This thread's purpose was born out of the thread 'How do you even begin to explain the Venezuela fiasco'. It's purpose is to do exactly that. If you want to refresh on what was discussed there go look at it, it's bumplocked so expect to scroll. I'm the Smartmatic poster and I think it's important to find people, organisations and names involved in the Class assault on VZ, also consider this a dumping ground for important finds on the case, if you want to drop platitudes or argue go to the other Venezuela thread. Bring something useful to the table.
This thread's purpose was born out of the thread 'How do you even begin to explain the Venezuela fiasco'...
Nathan Jones
Other urls found in this thread:
youtube.com
8ch.net
telesurenglish.net
youtube.com
beta.companieshouse.gov.uk
portal.kyckr.com
spitfirelist.com
youtube.com
en.wikipedia.org
youtube.com
youtube.com
cepr.net
mintpressnews.com
venezuelanalysis.com
telesurenglish.net
search.wikileaks.org
twitter.com
Dylan Roberts
2/2 Smartmatic sold out, came out under the SGO corp, based itself in London and came under the Auspices of thew World Bank.
Juan Hall
(3/3) Stacked it's Advisory committee payroll with reps from the supposedly independent Auditing bodies.
Josiah Thompson
How corporate forces are lobbying for a coup in Venezuela
youtube.com
Hunter Wilson
...
Luke Martin
What are these screenshots from. What are you even talking about. What is the significance of Smartmatic.
Ayden Baker
James Morris
Smartmatic is a company that offers 'election solutions' by their voting machines, Voter ID authorisation via biomteric and database management.
They have presided over elections in VZ, Armenia, the US, Europe and Africa. Up until 2014 it was under a Parent company called the SBC consortium A Venezuelan based Tech group, they are almost solely responsible for the wave of Automated voting coming in.
They work for electoral commissions which are set up by the states/nations in question, whose activities are Audited and aided by independent international electoral advisory groups as well as the parties and campaigns involved.
In 2014 Smartmatic reformed under the SGO Corporation couped it's Venezuelan ownership and based itself in London.
The cofounders of SGO are Lord Mark Malloch Brown who was also placed on the International board of directors for smartmatic and the CEO of Smartmatic Antonio mugica, respectively. Lord MMB has had a number of appointments, being appointed VP of Soros's Diamond fund which has one of it's bases in Curacas of the coast of VZ as well as a Development specialist on the World bank.
Tl;Dr he has been instrumental in developing the neocolonial imperialist framework.
Smartmatic had already begun it's work on the 2015 parliamentary elections at this point. Smartmatic has released data on all of it's case studies up until late 2018 by this point but still hasn't posted it's data on the 2017 elections.
This happened despite it's CEO coming out after the 2017 election accusing the Venezuelan electoral commission of voter fraud and claiming that the tally was a million out from the real vote count. To this day it hasn't released any data to the public. More interestingly it's Biometric voting process makes it very hard to cheat votes and the 2017 vote would have had it's most extensive set up, which if going by the 2015 setup was a near perfect election.
Our boy Mark Malloch Brown named himself a part of the call for a Transitional government and well, duhh.
A number of the people on the advisory committee (AND PAYROLL) of Smartmatic are members or leaders of International electoral commissions despite the conflict of interest. One Richard soudrette having overseen auditing the Armenian parliamentary and Russian regional elections in the last couple of years as an IEF and CSCE agent whilst also being on the SGO payroll. Other members are presidents of electoral commissions in Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria which is a little more than concerting.
SGO is based out of the City of London, not Venezuela, is aligned to Soros (haha) and was instrumental in contesting the election of Venezuela by omission of data and just throwing a vague number out there.
Bentley Wood
Still like to know why that thread was bumplocked.
Jordan Flores
Hol up, so the bitching about fraud in the last Venezuelan election was never about election fraud? It was always voter fraud? That makes it even more suspicious than before, voter fraud is not some trivial way to cheat an election, it is extremely resource-intensive and inefficient compared to election fraud.
Noah Parker
Yes, it was aimed at the National electoral council, primarily because it's a branch of government ratified under the 1999 constitution and not an independent electoral comission.
Because the opposition (mostly) boycotted the election, they see it as illegitimate, the rest of the opposition that engaged electorally were there to observe the count but jumped on their opportunity to kickstart the coup attempt, which relied on smartmatic's account.
It's their involvement and more importantly their being bought out that provided that first crucial step in geopolitical optics, an official 'independent' body contesting the election.
The attacks on the voting booths and other disruptive actions were about setting the stage for their narrative.
Ayden Morgan
Hold up. Some years ago, I did look into voting machines in Venezuela after reading opposition complaints. My impression was that the machines were more secure than what's common in the US. I read that the machines produced a paper trail and those were subject to checks by hand recount in random places. Has that changed? (That said, I'm not a fan of complex voting machines. There is an initiative in the Netherlands called "We don't trust voting computers", that has many computer people among them. I think the best machines are simple mechanical devices that make ambiguous inputs less likely than paper and pencil.)
Jaxson Morris
Strictly speaking their public facing practice is very secure, they have a database of all the venezuelan elections from 2004-2015 including others they were operating in that went ahead very well. notable exceptions including a couple of Russian municipals and the most recent Armenian parliamentary.
That's what's so phishy about their argument. How do the poll workers enter these extra votes to the tune of a million individual inputs despite biometric authentication?
I'm actually not too sure about the paper trail left behind, but it makes sense that producing physical documents is standard practice. This does throw up an unknown in the picture, but there are more than a few unknowns here that are bound to make someone uneasy.
Christian Wood
I had a look at Smartmatic prior to the SGO Corporation Limited formation. Citco Management (UK) Limited held a stake in Smartmatic.
Citco (Curacao Investment Trust Company) is an old pre-ww2 dutch family owned company that gives the wealthy access to various unregulated offshore shenanigans. The fund is one of if not the market leader in offshore wealth management (1 trillion in assets) and connected to George Soros via his Quantum fund.
The fund's board of supervisory directors are/were a 'collective' of mostly European Bankers with connections to Lord Rothschild's via his St James's Place Wealth Management firm.
Chase Cruz
Malloch Brown is the archetypal deceitful globalist.
He's been caught lying before:
Malloch Brown publicly defended handling of the Oil-for-Food Programme by the UN. While he countered critics that "Not a penny was lost from the organization," an internal UN audit of the Oil-for-Food programme revealed that there had been overcompensation amounting to $557 million.
And in this interview over Brexit:
youtube.com
He calls her a smart journalist and only a few minutes later when cornered over lying, tells her she's not a journalist. His credibility is more than questionable.
Angel Diaz
I'm curious as to how you found out about the stakes held cause my investigation skills are lacking atm, I'm only finding real surface shit and drawing the lines from from there.
Also, yeah WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT CURACAO
Christopher Bailey
Bumping the thread in case one of us autists finds out even more.
Adam Morgan
This is some next level shit OP. Goddamn this shit is making me feel like a brainlet. More questions than answers.
Smartmatic basically tried to remove Chavez but failed.
Are you saying the election corruption is high in Venezuela and the "opposition" is using it as an opportunistic way to force out Maduro/Chavismo?
How does Maduro play into all of this?
ANGLO DETECTED
Carson Scott
Companies registered the UK have to file with a public registrar called companies house.
beta.companieshouse.gov.uk
If you open the filing for:
05 Oct 2011 Total exemption full accounts made up to 31 December 2010
You'll see Citco Management (UK) Limited listed as a secretary. I can't see Citco listed on the shareholdings further up the filings but there is a company holding a stake based in the Nertherlands (Citco's origin) "Smartmatic International Holding B.V." the details of which are in the Dutch company registrar, unfortunately sat behind a paywall.
portal.kyckr.com
Stake might be jumping the gun, my bad, nevertheless there is still a connection. Possibly more avenues for exploration. Strangely whilst browsing around it turns out I'm not the only one to make this connection (Back in November 28, 2006):
"Program Highlights Include: The role of Smartmatic’s parent firm Citco as the largest hedge fund administrator in the world; Citco’s role as manager of George Soros’s Quantum Fund; the U.S. Government’s unsuccessful attempt at prosecuting Sandoz for conspiring with the Farben cartel in the run-up to World War II; review of the position of the Bormann network in the contemporary business and political environments."
source: spitfirelist.com
Henry Evans
Malloch Brown is also a member of the Queen's Privy Council, members are bound by oath to keep matters discussed at Council meetings secret.
Angel Jackson
The statement of voter fraud as espoused by opposition spokesman Vicente Bello is extremely dubious.
The first step in any voting system database design is ensuring one vote per person. According to their promo video the first phase (ID verification/capture) is part of the Smartmatic voting technology:
youtube.com
Reconciling the ID's with the votes isn't rocket science (EVEN if multiple votes were cast at different locations).
Sebastian Brooks
Hold on a second, so they dispose the ID data, not even a secure one way hashing function?
That means they've built a system that is designed in such a way that ANYONE can claim the vote is wrong, because it has a fundamental design flaw.
It's gross negligence or intentional.
Caleb Rogers
For clarification for all the autists (myself included) please describe what a one way hashing function is.
What my understanding is, is that the executive claimed the vote is wrong, because of the electoral commission not properly authorising voters… somehow? there was no follow up, it was purely media storm their accusation walked happily past the burden of proof.
I don't think they dispose of ID data, but are the ones who have it.
Grayson Roberts
Let's say you intend on building a secure voting system, a core functional requirement would be to ensure that one vote = one person.
That's pretty much common sense to anyone.
If there was a need to disassociate a persons ID with the actual vote, say for privacy reasons. There is no need to drop the ID data in it's entirety, a one way hashing function would suffice.
One way hashing is a pretty simple concept. It's a way of converting data into a unique number that cannot be reversed, it's at the core of thousands of software applications.
As an example:
'John Smith'
passed into a function could end up being
983948398408402402420942
But given the number 983948398408402402420942 there would be no way to get back to 'John Smith'.
Nicholas Diaz
–this does not work because names are not secret so you can just acquire lists of names and apply the hashing function yourself to link the identities to their hashes.
Justin Rivera
That's what salting is for, you pepper the data with something random to avoid that.
en.wikipedia.org
Sorry I was trying to keep my explanation simple.
Whats also rather questionable is that it puts the entire Smartmatic system into question, even paper based voting systems are more secure.
They've designed a system which can be overruled at a whim.
Is this a new weapon in the art of regime change?
Angel Gray
Seeing as the thread hasn't been bumped in a while, I'll toss out a question that's probably been answered before. What was the cause of Venezuela's crazy inflation, and how are people getting access to food and other necessities. From what I've seen, the narrative being spun by bourg media, that everyone is starving and dying in filthy overcrowded hospitals, is a load of horse shit. But how do they get by with 1million+% inflation?
Michael Roberts
Now you see where the power really lies. Instead of trying to design a fool proof voting system, you should focus on taking control of the media so you can make up whatever result you want and get everyone to believe you.
Daniel Allen
99% of the statements from countries rejecting the Constituent Assembly elections focus on it being "unconstitutional". Even if you ignore the Smartmatic statement: by extension, they can't really justify turning around and recognizing the next election from same people in the same organization.
Ignoring the rainy day fund completely and printing shittons of money (electronically) when shit started going down.
Michael Collins
Why would 6% of the population leave in just one year, then? The UN counts 4 million migrants already, with only 1.8 million having legal resident status.
Even though mainstream media can exaggerate a lot of it, access to medicine is nearly non-existent. Even finding ibuprofen or acetaminophen is a serious pain in the ass. Food in my city (Maracaibo) is mostly imported from Colombia, and the prices are higher than in Colombia. How do you think that the people earning $6 a month (minimum monthly salary) survive? The CLAP food boxes aren't delivered at anywhere near the supposed "1 per month" rate. You get one every 3 months at best. They're distributed to entire families, and can only feed two people for one week.
Robert Hill
There is also 3-Ballot, but that modification only works if the base voting method is relatively simple: Each voter gets multiple votes that cancel out each other in their effects plus one vote for the actual intent of the voter, all votes have unique identification numbers, and each voter can take home a copy of just one of their votes with its identification number. All votes and their identification numbers are published.
Chase Smith
salting is not defense against brute forcing. It's meant to prevent offline attack as you have to freshly calculate hashes.
According to world bank's 2017 data Venezuelan population is 31.98 million. Even if we assume everyone is eligible for voting, total complexity would be less than 2^25 (lg2(32000000)) which is trivial for modern computers.
David Williams
Sorry, I'm not saying that there aren't issues, clearly many venezuelans both anti and pro maduro, are getting fucked. But 1, if I'm not mistaken, things had by and large been getting better in the country since like the mid 90's, up until 2014 or so, when oil prices dropped which tanked the economy, after which the US imposed crippling sanctions. Of course, at the same time they support nations like Saudi Arabia who are undeniably far more despotic in nature.
Noah Reed
Full Jorge Ramos Maduro Interview Released
youtube.com
Holy fuck, Maduro absolutely blew him the fuck out.
Camden Myers
Watch the Moderate Rebels breakdown with it, the Youtube English captions aren't entirely accurate and miss some things.
Carson Williams
The problem with any kind of voter-verifying system like this is that real people can be tied to their votings, defeating the secret ballot and opening up voter intimidation.
Christopher Ramirez
Even if the 100 million figure wasn't exaggerated in places it's not completely made up, it would still be too low.
Wyatt Murphy
He fucking murdered Ramos.
Jesus…
Maduro has gotten good at shutting these clowns down
Jacob Sanchez
Also from this link
spitfirelist.com
actually check it out, it's covering shit from a few years ago, but it's good reading.
" Somewhat obscured by a tangled web of offshore companies, Smartmatic (and Sequoia’s voting machines) are actually owned by a group of entities affiliated with the member companies of I.G. Farben. The backbone of Nazi Germany and one of the most important companies in the history of commerce, I.G. Farben dominated the international chemical and pharmaceutical business. I.G.’s successor firms continue to dominate these fields.
After tracing the ownership of Smartmatic to entities associated with the Sandoz pharmaceutical interests; the program sets forth the profound relationship between I.G. Farben and the machinery of Nazi government. After highlighting I.G. Farben’s role in the Bormann flight capital program that relocated the Third Reich’s wealth abroad, the program underscores the position of the successor firms to I.G. in the day-to-day functioning of the Underground Reich. It is that Underground Reich that now holds sway over the Sequoia voting technology used in the U.S."
So, what I'm saying is that it is very unsurprising that pharmaceuticals aren't making it into the country. The economy isn't something that exists (by marketeer logic) a force independent of politics, especially at this stage of history, ESPECIALLY for a nation attempting to build a break from the leading faction of imperial capital.
This is a capital strike.
This is a capital strike.
This is a capital strike.
So far, they are doing extensive and life-threatening damage. The suffering and lives lost are the responsibility of the faction imposing unilateral sanctions.
Leo Kelly
Things to also take into account was that, not only has Venezuela been cut off from U.S Financial markets (a reminder that the US dollar accounts for 66% percent of foreign exchange every day)
but take a look at this quote from an economic report released by the center for economic practice and research.
By August of 2017, when the Trump administration issued its executive order imposing broad
financial sanctions on Venezuela, the economy had already been in recession for more than three
years. Although there has not been official government data for these indicators since 2015, the best
available estimates were that real GDP had declined by 24.3 percent from 2014 through 2016, and
consumer price inflation for January to August 2017 was probably somewhere between 758 percent
and 1,350 percent at an annual rate.
The August 2017 sanctions prohibited the Venezuelan government from borrowing in US financial
markets. This had a number of immediate impacts. First, it prevented the government from
restructuring its foreign debt, because any debt restructuring requires the issuance of new bonds in
exchange for the existing debt. Although the August 2017 sanctions technically affect only the US
financial system, in practice they were effective outside of the US financial system as well because 1)
the restructuring is negotiated with groups of bondholders, which would invariably include US
bondholders; 2) financial institutions outside the US financial system had good reason to fear that
there would be further sanctions affecting them, and this did indeed happen within a year and a half
Prior to the August 2017 sanctions, the debt that was up for restructuring was the debt of the state oil
company, PDVSA. The sovereign debt (from the government) could not be restructured after the
opposition won a majority of the National Assembly in 2015. This is because the opposition leadership
of the National Assembly stated that it would not approve any new foreign borrowing by the
government. Without this approval, new government bonds from a restructuring would be of
questionable legality under Venezuelan law, and the opposition pledged not to pay them if they were
to come to power. On that basis, a restructuring of government debt was impossible at that time.
Nonetheless the PDVSA debt at that time totaled roughly $30 billion, on which $7.1 billion in principal
and interest was due over the next two years; much of this debt service could have been postponed
with the restructuring of the PDVSA debt that was being negotiated before the August 2017 sanctions.
These sanctions also prohibited CITGO, the PDVSA affiliate that has some 5,500 gas stations in the
US, from repatriating profits to Venezuela. From 2015 through 2017, CITGO provided approximately
$2.5 billion in dividends to PDVSA.
ABSOLUTE MUST READ cepr.net
Immediately after SGO corp bought out smartmatic in 2014, the opposition won the National assembly in 2015. Where they were able to (with no regard to a combined national interest) stop the process of restructuring their debt and re finance their nation's biggest economic entity. It's conspiratorial, but timeline is also forming here.
Camden Moore
2/2
Venezuelan government also have been picking a fight with Monsanto-bayer. Which I'm coming in for the 'diverse economy' people.
Not only is jumping off of the green revolution something that was supported by the Indigenous communities and Agricultural collectivos
But it was an anti-imperialist break to become non-competitive in Agricultural production and if you're breaking off from Bayer-Monsanto's market, you are definitely going to be uncompetitive in the Market, making export impossible.
venezuelanalysis.com
I really don't have to explain the pharmaceutical situation again right?
Breaking credit would stop any nation from being able to access pharmaceuticals for a national health system, let alone the Corporate gangpile that has a hand in killing people just to wedge open a greater market share.
If you're not on the DOW thread screaming at the Market to fall over, you're not understanding the forces holding the Imperial order together. When US finance gets the big fuck, only then will the world revolution be possible.
Jackson Young
Excerpt of Commentary by Rene B. Azurin from the "Strategic Perspective" column: "An untransparent election" - BusinessWorld Online
Colton Young
I found that commentary in the Stratfor emails, couldn't find it online: search.wikileaks.org
My current theory is that cyber weapons might have been used against the Smartmatic systems, to put the election into question. It would relatively easily for the US to tamper with their systems especially after a US based firm (SysTest Labs) undertook a full source code audit (it was riddled with attack vectors). For those that don't believe they'd do something like this I'll cite stuxnet.
Plus if Trump could so gleefully state the military option is on the table, what's a little cyber espionage?
Nolan Martinez
Why do you think that the oil price drop tanked the economy in 2015, when oil revenues were even lower when Chávez's presidency started?
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One of the reasons was that they (Chávez and Maduro) didn't use the oil fund designed specifically to alleviate things like this. If they had used it, they would have had over 200 billion dollars ready to be spent when all this shit started, which could even have paid all their debt and then some if they wanted. However, the oil fund didn't even exist until 1998 (a year before Chávez's presidency), so it doesn't justify anything, it still shows that they're incompetent.