‘Kill Chain’ Director Sarah Teale joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss her new HBO documentary and 2020 election vulnerabilities.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Meantime, we're also digging into election issues outside of the state of Wisconsin and across the country as a whole. A lot's been made of the issues regarding the cyber security of elections and whether or not we've done enough to protect our elections-- both your local and at the presidential level. This was highlighted, of course, in an HBO documentary back in 2006-- the Emmy-nominated documentary "Hacking Democracy," and the team behind that is back again, this time with "Kill Chain," that is digging into a Finnish hacker and his attempts to travel around the US to show how our election system remains quite vulnerable to cyber security threats and foreign influence. Take a look.

- In 2016, we know that Russian actors targeted state election systems.

- When people say, no votes were changed, it misses the point.

- Imagine you go in and flip the digits of everybody's address.

- When you prevent people from casting a ballot, you've hacked an election.

ZACK GUZMAN: So joining us now is one of the filmmakers behind "Kill Chain"-- Sarah Teale joins us live on the Google Hangout. And, Sarah, I guess, you know, it's weird to expect you to cover the same threat in two different documentaries roughly 14 years apart here when we look at it. But I guess this threat is not going away. Are you surprised that we haven't done enough? And what did you learn about how those threats still exist today?

SARAH TEALE: We haven't done anything. We were totally expecting after "Hacking Democracy," which was very well publicized, that there would be changes in the system to secure the voting systems, the voting machines, the registration rolls. But in fact, in 14 years, nothing was done. And now, it's worse. Now we have state actors who are accessing our system, and, as we showed in Alaska, can change any vote.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, you highlighted some of those attempts. I mean, you say that nothing has been done. There were attempts-- those weren't passed. You highlighted a few including one by Senator Klobuchar that was trying to address some of the issues. What was that trying to fix? And what still needs to be fixed, if nothing has been done?

SARAH TEALE: That was a bipartisan bill with Senator Klobuchar and James Lankford, who's a Republican. There have now been six bipartisan bills that would have gone a long way to securing the vote. In other words, we need to be moving to hand-marked paper ballots, especially in a time of coronavirus. We need to look at mail-in ballots or people being able to drop them off and risk-limiting audits.

If you don't double-check, you can't be sure that your vote wasn't hacked. So one way of doing it is to count-- hand count a percentage-- a random percentage of the votes on paper to make sure that it's accurate. And so all these bills have addressed that, but they've all been stopped by the White House and Senator McConnell.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. I mean, you raised a good point in the documentary that these politicians are elected, so they don't necessarily want to admit that there are problems with our elections, because it might look poorly on the fact that they were elected to office. But I mean, when we look at this, there are elements that are kind of alarming when it comes to, you know, whether or not these are private companies that are publicly funded here when we talk about an election, but also don't provide the access to ensure that enough is being done, particularly on their side, to protect the data coming in and that it can't be hacked.

SARAH TEALE: Right. No, you're right. They are private companies, but they are publicly funded. But every time anybody-- any cybersecurity expert like Harry Hursty, the subject of a film, or anybody-- anybody in the state, any senator wants to look at those voting machines, which haven't changed in decades, and wants to look at the cyber security involved-- they claim, oh, no, no, no, we're private. You cannot-- you cannot look at the code. You cannot double-check. And they don't have cyber security people on staff. So that is one of the big problems. They keep claiming privacy issues when, in fact, they're publicly funded.

ZACK GUZMAN: I mean, it's an issue that we should all be paying attention to in an election year, beyond election years, no matter. But, Sarah Teale, thank you so much for joining us to share that. I also should note-- you can watch "Kill Chain" out there now for free on HBO's YouTube platform as well as on HBOGo. Thank you so much for joining us.