Instead, there will be a delayed announcement for the winner who will set up an impromptu speech and campaign party in New Hampshire, with a smaller national audience who only associates the Iowa primary with a failed mobile app. Whoever ultimately wins Iowa has been denied their prime-time moment to give a nationally televised, dramatic speech to a massive national audience watching the Iowa results. At this point, all the Democratic candidates have shifted their efforts away from Iowa and are off to New Hampshire for the upcoming primary. And that really is a problem because in politics, timing is everything. The result is the winner is officially announced, but late. But before that, here is nearly accurate footage of me hearing about this fiasco:įor a best case scenario, the caucus results are counted accurately using a backup method involving physical records, which appears to be the case right now. I'm going to go through some of these main points in detail, and lest we forget the importance of the outcome of this caucus (more on that later). The app is not widely available, has not been made open source, the security (and more specifically cryptography) algorithms used are not known, the general process for authenticating is not known, nobody knows what data the app stores on the phone, and the security community at large has not vetted this app. That advice was not heeded, and as anyone advising on cyber risk knows, that is a common outcome. The Democratic Party's cyber security chief saw problems coming and advised not going forward with the app. I've heard it was developed for both iOS and Android, though I can't confirm this. The app was not widely distributed, so I don't have access to it. The developer of the app is a small firm in Washington, DC. Please comment and correct me if I get any of this wrong. Not a whole lot is actually known about the app, so I'm just going to report what I know.
A post on an Android forensics blog about the political world, with potentially world event altering consequences. One, I don't want to lose readers, and two, much of my viewership is outside of the United States where other political stories are more relevant. I don't care to publish to the whole world my political opinions for two reasons. Note: this post will be about a political story, but it will not be of political opinion. But the stories in the news, the polling data, the strategy of campaigns, and the back-stabbing associated with politics all require the same mindset to follow as sports and pop culture. I'm not a political super-nerd, I'm no hyper opinionated thought leader, I don't get into Twitter battles, and I follow no political ideology as if it were a cult. So it should come as little surprise that I am, at least to a degree, interested in politics. Something I've found in common between my nerdiness with technology, movies, video games and sports, is they require some degree of dedication in following stories, along with a high degree of analysis to predict what is going to happen next. I am a football nut and follow stats like it is my job.