This article is comprised of excerpts from Gateway Pundit Article dated December 15th, 2022 by Jim Hoft and Gateway Pundit article dated April 19th, 2023 by Joe Hoft with contributions from Estancia News, David and Erin Clements. Link to the complete articles below.
Around 2011 DHS created their own intrusion detection system called the ALBERT Sensor. It’s part of the larger Einstein System that protects federal agencies from cyber risks. ALBERT is a “black box” server installed on a County’s network. It collects the traffic flowing on their election network and transmits this data to a nonprofit in NY. DHS selected this non-profit to monitor all the election data from across the United Sates. It is analyzed around the clock with the hope they can alert jurisdictions if they find any malicious traffic on their network. Few election networks had the system before 2016, less than 25 states.
DHS Director Jeh Johnson designated our elections as “critical infrastructure” just 14 days before Trump was sworn in. This petty move gave the left more weapons over elections. DHS then needed a command center for elections. So a collaboration was formed between the 501(c)3 nonprofit Center for Internet Security (CIS), the DHS cyber security unit CISA, and the Election Infrastructure Government Council (EIS-GCC). All three receive DHS funding. But DHS tasked only the nonprofit CIS to run the new Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). CTO Brian Calkin said “EI-ISAC was officially kicked off in March of 2018”.
The EI-ISAC monitoring center run by CIS is in a wooded rural area of East Greenbush, NY. It has roughly 300 employees and a $51mil annual budget funded by Congress (DHS). As we mentioned before, County election data from nearly the entire U.S. goes to NY in real time. It is monitored 365 days a year.
After Trump won his election, DHS wanted access to all local election systems. They quadrupled the number of ALBERT installations in the following two years by pressuring counties over Russian election interference. ALBERT Sensors are now in 98% of our nations election infrastructure. We call it a “black box” because the counties know little about the system. They are given no dashboard to see activity, no reports on what was captured, not even what ALBERT observed. ALBERT is free to a County, but they must sign an agreement that gives CISA access too. This includes info about hardware configurations and security settings. Update: We obtained the contract for Santa Rosa County Florida and it’s not free! After paying an initial fee of $8340 in 2018. the annual fee is $7440. We are paying them to steal our data!
DHS gathered election intelligence in 2018 by conducting “vulnerability assessments” in various jurisdictions. This included one week of DHS staff having remote access to poke around a County’s election network and systems. This was followed by a 2nd week where DHS staff went onsite to access the networks and hardware. Many counties found themselves teaching DHS about elections, not learning about security from these DHS staff. Election staff were frustrated and said DHS knew very little how elections actually operated.
To have their networks monitored, each County must sign a Memoranda of Agreement (MOA) with CISA. The County then becomes part of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program. Most federal agencies participate in CDM, but this is overkill for American counties. It gives CISA tremendous access to election systems, as shown on pg. 10 of their Election Resources Guide. CISA obtains asset information on County hardware, software, even security settings. CISA has visibility of “Identity” and “Access Management” information. This includes user accounts, privileges, credentials, and the authentication during the login process.
They say ALBERT sensors only “listen” to the data. They can only see the type of data flowing, not the actual data itself. However, Biden signed a cybersecurity Executive Order in May 2021 that required anyone in the CDM program to sign an new agreement (MOA). This mandates they now provide the more detailed “object level” data to CISA. This is supposedly for better “assessment and threat-hunting” purposes. ALBERT customers automatically become members of MS-ISAC. This Multi-State sharing program distributes cybersecurity information amongst its 13,000 members. It’s like your PC anti-virus software which reports any cyber issue, experienced by any user, to one central command.
“It’s scanning everything we do on our network and it sends it to a 3rd party”.
As has been suspected from the outset – CIS is touted as a quasi-governmental group partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to “protect our elections.” But in reality, CIS is just another compromised arm of the leftist NGO machine with its deep ties to the Democracy Fund.
CIS is funded in part by a major leftist non-governmental organization, Democracy Fund, and has also started guiding policy on “non-voting” technology. The use of this term is highly ironic, as the nebulous landscape of “non-voting” technology not only interfaces with all voting technology but provides the capability to control an entire election, from inflating voter rolls, AND modifying vote totals, to illegally overwriting local election returns.
(Democracy Fund is run by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, one of the largest contributors to far-left anti-American causes and a major contributor to the efforts to crack down on conservative speech in America.)
Do we want to trust another 3rd party out of State NGO to monitor our elections? We saw what ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) was doing in Florida. Sharing our personal information with other Left-Wing groups. We don’t have a clue what CIS is doing. I assure you it’s probably not good.
Here’s a video explaining what Center for Internet Security “CIS” does and the lack of transparency.