INTERVIEW: New HBO doc explores cyber war on America’s elections
Photo: Kill Chain is a new HBO documentary that looks at the hacking knowledge of Harri Hursti. Photo courtesy of HBO / Provided by Sunshine Sachs with permission.
For directors Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale, their journey into the troubles that have plagued elections in the United States began more than a decade ago. In 2006, their documentary Hacking Democracy was released; the film serves as a close look at the “dangers of the voting machines used in America’s midterm and presidential elections,” according to the movie’s official website.
Now the team is back (with Teale moving from executive producer to co-director) with Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections, which is set to premiere Thursday, March 26 at 9 p.m. on HBO. In the new film, the directors return to an expert source they profiled in the previous documentary, namely Finnish hacker and cybersecurity expert Harri Hursti, who shows the audience firsthand how American elections can so easily be hacked and influenced by foreign entities.
Another interesting development that inspired them to come together again and relook at the electoral process was a right-wing pundit who allegedly posted on his social media a scene from Hacking Democracy that featured an actual hacking experiment, known as the “Hursti Hack.”
“There was a right-wing guy who had a Facebook page, and he posted just the hack from Hacking Democracy on his Facebook page and got 9.1 million views,” Teale said, still amazed by the popularity of the post. “And so we realized that whether it was left or right, Republican or Democrat, people out there were concerned that the vote wasn’t secure, and, in fact, you might remember it was the Trump supporters who initially would say, ‘This will be hacked. This is not safe. The Democrats are going to hack it.’ So it’s both sides that are worried about it, so we started looking into it all and hooking up with Harri again in 2016.”
In 2017, the team found voting machines on eBay, and Hursti purchased them and started taking them apart and looking at their code. This was actually the very first scene that the directors filmed, and it served as a sorrowful muse for them to keep searching and keep exploring.
Each of the scenes that follows in this complex narrative are described in easy-to-understand terms, which helped Teale comprehend the technology, and no doubt this approach will help the HBO audience.
“I’m considered the dumb one of the team because if I don’t understand it, then it’s not understandable,” she said with a laugh. “It has to be at the very basic level for me. Simon Ardizzone, who is my co-director, is pretty technical, and Russell Michaels, who is the third member of the team, has an … ability to read manuals and understand the technology behind voting machines. So between the three of us we somehow can keep up, but obviously Harri is brilliant. Harri is at a genius level, and so we rely on him a lot. And Harri is also very cautious about what he says and doesn’t say, unless he really knows it and understands it and believes it.”
One of the underlying themes of Kill Chain is not only how someone or some organization can hack America’s elections, but also how this can happen in a country that prides itself on democracy and smooth elections. In many ways, the United States is the global paragon of representative government, yet the country is not free from disruption to the democratic process.
“In most Americans’ views, America has been the shining light for the world in what democracy means,” Teale said. “It’s never been flawless. There’s always been problems, but fundamentally people have been able to choose their governments, at the local level, state level, federal level. People have been able to make their wishes known at the ballot box, and to have that fundamentally undermined is terrifying and needs to be fixed.”
In her explorations, Teale and the team put a fine focus on the Russian meddling into the 2016 election, which she said showed not only interference by individuals from a foreign country but also the general sowing of discontent in the democratic process.
“I certainly think Putin preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, who he does not like, but … I think fundamentally the purpose is to sow distrust and chaos, to undermine democracy all over the world,” she said. “This has not only been happening in the United States. All of the European countries have been hacked by Russia, all of the former Soviet Union countries in particular. They got used to monitoring that and keeping an eye on that, but when it happened in France, it was a huge shock to the French. And in every case they found it to be Russian, so in a sense we’re playing catchup. We’re playing catchup to an issue that certainly the former Soviet Union countries have been dealing with for decades now, and it’s about time we understood what was really going on and why. You have to ask yourself why. It’s a much bigger agenda than caring whether Trump is in office. It’s bigger and more long term than that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections premieres Thursday, March 26 at 9 p.m. on HBO. Click here for more information.
