Friday,March 10 2017
MURAT YETKİN
murat.yetkin@hurriyet.com.tr
Rising risk of ballot box manipulation
Wikileaks has just released thousands more documents claiming that the CIA has developed special methods to turn almost every gadget that we use in our daily lives, from TV sets to mobile phones, into a two-way monitoring device to spy on individuals.
It would be naive to think the intelligence services of other advanced countries with digital capabilities - from Russia to China, from Germany to Israel - have been ignoring this field. Indeed, a huge debate about cyber manipulation and the spread of “fake news” started after the Democratic Party campaign of Hillary Clinton accused the Russian intelligence service of intervening and revealing the personal e-mails of key candidates, including presidential candidate Clinton. Alleged Russian involvement in the U.S. election has already led to the resignation of President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
As digital technology continues to evolve, the threat of manipulating elections in various countries becomes a serious problem that did not exist before.
