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Touch Screen Voting Industry Circling Wagons
bhoman writes "Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. "
Touch Screens are GOOD! The technology is getting an incredibly bad smear thanks to the idiots at Diebold who are using it in ways which are, well, dishonest. I wish somehow the technology could be separated from the fools who use it to further their schemes. Let's hear it for all the good that touchscreens do !
This might be just me, but the apparent insecurity of these voting machines almost ensures courtroom nonsense and bickering. I could be wrong, and I hope so.
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"Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so."-Lawrence Lessig
It to open the source for these "voting machines" so they can continually undergo a public review.
Hell the hardware needs to be open for review also. It's not like there is any secret designs in there (Unless you are trying to hide something illegal)
All it takes is a tiny bit of off the shelf hardware components, a refrence design and the software to make it work easily... anyone could make an electronic voting system.
until it's all open for review by today's IS and IT experts I will not trust it or the companies making them. This isn't some silly toaster or PVR... this is the basis of the United States... voting..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What is the fascination with Access? Why does every company seem to use Access for important data when there are so many other databases that are not only higher quality, but less expensive at the same time?
There is nothing funnier than companies that try to use Access as the database for 150,000-pageview-a-day websites. Middle management at its most entertaining.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
You can check fingerprints on paper too you know. And with paper, you have the ability to say "This ballot was held by X and he voted for Y" ...
Sure, but once it's in the ballot box, only those officially sanctioned to deal with the votes have access to them, besides, who cares about finger prints when the ballot paper itself identifies you? The point I was making was that anyone who comes into the box after me (say I'm a celeb, or a politician and they care) can dust for my fingerprints on the screen and see which button I pressed.
Sure this would be pretty lousy for speculative dusting, but if you're looking for a single fingerprint and you look shortly after it was laid down, you'd have a far better chance, I reckon...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS surely concerns over the security of a voting system are not off topic? Yeah, I know "Grousing about moderation" is offtopic, so I'll shut up now :(
If the touch screen prints out a ticket that confirms your vote and you put half of the ticket into a locked box all the votes are completely auditable. The ticket could even have a long random number on it that you could use to confirm your vote was counted correctly. If there is a re-count they put all the neatly printed, voter confirmed ticket stubs through an optical reader. No pre-preinted ballots are needed, just a roll of ballot stock. Something is fishy here, must business want to supply a materials to a customer on an ongoing basis. Here they are fighting the customer telling them you don't want to mess with paper.
Free cell phone tracking
The screen itself could probably somehow capture an image of your fingerprint, without the intervention of a second person with a dusting kit... but they don't really need it because they already have a "fingerprint" of you on the smart card you pick up when you walk in and show your photo id. no votes are anonymous with these machines.
In this case, closed source CANNOT be the best tool for the job.
Maybe "Shared source" or (c) US Government, only for use in authorised Government machines.
>>> Paper receipts make it easy for a corrupt party to pay for votes.
lack thereof makes it easy for a corrupt company (diebold) to steal votes. hmm... to have the votes bought, or stolen? it's a tough choice. however, it seems like it would be easier to affect the election on a much larger scale without a paper trail.
ATMS may not be that secure either
I live in Seminole County Florida and we used optically scanned paper ballots, like those answer sheets in school that required a number 2 pencil (of course for voting pens are used). They are easy to use with the names on the ballot right next to the box you fill in. The results are read instantly when inserted in the box that holds the ballots, when a recount was ordered they just ran all of the ballots through again and had the results ready in a few hours. We have had this system for years (at least 10) and have had no problems, it is an easy answer to all of the issues that we are seeing with low-tech and high-tech voting machines. It provides a physical record and does not produce hanging chads.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Though they only spent three-quarters of a page of copy on this, I found it interesting that U.S. News and World Report did a decent job with this week's coverage of this topic.
Typically, I don't have many kind words for USNWR, often questioning my own subscription tendencies, but I am pleased to see they reference the Johns Hopkins and Rice report regarding the insecurity of the Diebold system.
Now, if only folks would see the same potential flaws in the Hart Intercivic system, then perhaps they would not be shipping 9,000 e-Slate voting machines to California.
Personally, I detest that the last four times I've voted here in Texas I've walked away with a laundry ticket. I demand a paper trail! Or at least an online database where I can review all my past votes cast. (Of course, in a perfect world, the database would be open for peer review - r/o - and the source to the programs that access and tally the votes would be available for peer review.)
Not necessarily. The idea would not be for the voter to take the receipt with him, but to put it into a locked "ballot box" where it would provide an independent audit trail. Machines would be randomly audited after each election to ensure that fraud did not take place.
I would say that the system could be made even better this way: separate out the voting and tallying machines, using the paper as a medium of transfer.
It would work like this:
(1) Voter makes choices on the voting machine.
(2) Voting machine prints out paper ballot with text and barcode representation of the votes.
(3) Voter confirms that text matches his wishes; if so he places the vote in the tallying machine which scans the bar code, puts it into a database, prints the database serial number on the ballot and deposits it into a locked box. If the ballot is unreadable,the machine spits the ballot back out and the voter can try a different machine. If for some reason the tallying machine will not accept a voter's ballot, the ballot is placed in a separte locked box for manual tallying.
(4) After the election, database records are randomly audited to compare with paper ballots; paper ballots are likewise randomly audited to ensure that the bar codes correctly. The locked "ballot boxes" should have a mechanical counter which indicates the number of times they are opened; a proper log should be kept every time of every time the ballot box was opened and why.
Such a system would have the auditability of a paper system, with an electronic system's rapid and accurate tallying and ability to handle complex balots.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Quote from the article: While seeking information last January about a voting-machine company for a book she was writing, she found a Web site "on about the 15th page of Google." The open, unprotected site held some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio.
Whether or not some people care to admit it (and there are pleny who still don't), sometimes the only/best tool for the job is closed-source commercial software.
But let's stay on the topic of elections. Perhaps here the best tool is a paper ballot (gasp)? Of course you'll need machines to count the millions of ballots, and that should probably be open-source software (how can you build public trust in the process unless the public has insight into the process?); but in any case, you need a macroscopic audit trail.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Note however that even if we put a password on the file, it doesn't really prove much. Someone has to know the password, else how would GEMS open it. So this technically brings us back to square one: the audit log is modifiable by that person at least (read, me). Back to perception though, if you don't bring this up you might skate through Metamor.
There might be some clever crypto techniques to make it even harder to change the log (for me, they guy with the password that is). We're talking big changes here though, and at the moment largely theoretical ones. I'd doubt that any of our competitors are that clever.
I seem to recall that, back in the Dark Ages of the 70s, RACF was able to handle this kind of access control quite nicely. To say a log file can't be protected from the sysadm is either dishonest or incompetent. Either reason should be enough to disqualify a company employing someone like that in that position from anything requiring the public trust.
While I do believe that Paper ballots and optical scanners are the correct solution, it does need to be pointed out that they suffer from many of the same flaws. The same companies make the optical scanner databases as the touchscreen ones, and they use the same databases.
The votes could still be manipulated during the count. You could still have the issue where it reports different numbers by county than for the whole state, hiding from a limited recount. Only a total manual recount would catch cheating.
The reason that paper is better as an immediate medium is that the original is human readable and verifiable. A printed reciept is only good if every voter carefully checks it. If it is large enough to be human usable you might as well print the whole thing.
Finally papaer and permanent markers are cheap and portable. California could run their recall election on paper and have the votes scanned in the next county. One day delay in counting is way less than six months to buy touch screens.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
Don't mod me down before you read the whole thing!
Ask yourself do you life in an "real" democracy?
Is this realy true?
You are always told you live in a demoracy.
The only time you have dircet influence or impact on a democracy is when you can vote.
But what about your vote?
Who counts your vote?
You, the people or some private company?
What technology is used?
Who controlls this company this technology?
Who does a check of the results the company gives to the public (TV stations, newspapers...)?
Almost exactly one year ago we had public elections in Germany.And you know what: ALL VOTES WERE COUNTED IN PUBLIC BY HAND!
My mother was the boss of such a polling station. There were about 400 ballot papers to count. They thought they were finisched with counting and did a check like (how many ballots cast == how many votes counted) and discovered an error. So they counted again. One hour later everything was okay.
Also in the US every vote should be equal. Is this alway true?
You give your right away to technical solutions that differ about +/-5% if the same ballots are counted again! If I were to vote in the US, I would demand a counting by hand. Fuck the TV stations that want an excact result 15 minutes past the closing of the last ballot station! You don't have to use a technology only because some company promotes it's use.
For the sake of your democracy step forward and demand a manual counting of your votes!
That is not possible? Why because there a companies lobbying for their ultimate "Vote-A-Matic"? These products only cost the money of all the taxpayers. A counting of the votes by the public costs nothing! Many people volunteer for counting the votes.
Is there vote fraud in Germany? Of course there is but you can uncover ist better, because there is a manual counting of the votes. The result of every ballot station is published in newspapers and the internet. If you doubt the rsults of a specific ballot station, you can demand a recount!
Demand a manual counting of your votes in the US!
These are my thoughts of your lost demoracy.
NoSuchGuy
(Sorry for all the faults, english is not my mother language.)
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Harris Miller, by the way, the head of the ITAA. This is a
front organization for Bill Gates in Washington.
Harris Miller is not a tech expert, but an
immigration lawyer. He made his career lobbying
for importing more itinerant laborers to pick
crops. Impressed with his skills, the richest
people in America hired him to lobby for more H1-B
visas. Unfortuneately for American workers, he
suceeded. Norm Matloff has some information on Harris Miller here.
more information here.
Note: a guy that looks a lot like Miller
drives a Big Mercedes with Virginia vanity licence tags saying "ITAA".
He goes 95 MPH when everybody else is going 70-75 and runs people off the road.
I'm inclined to agree with you on the punch card issue delaying the CA election. However, I think punch card systems should be replaced with better systems if possible.
Pray that Queen Hillary the First doesn't make it into the white house in 2004, because if that happens who knows, we may see judges deciding elections from now on.
Isn't that what happened in the last presidential election? As a Democrat, I'm not bitter about it. The bottom line is that FL was a statistical tie; the margin of victory was smaller than the margin of error for ballot tallying. Nobody really knows what the intent of the electorate was with sufficient precision to state with true confidence who "actually won". Both parties were playing games with recount methods to try the skew the results in their favor. The irony is that subsequent analysis suggests that both parties were wrong about which method would have supported their candidate best.
I take away some different lessons from FL than most.
(1) The electoral college has some usefulness. The president is elected by electors, not popular votes. Therefore there is no question that Bush received the electoral votes of FL and that therefore he is the legitimately president of the US. There is a question whether the electors voted as they ought to have; however they are not really bound to vote in any particular way. If they voted with what was, in their opinion, the plurality of the electorate, then they really can't be criticized.
(2) Electronic voting machines would have helped, provided there was no fraud. The problem is of course it is impossible with current generation machines to prove this. There is no doubt that in the absence of fraud electronic machines would provide a more precise count. However,
(3) Concern about precision of tallying is misplaced. The real problem is that the method of the election, plurality voting, is so bad. Suppose Bush won the plurality of voters; this is by no means certain, but it doesn't really matter. Gore would have won by a clear margin in a head to head race, but Nader spoiled the election for him. I don't want to get into an argument about whether Nader should have taken this into account. No candidate should ever have to take the possibility of election spoiling into account, because we should have an electoral system which handles multi-way races better.
In short, electronic voting machines are a "quick fix" to a broken system; however they're fixing an aspect of the system that really is not so terribly bad. Even if they were perfectly secure, auditable and accurate, which they are definitely not, they wouldn't make much difference at all, especially in the CA recall election.
The real reason that the CA recall election should not go forward is that plurality elections with over a hundred candidats are nearly bound to produce a capricious result. Virtually the only system that is workable in this scenario is approval voting. Under approvial voting voters would check off all the candidates they would consent to have as governor. The candidate most widely approved of wins. Approval voting is simple to understand, requires only a single round, doesn't require the voters to rank candidates in an enormous field where they may not be familiar with most of them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
An excellent article
...from the moscow times. Oh the irony.
Also, has an extensive bibliography of other links at the bottom.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
There is no problem with punch cards per se. Punch cards punched by machines are pretty damn reliable and unalterable without alteration being detected (assuming you have a checksum value indicated too).
The problem with punch card VOTING is that they are being punched by weakling grandmas.
So make a touch screen system that instead of tallying votes, just does the punching for you. You select your candidates via touch screen (or really, any way you want.... buttons and levers, voice recognition, braile, etc.) and out pops a punch card with your choices.
Now just like in places using the optical scanners, you then take the machine-punched card to the other side of the room to a punch card reader, manufactured by a DIFFERENT company that lets you read what votes are recorded on it. If your votes are right, you deposit it in the ballot box to be counted. If not, you (they dufus who made a wrong selection) go to the poll manager, claim spoiled ballot, and get a new card, start over and do it right this time.
If your ballot is challenged, it can be put in a challenge envelope, rather than haveing to whip out some paper ballot where your votes can be easily read by anyone, destroying your confidentiality.
This system eliminates the problem of no paper "record" of the touch screen votes, since the touch screens are NOT tallying votes... they just produce punch cards... not tallying or recording (and no Access databases of the tally to be hacked).
If the touch screen machine is hacked, then it will be detected real quick by someone checking a card punched by the touch screen machine on the reader across the room. Someone would have to hack BOTH of them to make a fraud work.
This takes a lot less smarts and security in the touch screen kiosks, and recounts are possible since an audit trail exists (the paper ballots). Lightning strike/power failure/other FUBAR/ doesn't wipe the memory (and the votes) on that touch screen machine.
BTW, I'm pattenting this process so you will all have to pay me royalties. Profit!!
Just as the Salon.com article was picked up here at Slashdot, Conspiracy Planet picks up articles from wherever it wants. It copied an article that was in Scoop Media. The Seattle Times reporter was somewhat misleading, and he was determined to get the word "conspiracy" into the article somehow.
I put him on notice that if he called me a conspiracy theorist, he would have to back that up with facts or I would require the editors to print a correction. Then he said "well, I'll just print what others say about you."
This guy did everything but stand on his head to slant the story, but I blocked most of the efforts. Something he fails to report in his story is that the Microsoft Access hack that is the subject of the Scoop Media article, the Ken Clark memo, and the Salon.com article (and was vetted out right here on Slashdot) -- well, I demonstrated that hack in front of the Seattle Times reporter, the IT guy for the Times, and a Seattle Times photographer, who commented, "Wow. This shows you can rig an election."
The reporter's use of the "Conspiracy Planet" reference was pretty disengenuous, when you realize that he knew damn well my work has also been covered in the Washington Post, AP Wire service, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN.
As you can see, I'm getting sick of the "conspiracy" label, since I've broken seven stories in a row on the voting issue and every one of them has checked out and, eventually, been picked up by the mainstream media, albeit haltingly. For a long time I just ignored it, but now, when reporters try to go there, I tell them to back it up or get hit with a correction, and if they don't correct, a libel suit.
Sad that it has to come to this -- printing facts is not the same thing as being a tinfoil hatter. What I do is scrutiny, and my facts check out.
Bev Harris
The major flaw in a secret ballot, however, is that the only person who knows for sure how he voted can't verify his vote was counted correctly. The people who can verify the vote don't know what the vote is. There's no check. Even in a simple summation, You can't verify the output without knowing all the inputs.
Take a simple model of a non-secret ballot where everybody's vote is published in a newspaper the day after the vote. John Q. Public can check the paper, verify his vote was recorded correctly, and verify that all the votes add up to the reported total. There's no opportunity for fraud except for the case of vote buying but then the voter is a willing participant, and, in fact, can be done in the existing system through absentee ballots.
What's needed is a method where the voter can verify his vote and the reported totals without sacrificing his anonymity. Then it doesn't matter if the vote is cast on paper, electronically, or by smoke signals. It then becomes an argument over which system is more efficient (less mistakes, faster results, etc.) rather than which system is more open to fraud.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
Have your touch screen record and count votes electronically.
have a paper log on a cash register roll, in plain English, and in machine readable barcode.
Have that log visible to the voter under glass.
After voting, the voter can verify his ballot.
If it is right, press enter, and *snip* the "receipt" is dropped into a locked ballot box upon which the machine is mounted.
If it is wrong, the voter can press a button to void the ballot, the log entry and barcode are voided, and *snip* the voided "receipt" is dropped into the locked ballot box, and the roll scrolls up for a fresh ballot to be cast.
The machines can instantly tally and report the recorded votes. If you want to audit the vote, the board of elections have a permanent, not easily tampered and not sequential log to scan in with barcode scanners. Still not satisfied with the programming of the barcode scanners? Well, it's there in plain English too, verified by the initial voter. Start counting. No hanging or pregnant chads, no guessing about the intent of the voter who did or didn't punch a hole.
The ultimate in open source, since common people can verify the accuracy of the count.
An electronic log can never have that much certainty.
Tell two of your friends about vreceipt, and have them tell two of their friends, etc. We need to have everybody asking their congressmen not only "Why are we implementing easily tampered with voting systems?", but "Why are we implementing them instead of mathematically verifiable alternatives?"
There's a lot to the white paper at that link, but here's the part that makes voting receipts possible: The receipts are given out and are identical to an entry in the published "first stage" election results, so you can verify that your vote was counted. The receipts have been repeatedly encrypted with different election officials' public keys, so nobody who wants to buy/blackmail your vote can tell who you voted for (but you can, by examining the original "2-ply" receipt which you pull apart before leaving the booth). Election officials scramble the order in which results are published after each decryption stage, so nobody can trace your vote from first stage to final cleartext results, but half of the published decryptions are randomly checked so any corruption on the part of the election officials will be caught. You still need to have poll watchers to make sure that a polling site doesn't report more votes than there were voters (since the vreceipt process protects against lost or altered votes, but not illegitimately added votes), but that's much easier than attempting to make sure that even an open source voting machine is doing it's job right.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Could you explain why, exactly, this is a problem? If someone chooses to sell their vote, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so? This is a serious question.
Because it undermines the whole notion of voting for a candidate because of the things they promise to do once in power. Bad election practices such as these were common in parts of England until the nineteenth century. "Rotten boroughs" with small numbers of eligible voters could be used to ensure a candidate got into parliament. Even after the widening of the franchise a mixture of bribery and coercion was common, with small farmers and manual labourers expected to vote how their bosses saw fit.
Chris
I'm a long-time IT person, and I voted using one of these machines last election, and it was *very clear* that these machines lack accountability.
Thank you for exposing this, and no, I'm not a nut; I voted Republican, am a conservative, but this is not a conservative or liberal issue; this cuts to the core of the republic and it needs to be fixed right now.
And Diebold has been sending cease-and-desist letters out to people who have covered this. This particular mistake looks like a screw-up rather than fraud, but either way I want no part of it.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
Here's one that supposedly happened quite a bit until systems were modified to defeat it:
You go to the polling place, and get stopped across the street by a couple of guys, who hand you a pre-filled ballot form. You put it in a pocket, walk in, get a blank form, go into the booth and dawdle for a few minutes. Before leaving the booth you pull out the pre-filled form and pocket the blank form. When you leave the booth you drop the pre-filled ballot into the box, walk back across the street and and give the blank ballot to the guys waiting there. They give you your money/don't break your kneecaps/don't kick you out of the union/whatever.
My voting area uses punched card ballots (and they've never been a problem) that have an feature designed to defeat this. Each ballot has a perforated easy-tear section with a serial number printed on it. When you get your ballot, the volunteer writes down the serial number you took. Before you can put your ballot into the box, the volunteer verifies that the ballot you're about to put into the box has the same serial number as the one she gave you. Then you tear off the serial number, which gets destroyed, and put the remainder of the ballot in the box.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
All these discussion about costs and speed usually leave out the primary goals of a democratic voting procedure, which should be:
The ballots are secret so that nobody can be persecuted for his vote.
The final tally reflects accurately the will of people having voted. For accountability purposes the count should be easy to verify so that allegions of election fraud can be resoved without doubt.
All entitled citizen can take part in the election and cast their vote in a safe and a easy manner.
I seriously doubt, that the average citizen is capable to even understand the necessary steps to check whether a computer-voting machine has been tampered with, not even to think about being able to verify the authenticity.
Considering how many ways have been found to tamper with simple and easy to understand paper ballots, adding the possibilities for fraud offered by a computer are mind-boggling.
Without any paper trail, "The computer said so" will be the final arguments about whether election results are correct. Going by how reliable computer systems are runing in banks and the IRS, this isn't really a very high standard of confidence for a democracy.
If a paper trail is generated anyway, why is it necessary to replace technologies understood and trusted by most people - pens or stamps - with computers? The only added feature is that the secrecy of an election can be more easily be subverted.
That fact that those computers are running Windows and a voting software written by half-wits is making things only slightly worse. Even the best and most open system design won't reach the trustworthiness and accountability of a simple pen or stamp.
I want the names of all the Diebold technical personnel involved with these machines so I can add them to our hiring blacklist.
Perhaps I've been living in an idyllic career vacuum, where everyone is competent and of good character -- and perhaps that's why I'm completely, jaw-droppingly astonished beyond words after reading Scoop's copy of the internal Diebold memos. With the possible exception of $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), I've never witnessed such opaque incompetence. These "engineers" not only don't know what they're doing, they clearly don't want to know what they're doing.
That whole "explanation" as to why a password on the database would be "pointless", since GEMS needs a password to add vote records... <*shaking head*> It's crystal-fscking-clear that they want an anonymous database user/account (the voter) that can only append records (votes) to the database; it must not be allowed to read or modify records. Read-only accounts are given to the vote counters and, if you really need to, a single strongly-passworded read-write account is given to the election commissioner. Once you establish these requirements, you then look for software that will do this for you. If MSAccess won't do it, junk it and move on. If no existing databases will do it, then My God, you're going to have to do some actual engineering! .
These idiots are trying to fudge the requirements because, apparently, they don't want to have to use any software they can't scoop up at Fry's (and, apparently, writing their own software is an anathema). I mean, yeah, their incompetence has placed the integrity of the Republic at risk, yadda yadda yadda, but am I the only person who sees their behavior as a kind of disinterested laziness? I can sort of understand people who are disinterested in the act of voting because the hiring roster has been stacked. But I mean, for God's sake, what kind of self-respecting person -- never mind software engineer -- would demonstrate such a profound lack of interest and respect in designing a fundamental instrument of democratic principles? If it were me, I'd be lying awake at night, worrying that I wasn't dilligent enough, wasn't smart enough to take on work of such profound importance. It would probably eat me alive, because any screw-up could be disasterous, because doing an excellent job would be so absolutely critical . But no, these guys are just phoning it in, tossing aside crucial security concerns with utterly stupid aphorisms such as, "Passwords actually don't matter much..."
Blacklist them. The software screwup you avoid may be your own.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Here is what I have been doing all day:
Reporter: Why is Diebold sending cease and desists?
Me: Because they don't want anyone to see their memos
Reporter: Oh. What is in the memos?
Me: Oh, things about security flaws and using uncertified software and using cell phones to intercept and transfer votes and discussions of how to fake things...
Reporter: Wow. Where can I download these?
Me: At this web site
Reporter: Okay I'm going there now, okay, it's downloading, when I'm done will you give me a guided tour?
Me: Sure. And here is a neat little web page where you just enter any search term and it instantly searches and find you the Diebold memos that match
Reporter: What search terms should I start with?
Me: Try "boogie man" and also "hack" "cel phone" "broken" "fake" and one of my personal favorites, "What good are rules"
Reporter: I'll try that "what good are rules" one. Found it. Gosh, what is he doing? Is that legal?
Me: No.
And so it goes. Excellent plan, Diebold. Yes, shut down a web site, that'll help.
Besides reporters, the memos were downloaded today by the U.S. House of Representatives.
This is a SEARCH ENGINE, folks, that finds the Diebold memos. What's next -- Google?
"The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients' rights and to seek your agreement to the following: To remove from the web site the Diebold Property, and to remove or disable the information location tools (including any associated indices used for searching) contained therein as identified in the attached chart and to destroy any backup copies of the Diebold Property and/or information location tools, including associated indices, that are contained on your server."