Exclusive: clip from canvasser for Musk’s America Pac reveals apparent ease in which GPS location can be spoofed
Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undercut by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.
The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.
A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door-knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.
The video, shared with a few hundred canvassers, walks through the setup: a user downloads a GPS-spoofing app to falsely place themself at the door of a Trump voter, fakes responses to the survey and takes steps to cover up the fraud by varying the survey responses to make it believable.
Almost 20 years ago I was friends with a bunch of Red Bull girls. Their job was to take the Red Bull mini cooper every morning, fill it up with cases of Red Bull and drive it around handing out free Red Bull any place they found people congregating. They would often just drive down to the river and dump the cases there and then go home and get high and watch TV all day. Red Bull seemed to catch on to how easy it was for their employees to do this, so they issued them PDAs with GPS that would track where they went all day. I was a Windows CE mobile app developer at the time, so they asked me to see if it was possible to spoof the Red Bull tracking app, which turned out to be ridiculously easy to do since it just logged the raw GPS coordinates into a plain text file once every 15 minutes.
I did this for a pretty obvious reason (they were all very attractive) and because they gave me cases of diet Red Bull which I actually liked for some reason, but I think I was also doing humanity a service by preventing at least some people from ever even trying that vile concoction. I don’t think it helped the fish though.