Diebold Chases Links To Leaked Memos

bllfrnch writes "Mary Hodder, over at The Berkeley School of Journalism's bIPlog, reports that electronic voting bigwig Diebold has begun sending cease-and-desist letters to universities whose students are linking to hijacked internal company memos that elucidate the company's level of respect for citizens' right to vote. Particularly shocking is the line: "If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.""

Comments

Distributing the Diebold memo with apt-get

[Debian Troll's Best]

I've done a fair bit of contact work for a large Federal Government departments, and one issue which was recurrently faced was that of how to distribute important documents across the whole organization, without the loss of a document server or two bringing down the whole thing. The situation with the leaked Diebold memo reminds me of this situation. And here's how my team and I solved it in our contract work: apt-get.

Yes, the power of apt-get could be used to form a type of ad-hoc distributed network for the distribution of the Diebold memo, without fear of a single server being shutdown making the document disappear. What we did for the Fed was to create a set of apt.sources files which contained the addresses of a bunch of mirror servers which contained the documents of interest. When a user needed to find a document, they would simply issue an apt-get instyall Document command at their workstation, and apt-get would do the rest.

It gets better. When a new revision of the document was released, it was a simple task for the user to perform an apt-get upgrade Document, and the latest version was dragged across from what ever server happened to be available from their apt.sources file. We even spent a couple of weeks hacking dselect to launch OpenOffice when necessary to create a kind of crude distributed document management system. The users loved it! It's the UNIX way!

But anyway, back to the problem at hand. What is needed are a bunch of Debian servers to host the offending Diebold memo which has been leaked, and for people to start adding these to their apt.sources files. That way, Diebold won't be able to shut down any servers, and if they leak new information, it can easily be upgraded with apt-get upgrade Diebold! apt-get just continues to amaze me.

apt-get free speech!!!

For our non-US readers' edficiation

[hey!]

I've lived in several communities in the US and have been voting since 1979 and I've never even seen a voting machine. I've always voted on paper forms that were designed to be read by an optical scanner. Other people have never seen anything but punch ballots, or "voting machines" with pull levers that mark ballots for people.

There is no country wide standard of how voting is conducted.

People outside the US may not be aware of this, but local governments (cities, counties and states) are extremely important in our system. US states are pretty much exclusively in charge of setting standards on how voting is conducted. For example, while every state has secret ballots, this is only a widely accepted custom; well into the nineteenth century people voted in some places by testifying publicly at the local courthouse. States typically don't have very stringent standardization. Local municipalities or counties (depending on the part of the country) actually conduct the polling and have a great deal of leeway in how they do it.

Combine this local autonomy with the typically frugal funding of municipal functions compared to what a European would expect, our entrepreurial spirit and our love of technological quick fixes, it's pretty much inevitable that there should be an array of half baked systems out there. The Diebold system in question is only the latest.

I wonder whether this chaos has a kind of protective effect, at least on the national and statewide level. Think about this: barring a knife edge result like the last presidential election, the only way to rig a statewide or presidential election would require undermining a variety of systems in a variety of places, using a variety of methods. The chancs of avoiding detection decrease hyperbolically in the number of exploits attempted.

The real danger with electronic voting is that in our post-Florida mania for a technical quick fix, a de facto electronic voting standard will emerge. This has happened in the past, for example in states adopting the secret ballot. However, electronic voting provides a single point of vulnerability, in which a rogue staffer with sufficient skills could conceivably change the composition of the US government. Americans tend to dismiss the possibility of voting manipulation by corporate interests as class warfare paranoia, but think of the opportunity this presents to certain foreign intelligence agencies.

What we ought to do is something that has never been done in the US: set real standards for polling methods, especially (but not limited to) electronic ones. I think most people here understand what this should include: things like auditabiliy, indepedent security analysis as part of system acceptance, etc. These standards could be implemented by multiple vendors, and for security reasons we would probably want to have at least four or five major players, and set maximums for the percentage of an electorate in a state voting on a particular vendor's machines.

We, The Mirrors, Need Help

[Lumin Inverse]

Hello, I'm the Boston University mirror.

I expect that BU will receive a DMCA notice in the next day or two, and ask me to remove the memos. Although I would very much like to find this, I simply don't have the resources to get into a legal battle (and it's doubtful BU would stick its neck out for me).

But that's not even necessary. If I could just find two people willing to put up mirrors once my mirror goes down (I've already found one), than their takedown notice will have the net effect of putting another copy of the memos online. This seems to be the best overall strategy for those who can't fight this legally.

If a willing mirror could email me, and let me know what the url of your mirror is, I'd really appreciate it.

chrisn1 [at] bu [dot] edu