Slashdot Mirror
Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia
h0mee writes "Diebold, manufacturer of election equipment, has issued a Cease and desist notice to the upstream provider of San Francisco Indymedia for having links to mirrors of a leaked internal diebold memo. More than just a case of a leak, Diebold has been raising a lot of questions about the fairness and security of elections in the United States. (Perhaps it's time for peer reviewable software like gnu.free? ;)"
free e-democracy project
if that isn't terrorism...
Their efforts have been pretty effective so far. Every link in the 'links' in the article are gone/down.
Any body care to share? Maybe provide on the P2P networks and post keywords here...
This is the first time I've ever seen a free software project post pics of those behind it on their website's homepage. And not exactly modestly sized, either. This doesn't really add credibility to the effort.
could the goverment actually convice its people that by pressing a button on an ordinary computer you have a democracy
Indymedia is a very important platform in the current world where most people are influenced by mass media. So, support them by giving them webspace outside of the USA, so that they will be able to continue exercising their right to free speech!
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Given the current overly coroprate friendly environment in US-Justice and vice-versa, I would like to take a bet that this will not be resolved and that Diebold will be free to win elections for it's favourite party.
That doing this will make the leaked documents even more noticed, with people wanting to know why Diebold wants them censored, thus resulting in hundreds of new mirrors popping up and everyone sharing this with each other?
Guys, like always, you're jumping the gun a little bit in favour of Free Software. I do not deny that an open project could be usefull in voting machine technologies, but that is far from the only solution. All that is truly needed is accountability built into the system. If a commercial product created a paper-trail that could appeald to in case of a challenge of the voting results (and the voters could see their vote choice printed) it would solve the major problems the diebold systems were designed to have. True, a GPL'd solution could do this as well, but when we start saying that no commercial product will work, we start to look like zealots who's primary goal is to get Free Software out everywhere. The issue this time isn't free vrs non-free software, it is free vrs. non-free elections: if such is possible this is a more important issue than Free Software proliferation.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
We need someone to come up with a GPL'd project that is an OS that does ballots on the x86 platform which is open source and workable, freely downloadable and testable then get people together to demand that it be put on election systems instead of using questionable ones.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Let's think. US elections are too big an issue to be left to the people.
After all, if people were to say their opinion in the elections, the opinion would have to be honored. And what would that leave the US power elites?
So, you see, fair elections make it harder to uphold the status quo, and to concentrate the wealth and power to the hands of the select few.
Naturally, you cannot have that. Hence the elections must be silently modifiable.
E-voting is simply a bad idea. Voting needs to be done using paper, in order to keep accountability. Paper, once written, cannot be changed and can always be recounted. Software offers no such guarantee, not even if a thousand 'experts' all proclaim the software to be safe.
try this out... its not the memo but it explains the security flaws http://avirubin.com/vote/
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
Just use paper! Is it really that hard?
there's pleNTy of evidence that the evile wons are not planning to surrender/go away any time soon, but no matter, the creator's newclear power plan, & planet/population rescue initiative, is generationally unstoppable, as is the gnu millennium.
as the lights continue to come up, we'll all know what time (it) is. there'll be no going back, & no where to hide.
for each of the creator's innocents harmed, there is a badtoll that must/will be repaid by you/US, as the perpetrators of the whoreabull life0cide against humankind will not be available to make reparations.
nuff said.
How about this?
Since we know there are four manufacturers of potentially constitutionally illegal voting machines, it seems that Diebold is being thrown to the pack. Like George Tennet.
While the sheelpe are pleased with the effectivness of American justice to punish those deserving (Hows the mansion Kenny-boy!), the other three companies finish the job and end the "democratic" US. It used to be a republic, but you all gave that up a long time ago...
Here is a link to the memos thaty actually works
Free cell phone tracking
I have no doubt whatsoever that by the end of the day these documents will be mirrored in hundreds of places around the world.
http://www.equalccw.com/lewisdeconstructed.pdf This links to a pdf that has excerpts of internal memos at diebold.
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
How about just an electronic voting system that has redundancy. Example:
1) User votes for who they want to and it is recorded
2) Machine prints out card with users vote
3) Card is checked by user for accuracy
4) Card is then re-inserted into machine to generate the backup tally.
If the tallies from 1 and 4 don't match, the cards are "certified" and then rerun.
seems that the felonious wons still bulleave that THEY, are the center of the wwuniverse. how fauxking MiSguided they MuSt be.
.controll freak behaviours.
they even go so far as to deny the existence of the creator, & the newclear power plan, as they cannot comprehend (poor training?) the wholeness of the gnu millennium, choosing to narrow their focus DOWn to phonIE monIE, & power &
lookout bullow.
Some influentail people start to consider about
"Pressing button democracy".
Read original
Japanese text or English translation
They are not majority,of course.
Internal Memos: Diebold Doing End-Runs Around Certification
Ring your local elected representatives. Write to your local paper. Tell them the story. Demand that they get Diebold executives charged with vote-tampering. Whining to your fellow slashdotters will achieve nothing. Go hack the real world.
This isn't the only site that Diebold has shut down. I guess it just finally went far enough to get posted here. blackboxvoting.org is another one.
No educated person can believe that these systems are anything but a predesigned plan to subvert elections. It is impossible to make computer voting secure without compromising the secret ballot. Even the most basic steps to make these systems secure have not been taken.
There's no way to fix computer voting. Diebold will "fix" their security problems and it will still be easy to subvert the elections through well-hidden backdoors. Everyone will think the machines are completely secure because they'll remember the fuss about their security.
Do you want a corporation to have the power to decide arbitrarily the outcome of elections?
Hear, hear.
The important thing in democracy is not the voting, it's the counting.
Any technology introduced to improve the act of voting cannot make the act of counting less transparent or democracy suffers.
It is apparent that Diebold's systems (not to mention Diebold's paranoia for secrecy) render the act of counting less accountable and less transparent. Ergo, democracy suffers.
If used in a close election - where exit polling and other secondary measurements are unable to confirm the results of the counting - the wrong person might actually get elected President of the United States of America.
With no sense of responsibility to the coutry at large, this illegitimate President might launch a series of Napoleonic wars to to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy.
I digress into fantasy... the little blue ones I washed down with all those adult beverages must be kicking in.
A hash is made based on the votes selections, voting location, vote submittal time, etc. Basically everything but the voters name (one (wo)man, one vote doesn't mean traceable).
This hash is printed and/or emailed to a voter-defined email address (which could default to a 3rd party organization if the voter has no email). This email would contain a link that when clicked would query the central database of tallied votes. If the user-passed hash string is contained within the tallied votes, all is A-OK. If it's missing, then some impropriety has taken place.
The hash could be stored in the Db, but would be regenerated at each user-initiated check as a further check to ensure that what the voter entered was recorded correctly (this is by no means a perfect solution, so suggestions are welcome ;). Then, each user that generates an error should start an investigation, etc, etc.
Now for that messy licensing thing - This idea is copyright Nick Campbeln, 2003, All Rights Reserved. Wanna use this idea? Cool! The license requires 5% of your annual profits off the system that utilizes this idea. Is your solution open source and given away freely to any government who wants it? Cool, 5% of $0 = $0.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
l00ks LIEk that's what's happening.
lookout bullow. J. Public's well fed dupe with the phonIE fauxking georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazi execrable.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator regarding decisions of the heart/mind/wallet.
pay attention (to yOUR environment/the weather, for example). that's affordable, & can lead to increased ability to assist in the disempowerment of the felonious greed/fear/ego based ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys bullshipping industrIE.
"It has recently come to our clients' attention that you appear to be hosting a web site that contains information location tools that refer or link users to one or more online location containing Diebold Property."
Earth to Diebold: Emails are not property
I trust that the community will have a full set of mirrored locations available today, as we seem to do each time a C&D letter is sent...
I have mirrored the chapters from the book that have been trying to be knocked out as well as the memos I could find. If you have more memos, e-mail them to me at webmaster@scifience.net. Go to http://www.scifience.net/ and read the first blog post. Click the link for the book chapters and click to read more for the memos.
Internal Memos: Diebold Doing End-Runs Around Certification
.mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new. In VTS, you can open the database with progress and do the same. The same would go for anyone else's system using whatever database they are using. Hard drives are read-write entities. You can change their contents.
.mdb file. Even technical wizards at Metamor (or Ciber, or whatever) can figure that one out.
.mdb file to prevent Metamor from opening it with Access. I've threatened to put a password on the .mdb before when dealers/customers/support have done stupid things with the GEMS database structure using Access. Being able to end-run the d
Friday, 12 September 2003 (PDT)
By Bev Harris - blackboxvoting.org
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
If certification isn't being done properly, the whole house of cards falls. Below are actual copies of internal Diebold memos which show that uncertified software is being used in elections, and that Diebold programmers intentionally end-run the system.
Quick backgrounder first, scroll down to see the memos.
BACKGROUND
Our voting system, which is part of the public commons has recently been privatized. When this happened, the counting of the votes, which must be a public process, subjected to the scrutiny of many eyes of plain old citizens, became a secret.
The computerized systems that register voters, will soon sign voters into the polling place using a digital smart card, record the vote we cast, and tally it are now so secret they are not allowed to be examined by any citizens group, or even by academics like the computer scientists at major universities.
The corporate justification for this secrecy is that these systems adhere to a list of "standards" put out by the Federal Election Commission, and that an "ITA" (Independent Testing Authority) carefully examines the voting system, which is then provided to states for their own certification.
As it turns out, the states typically do not examine the computer code at all, relying instead on a "Logic and Accuracy" test which will not catch fraud and has frequently missed software programming errors that cause the machines to miscount.
A Diebold message board has been used since 1999 to help technicians in the field interact with programmers to solve problems. The contents of this message board were quietly sent to reporters and activists around the world, most likely by a Diebold employee. In a letter to WiredNews, Diebold has acknowledged that these memos are from its own staff message boards.
Without further commentary, judge for yourself whether Diebold has been following certification requirements:
From Nel Finberg, Technical Writer, Diebold Election Systems
(Note: Metamor/Ciber is the ITA assigned to certify the software)
alteration of Audit Log in Access
To: "support"
Subject: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Nel Finberg"
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 23:31:30 -0700
Importance: Normal
Jennifer Price at Metamor (about to be Ciber) has indicated that she can access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password. What is the position of our development staff on this issue? Can we justify this? Or should this be anathema?
Nel
Reply from Ken Clark, principal engineer for Diebold Election Systems
RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
To:
Subject: RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Ken Clark"
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 09:55:02 -0700
Importance: Normal
In-reply-to:
Its a tough question, and it has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality.
Right now you can open GEMS'
Now, where the perception comes in is that its right now very *easy* to change the contents. Double click the
It is possible to put a secret password on the
Please send material/link to dave at doklaan dot net!
Finally, someone posted them on Slashdot
It's not like paper is some magic substance that prevents fraud. Paper ballots using ink marks can be photocopied. Paper ballots using punch-outs (e.g., chads, be they pregnant, hanging, or otherwise) are more awkward to copy but still can be done. Paper ballots can be burned (just like electronic ballots can be fried by electrical or magnetic forces). And so on. Society has greater comfort with those limitations, because society has been using paper ballots for quite some time, but all we need is one good scandal on top of the Bush-Gore election dispute to have people start more seriously questioning the validity of paper.
Ballots that contain some sort of code that is cross-checked against an electronic record in a database, using values only computed at the time the vote is recorded, would be rather difficult to forge, but, then, that implies electronic voting with a paper-based audit trail.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
So will Diebold be setting up the Iraqi "elections"?
I'm absolutely sure that somehow a Shiite Cleric will not win and instead the Iraqi's will "choose" to elect an ex-banker with ties to the US oil industry...
This is not THAT HARD.
Writing a stable voting system with checks and balances that are auditable, and having a system that really works should NOT BE HARD. A mid-level university project, at most, could get it right. We are talking about something really important here....
I mean, it sounds like diebold wrote this with a couple junior guys over a couple weekends, using whatever toolkits they could get their hands on to make the job easier.. what gives?
>what this means is the software used in these elections was never looked at by ANYONE except a handful of programmers in Canada.
:)
Don't you guys trust us Canadians?
Seriously, isnt't there something legalwise that any private citizen can do to stop or correct this sort of crap from happening?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I just checked diebold at mailinator.com, on the off chance that someone might have sent the memos there. No Messages.
Internal Memos: Diebold Doing End-Runs Around Certification
.mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new. In VTS, you can open the database with progress and do the same. The same would go for anyone else's system using whatever database they are using. Hard drives are read-write entities. You can change their contents.
.mdb file. Even technical wizards at Metamor (or Ciber, or whatever) can figure that one out.
.mdb file to prevent Metamor from opening it with Access. I've threatened to put a password on the .mdb before when dealers/customers/support have done stupid things with the GEMS database structure using Access. Being able to
Friday, 12 September 2003 (PDT)
By Bev Harris - blackboxvoting.org
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
********
If certification isn't being done properly, the whole house of cards falls. Below are actual copies of internal Diebold memos which show that uncertified software is being used in elections, and that Diebold programmers intentionally end-run the system.
Quick backgrounder first, scroll down to see the memos.
BACKGROUND
Our voting system, which is part of the public commons has recently been privatized. When this happened, the counting of the votes, which must be a public process, subjected to the scrutiny of many eyes of plain old citizens, became a secret.
The computerized systems that register voters, will soon sign voters into the polling place using a digital smart card, record the vote we cast, and tally it are now so secret they are not allowed to be examined by any citizens group, or even by academics like the computer scientists at major universities.
The corporate justification for this secrecy is that these systems adhere to a list of "standards" put out by the Federal Election Commission, and that an "ITA" (Independent Testing Authority) carefully examines the voting system, which is then provided to states for their own certification.
As it turns out, the states typically do not examine the computer code at all, relying instead on a "Logic and Accuracy" test which will not catch fraud and has frequently missed software programming errors that cause the machines to miscount.
A Diebold message board has been used since 1999 to help technicians in the field interact with programmers to solve problems. The contents of this message board were quietly sent to reporters and activists around the world, most likely by a Diebold employee. In a letter to WiredNews, Diebold has acknowledged that these memos are from its own staff message boards.
Without further commentary, judge for yourself whether Diebold has been following certification requirements:
From Nel Finberg, Technical Writer, Diebold Election Systems
(Note: Metamor/Ciber is the ITA assigned to certify the software)
alteration of Audit Log in Access
To: "support"
Subject: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Nel Finberg"
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 23:31:30 -0700
Importance: Normal
Jennifer Price at Metamor (about to be Ciber) has indicated that she can access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password. What is the position of our development staff on this issue? Can we justify this? Or should this be anathema?
Nel
Reply from Ken Clark, principal engineer for Diebold Election Systems
RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
To:
Subject: RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Ken Clark"
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 09:55:02 -0700
Importance: Normal
In-reply-to:
Its a tough question, and it has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality.
Right now you can open GEMS'
Now, where the perception comes in is that its right now very *easy* to change the contents. Double click the
It is possible to put a secret password on the
How about a much easier solution. PRINT A MARKED BALLOT! (With a barcode) Then if there are discrepencies you can re-count by hand if you REALLY have to, or can just load the ballots up in a counting machine and scan all the barcodes.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
It's the articles/posts on Indymedia calling for the deaths of Jews and other that they don't like that bother some of us.
I don't seem to recall this many investigations, procescutions, and leaks since the days of Reagan near the time of the S&L crisis.
Seems to me a lot of companines are now coming under scrutiny from a combination of things. Public sentitment, investor anger, and a Justice department that does act.
Yes they allow some things to slip by, but do the other 3 groups.
Remember, the DOJ just isn't in Washington. Ashcroft is a favorite whipping boy because he is the most visible part. He gets credit for some things (though he does do a great job of not taking credit for what the field does) but he gets blamed for many things he isn't involved in. (can you say Philly?)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What incredible timing for them to bring this to light!
The Civic Media Center, one of the few independent libraries and reading rooms (aka indyshops) in the USA, is having a town meeting this week with the topic "Voting Technology and Its Impact on Democracy" Noam Chomsky is also going to be in town this week. This should be great for the discussion!
The useful half of this really matters. This is a case where I don't care if we can sell competing products, but I do care very much that the source open for review.
Even a Microsoft-style shared source license would be better than the status quo, though it pains me to say so.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
You operate under the false impression that government wants fair elections. It is a time-honored American tradition to manipulate elections. It's almost a contest between the two parties to see who can do it more.
Now for that messy licensing thing - This idea is copyright Nick Campbeln, 2003, All Rights Reserved. Wanna use this idea? Cool! The license requires 5% of your annual profits off the system that utilizes this idea. Is your solution open source and given away freely to any government who wants it? Cool, 5% of $0 = $0. You do realise that you patent ideas, (which takes years and money and lawyers) and copyright specific implementations of those ideas (which is free and automatic)? So you've got two choices - either go to the patent office and register your above plan, and try and get it past prior art (better have a lawyer draft that patent application!), or write an entire system that does what you describe, which you will have copyright of; but then that doesn't stop anyone else using the same idea, but different code to implement it. Hmm. Maybe I should go patent the 'try and make money by coming up with an idea that's totally impractical then try and charge people for using it without doing any work, except post it on a public forum'. I'd make millions. Now, back to the idea. I can see several basic flaws. First, email is not a reliable medium, and you'd get corrupted votes that way. Also, what happens when people get viruses or spam that pretend to be vote confirmations, and people click and completely break the voting system with 'missing' votes? Two, the live vote database exposed to the 'net, so it can be verified by a url? Very secure. Honest. Three, it relies on an informed, electronically connected populace to verify their votes. Err, if we had that, we wouldn't be having this problem in the first place, as people would be demonstrating in their millions on the streets at what's being done. Four, ever heard of voter anonymity? You've got a hash containing who someone voted for, tied to a valid email address. Not that any political party, or police state would love to get hold of such data. (So Mr Anderson. We see you voted for the Legalise Pot Now party. Don't mind us looking in your trunk, do we?)
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You can try these:
Y M2CHIW.SX3G7IQNFDENESHR4V6XEANMLH5R4FZEA5EZ7JY&dn= VOTER%20FRAUD%20-%20Electronic%20ballot%20maker%20 Diebold%20allows%20tampering%20of%20votes.%20Repro duce%20it%20yourself%20with%20this%20file%20or%20g o%20to%20equalccw.com.%20GEMSIS%20included.zip
l ot%20maker%20Diebold%20allows%20tampering%20of%20v otes.%20Reproduce%20it%20yourself%20with%20this%20 file%20or%20go%20to%20equalccw.com.%20GEMSIS%20inc luded.zip|108880437|89fce29dbc4e2a62c26528fc0e0455 9a|/
magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:NYW73XZ57R2QB2K2DPFS6NDAZ
ed2k://|file|VOTER%20FRAUD%20-%20Electronic%20bal
I wouldn't have the Diebold Memo's or the $cientology OT's if it wasn't for their C&D letters which made it interesting enough to me to bother to find and download.
From the Indymedia thread. Let's make Slashdot liable!
.mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new. In VTS, you can open the database with progress and do the same. The same would go for anyone else's system using whatever database they are using. Hard drives are read-write entities. You can change their contents.
.mdb file. Even technical wizards at Metamor (or Ciber, or whatever) can figure that one out.
.mdb file to prevent Metamor from opening it with Access. I've threatened to put a password on the
heres
by some Tuesday October 14, 2003 at 10:23 AM
Internal Memos: Diebold Doing End-Runs Around Certification
Friday, 12 September 2003 (PDT)
By Bev Harris - blackboxvoting.org
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
********
If certification isn't being done properly, the whole house of cards falls. Below are actual copies of internal Diebold memos which show that uncertified software is being used in elections, and that Diebold programmers intentionally end-run the system.
Quick backgrounder first, scroll down to see the memos.
BACKGROUND
Our voting system, which is part of the public commons has recently been privatized. When this happened, the counting of the votes, which must be a public process, subjected to the scrutiny of many eyes of plain old citizens, became a secret.
The computerized systems that register voters, will soon sign voters into the polling place using a digital smart card, record the vote we cast, and tally it are now so secret they are not allowed to be examined by any citizens group, or even by academics like the computer scientists at major universities.
The corporate justification for this secrecy is that these systems adhere to a list of "standards" put out by the Federal Election Commission, and that an "ITA" (Independent Testing Authority) carefully examines the voting system, which is then provided to states for their own certification.
As it turns out, the states typically do not examine the computer code at all, relying instead on a "Logic and Accuracy" test which will not catch fraud and has frequently missed software programming errors that cause the machines to miscount.
A Diebold message board has been used since 1999 to help technicians in the field interact with programmers to solve problems. The contents of this message board were quietly sent to reporters and activists around the world, most likely by a Diebold employee. In a letter to WiredNews, Diebold has acknowledged that these memos are from its own staff message boards.
Without further commentary, judge for yourself whether Diebold has been following certification requirements:
From Nel Finberg, Technical Writer, Diebold Election Systems
(Note: Metamor/Ciber is the ITA assigned to certify the software)
alteration of Audit Log in Access
To: "support"
Subject: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Nel Finberg"
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 23:31:30 -0700
Importance: Normal
Jennifer Price at Metamor (about to be Ciber) has indicated that she can access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password. What is the position of our development staff on this issue? Can we justify this? Or should this be anathema?
Nel
Reply from Ken Clark, principal engineer for Diebold Election Systems
RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
To:
Subject: RE: alteration of Audit Log in Access
From: "Ken Clark"
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 09:55:02 -0700
Importance: Normal
In-reply-to:
Its a tough question, and it has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality.
Right now you can open GEMS'
Now, where the perception comes in is that its right now very *easy* to change the contents. Double click the
It is possible to put a secret password on the
That's not the first time a comercial software advocate has stooped to name calling. I'll ignore it because it adds nothing.
I'd like you to name one advantage of closed source software and tell me how this outwheighs the need for public transparency in the electoral process. I can easily show that closed source can defeat a paper trail. Can you show an advantage that makes this risk acceptable?
Any closes system can be comprimised by it's owner. A major disadvantage to closed comercial code is that it may contain backdoors. FTP logs from Di-bold machines with time stamps durring elections lends strong support to those who say that DiBold machines have backdoors. Because backdoors work without visible signs, there would be no reason to go to the expense of hand counting. Free software won't have any such mechanism unless it's illegally added.
The only way for a computing machine to be owned by it's physical owner is for it to be free and for the physical owner to be root. This applies to voting machines the same way it applies to personal computers. When DiBold or someone other than the election commision is root, someone other than the election commision runs the election. All they have to do is log in and change things where needed to acheive their ends. In a close election, a paper trail will not be able to prove the fraud, not even a paper trail where the voter has been handed a printed vote to stick into a box.
What possible advantage can their be to closed source that's more important than the integrity of the election? You can't point to code quality because free software has proven itself superior to it's comercial equivalents. You can't point to availability, because free software is filling all nitches already and will fill any nitch mandated by law. You can't even point to ease of use because the ballot layout is decided by the election comissions and free software will meet any demands placed on it. What are you left with? What am I missing that makes me a "Zealot"? What do you have to offer that justifies name calling?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sorry Diebold, if your going to be dealing with something as powerful as a vote, then I don't think you have any "property rights" regarding your tech. It should be free and open and subject to review.
If this crap comes to our state, I'll be visiting the courthouse with some buddies.
Oh come on! It's as if the last 30 years of cryptographic knowledge never happened. Of course it's possible to digitally sign electronic data, and nobody with a clue about electronic voting would even consider not doing it.
These people are supplying voting machines, and they don't even know how to create tamper-evident databases? They even have the gall to assume their competitors are using the same simpleton technology as they are.
I suggest that anyone involved with these systems read Peter Wayner's Translucent Databases for a primer on how databases can be made secure, even against those who know the root password. [not that Diebold machines seem to have a root password]
For further reading, Diebold might want to read some of Bruce Schnier's books, which are an interesting read on what can be done with cryptography, and what are its limitations. They might even consider hiring a competant expert, e.g. some of Schneier's peers.
p.s. I claim the quote above as fair use, under english copyright law.
It has nothing to do with freedom, what's fair, or what's right, wrong, DMCA, GPL, whatever. It's all about money - who has it, who uses it, and who gets to make more.
Diebold has the money, and uses it wisely to get favors done, and in turn, does favors back to the people they work with. It's just business, nothing personal.
Just bend over and accept it.
This may not be the most perfect example, but like media releasing classified documents. Once this is done, it is public. Either this is a horrible example or freedom of speach is being trampled on (or both). This is more likely to damage the press then anyone else.
-Seriv
Interesting.
Second, it's a COMPUTER voting system, it's connected, besides... a voter-defined email address (which could default to a 3rd party organization if the voter has no email)
As for SPAM, valid potential problem, that's in intrinsic problem with email. As for email is not a reliable medium, and you'd get corrupted votes that way, it's a good thing businesses don't rely on email, ope wait...
As for email induced corruption, it may happen a few times per major vote (ok, lets be generous and say 1/100,000 emails? That's have been about 40 bad emails in the Cali election), each user that generates an error should start an investigation, etc, etc.
As for exposing the Db to the web... Diebold has already done that on an open FTP, so anything would be an improvement. And all you need to check is the hash, not the votes, per say.
There are issues, sure... but it does provide a means of checking the vote was tallied. Voted for pot? Scared of the man? Send the email to the default email (to CNN, NBC, etc).
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Now all we need to do is have some band like Enturbulator 009 to stick it to Diebold in music as was done for Co$'s avagrams.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The attitude of DiBold's staff is unacceptable. Here's two outright shockers:
Ken Clark, dismmising a concern about no password being needed to modify the audit logs, "Of course everyone knows perception is reality." The idiot then goes on to describing Microsoft pains and curse his users as stupid in complete ignorance of free alternatives that cause no pain.
Tyler says, "with regards to the entire NASED certification process, I can never quite get a handle on the relationship between "ostensible" and "reality."... :-) "
The more you read, the worse it gets.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The google cache is only one small part of the memos. the original is over 100mb and 10mb zipped. get it by using http://www.freenetproject.org/
L 0O1A% 7e5Q36UhTyrg/lists.tar.gz
d then/ 451/li sts.tgz.torrent
download key
CHK@kjQmh1wZdYsbU5OmnIFYGQbiDU4NAwI%2c1lWlUl
The more have and share it... the easier to get it.
Another one is bittorrent
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent
An
http://www.emptylogic.com/suprnova/torrents
The fundamental problem is that it needs to be impossible for me to prove to a vote buyer that I voted one way or another.
If I can prove to myself my vote was counted a certain way, so too can it be proved to others. And then votes get bought.
This is a _hard_ problem, and alot of it comes from misunderstanding the nature of it.
--Dan
All evidence at this point stands to up to reason and makes clear the implications for a high level of vote taking, accounting, and tabulation fraud. The evidence presented should be enough to warrant any reasonable governments to bring the processes, in detail, into question and to suspend use of this voting platform until a grand jury can form an opinion and/or verdict on the continued use of these types of voting platforms.
OK, the above possibly being true, why haven't voters caused an uproar over this potentially corrupt system being used? Simple - apathy. Most citizens are too worried about other things to care about the government. Most people want the government out of their lives and in exchange they will stay away from government functions. This plays right into the hands of those willing to put a system, such as this, into production. What can be done about the citizenry? Very little. A possible route is to find a way into the mass media and announce this fraud to the world. But the world already knows and can't change our system so what is your point already.
The only way to attack this system and initiate change is to use the power of government against the system. Find a politician that has power and is willing accept reason. Convince him/her to find a way to present charges of vote process fraud, and hope like hell that a committee will suspend the use of the process until a full investigation by independent panels can write an opinion. This will be time-consuming, and the result may not be what is desired, but as I see it, the only way to stop this potential fraud and abuse of the voting system.
Remember the Pentagon Papers case?
No matter how these documents were obtained, they are clearly newsworthy. They touch on matters of public interest.
If the DMCA can be used to prevent the publication and dissemination of these documents, doesn't that suggest that the DMCA violates the 1st Amendment, and thus must be struck as unconstitutional?
Now that will have the hackers really quivering in their boots!
The last time I had a "password recovery" issue with Access, I found everything I needed to hack it with just a few clicks on Google. I spent about an hour searching for snippets of code to throw into VBA.
I guess the people at Diebold never heard about password recovery tools
The Independent ran a great expose on all this a few days back. Scary reading... and like the memos, the more you read the worse it gets
Right--and Slashdot is just so free of trolls ;) You could serve dinner on a -1 threshold.
IMC newswires are largely unmoderated. People are as free to post filth as they are to post insight. Some editorial groups will hide (though not delete) obvious trolls, hate speech, and the like... but other editorial groups don't.
The software that operates the vast majority of the IMC sites (variants of Active and dadaIMC) has no concept of "community moderation" -- so most of the moderation that happens is done by a small group of volunteers, according to the local collective's (usually quite permissive) editorial policy.
IMC is no more to blame for the behaviour of its trolls than Slashdot is to blame for its own.
As far as I'm concerned, there are significant problems with the organization of many indymedia centres -- including the global network -- that it slowing the work toward pervasive, free media. Ultimately, however, the IMC -- which in 4 or 5 years has grown from a single issue weblog (Seattle) to a global network of free media activists -- has done an excellent job in providing a forum for alternative voice.
To think that what a few trolls post to an open forum somehow reflects on the activists who make IMC happen, and the authors who bring insightful commentary to the public debate, is indirection at best and deception at worst.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Inform Diebold that vote tampering will now be considered a form of terrorism and treason... punishable with sanctions up to and including the extreme and permanently extreme.
Add further that experts in technology from each of the parties represented in the election (including itty-bitty parties), will be appraising the results and the process by which votes have been counted.
Let them know that fraud will result in harsh and immediate reprisals against the company and more importantly it's CEO and Board.
Since screwing with the future integrity of our country and it's government doesn't apparently seem to bother them, maybe the threat of "parting them out" to an organ/tissue distribution center (so that the slimy buggers might actually serve a worthwhile purpose) would result in behavior vaguely resembling honorable and trustworthy.
If you want to make voter fraud unthinkable, just make the penalty for voter faud unthinkable.
Genda Bendte
Was Theo deRaadt one of them?
Make absolutely no mistake - these machines were built with flaws intentionally. Most of the country would see a fancy new computer as a huge step up from a punch card. Those punch cards were brought to the national spotlight as old, outdated and obsolete. Why? So that we get new machines.
This is about Bush stealing the 2004 election with machines that leave no paper trail, that have no audit mechanism.
These machines are the "bullets" Dubya is using to stage the final chapter in his little coup d'etat.
Thanks to the DMCA, even talking about those flaws is illegal - and we all know how the Supreme Court feels about Dubya - they appointed him, after all.
THIS IS A HARBINGER OF WAR, DISEASE, PESTILENCE, sacrificial American citizens and hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners whose only crime was being non-white and living above natural resources.
We have been concentrating too much on the post-election auditing, and not enough on the pre-election requirements, design, build test cycle.
A short proposal:
A) A vendor is chosen (Not Diebold, because they obviously cannot do it)
B) Vendor designs the system, chooses the tools, and builds it.
C) 3 validation teams are chosen. 1 commercial entity, 1 university entity, and one independant team chosen by 2 or 3 of the major parties. Maybe even us, the general public as well.
D) The teams audit and validate the code, processes, and fully test the system
E) At this point...the entire system is locked away. The vendor no longer has access to it. No patches, no updates, no more code.
E.1) The system needs to be treated with no less security than a nuclear weapon in the military. i.e. it becomes a "No Lone Zone" - No one person or entity has acceess to the system. There MUST be a team of at least two distinct parties with the keys to the storage warehouse.
F) On election day, the parties with the keys unlock their respective locks, and the system is put in place.
G) Vote
H) 3 other disparate but similar teams, validate the results. Paper against the actual db.
I) No Profit, but a valid election.
Steps C-E.1 are, currently, completely, ignored. That's what needs to change.
Does it matter that the correspondence seems to have been intentionally leaked by someone at Diebold? It just seems ludicrous for Diebold to claim copyright ownership of correspondence, especially correspondence that was made public by someone at Diebold.
I was skeptical before, but it seems more and more that something "fishy" is going on here...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Two can play at that game. I think the PUBLIC ought to issue a cease and desist order to Diebold, demanding that they remove their pathetic attempt electronic voting from every installed location immediately until they can come up with something that is open, secure, and verifiable. Something like this ought to do:
Dear Diebold,
It has come to our attention that you, through your electronic voting machines, have been tampering with an institution that has formed the very foundation for our system of government for more than 200 years. As you know, this system is the common property of the U.S. citizens, and is NOT available for your experimentation, carelessness, and outright contempt when it comes to ensuring the integrity of our Democratic process. Effective immediately, please remove your machines from all public venues until such time as you have
- a) realized the importance of what it is you are dealing with
- b) opened your system for public scrutiny
- c) implemented means of validation that go BEYOND what might be reasonably expected
- d) implemented a system of absolute and careful scrutiny for EVERY software modification, far PRIOR to its ability to have any effect on any election results
- e) implement a system of security checks and balances that will ensure the integrity of the voting system to the general public.
Until such time as you have demonstrated all of the above, the citizens of the United States are hereby terminating any further dealings with your firm.
Sincerely,
U.S. Citizens.
Diebold doesn't care about that. They are in business to make a profit. They have a product to sell, and all they care about is convincing people to buy their product.
Whether it works or not is beside the point.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
Of course it's possible to digitally sign electronic data, and nobody with a clue about electronic voting would even consider not doing it.
Why bother? If you don't trust the system that does the signing, or the people who created the key it's signed with, then why bother to sign the data? It just gives a false sense of security.
Unless the system produces a human readable, physical record of votes that the voter can verify before submitting then the system is open to fraud.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
My great fear is that this can mean the end of democracy in America.
History may say:
American democracy - Born 1789, died 2000.
Nice try.
This is the Constitution.This is the Constitution under the Bush administration. Any questions?
Why doesn't the government simply become a CA, issue public-private key pairs to every voter, and have each voter create a "vote" document by signing it? All the votes could be posted publicly anywhere, and counted ad nauseum by anyone who felt the urge. If ever more than one vote from the same voter in the same election were found, that vote would be invalidated (the guy didn't keep a careful enough watch over his private key).
You are being charitable. You say:
These people are supplying voting machines, and they don't even know how to create tamper-evident databases? They even have the gall to assume their competitors are using the same simpleton technology as they are.
But I see no reason to believe that the security flaws were because they couldn't do better rather than just because they didn't want to bother. Whether actively or passively.
I've USED MSAccess, and I will certify that it is one of the stupidest decisions possible for this kind of system. So stupid that I suspect that there were external constraints of some sort that caused them to choose it in defiance of appearant reason. This doesn't, however, enable one to determine what the reasons were. One doesn't KNOW that being able to break into it via widely known techniques without a password was the reason. That's on one of many possibilities. (E.g., how much MS stock does the company own?)
One quite likely reason is that the technicians and the management aren't on speaking terms with each other. Certainly putting a NON-critical DBMS on MSAccess was enough to convince me to go on a decade long campaign against MS products. (Well, after the upgrade from MSAccess95 to MSAccess97. I gave them two years to fix things.)
One interesting thing about MSAccess is that it experiences spontaneous breakdowns. Code that has been working correctly for months to years will suddenly stop, and the only way to fix it is to recompile. There's nothing that needs to be changed. It's not some special case in that data that isn't being handled. You just need to recompile it. (Occasionally I've had to go as far as exporting the routing throwing the error to a text file, wiping it from the database, and then recreating it by copying the text file...but that was during the conversions from MSAccess95 to MSAccess97, so I might just not have learned the proper techniques yet.)
So maybe choosing MSAccess was just a way of ensuring job security.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Use the Canadian system: pen, paper, and many eyeballs. Here, the ballots must be of a specific paper, provided by Elections Canada. Each polling station gets exactly how many ballots they need. Only members of EC and the voter can handle the ballots. All voting procedures are witnessed by no less than two representitives from different parties. The votes are counted that night by EC at the polling station, until the EC and the witnesses are satasfied the count is accurate. The votes are then sealed by EC and stored for the possibility of a recount.
It's neither high tech, nor fast. But it is damn hard to fix, and easy to understand by (nearly) all involved.
As my mother said, mirror early, mirror often.
Hello,
i'm wondering, who can proof this doesn't work with ''normal'' counting? Would it be more or less easy to do so? After all, it's a matter of trust.
Bottomline: ''the right to vote' says nothing. In this case, saying you live in a democratic nation as an argument is a fallacy.
Print out the site. Send it to your Congressman. Ask that it be added to the Congressional Record as an "extension of remarks".
>snip<
Very truly yours,
Ralph E. Jocke
Sounds vaguely like something Bart Simpson would use over the phone to Moe's Tavern. I wonder if he has a partner named Strappe? "Jocke Strappe and Associates" would be a great name for a law firm.
No, I didn't have anything to add, I just wanted to mock the lawyer's name.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
But, apparently, they are "Property". Whatever that means.
Posting AC to avoid the inevitable michael-bitchslap.
Um. Election methodology is NOT news for nerds. And michael posts this completely irrrelevant shit so often that we really need a category for us to allow filtering of this content. Why subject us to "news-for-election-officials" when most of us come for "news-for-nerds" ?
PLEASE make a new "voting machine" category!
(These point to the same file, by the way.) This isn't the original memo data, though it may contain it; it's a 100M zip archive. As always, be careful what you download off P2P networks.
French proverb:
Common sense is not common.
This is SO simple! It is unbelevable how simple questions get over complicated by people.
Why do we need an EXPENSIVE machine to do something SO SIMPLE!
Its not a matter of WHAT SOFTWARE, is a matter of using software at all!! Open software? are you stupid?!
Just because anything can be cheated given unlimited money/power/influence in a hypothetical world, does not make them all the SAME!
One-Click Fraud is much easier than paying black people not to vote (see nixon.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
blackboxvoting.org is down
g .htm
L ACKBOXVOT ING.torrent
mirror
http://www.talion.com/blackboxvoting.or
also available on torrent
http://suprnova.gunny.org/torrents/453/B
that's some fucking pear if it can review that pile of shit.
http://www.indymedia.nl/nl/2003/10/14569.shtml
If anyone has a summary or translation in non-English, please post.
The last time I worked an election, the machines were stored in a broom closet off of an elementary school gym. Pre-balloting code for the specific election was left in them for several days. I can really see armed marines guarding those doors at all times so that the women's Pilates fitness group that uses it Thursdays can't tamper. The look on their faces when they read that "If you open this door then you will die!" sign ought to be priceless. On the other hand, cartidges with post vote data were handled according to a no lone rule, as in "I carry a locked box, other Judge carries the key". Paper print outs obtained immediately after closing the polls were made available for the press and auditors sent out by the major parties.
Who is John Cabal?
news.independent.co.uk
There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the programme was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing the source code because it would be at a higher level than I am accustomed to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff looked like the homework my first-year students might have turned in." Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by individuals with little real-world experience".
But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning flaws". These included putting the password in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote; and other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access.
Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information and "a multitude of false conclusions". Substantially similar findings, however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf of the state of Maryland, in which a group of computer security experts catalogued 328 software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high risk of compromise". "If these vulnerabilities are exploited, significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results," their report says.
Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election package. The claim cannot be independently verified, because of the trade-secrecy agreement, and not everyone is buying it. "It is documented throughout the code who changed what and when. We have the history of this programme from 1996 to 2002," Ms Jekot says. "I have no doubt this is the software used in the elections." Diebold now says it has upgraded its encryption and password features - but only on its Maryland machines.
"But, apparently, they [emails] are "Property". Whatever that means."
Okay then, I'll take out a mortgage on my last 20 emails and some other copyrighted text I just scribbled down...
What? You mean you can only mortgage property?
You are the Anti-Christ!
Jesus was the King of the Jews! The Son of David!
He came to save us all, but then the Jews didn't want to recognize him, so they murdered the Son of the Most High God. And then, uhm...
and then...
Oh FUCK. Never mind.
Judeo-Christian-Islamic "religion" is a huge pile of demented HORSESHIT!
"I've USED MSAccess, and I will certify that it is one of the stupidest decisions possible for this kind of system. So stupid that I suspect that there were external constraints of some sort that caused them to choose it in defiance of appearant reason. This doesn't, however, enable one to determine what the reasons were. One doesn't KNOW that being able to break into it via widely known techniques without a password was the reason. That's on one of many possibilities. (E.g., how much MS stock does the company own?)"
Why attribute to maliciousness what can be explained by incompetance? If they used MS-Access, that doesn't mean they did it because they have microsoft stock. It could just mean they don't know how to write complex programs. For people like this, Access is ideal. They'll never know it's limitations, because they don't know enough about the system to measure them.
I might be going out on a limb here, but would anyone like to take a bet that the system itself was written in Visual Basic? Can anyone who's used these machines say whether it looked VB-esque?
Access and VB are ideal for people who don't know how to program, but need to get something working to do a simple job. They're not designed for people who constantly think about security, but then anyone who does constantly think about security will know how to use proper tools anyway.
BlackBoxVoting.com is still up. You can read the book online.
Yeah they are anti-american in the same way that Noam Chomsky is anti-semitic. They disagree with the group that they are a part of so they are anti-$whatever.
Uh, well, that and the fact that Noam wrote an introduction to a book by an anti-semitic author by the name of Robert Faurisson who denied that the holocaust took place. Noam described Faurisson's holocaust-denial statements as "findings", and said:
"I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence in gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust."
Link Here
don't worry, they are on at least 500 pro democracy websites, many not published yet. Many are on CD. Get the memos, burn them, pass them on to you Att General and the media. Do it today if you can.
Sorry for the Anonymous post, but one has to be careful in Ashcroft's America.
Theres lots of room for improvement in the election process.
The right solution is one that I am working on (with many other experts in the field, and some committed people). See EVM2003. However, as with many volunteer projects, we've been delayed a bit (developer schedules and so on). I could really use a couple more good volunteers, especially ones who are familiar with wxPython, which is the library/language for the demo touchscreen interface. However, other folks who might want to work on the blind-accessible vocalization interface, documentation, or other parts, would help too.
Please email me: David Mertz (mertz@gnosis.cx)
Buy Text Processing in Python
I agree that e-voting is pointless but if someone's going to insist then closed software is just insane. The point about the electorate being able to inspect every aspect of the process applies to paper voting too.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"Which means open-source of some sort."
I don't see how open-source really qualifies as open, in the sense of "Open, Public Elections."
Think of how many people use open-source software without ever needing to delve into the coding inside. And these are people who are actually using wierd, freaky OS's they had to intentionally install. This is a small subset of the population.
Now consider how many people are going to go through the trouble of poring through source code of voting programs. Arguably fewer, since voting programs are a small subset of the set of open-source software.
We may accept the wisdom of "many eyes make shallow bugs" (or light work), but it's a trusting soul who lets voting get too complicated.
Ballots should be on paper; one person, one vote. Never mind all the other inadequacies of the system, until we can make software as stable as my calculator watch, we shouldn't be putting elections in the hands of developers(even open-source programmers).
Best,
Andrew Musselman
Look at these memos! These guys are amatures at subverting the laws of the land and trying to usurp democracy. They didn't even CC all communication to their lawyer -- now how are they gonna claim attourney-client privelaged communcation if these memos ever make it to court?
At least microsoft and all the big-time corporate crooks are a little better at it. . .
Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind though. Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .mdb file in Gaston recently. I know our dealers do it. King County is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before.
:
Oh really is the above aluding to
A. election-fraud.
B. just plain bad software from Diebold.
C. piss-poor administration by some local-yocal election officials
D. All of the above
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Slashdot didn't give one of their worst trolls his own news section. Majdur was given his own IMC.
I don't think Indymedia's anti-semites are trolls. I think they're serious. Latuff, Majdur, FREE PALESTINE!!! and the others have been keeping their jew-hatred act up for years. Trolls would get bored or switch subjects after a couple months.
The activists who make IMC happen seem to support this kind of anti-semitism, given their support for the openly anti-semitic Workers World Party and its ANSWER subgroup. At one point, Indymedia's central site removed Indymedia Israel from its links out of the belief that Israel (and as a logical result, Israel's jews) should not be allowed to exist. It took some protests for them to replace it under a series of different names like "Southwest Asia" and "Levant".
These guys are acting like stealing an election isn't a crime any more - maybe because they were so successful in the last US presidential election?
I understand from previous articles that the CEO of Diebold has publicly sworn to do whatever it takes to deliver Ohio's electorial votes to Commandante W in the 2004 election. And American voters must depend upon UnderFuerher Ashcroft for the enforcement of the election laws that Diebold has admitted breaking in their own memos.
So they make war at their own whimsey (or personal grudge, more like), imprison without counsel those who disagree with their bloody deeds and hands, and their voting public elects a muscle-builder actor as provincal governor of the largest and most important state!
The world is in for times as hard as the 1930s and 40s in the very near future, only the sides seem to have changed for this round...
I'm old and sick, but I fear for my children and grandchildren.
Peer-reviewable software is nice, but there's still no way to be certain that the source that got reviewed corresponds to the binary running on the computers. On the other hand, a protocol whose security depends entirely upon the publshed data doesn't have that problem -- put crudely, if a voting computer yields data that checks out, then it doesn't matter a whit what the software on that computer did (assuming it didn't leak information). You can read about such a protocol here.
hey all. here's a link to another mirror of the book, as well as pages offering the memos mirror
enjoy.
Dan,
If the machine prints a receipt showing how you vote, and that receipt is then put into a ballot box for use in a recount, how exactly would the voter then prove to a vote buyer how they voted?
In pure paper ballot systems, all the party in power needs is some blank paper ballots. Then they can mark them how they want, give them to the bought voter, and demand a blank ballot in return for the payment after the bought voter casts the pre-marked ballot.
This can be interfered with by having poll workers from both/all parties sign the back of the blank ballot given to the voter in the polling place, and then only if multiple party's workers are corrupt can such a scheme work. Alas, this is not impossible, even in america.
But printed receipts output from an electronic which can be used for validation and recount would be somewhat more difficult to corrupt, particularly if they included hashkeys/timestamps, digital sigs from the machine being used...protecting the secrecy of the vote under theses circumstances may be problematic, but I feel sure that can be provided for as well.
We just need to have system architects who know how to authenticate and protect data in charge of the design, instead of criminals who want to build a corruptible system they will be in charge of.
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:9-AbXKUlDZ4J: why-war.com/resources/files/diebold_internalmemos. pdf+diebold_internalmemos.pdf&hl=en&ie=UTF-8#4 7
and took a copy just in case, love the bit about .... well if they want a system test we could do a batch file that prints out **** system test passed*** a true BOFH solution!
Just because anything can be cheated given unlimited money/power/influence in a hypothetical world, does not make them all the SAME!
Cheating in elections using paper ballots isn't hypothetical, it's something that has happened and will happen. I don't think it's a given that paper balots are always safer from fraud or mistakes than electronic systems.
The book and the memos are mirrored here:
SSK@THn_MFmAqoGeXk9COwwSiFp6PAvBCMA/bbv//
(requires Entropy)
The key, just as you state, is accountability. I've been involved in electronic secret voting on numerous occasions and it has always worked without a hitch.
Here's the thing: Every voter chooses a secret phrase. One trusted party knows the connection between you and the phrase you choose. (Phrases have to be unique.)
Then, you cast your vote, for alternative or candidate X.
As a result of the ballot, all people who voted are publicly listed. Also, under each alternative or candidate, all phrases from the voters for that alternative is listed. One phrase per voter. The votes are easily counted, and everyone can see that they are on the list of voters, and that their vote has been correctly counted since their phrase is under the alternative/candidate they voted for. However, only the trusted party has the full global list of who voted for what, but everybody can verify that their piece of the ballot adds upp to the stated total.
This gives full accountability and transparency while maintaining anonymity (well, it does require a trusted party, but that party can well be a government one).
Paper, once written, can still be changed. You, however, know how you voted, and can (and will!) check that your vote was correctly counted.
I don't think there can be any acceptable solution unless a large layer of it is open-source.
Unlike your blathering, this does not mean it has to be GPL or use Linux.
Even the Microsoft Access solution those idiots at Diebold seem to like would be acceptable if the entire Microsoft Access / VB program was available and could be analyized by Access experts at Microsoft and outside Microsoft. There is not even any need for the CE or Access source code itself, as long as experts in it are quite certain that no reliance on a bug or misfeature inside access could be exploited by the code.
By "open source" I mean that anybody can look at the source. It can still be copyrighted or even patented, it does not mean GPL, and it should be easy for a commercial company to make quite a good profit by making the best version.
Unfortunatley even if the entire system was open-source I think there is going to have to be the printer and paper ballot trail. Somebody with a plan could still replace every machine with an altered version that is not actually running the peer-reviewed code, and this is the only way I can see to solve this.
In colleges it's called Scantron and I think it would be a damn good idea. Initially I was very enthusiastic about the touchscreen voting but now that all this weirdness has come out about Diebold I think that perhaps the KISS principle needs to be followed here.
A Scantron or Scantron-like system would work, it's proven technology that's been around for almost as long as I have been (I'll be 40 in November) and there would be an easily followed paper trail if there is a question of voting irregularities.
I must admit, seeing the Windows "hourglass" cursor when I placed my vote the first time I used one of those Diebold touchscreen thingies also gave me pause. Windows should be nowhere near anything requiring real security.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
There was a story in the Independent a few days ago.
Indymedia is open publishing. Anything that someone enters into an Indymedia website and click the "publish" button at the bottom of the page goes up. In the same way that Slashdot should not be held responsible for what you or I may post in the comments section, there is no staff of Indymedia editors sitting in a room somewhere determining what's going to go up on the news wire. Indymedia only presents an uncensored place on the web for individuals to post their own journalistic efforts. I just checked, though. Indymedia did have summitted coverage of Israel's acquisition of submarines that fire nuclear-armed Harpoon cruise missiles. These weapons are so illegal and destabilizing that even at the height of the Cold War, neither the Soviet Union or the United States produced any. They were eliminated in the Salt II treaties and are HIGHLY illegal under every single arms agreement in the world. I figure you just forgot mentioning that, right?
Paper ballots leave a very good audit trail, but are much slower to count. Counts are often communicated by phone to the central poll. Distributed counting (many small polls, each one having only a few thousand ballots to count) can speed things up, but requires more people.
Common problem are intimidation and violence at the polling place, rigging voter lists, and similiar actions. Paper ballots can be "stuffed", but if there are more votes than voters this can be detected. Electronic votes can be tampered with digitally, but it is possible to make a system that if tampered with the tampering is detectable.
In my opinion, for electronic voting to work, the machines, code, procedures, etc... should all be competely open to public scrutiny. Security via obscurity will not work. Many of the safeguards used for paper ballots (eg physical secrity, no network links, multiple scrutiners, etc...) can be applied to electronic voting. Automated tallinging of multiple polling places without using a network would reduce many of the advantages of electronic poolling, but if the voting machines are physically secured and can be checked later the problem s are reduced.
Niether paper or electronic voting is perfect, and both systems can be abused, but eletronic voting, if implemented correctly, can make elections faster and cheaper when huge populations are involved.
Anarchists never rule
Suuuuure. I'll tell that to the wiccan lesbian with a blue mohawk I saw wearing a indymedia press credential (available to anyone upon request for free) taking notes at a city meeting a few weeks ago. Indymedia can be bizarre, poorly written, badly spelled, and sometime completely off the planet. However, the one thing it is not is CONTROLLED. On second thought, YOU tell that woman your Soros stuff. That should be fun to watch.
Assassinating Arafat is okay because the Israeli Likud Party says so, right? It's not anti-semitic to challenge current Israeli policy. It's anti-LIKUD. The Likud is no more representative of Judaism than Donald Rumsfeld is representative of Christianity.
No. It is OK because Arafat helps pay for the suicide bombers whos MAIN MISSION is to kill women and kids.
Rob: "And then when we loaded the software to fix that, the machines were still acting ridiculous. I was saying, 'This is not good! We need some people that know what this stuff is supposed to do, from McKinney, NOW! These machines, nobody knows what they're doing but Diebold, you need some people to fix them that know what's going on. They finally brought in guys, they ended up bringing in about 4 people...
You'd think that with such troubles, someone might follow standard company procedure and write up a bug report.
"All bugs ever reported have bug numbers," wrote Ken Clark in a memo dated Jan. 10, 2003, pointing out that the whole collection can be found in "Bugzilla." So I went looking for Bugzilla reports from Georgia. My goodness. They weren't there.
Bugzilla report numbers 1150-2150 correspond with June-Oct. 2002, but although hundreds of these bug numbers are mentioned in memos and release notes, I only found 75 Bugzilla reports for this time period, and none from Georgia. Strange. I was looking forward to reading the explanations about how computers can get up in the morning and announce that they have no brain [mentioned on an earlier page]. Aha -- Here's a memo about missing Bugzilla files: It's dated 8 Jul 2002, from principal engineer Ken Clark.
Subject: bugzilla down, we are working on it. "We suffered a rather catastrophic failure of the Bugzilla database," he writes. He warns that recovery of the bugzilla reports "will be ugly" and adds that "there will be a large number of missing bugs."
In a follow up note on July 16, Clark says "Some bugs were irrecoverably lost and they will have to be re-found and re-submitted, but overall the loss was relatively minor."
Bev Harris Black Box Voting
First of all I think E-Voting is a great idea, if it is implemented correctly. As much as I am a fan of open source this is one area where the benefits of closed source, making it that much harder for hackers to circumvent our voting process, out weighs the benefits from open source. As the system stands now the companies in charge of the voting machines have CONTROLE to change votes or misplace them with no accountability. This whole mess of a system could be fixed with a few modifications.
Each registered voter is assigned a random ID*, and is sent a letter to remind him to vote including his ID. This list of ID would be only available to the government agency in charge of voting. It could also be obtained at their registered place of voting if lost or forgotten.
Every voting machine would be given a list of random numbers from a central server. No number must be given to any two machines. The Machines would assign each vote one numbers as an ID. After a person is done voting he is given two paper receipts containing his ID, the serial number of the machine used, and a list of each vote made and corresponding ID. They would be required to read the receipt and confirm that it is correct before they turn one copy in and go home with the second. The machine would also store an electronic copy. If a machine malfunctions and the electronic copy is lost there is still a paper trail and the vote would not be lost.
After the poles close, a list of all votes and corresponding ID would be made available to the general public from a government website, or for a small fee a CD. Anyone could look at the list and tally up the results themselves if they wanted to. Additionally people could give a copy of their receipt to any organization to collect a database of votes making sure that people aren't given the same ID for any vote. People who don't vote could reply to the government agency in charge and inform them that they did not vote in the election. This way there wouldn't be any 'extra' votes.
I can see a few holes in this method, but is appears to be a whole lot better than our current, and all proposed systems that I have heard of. Here are a few that I can think of.
-*The assignment of an ID to each person isn't required. It would be more secure, but it could be possible for government insiders in charge of the systems to know how you voted.
-If there are lots of dogs cats and dead people still registered to vote, this system would not do much to stop someone from taking advantage of it.
-The whole idea of assigning an ID to a vote, and making the list available to the public, only works if people check to make sure their vote was counted correctly.
-Hosting a large list for public use could be difficult. ( government use of BitTorrent?)
-People misreading their receipt or messing up while voting crying foul when it was their own fault, and no error or cheating was involved.
If you can think of anymore please feel free to add them.
May I suggest voting via Absentee Ballot then?, where you mail in a peice of paper.
Worst troll ever. Go back to school, fag.
Although I hate to bring this up, as it always brings out the "free speech" zealots, if the USA adopted compulsory voting, this would not be a problem.
In the USA, you rock up to vote out of a feeling of civic duty. If someone shoves a machine in front of you and says "press a button", you refuse on the basis that you don't trust the machine. You go home frustrated but unable to do anything - possibly part of a silent majority, but who'd ever know?
In Australia, I rock up to vote as required by the Constitution, or I get fined, etc. If someone shoves a machine in front of me and says "press a button", I refuse to vote on the basis that I don't trust the machine. I get a fine notice which I refuse to pay. I go to court, and it becomes a Constitutional issue - can't be ignored, and won't go away.
Now, whose Constitution gives its people real freedom?
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
Paper and pen are just fine. Print the names of the candidates on a sheet of paper and have voters circle the one they choose. It really is that simple.
Well zealot man, you can try to mortgage anything you want. That doesn't mean the creditor has to accept it. Simply because a creditor wouldn't accept it does not mean its not property. Care to try again?
1. Hold left Shift-key down
.MDB file
2. Double-click on
3. Enjoy your access to Access!
You f%king Kleptocrat!
Taste your own medicine!
One of the concepts we seem to have lost sight of is that fast and efficient aren't always a laudable goals. There exist a number of mechanisms in democratic governance where torpidity and inefficiency are both intended and desirable.
The means for amending the constitution were purposively made difficult and slow.
Having judges decide all criminal cases would be enormously more efficient than providing resolution for some via jury trials.
I can understand why some people, especially those who administer elections, want to move to computerized systems that are faster, more efficient, and potentially more reliable (existing systems debatably have the same or worse reliability).
But given the infrequency of elections and the potential harm that can come from tampered outcomes, I really feel we're moving in exactly the wrong direction we should be and the enormous sums being spent on computer voting systems (and the endless parade of maintenance and upgrade invoices that will constantly march into the comptroller's office) instead on more reliable paper voting technologies.
A working BitTorrent link, and you've got it at zero.
Good idea--but in a dispute situation, there would have to be verification that the barcodes being counted matched the human readable text.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Indymedia has taken OSI funding from George Soros. They have also turned down some no-strings-attached community grants from other institutions they deemed not in line with their politics. Some people have also alleged ties with the domestic terrorist International ANSWER.
When looking for funding, IMC has no problems saying that it is a baised shitty rag. Then it tries to change it's story with its public facing face.
You say that even with paper trail that CS systems are inadaquate, explain why (see previous post for my full argument). Give some reasons people! Why isn't a system where the voter can be assured that a physical copy of their vote has been registered and can be counted accepable?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Open-source software is good! Closed-source software is bad!
Now give me karma!
My blog can kick your blog's ass
You're trashing OSI now. You're calling ANSWER a "domestic terrorist." Answer has non-violent demonstrations and makes puppet shows... Do Kermit and Ms. Piggy have explosives under their felt or something? IMC has no bias. It is an open publishing site. It is not a publication. Its a means for independent writers and journalists to get their work on the web in a central location. Oh... I forgot. The neo-con definition of "bias" is any organization that allows for the opportunity for any coverage other than the press releses neo-con spin doctors create is "lib-ruhl plot."
Assassination is ALWAYS wrong. If Arafat is responsible for recent terrorist acts, go to the World Court and seek justice the way responsible members of the community of nations have agreed to do so. That you would accept the murder of one human being, yet flail about screaming about other violence only proves your hypocricy, and the hypocracy of the Israeli Likud Party position. Islamic and Jewish peoples have been killing each other on those lands for millenia. All of the killing is wrong. The only way to move forward is for all parties to stop killing. That means the Likud has to stop ordering killings, too.
Punch cards came on the scene in Johnson County, Indiana just about the time I was eligible to vote. Was heralded at the time as a great leap forward (but then computer centers still were being fed with punch cards and IBM 026/029's were still commonplace..)
These machines replaced expensive voting machines that didn't produce a paper record either.
How's the diebold system any different from the big old voting machine (that I've only used once in Iowa...and Florida had systems here much like the old Johnson County system until recently)?
I know there's stories of opening up machines after an election only to find zeros in the counters or that only one party's counters were connected to the switches, etc.
Yet, people used the big old voting machines...
AC, you missed a rather critical element:
This hash is printed and/or emailed to a voter-defined email address
There's some really good crypto that can be designed that meets the required needs -- particularly involving "windowing" approaches to secret key material. But any solution that doesn't have a trustable audit trail attached to it is corrupt by default -- not because of who runs it, but because it fails to meet the single requirement of an election: Not to determine who won, but to make everyone agree on who lost.
--Dan
You think so? I thought I had the nuance of a truly pissed off kkkonservative down pat. Oh well...
Cease and desist letters aren't the right way to secure a product, expecially an electronic voting system. Good design and careful programming are the way. And the nature of their product creates a great need to know what's going on behind their closed doors. The security of our democracy depends on it. While I haven't tried their product, the flood of criticism makes it seem that Diebold has a lot of marketting expertise but is lacking people with the skill and talent to actually create the kind of secure, reliable voting system that they're trying to peddle. Snake oil comes to mind, especially if they're using Microsoft Access, and storing the audit log as plaintext in the same database as everything else is a big no no. And that 'You could probably get away with a batch file that prints "system test passed" for all I know.' comment is scary as well.
They're discussing security problems that any second year programming student should have learned to address in the design phase. It's not THAT hard to make an audit log that can be written once but cannot later be read without the private key or modified without destroying it or having knowledge of the initial state. And really they should be writing a copy of the encrypted log to something more permanent, so that someone can't just walk into a voting office of a district mostly favoring the opponent with a big electromagnet and degauss all the voting machines.
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/sf/stemmachine.html
I would guess that about 75% of americans supported the recent massacre in Jenin... http://this.is/jenin/text1_en.html Under your logic, the american ambasador was a legitimate target? I am sure that incident needs no link.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
It isn't hypocracy on my part. He is guilty of crimes against humanity and should be taken care of.
As for the world court, would that be the same world court that has NO real inforcement power? What would they do? Ask nicely for him to surrender?
As an aside, why is it that everyone I debate on this issues has to hide behind an alias or be an AC?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1957862.
http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subj
"n a study to be released next month by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and provided exclusively to The Jerusalem Post, Palestinian sources confirm that at least 34 Palestinian armed terrorists were killed fighting in the battle for the Jenin Refugee Camp.
The total number of Palestinian causalities in the battle was 52, a sharp contrast from the claims of Palestinian propaganda professionals who have openly stated that thousands had died.
[...] The study reveals that for the first time that Palestinian terror organizations saw themselves as "armed combatants" and not as civilians who died in a deadly massacre.
The 35 page study, which is based on primary sources, clearly illustrates that Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas prepared themselves thoroughly with automatic weapons, grenades, anti-tank missiles and explosives and perceived the confrontation with IDF troops as nothing less than a "military to military battle."
The study refutes claims by PA leaders at the time that IDF forces were attacking innocent civilians and that the only Palestinians who had perished in the battle of Jenin were innocent, unarmed Palestinian men, women and children.
[...] In addition the research indicates that Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas had created a joint bomb making facility in Jenin which produced over two tons of explosives.
The JCPA paper states that civilians were intentionally used as human shields and that both women and children were deployed by Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad to divert IDF troops into ambushes and booby-trapped areas.
The Jenin Refugee Camp was prepared as a "reinforced fortress" where nearly 200 Palestinian terrorists had gathered for the battle, the JCPA research states. "
Did that post mean that you
A. have the hots for a neocon? or
B. Are offering your pasty body to a neocon?
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Some people seem to have in high steem the values of the USSR, PRC, DDR, PRK and some other nasties.
How can we drill in this people's brains that the software used by a democratic goverment, specially during something so important as elections, has to be 100% accountable by anybody that wishes to do so. No NDAs, no half hearted open code offerings.
Only 100% fully open code will do, no close source sofyware can meet those high standards.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's a good article about this in the Independent of London: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story .jsp?story=452972.
The article makes it clear that we're dealing with fundamental issues of democracy, not with details of computer implementations. The rest of the world is not impressed by the US's infatuation with evoting.
nope, you must not understand. You completely missed the point.
You quoted the line but you did not get it. I did not say what you infered.
Sure paper systems can be 'hacked' and have been. Big deal. Electronic systems can be hacked BETTER and HAVE BEEN. What is worse, we will never catch them, and have not even had officials recognize that there was cheating! At least with paper records, its possible to do something.
Electronic systems without a readable paper trail are litterally a million times worse! (They COST MORE too.)
Know what my state uses? paper & pencil. Its counted by machine, but it can be done by hand and the voter can see how they voted clearly.
Just think about it. SIMPLE IS BETTER. The more layers of abstraction from the actual vote data the more places things can be done. The more direct the better.
Canada does it better. Its all done by hand, and its so CLEAR that nobody can claim error. A single counter can't change the outcome, onless it gets close. Not to mention they can if they have to trace it back to the bad counter, the counter has no defense.
The answer:
Do what Canada does. Slow but cheap.
Perhaps add a randomly assigned second count. no 2% error, which is unacceptable.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Here are some torrents!
BlackBox Votings Chapters - written by Bev Harris
Diebold Internal Memos - ENTIRE archive of diebold internal memos from 1999 to feb 2003
GEMSIS - Actual vote counting software produced by Diebold
Everybody download these and upload as much as you can!
Down with Diebold!
sig? uhh, umm, ok
There is no need to assassinate Arafat. Just issue an arrest warrent for his ordering the deaths of hundreds of Israelis and thousands of Palestinians who have died in the wars he has ordered.
If he resists arrest and will not come peacefully and gets shot, so be it.
Keep the World Court out of it. European neo-nazis have been trying to get it to bring actions against Israeli leaders for refusing to march into the ovens when Arabs demand it. Pretty soon this court will be like the Nuremburg Court if it were run by the Nazis instead of the allies.
The worst tech decisions usually happen in very early phases of a project.
...."
Many projects goes through a lifecycle of
1)Slideware.
Before anything is written at all, while still hunting for the first pilot deal, entrepeneurs tout their idea: "Our product enables
2)Demoware
As soon as you have at least one customer interested, you need to whip up a demo. This is often done by hiring an intern for the summer to whip up some screens, and some simple interaction.
3)Real Ware
In the worst case, the system is not designed properly, but is simply an extension of the intern's summer work. This is not the intern's fault.
Another possibility for screwup:
If it is a hardware company with no significan sw experience, they'll just put their best hw engineers to hack a system.
But I think the most common errors is to try to catch up lost time. In attempting to deliver a project on time, the engineers need to make many short cuts, with an expectation to do it right at some later time. "Need to use a proper database here when we get time", "This function needs better error checking", "This library ought to have been tested for coverage", "this bubble sort really sucks, but I don't think we'll ever have a large data set..", "I know C++ would have been a better language for this, but my staff only knows Basic"
What they don't realise, is that "a later time" never comes. Design decisions is something you might be stuck with forever, and all others issues will be forgottten unless they blow up in someones face.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and Global are owned by the McCarthy group... I think they can be safely considered one company.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm ready to kill to protect my country. This is true against terrorist bastards, and it's true against internal threats as well. Try to rig elections in America, expect to die. We should take the men and women behind these corporations out into the street and hang 'em high, just like they would in Texas. A cheat is a cheat. A Fraud is a fraud. I don't care if you vote Republican or Democrat, your vote won't matter if these people get their way. We have no choice but to fight. I'm not advocating killing anyone yet, there are less extreme steps to take first, but if those all fail, then killing would be justified, in my opionion. It's for your country, after all. It might still be a sin, and God probably wouldn't understand. But I don't think it can really be illegal, because once your country has fallen to the point that elections are rigged, how can the laws of your country be valid? If you defraud the system, you defraud the entire system. If they can cheat, we can kill.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Unfortunately, the paper ballot is still the best system for voting. Even with it's flaws it provides an accountable paper trail.
Personally, I want the Supervisor of Elections to sweat every 4 years to earn their money. If they physically touch each ballot it connects them to the author of that ballot and I like that very much. Manipulating electrons is great for games and word processors but, and I hope this doesn't sound trite, the fate of the world depends on the integrity of the ballot.
My suggestion to subvert the inevitable implementation of this intentionally flawed system by the anti-Americans in our midst is to vote using an absentee ballot. And keep banging the drum to get everyone to use an absentee ballot otherwise you're just pissing up a knotted rope.
I've said this a hundred times: If I was going to overthrow America I'd wear an American flag lapel pin, I'd do everything I could to make myself look like I'm rabidly, almost irrationally patriotic, I'd subvert the established businesses by bleeding them white to cause widespread economic collapse, I'd fill the common peoples head with nonsense issues to hide my real intentions, I'd send all of the manufacturing that undergirds Arsenal America overseas to prevent America from defending herself, I'd get our troops spread thin in insane overseas adventures so there isn't anyone to defend the homeland, I'd cultivate a secret relationship with a few crazies to pull some outrageous acts of terrorism to scare the populace, then I'd curtail everyone's civil liberties in the name of security and then I'd just walk in and take over a once proud and honorable people to do my bidding. Sound familiar?
The most important feature of a democratic election system is transparency. Any voter should be able to monitor the progress of their vote with absolute assurance that it has (or has not) been included in the final count.
To ignore this principle is to invite the subversion of democracy.
You can read the offending article here:- 1.htm
s acoup
http://thehacktivist.com/bbv/diebold-memos
And get the book here:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/features/?s=u
I do not support Arafat. I do not support the use of terrorism (Real terrorism, not this thing in the US where EVERYTHING is terrorism). I think that both parties in the Middle-east are wrong, and need to stop acting like children with this tit-for-tat bullshit.
Arafat is documented as supporting the use of terrorism for his purposes. That much is certain. The problem is that the PLO is the only semi-credible goverment for it's people. The alternatives are Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Hezbollah, etc.. Additionally, until Israel stops killing people in refugee camps with American made Apaches, Tanks, F16s, and Caterpillar equipment, these people will never see the wrongs that have been commited them by Arafat and his regime.
While Israel in the past has be many orders of magnitude more peaceful than the Palestinians, Sharon and his group have thrown that away, and escalated violence, and insurgency by using the IDF with extreme prejudice to go after members of these movements. I do endorse this kind of actions, but not in the middle of a marketplace with women and children standing by. This is just as low as what the suicide bombers do, because they are non-discriminatory in their military operations.
As an american, I would think that if we went to Israel and said "We are cutting military aid, until you can come to a peaceful solution with the Palestinians" that we would have a peaceful solution rather quickly. Isreal has nuclear weapons, so I don't think we'd have to worry much about an invasion.
I could rant forever about this...but both sides are wrong. The US is wrong for not taking a more proactive role in this conflict as well.
A copy of the 11 mB archive is mirrored here.
Hmm, maybe the community might benefit by printing this "Diebold Intellectual Property" on t-shirts a la the DeCSS code.
I work at a bank, and have experience with Diebold machines.
It would NOT be hard to implement a hot-swappable printer into a voting machine, just have the printer unit on a slide-tray that any lackey can replace with one of a few spares. If it starts jamming you just swap it out and press the 'reprint' button that you put behind the locked-in printer to reprint the last transaction.
Also, concerning the usability of these systems after months in storage:
bank validators, the machines they hold the check and a slip in to print numbers and a validation code on are based on the same technology used in dot-matrix printers. These devices rely on carbon-imprints from pins that impact paper, not ink from a laser unit. They can be stored in any livable condition indefinitely without a loss of function, and as I said before, they could be made hot-swappable.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a form letter that can be sent to your congressman. Their form letter talks about touchscreen voting (e-voting) and the need for a paper audit trail. It does not mention anything about Diebold. I chose the online option to edit the letter and added a paragraph about Diebold. It used my address and ZIP code to automatically find an appropriate representative in my district to send it to. If you want to do the same here is the link:
t em =2754
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&i
If you prefer to write your own letter from scratch do that instead. Let's get their attention! They also have online letters available to be sent to them on other topics such as SCO.
...is over here. Despite what some flamers say on here, the many, independent Indymedia chapters have been on the forefront of civil rights battles since IMC was founded in 1998. We're still there, carrying on.
-- haaz.