Senior Writer
Willis Sparks
Senior Writer
Willis Sparks is a senior editor for GZERO Daily. He is also a Director in the Global Macro practice at Eurasia Group, where he has worked since 2005. He has made speeches on international politics on every continent except Antarctica. Willis holds degrees from Brown University, the Juilliard School, Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris. He also holds an honorary degree from the Moscow Art Theatre School. A native of Macon, Georgia, Willis has worked as a stuntman at New York's Metropolitan Opera. As a child, he declined an opportunity to spend an afternoon riding the Great American Scream Machine, a rollercoaster, with Ronald McDonald, for money. He has never regretted that decision.
Aug 17, 2018
In Las Vegas, this week, young people participated in the much more wholesome activity of hacking voting machines. As part of DEF CON, a cybersecurity conference, children aged 8-16 tried to hack replicas of state election websites. The event was designed to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of digital-age elections, and an 11-year-old made headlines by changing election results on a replica Florida state website in less than 10 minutes. None of the contestants managed to break into a heavily protected voter registration database, but we can expect more experienced hackers to spend time working on that problem.