Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections’ on HBO, a Documentary That’s Also a Horror Movie

Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections is HBO’s second upsetting-slash-vital political documentary this month, following After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. It’s essentially a sequel to 2006’s Hacking Democracy; both films are directed by Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale, and follow cyber security guru Harri Hursti as he shines a light on weaknesses in American voting machines and processes. So things HAVE to have gotten better in 14 years, right? Um, well, about that.

KILL CHAIN: THE CYBER WAR ON AMERICA’S ELECTIONS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A parade of U.S. officials publicly espouses how secure the election system is: No votes were changed by hackers in 2016, they insist. Since the system is a hodgepodge of different methods in different counties in different states, it’s too idiosyncratic to be affected by a large-scale attack, they say. Enter Hursti, who’s in the business of showing these people they’re absolutely full of crap. In Hacking Democracy, Hursti cut through the security systems in Diebold voting machines like Godzilla through a sheet of Saran Wrap. Diebold responded with a defensive PR campaign in which they attempted to squash the film’s release (they were unsuccessful) and prove the notorious Hursti Hack false (also unsuccessful; it was independently verified) — more effort than the company would have expended by just FIXING THE DAMN MACHINES, Hursti points out, in kinder, less all-caps terms.

The film then reveals that those exact same Diebold machines will be used in 20 states for the 2020 election. Eat shit, common sense!

Hursti says his job is to be a good guy who thinks like the bad guys. He’s a genius, sure — we visit his mother’s home in Finland, where she keeps awards he won for writing software at age 12 — but there are others like him, and they’re not so benevolent. Subtitle: FLORIDA. (Yes. I can hear you groaning.) That’s where a voting-machine company called VR Systems is headquartered, a company whose machines experienced a “glitch” during the 2016 election, a “glitch” that was in fact a Russian cyber attack the NSA knew was going to happen before the election but didn’t reveal. An NSA employee named Reality Winner leaked that bit of information in a heroic act of Snowdenism, and got five years in a federal penitentiary for it.

Subtitle: THE VOTING MACHINE COMPANIES DECLINED TO BE INTERVIEWED. Do you blame them? I mean, who wants to look like a corrupt idiot in public?

Kill Chain plows forward with Hursti investigating more examples of sketchy occurrences in other elections, and shows how the “solutions” to these issues are even more problematic. Infuriatingly, he buys an AccuVote TSX for $75 from an electronics recycling center that has pallets upon pallets of them stacked in a warehouse — a voting machine that’s still being used in some municipalities, and shouldn’t be accessible to the general public, because then any malevolent actor could open one up and figure out how it works and potentially alter election results, which is exactly what Hursti does. He organizes a “voting machine hacking village” at a hacker’s convention in Las Vegas, and the participants successfully infiltrated EVERY MACHINE Hursti brought. Every. Single. One. Now imagine a malevolent adversary to our country using nigh-unlimited resources to do this exact stuff, Hursti says. The documentary is jammed with horrific moments like this, and I’ll let you discover the rest for your gobsmacked self.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I used to say The Shining was the scariest movie I ever saw.

Performance Worth Watching: Hursti is a hero. Despite his intelligence and confidence, he’s never arrogant. He’s matter-of-fact and, most importantly, highly credible.

Memorable Dialogue: One talking head points out how wrongheaded the U.S. government is: “We may be bringing the world’s best 20th-century military, when the battlefront in the 21st century is election security, cyber security.”

Sex and Skin: The only thing getting effed here is democracy.

Our Take: Kill Chain is one highly upsetting facepalm moment after another — but STOP TOUCHING YOUR FACE! It goes fascinatingly deep into the hows of election hacking, specifically, how infiltrating a voting machine is a disturbing hot-knife-through-butter scenario. But it also offers a smidgen of hope, with experts suggesting solutions: good old-fashioned paper ballots, which can’t be hacked by someone in the parking lot with a laptop, and are imminently auditable when results are questionable.

The question Kill Chain doesn’t try to answer is why. Why manufacturers of voting machines don’t bother to employ cyber security specialists. Why everyone in the system just complies with mandates to use outdated machines. Why voting machine developers would implement a system that actually discourages audits. Why bullfrog Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lets election security bills rot on his desk instead of putting them up for a vote, with nary a whiff of an explanation as to why he deems them unnecessary. “Greed” seems to be a solid catchall answer, although it seems more complicated than that, but it probably isn’t.

The doc isn’t brazenly political — it merely suggests gross Republican corruption rather than stating it outright. It’s a portrait of brazen incompetence or brazen corruption, or both. Maybe it’ll inspire conspiracy theories; maybe it’ll inspire despair; maybe it’ll inspire activism. It would be funny if it wasn’t utterly terrifying.

Our Call: STREAM IT, sooner rather than later. Sometimes the truth is really really really really really really infuriating. But it’s still the truth.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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