S. patents place the “drawing sheets” at the beginning, then print the specification and claims in numbered columns, two per page, Canadian patents have single-column numbered pages, and call the drawings “figures” and place them at the end. In both countries, patents have line numbers.
There are two kinds of patent claims: independent claims, and dependent claims. The independent claims are the broadest ones in the patent, and each one describes the claimed invention on its own; if something is not described by any of the independent claims in a patent, then it is not covered by that patent at all. A dependent claim refers back to another claim, and adds more requirements; a dependent claim always describes a smaller set of possible inventions than the claim it refers to.
From that description alone, dependent claims might seem useless. The reason to list dependent claims in a patent is that if any claim in a patent describes ‘prior art’, or an invention which was already publicly known over a year before the patent application was filed, then that claim is entirely invalidated. The reason to have dependent claims in a patent is to preserve some patent coverage even if prior art fits the descriptions in some of the independent claims, and thus the affected claims are invalidated.
When analyzing or discussing multiple patents, the usual practice is to refer to each patent by its last three digits. For example, Dominion’s patent US 9,870,666 would be referred to as “the ‘666 patent”.
A single patent application will frequently be “continued” into multiple patent applications, covering separate pieces of the invention or adding more claims to describe a single invention, and issued as multiple patents. When the inventor seeks to patent their idea in more than one country, multiple patents will be required. The set of patent applications and patents deriving their ‘priority date’ from a single application is referred to as a ‘patent family’.
Patent families in the Dominion–HSBC collateral agreement
The collateral agreement between Dominion Voting Systems Corporation and HSBC Bank Canada, filed 2019-09-26, included five separate families of utility patents:
CA 2,466,466, covering the two inventions of three-category, two-threshold mark interpretation, and storing ballot interpretation as image data, and the U.S. patents claiming priority to it:
US 8,195,505
US 9,710,988
US 9,870,666
US 9,870,667
US 8,913,787 and its continuation US 9,202,113, covering ballot “adjudication” systems which modify the ballot image
US 7,111,782 and its continuation US 7,422,151, covering certain features for Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines with paper trails
US 8,844,813, covering ballot scanners which include a user interface to allow the voter to input a correction if the ballot is deemed to be ambiguous or contains a write-in vote
The family derived from U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/193,062, covering several miscellaneous features for ballot-scanning machines, consisting of the following U.S. patents:
US 8,714,450
US 8,864,026
US 8,876,002
US 8,910,865
The agreement also included several design patents and trademarks, but I will leave those to others, at least for now. The utility patents involved in the agreement are interesting enough.
CA 2,466,466 family
CA 2,466,466 (“System, Method and Computer Program for Vote Tabulation With An Electronic Audit Trail”):
NOTE: Google Patents currently shows only the contents of the original application, not the final patent. To see the final patent’s abstract, description, and claims, go to e.g. the USPTO Global Dossier website, and see the Abstract and Description filed 2010-05-05 and the Claims filed 2018-02-28.
Every description filed during the process of obtaining this patent begins with the title “System, Method and Computer Program for Vote Tabulation With An Electronic Audit Trail”.
In the original description, filed 2004-05-05, the image representing the machine’s interpretation of a ballot is first called a “watermark” (p. 5 lines 4 to 12, and elsewhere), and later a “fingerprint” (p. 11 lines 14 to 16, and elsewhere). In the revised description, filed 2010-05-05, which is published in the final patent, the term “watermark” is replaced with “vote stamp” (p. 4 line 29 to p. 5 line 3); the additional term “fingerprint” for this image is retained (p. 11 lines 5 to 7).
In both descriptions, the actual counting of the vote is performed before the “watermark”, “fingerprint”, or “vote stamp” image is generated and appended to the ballot image: the machine “appropriately increments a main counter (not shown) that forms part of the memory (not shown)” (original description p. 11 lines 7 to 8; revised description p. 10 lines 29 to 30). The patent does not mention any provision for counting the votes again at a later time based on any data stored into the ballot image files, and the image referred to as a “fingerprint” is not an appropriate format for data to be readable by computer software for that purpose.
What is referred to as an “audit” (original description p. 18 line 35 to p. 20 line 17; revised description p. 18 line 29 to p. 20 line 15) is merely a visual comparison of what is recorded in the “vote stamp” image appended to a ballot with the image of what the voter marked on the ballot itself. Even performing this “audit” on every single ballot, as suggested in the patent (original description p. 20 lines 13 to 15; revised description p. 20 lines 11 to 13), would not confirm that the tabulated vote counts accurately reflected the ballots which were run through the machine.
52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(A) requires that “[t]he voting system shall produce a record with an audit capacity for such system.”, but does not specify what that audit is supposed to verify. Presumably the useless ballot-by-ballot “audit” procedure described in the patent is meant to fulfill that requirement.
The description advertises that: “The main advantage of this type of fingerprinting and corresponding audit trail is that it easily enables virtually any auditing strategy.” (original description p. 20 lines 5 to 6; revised description p. 20 lines 3 to 4) But they limit the discussion of “auditing strategy” to how many and which ballot images are reviewed, and silently exclude any audit of whether the voting machine counted the votes correctly.
This patent uses the terms “audit trail”, “watermark”, and “fingerprint”, which already had established meanings in the field at this time, and the concepts that this patent applies those terms to do not fit those meanings. To focus on the simplest case, an ‘audit trail’ is customarily a log of accesses to an object, and this phrase had no other generally accepted meanings at the time this patent application was filed. This patent does not describe an ‘audit trail’ of any kind.
Another invention described in this patent was the tri-state interpretation of ballot items, with the three possible interpretations of ‘not marked’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘marked’, and two thresholds between them (original description p. 4 lines 25 to 29, and other occurrences; revised description p. 9 line 31 to p. 10 line 11). In particular, they specify that the thresholds are in terms of pixel counts, of the number of pixels in the marking area that the machine determines were darkened by the voter.
Another notable feature of the patented system was briefly mentioned in the patent specification: “weighted candidate votes” (original description p. 9, lines 8 to 10; revised description p. 8 line 34 to p. 9 line 2). No details were provided as to what this feature refers to or is meant to be used for.
The final revision of the list of claims, which was issued in the patent, was filed on 2018-02-28. Even though the patent title states that the covered invention performs “vote tabulation with an electronic audit trail”, none of the independent claims are restricted to any system with anything that even the patent applicants would describe as a sort of “audit trail”; the two independent claims both cover all ballot-scanning systems which implement the tri-state interpretation feature, with any type of threshold, and which report whether a ballot contains any ambiguous marks. Only two of the dependent claims, claims 13 and 14, mention a “vote stamp”.
US 8,195,505 (“System, method and computer program for vote tabulation with an electronic audit trail”):
This patent includes the tri-state interpretation of ballot items disclosed in the ‘466 patent, including the fact that thresholds are specified as pixel counts (column 6 lines 17 to 32). This patent also includes the image of the ballot interpretation written into the ballot image file; the terms used are “vote stamp” (column 3 line 24), and “fingerprint” (column 6 line 62).
It also retains the vague “weighted candidate votes” (column 5 lines 40 to 42) feature from the ‘466 patent.
Both independent claims in this patent are limited to ballot-scanning systems which perform tri-state interpretation of ballot items, using pixel-count thresholds, and return ballots which have ambiguous marks to the voter, and store the machine’s interpretation of a ballot as image data within the ballot image file.
US 9,710,988 (“Marginal marks with pixel count”):
Again, this patent includes the tri-state interpretation of ballot items disclosed in the ‘466 patent, including the fact that thresholds are specified as pixel counts (column 6 lines 41 to 56). Again, this patent also includes the image of the ballot interpretation written into the ballot image file; the terms used are “vote stamp” (column 3 line 42) and “fingerprint” (column 7 line 20).
It also retains the vague “weighted candidate votes” (column 5 lines 63 to 65) feature from the ‘466 patent.
Both independent claims in this patent cover all ballot-scanning systems which perform tri-state interpretation of ballot items based on pixel-count thresholds, and indicate that one or more ballot items are ambiguous. Even though this patent’s title specifies “marginal marks”, this patent is not limited to systems which produce such marks.
US 9,870,666 (“System, method and computer program for vote tabulation with an electronic audit trail”):
Yet again, this patent includes the tri-state interpretation of ballot items disclosed in the ‘466 patent (column 6 lines 41 to 56), and the image of the ballot interpretation written into the ballot image file (“vote stamp” (column 3 line 42), “fingerprint” (column 7 line 20)).
And yet again, the “weighted candidate votes” feature is present (column 5 lines 62 to 64).
As with the Canadian ‘466 patent, this patent’s title states that the covered invention performs “vote tabulation with an electronic audit trail”, but none of the independent claims are restricted to any system with any sort of “audit trail”. They cover any vote counting system with two thresholds between the three categories of ‘not marked’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘marked’, and which flags ballots which contain ‘ambiguous’ marking areas.
The patent specification contains Dominion’s core idea of writing the machine’s interpretation of a ballot in the form of an image (column 7, lines 21 to 25), and dependent claim 12 covers systems which use this idea in combination with what claim 1 covers, but this patent’s independent claims are not restricted to systems which write their ballot interpretation in the form of an image.
US 9,870,667 (“Appending audit mark image”):
The tri-state interpretation is in column 6 lines 41 to 56. As before, the terms used for the image of the machine’s ballot interpretation are “vote stamp” (column 3 line 42) and “fingerprint” (column 7 line 20).
The “weighted candidate votes” mystery feature is right where it was last time (column 5 lines 62 to 64).
As with the ‘505 patent, both independent claims in this patent are limited to ballot-scanning systems which perform tri-state interpretation of ballot items, using pixel-count thresholds, and return ballots which have ambiguous marks to the voter, and store the machine’s interpretation of a ballot as image data within the ballot image file.
US 8,913,787 and family (“adjudication”)
US 8,913,787 (“Ballot adjudication in voting systems utilizing ballot images”):
This patent describes Dominion’s process of “ballot adjudication”. The overall concept of ballot adjudication is that one or more election officials are prompted to review the image of a ballot deemed to be “ambiguous” by the ballot-scanning system, determine the voter’s intent, and record and tabulate that determination. While this general concept of adjudication could be designed and implemented in a sound manner, the details of Dominion’s ballot adjudication process are anything but sound.
As in the ‘466 patent and family, this patent specifies that the interpretation of a ballot image be stored as image data, and within the ballot image file itself. However, unlike the ‘466 patent, the adjudication process takes place after the ballot has already been scanned and stored in an image file. Storing the adjudicator’s interpretation as image data inside the same file as the ballot image means altering the ballot image file itself.
It should be noted that alteration of ballot image files is at the core of Dominion’s ballot adjudication patents. All three independent claims in the ‘787 patent are limited to systems which store the adjudication decision as image data within the ballot image file.
This design decision has two major implications. First, if ballot image files are altered by the normal election process, then not only is there no cryptographic authentication to detect any tampering with the ballot files, but authentication of ballot files cannot be added to the system later without a complete redesign. This is a major security flaw, deliberately built into the system at the very core of its design.
Second, it shows that the use of Dominion’s adjudication system in any U.S. Federal election is a Federal crime, by the system’s design. 52 USC § 20702 states: “Any person, whether or not an officer of election or custodian, who willfully … alters any record or paper required by section 20701 of this title to be retained and preserved shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” Ballot image files are records subject to 52 USC § 20701; their alteration by the adjudication system is thus a violation of § 20702.
Third, the adjudication system produces its records in electronic form only, with no permanent paper record. 52 USC § 21801(a)(2)(B)(i) requires that each voting system used in an election for Federal office “produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity”. 52 USC § 21111 authorizes the Attorney General to bring a civil action against any violation of § 21801.
US 9,202,113 (“Ballot adjudication in voting systems utilizing ballot images”):
The summary and description of the invention in this patent appear to be unchanged from those in the ‘787 patent. Only the claims differ.
As in the ‘787 patent, recording an adjudication decision by altering the ballot image file is at the core of this patent. All three of the independent claims in this patent are limited to systems which store the adjudication decision as image data within the ballot image file. As with the ‘787 patent, altering an election record, such as a ballot image file, after it is produced is a Federal crime, and storing the records in electronic form only is a violation of Federal law.
US 7,111,782 and family (DRE with certain features)
US 7,111,782 (“Systems and methods for providing security in a voting machine”):
This is a patent on certain Direct-Recording Electronic voting machines with “Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trails”, which write some representation of the voter’s ballot out on paper, but prevent the voter from reading it directly, modifying or correcting it in any way. If the machine decides to write out a human-readable portion of the paper record which does not accurately reflect the voter’s intent, the voter’s only recourse is to ask the machine to print “VOID” on that record, and then ask the same machine to write out the same ballot again.
This patent describes the overall concept of “receipt under glass” voting systems as prior art (column 13, lines 1 to 3). What the specification of the invention asserts is novel (lines 4 to 9) is the concept of moving the printed record back and forth to make certain portions of it visible through a window; later text (column 14, lines 13 to 18) elaborates that this allows the machine to limit the voter’s view to only a small portion of the alleged record of their selections at any time. Again, this impairs the voter’s ability to verify the record or to respond to any false record printed by the machine, as required by 52 USC § 21081(a)(1)(A)(i) and § 21081(a)(1)(A)(ii).
This design has two slightly more subtle issues. First, if the machine can move a record back to the printer head to write “VOID” on it, then the machine is physically capable of altering its printed records in other ways. This capability, in itself, defeats the entire purpose of having a record printed on paper. It also violates the statutory requirement of 52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(B)(i) (“The voting system shall produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity for such system.”) that the paper record be permanent, as well as the requirement of § 21081(a)(2)(B)(iii) that the paper record “shall be available as an official record for any recount conducted[…]”. If any such record actually is altered, that would also be a Federal crime under 52 USC § 20702.
Second, in column 12, lines 40 to 43, the patent proposes to print as part of the record an authentication code for the voter’s choices, which can only be read by other machines, and whose only possible use would be to disregard the voter’s choices as an invalid record. Having a portion of the paper record this critical only be interpretable by a machine defeats the alleged “Voter-Verifiable” aspect of the paper trail.
In addition to defeating the essential purpose of a “Voter-Verifiable” paper trail, the use of an authentication code which can only be read by a machine, not by a human being performing a manual audit, violates the “manual audit capacity” requirement of 52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(B)(i).
In short, the overall receipt-under-glass approach is inherently more vulnerable to manipulation by a malicious machine than voter-marked paper ballots, and the additional features which Sequoia and its successor corporations describe in this patent make it even more vulnerable to this type of sabotage, and violates the requirements of 52 USC § 21081.
Among the patents involved in the Dominion–HSBC collateral agreement, this patent has an unusually large number of claims. The USPTO charges extra for each additional claim beyond some limit. (Independent claims and dependent claims are counted separately for some, not all, fee purposes.) Without trying to trace the exact limit through the legislative and regulatory history, I am confident that 195 claims was beyond that limit, even though only the first is an independent claim. This was an expensive patent to file for.
Given that, it is surprising that both the USPTO and the “inventors” allowed Claim 1 to cover every “receipt under glass” voting system with a tamper-resistant printer, despite their statement in the text of the patent itself (column 13, lines 1 to 3) that receipt-under-glass systems are in fact prior art.
US 7,422,151 (“Systems and methods for providing security in a voting machine”):
This patent has three independent claims. The first covers receipt-under-glass systems with an RFID device in the printer module to prevent the use of third-party equipment; the other two cover different variations on the ‘782 patent’s idea of moving the receipt back and forth under a window that only shows a portion of it at any time. As with the ‘782 patent, the mere physical capability to move the machine’s paper record back to the print head after a ballot is reviewed by the voter and/or cast is a violation of Federal law.
US 8,844,813 (“Electronic correction of voter-marked paper ballot”)
The basic idea in this patent is to prompt the voter for clarification or correction after scanning a ballot which contains an ambiguity, error, or write-in candidate, and record the voter’s response. This patent proposes to put a printer in the path of the scanned ballot so that the voter’s decision can be recorded on the ballot, but it states that the printer is optional (column 7 lines 28 to 31, “may include a printer”), and the independent claims are not limited to systems which include such a printer.
Either way, this feature introduces both a major security problem and a legal problem. If the printer is included in the ballot-scanning machine, then the vote-counting machine can alter any ballot put into it, without the voter’s knowledge. This capability violates Federal law:
A ballot cannot become a permanent paper record until it falls past the printer head into the ballot box. The mere capability to alter any ballot between the time that a voter inserts it into the ballot-scanning machine and the time that it becomes a permanent paper record violates the requirement of 52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(B)(ii) that “The voting system shall provide the voter with an opportunity to change the ballot or correct any error before the permanent paper record is produced.”
If a ballot is actually altered after a voter intends to cast their vote, that alteration is a violation of 52 USC § 20702. Such an alteration is not inherent to the design, but is deliberately made possible by it.
If a ballot-scanning machine covered by this patent does not include a printer, then the only record of voters’ decisions is in electronic form. This makes the machine no better than a DRE system with no paper trail whatsoever; it violates the requirement of 52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(B)(i) that “The voting system shall produce a permanent paper record[…]”.
This patent’s specification includes the Dominion image-modification idea (column 11 lines 10 to 46), and includes some dependent claims covering the combination of that idea with the independent claims. As with the ‘466 patent’s entire family, this feature is designed to deceive election workers into conducting labor-intensive “audits” which do nothing to audit the tabulated votes that are actually reported as the election results.
US Prov. Pat. Appl. 61/193,062 family
US 8,714,450 (“Systems and methods for transactional ballot processing, and ballot auditing”):
Both of the independent claims in this patent cover only systems which print a unique “transaction code” on each ballot as it is scanned. As with the ‘813 patent, if the ballot-scanning machine is physically capable of printing anything at all on a ballot as it is scanned, then it can alter the ballot in other ways, without giving the voter a chance to detect such tampering; this violates the same statutes as systems covered by the ‘813 patent which include a printer.
Both independent claims require that the transaction code be verified with records stored in the voting machine, and that ballots whose transaction codes do not pass that verification are not counted. While a “manual audit capacity” could potentially be devised that would produce the same result as the machine, e.g. using a shelf of bound volumes of transaction-code records, it would be an expensive and laborious procedure, and the “permanent paper record” requirement would require that the record books be printed out for every election at the same time that the electronic records are produced. Given that expense, it is not credible that any voting system covered by this patent and actually put into use complies with the statutory requirement of 52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(B)(i).
The specification and some dependent claims indicate that the voting system which Dominion wrote the patent to cover prints the transaction code as a barcode, which is much less likely to be human-readable as required by § 21081(a)(2)(B)(i), and that the voting system alters ballots by printing on them after they are cast by the voter, or by printing on them that they are “invalid”, in violation of 52 USC § 20702.
US 8,864,026 (“Ballot image processing system and method for voting machines”):
This patent is a bit of a mess, with various uses of two different image-processing features, with and without printing on the ballot as it is scanned. As with the ‘813 and ‘450 patents, if the ballot-scanning machine can print on the ballot, then it can tamper with the voter’s intent, in violation of Federal law.
Independent claims 1 and 22 cover de-skewing the ballot image, correcting for image size variations, and printing onto the ballot. Claim 1 also requires drawing color-coded highlights on the scanned ballot image. Claim 22 also requires prompting the user to identify any write-in candidates voted for on the ballot.
Independent claims 15 and 26 cover using image processing to correct defects on the ballot, automatically locating ballot items, and drawing color-coded highlights on the scanned ballot image. Claim 26 also requires printing on the ballot.
Of the dependent claims, claims 10 (dependent indirectly on claim 1) and 20 (dependent on claim 15) also call for printing, this time in machine-readable form. As with the ‘813 patent, this feature violates various provisions of 52 USC § 21081.
All of these claims cover ways of using ballots printed or photocopied at home or in the field, and are not relevant to ballots printed and distributed in a secure manner.
As with the ‘450 patent, the independent claims are broad enough that the patent could potentially cover systems which comply with Federal law, but the specification and dependent claims indicate that Dominion’s own system which they wrote the patent to describe and cover violates Federal election laws by design.
US 8,876,002 (“Systems for configuring voting machines, docking device for voting machines, warehouse support and asset tracking of voting machines”):
This patent has two independent claims, claim 1 and claim 13. Claim 1 covers a “tracking and preparation system” of which the voting machines are a part, while claim 13 covers certain voting machines on their own. Claim 1 requires that each voting machine have a network communication device, with both a wired and wireless component; any system in which voting machines do not have a wireless component is not covered by this claim, although the voting machines themselves might be covered by claim 13.
Both independent claims are limited to devices with a “hardware interlock”, configured to activate “an electrical interrupt to prevent network communication with the voting machine while maintaining a physical network connection”. The specification refers (from column 4 lines 48 to 52) to figures 8 and 9 (drawing sheet 8) for examples of hardware interlocks, which show the network connector being physically disconnected or obstructed. However, this would not shut down the wireless interface present in any voting machines used in a system covered by claim 1, nor would the depicted interlocks allow the voting machine to “maintain[] a physical network connection”.
The precise form of the “electrical interrupt” to prevent the voting machine from communicating with the network communication device is not explicitly specified. However, given the nature of internal communication buses in currently available hardware, this “interrupt” is unlikely to be any form of electrical switch that would truly disconnect the network communication device from the voting machine processor. Nor would any “interrupt” that would disable the network communication device allow it to “maintain[] a physical network connection” as claimed. I can only conclude that the wireless network interface hardware remains powered on, active, and accessible to remote attackers during the election period, and that the interface between that hardware and the processor is not truly disconnected either.
A further concern is that, according to the specification, the “election and voting machine preparation” in the host computer of the system covered by claim 1 can remotely cause the voting machine to erase its “results cartridge”. The general capability to cause the voting machine to perform a test by sending a command over the wireless interface is in column 6 lines 57 to 61; “Destructive RME tests” is in column 7 (in a table; no line numbers), and explicitly states that “any data residing in the memory is lost” (referring to the memory in the “results cartridge”). This capability may be used to erase records in violation of 52 USC § 20702.
US 8,910,865 (“Ballot level security features for optical scan voting machine capable of ballot image processing, secure ballot printing, and ballot layout authentication and verification”):
This patent has three independent claims, all having to do with printing RSA digital signatures on a ballot, then at a later time, attempting to verify the signature, and physically marking the ballot as invalid if the signature is incorrect. (The patent claims do not explicitly mention RSA, but among the signature schemes generally accepted for use, the terminology they use for signature verification, “decrypting the encrypted security code using the private-public key pair to obtain the authentication value”, only applies to RSA-based signatures.)
Claim 1 covers printing an RSA signature of the voter’s decisions on a ballot, after the voter has marked it.
Claim 4 covers pre-printing an RSA signature of the precinct at which a ballot is intended to be used.
Claim 7 covers embedding a physical security feature in a ballot and printing an RSA signature on it, and then checking when the voter submits it that the security codes in both of those security features are stored in the ballot-scanning machine’s memory.
As with the ‘813, ‘450, and ‘026 patents, building a printer into the vote-scanning machine introduces a major security problem, as well as legal problems.
As with the ‘782 patent, printing machine-readable information on a ballot which can prevent the information verified and/or marked by the voter from being counted defeats the main purpose of having a paper ballot with human-readable marks, and violates 52 USC § 21081(a)(2)(B)(i).
Thank you.
Here is another piece I’ve written, that you should see more than anyone else:
r/K selection theory, amygdalas, and the two-party scam
The simplest mathematical model of population growth in an environment with limited resources is the ‘logistic equation’, given this name by Pierre-François Verhulst in 1844. It is easiest to understand and most useful in the form of a differential equation: dN/dt = rN(1 – N/K). Here N is the population size and dN/dt denotes the rate of change of population at any given time, r is a constant for the organism and environment reflecting the rate of growth, and K is a constant reflecting the environment’s carrying capacity for the organism. A small population can feast off the land; members of a large population are barely able to obtain enough food to survive themselves, let alone reproduce.
In the 1960s, Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson coined the term r/K-selection theory, to describe the sets of behaviors which are optimal under the two extreme cases of the logistic equation. r-selected species have free resources, and focus on eating and reproducing. Since they are surrounded by all-you-can-eat buffets, members of r-selected species run away from each other rather than fight for any particular mate, location, or other resource.
Members of K-selected species, on the other hand, must compete with each other for a scarce food supply. To succeed in passing their genes on within their population, they must be capable of finding and fighting for food, find mates who are similarly competitive within their species, and raise their own offspring until they are ready to fend for themselves. A corollary is that they must socialize with their mates and other members of their species.
In the 21st century, a biologist who now blogs under the pseudonym “Anonymous Conservative” discovered that in humans, r-selected traits and K-selected traits correspond roughly to the political Left and Right, respectively. He also discovered that r-selected traits are caused by a weak or damaged amygdala, and speculates that r-selection is caused in part by a genetic trait which diminishes the effect of dopamine, and in part by growing up in an environment which does not include any hardship, but instead floods the individual with dopamine.
Further, Anonymous Conservative makes the moral judgment that the K-selected traits are good, and the r-selected traits are evil. Early sexualization of young, one of the r traits, is indeed evil.
In hindsight, his theory has a few errors. First, the genetic component he blames for a predisposition to r-selection is not necessary to explain how it is inherited. Child sexual abuse is known to damage the victim’s amygdala, and an r-selected parent who sees nothing wrong with their children becoming sexually active at an early age is likely to allow their children to suffer this damage. Given that this trait will be transmitted from parent to child by nurture rather than genetics, any genetic component which may contribute to weak amygdala would have too little effect to be detected.
Second, current events suggest that he was wrong about the environmental cause of weakened amygdala as well. He believed that growing up under adverse conditions would strengthen a child’s amygdala, pushing toward K-selection, whereas prosperity weakens amygdalas even in adulthood, driving individuals toward the political Left. Instead, the U.S. economic boom under President Donald J. Trump’s administration has moved the population to the political Right. We have now run that experiment; the constant stress inflicted on Americans under previous administrations caused damage to our amygdalas, and removing that stress allowed our amygdalas to heal and strengthen.
Third, he misunderstood the relevance of r/K-selection theory to politics. The traits associated with r and K are indeed moral complements, but both clusters of traits are split between good and evil. In the extreme case of K-selection, competition without regard to morality invariably leads to cheating, and loyalty only to one’s own in-group means preying on the rest of one’s society.
Our ruling class has sought to maximize the stress level of our society, thus driving as many people as they can to the extremes of r or K. They then exemplify the worst amoral caricature of each side themselves, and rely on this misalignment of the natural extremes of behavior from morality to drive a wedge between the extremes: Both r-selected and K-selected individuals believe that they are good and the other side is evil, and both are right as best they can tell.
Anonymous Conservative refers to r-selected individuals as ‘rabbits’, and K-selected individuals as ‘wolves’. These terms derive from the species chosen by MacArthur and Wilson as examples of r-selection and K-selection; they in turn had taken these examples from symbolism which had been used to represent two factions of the ruling class for centuries. The rabbit symbolizes not only promiscuity and sexual depravity, but also wanton cruelty and brutality; the wolf is a trickster, who hunts its prey by deception.
The Antifa logo with its two flags, red and black, also symbolizes this “rabbit” vs. “wolf” symbiosis.
excellent summary, thank you.
Thank you.
Can someone explain “early sexualization of the young” and what exactly this does psychologically? I would prefer that this be explained in naturalistic terms using psychology. There may be a spiritual element at play as well, but I’m not interested in that.
There’s a few examples I can think of. I know two brothers who I believe were targeted who in their teens took turns having sex with their mom’s maid. And I’d bet that maid was placed in their home by cabal. I didn’t know the brothers well, but what little I did know of them led me to believe that they would not have used coercion. And let’s face it, most teenage boys would have difficulty resisting the advances of an attractive live in maid.
There’s other examples I can think of. One of my early cabal handlers gifted my father with a subscription to Playboy when I was like 12. I really thought nothing about it at the time, and I’m sure my father didn’t. In retrospect, since that cabal handler injected so much mischief in our lives I can’t believe that this wasn’t part of the deal.
So what does early sexualization do? Lead to hyper sexualization? Inability to form long-term pair bonds? Any other likely psychological changes?
Yes and yes. Sexual arousal is in large part an amygdala-function, which is where a lot of the r and K-traits sit, and at that age it is kind of like taking a drug which overwhelms the amygdala and remodels it. So as sexual arousal in that early developmental period washes over the amygdala, it not only affects sex drive, it also affects responses to fear and confrontational urges, pair-bonding, time preferences in terms of how willing you are to wait, thrill-seeking, conscientiousness, and so on.
In my opinion, as selection adapted us, it concentrated all of that in the amygdala “purposely” as a way of allowing early sex to shift a person’s entire psychological strategy from more K to more r. If you are 12 and everyone is mating like crazy around you, and one of them mates with you, the environment is r, and if you are going to be successful, you will have to be r too. And probably not just in mating, but in the entire panoply of r-traits.
Okay, so any more specific ideas on the difference between pre-pubescent sexualization and, for example, early teenage?
Any consideration for earlier years for marriage that were seen in history?
Does abstinence develop a level of self-control that should produces other behavioral benefits that we can observe?
Any elaboration on this point would be fascinating.
It is not my specialty, everyone handles stress differently, and you are probably looking at some chicken and egg factors, but it seems kids who are groomed by adults will tend to be hyper-sexualized. I know the porn industry is filled with women who were molested at a very early age. And it also seems to alter time-preferences, making them look for the quick buck, and not plan for the future very well. So it remodels brains. And I would assume the earlier the more.
The chans are filled with people who assert full abstinence from all sexual activity has made them more focused, driven, and successful, though I have wondered if that is a CIA psyop to try and drop testosterone levels in that group. It is tough to tell what is real or not.
My guess is your handler got your dad that subscription for you, and he was trying to get you hooked on the dopamine of sex, maybe to make you more controllable, or predictable, and maybe to weaken you somehow.
I was thinking that an additional harm for a boy entering puberty of having access to Playboy is that it makes all the girls one is likely to see at school seem ugly or unimpressive in comparison. And consequently promotes fantasy thinking, self-absorption, etc.
Excellent point.
I replied to this but the site sent the reply to the bottom of the page.
“Given that this trait will be transmitted from parent to child by nurture rather than genetics, any genetic component which may contribute to weak amygdala would have too little effect to be detected.”
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That is an unwarranted assertion, you have no basis to declare the relative influence.
I agree that nurture has an effect as well as genetics, I believe that AC already did acknowledge that.
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“the U.S. economic boom under President Donald J. Trump’s administration has moved the population to the political Right”
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Did it?
Or was the population shifted right before and Trump just gave that shift an outlet?
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“Third, he misunderstood the relevance of r/K-selection theory to politics. The traits associated with r and K are indeed moral complements, but both clusters of traits are split between good and evil.”
“Our ruling class has sought to maximize the stress level of our society, thus driving as many people as they can to the extremes of r or K. They then exemplify the worst amoral caricature of each side themselves, and rely on this misalignment of the natural extremes of behavior from morality to drive a wedge between the extremes: Both r-selected and K-selected individuals believe that they are good and the other side is evil, and both are right as best they can tell.”
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This is true to a certain extent.
I have always advocated for some balance, but K is more virtuous and must be dominant.
Perfect balance is not possible and would not be best if it was.
The rabbits that believe K is evil and morally inverted and the proof is in their fruits.
r dominated societies do not promote the good, the beautiful, and the true, while even excessively K societies do.
That is amazing…I assume you have other sources of income. Regardless, Thank you. It is a great help to us patriots in the field. I linl more to your stories than any other site. GTH is a close second but Sundance is more investigative. BTW – I think he is a white hat for whatever my opinion is worth.
Comments from a friend:
“Some cool tips. One mistake from the start though. Going automatically to WordPress. There are now a couple generations of hackers who have used WP as their “training grounds”. It is the most unsecure script available out there, Drupal CMS is right behind it as the second most easily hacked.”
“So there needs to be some instruction on how to upload and install raw scripts to a host server and create a database connection old school. Not every host is going to have the tools to just install the script you want in a few clicks. So it will have to be installed to the server manually. And it actually isn’t that hard.
So with that said, every “dashboard” and control features available are going to be unique because there is no industry standard. Each one is a new learning experience from scratch even if you have built a LOT of sites. So it is always an exercise of trial and error that takes time to sort out.”