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Groton Daily Independent
Friday, Oct. 27, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 110 ~ 46 of 48
sounds showed them to be extremely similar to those of crickets and cicadas that live along the northern coast of Cuba.
“It’s the same bandwidth and it’s audibly very similar,” said Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Molina, a telecommunica- tions specialist with the Interior Ministry. “We compared the spectrums of the sounds and evidently this common sound is very similar to the sound of a cicada.”
The program’s narrator said that unnamed “North American researchers” had found that some cicada and cricket noises could be louder than 90-95 decibels, enough to produce hearing loss, irritation and hypertension in situations of prolonged exposure.
Cuba said it had reported its ndings on the similarity of the recordings to cricket sounds, and the U.S. had not responded.
The special’s narrator said U.S. diplomats continued to travel around Cuba after the incidents began to be reported, and there were requests for dozens of visas for visits by friends and family, something the narrator said undermined U.S. allegations that the diplomats were not being kept safe in Cuba.
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Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein
Q&A: Why wiping of Georgia elections server matters By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press
Election reform activists sued Georgia of cials on July 3 demanding its highly questioned statewide elections system be immediately retired. Four days later, technicians at Kennesaw State University, which administers the state’s elections, destroyed a key piece of evidence — wiping clean an elections manage- ment server.
The server, holding data on Georgia’s 6.7 million voters and les used to stage elections, had been ex- posed on the open internet for at least six months until early June. A security expert, Logan Lamb, rst alerted of cials to the gaping vulnerability in August 2016 but it had gone unpatched.
WHY PRESERVE THE DATA?
It’s necessary to know whether the server might have been hacked and the outcome of last November’s election and a special House of Representatives vote on June 20 altered. Data on the server included passwords used by county of cials to access elections management les.
HOW DID THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LEARN OF THE DATA DESTRUCTION?
It obtained an Oct. 18 email written by an assistant state attorney general to lawyers in the case. The AP also was given 180 pages of email exchanges of election administrators obtained in an open records request. The documents con rmed the irretrievable deletion not just of the main server but also of two backups on Aug. 9.
WHO ORDERED THE SERVER WIPED?
Secretary of State Brian Kemp — a Republican running for governor in 2018 — oversees Georgia’s elections and is the main defendant. On Thursday, he blamed the wipe on “the undeniable ineptitude” of Kennesaw State’s elections center. His spokeswoman told the AP that Kemp’s of ce did not order the destruction and did not know of it beforehand.
Kennesaw State of cials have not responded to the AP’s request to know who ordered the server wiped or why they did not keep an image before deleting its data.
Emails in the open records request show that a senior university engineer instructed technicians to wipe the server’s hard drives. The university’s press of ce said in a statement Thursday that the instruction followed “standard operating procedures.”
The Atlanta FBI, which made an image of the server when it temporarily took custody in March, would not say whether it retained that copy — or whether it has done a forensic examination to determine whether the server was accessed by hackers and had les altered.
The state attorney general’s of ce, Kemp’s lawyer in the case, noti ed the court Wednesday of its intent to subpoena the FBI for the image.