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Diebold Folds In DMCA E-Voting Lawsuit
sunbird writes "Diebold has filed a responsive pleading (PDF) in the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to challenge Diebold's practice of using the DMCA to suppress discussion of the critical flaws with electronic voting. Diebold states that it has "decided to withdraw its existing DMCA notifications and not to issue any further ones . . . ." Other recent developments include: this transcript of the court hearing on EFF's application for a preliminary injunction and Dennis Kucinich's linking to Diebold memos from his webpage at the U.S. House of Representatives. Stay tuned- the judge has scheduled a status conference for this Monday in the case."
Talk about a poorly crafted piece of legislation. There are so many ways to abuse this ridiculous thing. It really needs to be amended to get rid of all of these legal like mechanisms that do not involve the courts. You should have to get a judge to issue an injunction to take material offline, not just say "You have to do it".
Diebold's defense that the plantiffs "did not suffer irreparable harm" because Diebold didn't actually sue them is outrageous. The threat to sue, especially by a party with deep pockets vs a small party definitely causes a chilling effect on free speech. If Diebold had not intention to sue, why did they ask for the material to be removed?
I just read this in conjunction with the story on Best Buy and FatWallet, and I can only hope, maybe people are finally seeing the DMCA the way we see it. Here we have two cases against major companies challenging the DMCA for its chilling effects. How long before it works its way up to the Supreme Court?
Unfortunately I have my doubts as to whether Diebold or any of the other voting-machine manufacturers would be particularly willing to go forward with such a process. As much as many of us (myself at times included) might like to believe that this is fueled by a massive right-wing conspiracy, the real fact is that it's just not their usual MO.
Prior to entry into the voting-machine market, Diebold's primary presence in computing has been in manufacturing ATMs. A brief consideration (disclaimer: I didn't research this and won't be held responsible if it turns out to be dead wrong) suggests that these are, by design, pretty much turnkey systems in which a large amount of the security is provided by an extremely limited user interface. There aren't a lot of branches in the ATM flowchart, and the necessary local configuration is probably minimal.
Now compare this to the requirements of a voting system. Because ballots vary greatly from one precinct to the next, each voting machine must store considerably more local configuration. With this comes a much more complex UI and many more opportunities for security to be compromised. If this is a first foray into a system this complex, it may be a simple underestimation of the requirements. When one considers that the operation of the Diebold voting machine as discussed in the Johns Hopkins paper is not unlike that of an ATM, it's easy to see where someone may have seen elections as just another nail to hit with their particular hammer. Little did they know that the demands are so different.
The Republicans are firmly in the pockets of Computer Hardware and Software manufacturers that want to keep the DMCA to prevent competitors from copying products and making compatable ones.
The Democrats are firmly in the pockets of the RIAA and MPAA that want to keep the DMCA to help them keep their strangleholds in thier markets.
Everyone else has an icecube's chance in hell of getting in regardless of who funds their habits.
It is worth mentioning Mr. Kucinich is trying to get the presidential nomination and has very little financial contamination from the formentioned industries. $36,275 from TV, movies, and music industry and $25,590 from the computer industry out of $3,399,709 total.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Paper ballots, which are fed into a simple optical reader at the polling station. The ballot is then dropped into a locked ballot box. The result can be counted instantly by the machines, but there is a good old-fashioned paper trail which can be hand counted should there be any doubt over the outcome.
I think maybe you are confusing this with IBM's countersuit against SCO. In this case, there was no precident that could be set either way. (AFAIK, IANAL)
What happened at the hearing was that the judge made it clear that he was going to provide declarative relief in favor of the plaintiff, although not an injunction on the question of the fair use of all 13,000 emails. It isn't always as crystal clear from the hearing what the judge will do, but check out this comment from the Judge:
You can see how he's not going to go for an injunction if you read the whole hearing transcript.
One very importaint thing, it became clear that because of precidents set in the Scientology case, if Diebold had sued, the court was going to have to go through all the emails and decide on a case-by-case basis which of them are subject to fair-use protections and which aren't because they contain no public-interest material or contain an overwhelming abundance of "how-to/how-not-to" information with commercial value. From a technical perspective, of course, we have already seen how some of the source code with respect to weak encryption has some of the most importaint public-interest information. There is no way any judge would be savvy enough to catch that on the first go-round, and so this would have been a real money-loser for the good guys.
So, I am very glad this didn't go to trial.
This is from the Kucinich Blog from June 20, 2003. Americans have become very sensitized to manipulation of the vote since the debacles in the 2000 presidential elections. All over america, people are expressing to me their concerns about honest elections, about election technologies, about the ownership of voting machine suppliers, about the potential for fraud...all of which can undermine our democracy. We need solutions. Here's what we can do: we can organize in every community across this country into citizen groups of individuals with technical expertise in computer programming, systems design, and working knowledge of elections. These precinct activists can begin immediately to create a template for securing the 2004 vote. The elements of such a program might include: taking action to gain access to inspect the technology, to learn what safeguards have been put in place to make sure that no coflicts of interests are involved, and to make sure there are no problems with the chain of custody. What I'm advocating is monitoring the vote. Maybe we should call it MTV2004...Monitor the vote 2004. Perhaps we could begin to post our ideas to the wiki www.civicactions.org. We will need to organize state by state or county by county. If anyone has any ideas, please go to the wiki and let's act collectively to ensure a fair election in 2004. (lifted from his Blog under his CC license).
Just last week, he blasted the FBI for stripping away the constitution. All from a man who 25 years ago, on Dec 25, 1978, refused to sell Clevelands municipal electric company under threat of political death. He stood by his principles and sacrificed his career. After a few years and hundreds of millions in savings, the people brought him back. If there is ever a candidate for president who supports rights of netizens, and "we the people", this is him. Consider a Thanksgiving day gift .