Slashdot Mirror
Feds to Open BlackBoxVoting User Logs?
Doc Ruby writes "Investigating a crack of eVoting company VoteHere, the FBI is said to be issuing a subpoena for the traffic logs of journalist Beverly Harris' BlackBoxVoting website. The FBI is pursuing Harris on the theory that her site is the connection between incriminating memos leaked from (VoteHere competitor) Diebold and the intrusion into VoteHere's servers. Are you on the list?"
Apparently a judge somewhere has been shown enough information to think that a search of the site is warranted...
Tampering with the election companies is a great way to prove that they're insecure, but it's still illegal...
How about the feds crack down on the companies that make this terrible software in the first place?
..if sites with potentially controversial content make a policy of not keeping logs more than 24 hours (or even better, simply write the logs to /dev/null) then there's nothing at all for the FBI, NSA, etc. to subpoena.
How long before the feds make it a requirement (via some law similiar to PATRTIOT) to keep logs?
...there isn't enough epithets I could hurl right now at the level of inanity at this. You have a case where the firms entrusted to provide equipment & services to THE most critical democratic process are in need of investigation more than anything else. The hubris and incompetance is fucking staggering.
This administration is easily outpacing the chicanery of Harding, Fillmore, and Tyler combined.
I'm going to put my faith in God, and use that as an excuse to abdicate any responsability.
Whew! I feel better already.
This is so wrong. We're talking about electronic voting, something which demands security (and transparency, but never mind the apparent paradox just now) and they're not concerned that someone has broken into their network? That's like the police not being worried that someone has been wandering around the evidence room.
Next, "A crime is a crime is a crime". Not only is that redundant but unless you're speaking algebraically it's a bunch of bullshit. In court, your method, your motive, and whether or not your hair is neatly parted and whether or not you've flossed that morning all have a profound effect upon the results of your trial. Furthermore there is a big difference between (say) accessing someone's network for monetary gain, accessing someone's network for the purposes of just defacing it, or accessing someone's network in the pursuit of liberty. Today, that sounds cheesy and fake, which makes me sad. There are valid reasons to break the law. Sometimes when you break the law for a valid reason you are punished anyway, and sometimes not, which is a risk you take - but please allow me to remind you or inform you all (as appropriate) that here in the US of A evidence gathered during the comission of a crime by a private party is admissable in court, but evidence gathered by a police officer which he has to commit a crime to collect is not (typically) so clearly society recognizes some cases in which it might be a good idea to allow selective enforcement of the law.
Maybe I just rant too readily, but I don't like this guy already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uhm, I take it the first think they'll do is trim all of the entries from tonight on. Clearly, the information they wanted to find out, if it exists, would be on the logs before the first report of the warrant came out. It'd be expected to be on the logs before the warrant was written.
The investigation began last October, when VoteHere, an electronic voting software company in Bellevue, reported that a hacker broke into its computer network. VoteHere founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Adler says, "We didn't think it was a big deal."
And they want us to put our democracy in their hands??? Yikes!
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
There not going to care about what else is in the logs. They're not there to go fishing, they know what they're looking for, and it's either in the logs or not. The warrant isn't a blank check, they had to tell a judge what they're hoping to see. We'll see what that is eventually if there's ever a trial.
I think young people might get more engaged in the political process if they worked as scrutineers and staff at polling booths, but automating everything down to "push button A for war, button B for peace" won't help a bit.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
...but my logs would have long been rotated out from January. They couldn't even imply there was something being hidden by being deleted.
However, as we saw in the Steve Jackson case, the seizure is more to punish than to glean any info.
Truly, I am all over anyone who hacks, destroys, or otherwise wakes the public up to the dangers of e-voting. Of course, I'm now marked for GitMo by the Bush Administration, so I probably won't be posting as often...
You see, it is illegal for a government agency to go in and demand the list of all the members of a group.
.com's of the late 90s had no visible means of support?
This wasn't done by a government agency acting alone, it was done under a Grand Jury approved warrant.
And you can't investigate leaks to journalists by going in and grabbing the reporter's computer.
Journalists love to claim "journalistic privledge". To bad that's not valid in any court I know of. They've gotta co-operate in an investigation just like everybody else, or at least take the punishment for Obstruction of Justice.
I started getting solicited to accept VoteHere software. I didn't bite, because it was obvious that this was an entrapment attempt.
Not good enough. She should have reported those e-mails to authorities so that they'd investigate them. Claiming to have those e-mails but not turning them over headers and all is one way to be sure a warrant with your name on it is coming.
Okay, a word about VoteHere: This is the company that has no visible means of support.
A lot of companies develop and release free software so that they can frost their own widget later. Come on, how many
And (you know who you are) -- consider this a heads up: If you start bumbling around in my house with U.S. marshalls, the very first thing that will happen is mainstream news coverage that you are misusing the Patriot Act to get at membership lists and private correspondence for a fishing expedition on stuff that isn't even the subject of a legitimate investigation.
You can only hope, Bev. You don't control which side the media's going to take... and you don't exactly have journalist credentials that the "mainstream media" are going to accept.
If she really thinks she's the subject of an investigation, anything she publishes should be going through her lawyers before coming out. Clearly this wasn't, because she just dug the hole deeper.
You don't really get to claim "unfair subpeona" when you clearly had evidence that you should have reported as soon as you got it.
It has been said before:
Question Authority
and Authority will question you.
But in the past, for most of us, that was just a quaint saying to chuckle over in the dorm lounge. This is the first time this shit is coming HOME for many of us. If you think this list of users isn't going to go into a database somewhere, you probably aren't on the list in the first place.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think that you are reading way too much into the situation.
/. editors are sick of seeing MS vulnerabilities appear in the submission list? Or they believe that adding YAMV (Yet Another Microsoft Vulnerability) to the main story page will not add much value to the site. The only thing it would add is old MS bashing will be repeated yet again.
Have you considered the possibility that the
On the other hand, I could be wrong and MS could own OSDN wholly, the shares are cheap enough...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
If Robert Novak can continue to avoid naming his source in the CIA Officer identity leak, then Bev should have no problem. Plus what she's doing bears a much greater resemblance to journalism than whatever Novak spews.
Open source isn't any sort of panacea for electronic voting because the end user doesn't control the actual system. This is different than when you're a paranoid security fanatic and you hand check every line of source that you compile on your personal machine, as well as verifying the output with 3 different compilers. Someone _else_ is loading the software and firmware onto those touchscreens and you can't ensure that that code is the open source code. Thats what the auditing is for, because thats where it's important. Open source development might help make it more secure (both algorithmically and in code), but it doesn't address the issues that really concern her.
Another Microsoft vulnerability is not news. Boring, boring.
You need a significant new Microsoft vulnerability to make it news.
An Open Source vulnerability generally is news.
The Microsoft ads indicate that Micrsoft is feeling pressure. Be aware that ads are targeted not to the customers of the product but to the management of the company that approves the ad. The TCO ad just means that Microsoft found somebody who could figure out that a mainframe was more expensive than a dual Xeon Intel box. I'm sure an extended cab pickup is cheaper than an 85-ton earthmover.
All software has bugs. But you knew that already.
We found another one. This not the first. It won't be the last.
You need to update to keep your system secure.
If there ever will be a hole, your system is not secure.
Not knowing of any insecurities is not equivalent to being secure.
If journalistic privilege didn't exist, would Novak really have been able to get away with publishing the identity of a CIA operative, and been able to shield the source of the leak by claiming journalistic privilege?
There are dozens, if not hundreds of pieces of caselaw which point to a journalistic privilege existing. However, this journalistic privilege is not absolute. (Then again, no privilege is absolute! Even before USA PATRIOT was passed, attorney-client privilege wasn't absolute. Doctor-client privilege isn't absolute. Priest-penitent privilege isn't absolute.) This means that, under very specific circumstances, a court can order a journalist to cough up a source, evidence, etc.
But it's an uphill battle and it usually ends very, very poorly for prosecutors. It's a lose-lose situation. If they lose, then they look like jackasses in public and they don't want that. If they win, then the next time they're up for re-election every newspaper will endorse the other guy, and they don't want that.
In the article, she's confident that the person who was offering her the VoteHere information was NOT the person who was a contact regarding Diebold.
She also states that the investigators rarely even ask her about VoteHere, that they seem to be fishing for something else...what else is there?
Diebold gets kicked out of California. There are reasons why that company/industry would want to see her/her website/whistleblowers to go away.
I'd be really sad, if we've reached a point in our history, where the FBI gets involved in covering up the Diebold mess. Diebold has *more* than earned its place of shame, and electronic voting needs more watchdogs and whistleblowers...not less.
The US Constitution specifies a peaceful "overthrow" of the government every two years: every 4 years an election allows the Executive branch to be replaced, and requires at least partial replacement every 8 (maximum 2 consecutive presidential terms); every 6 years an election allows 1/3 of Congress to be replaced, staggered by 2 years. The remaining Judicial branch is appointed at the Federal level, rather than elected, with the 9 Supreme Justices appointed for life. Some say that lifetime appointment protects a career of malfeasance. Some say the local justices elections are a worse reward for bias. And some say that the Judicial branch's increasing power to decide elections, by constraining candidates' access ballots, and voters' access to ballots, is a problem almost as serious as corporate secrecy constraining everyone's access to the voting machines inner mechanisms.
"Ours is a government built not on trust, but suspicion."
- Thomas Jefferson (paraphrase)
--
make install -not war
Oh, you have a policy of not keeping logs? We don't believe you. Mind if we visit your house and confiscate all of your computers and servers? We still need to know if your website is associated with the theft of Diebold documents.
They'll specify "all electronics and papers pertaining to logging", and they'll take everything. The only reason they aren't already gone is because we're here and if they go after em', it'll look aufuly suspicious now won't it? A website exposing the republicans' (the guys who are in power right now) connections to fixing voting machines all of a sudden gets raided by the FBI because the FBI thought they might have logs pertaining to the theft of logs at Diebold, a corporation republicans have a lot of dealings with.
Of course, it won't be spun that way in the mainstream media. No mention will be made to the connection between Diebold and republicans, and Diebold will be spun as a nice corporation that had some critical documents stolen by nefarious kniving hackers. Not to mention the humiliating defeat in california the company had, this'd just begin to really get the ball rolling at the top of the snow hill, so to speak.
Now, if you l33t haxors really want to do something useful, MIRROR THE WEBSITE! Think about it this way; Blackboxvoting.org goes down due to an FBI raid, an organized mirror is available. The main mirroring page has a nice paragraph or two explaining the websites position. The blackboxvoting owner then requests the website be redirected to the mirror site. The news hits mainstream media the day after the raid, whammo, everyone's typing blackboxvoting.org into their web browser and checking the website out, as well as reading their position on the whole thing. I'll leave the rest upto your imagination, but I think people will begin to get even more uneasy knowing congress is screwing around with their right to vote.
Of course, the ensuing media debacle will be, as always, phased out in a blast of confusion, but at least a couple thousand more Americans know their voting system is going down the toilet.
Got Gestapo?
Candy-Coated Knowledge
"Just a bunch of citizens" meeting in secret and nosing into anything a prosecurot thinks might be a sign that a crime might have been committed.
Alas poor justice i knew it well. Justice must be done and be seen to be done, other wise how can you have faith and trust in it?
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
If I had to keep a permanent archive of my customers' e-mail, spam would drive us into bankruptcy.
No sig
If Robert Novak can continue to avoid naming his source in the CIA Officer identity leak, then Bev should have no problem. Plus what she's doing bears a much greater resemblance to journalism than whatever Novak spews.
... any investigation of Bev is likely to resemble a search and destroy mission.
The key difference is that Robert Novak was doing the administration's dirty work in outing the CIA operative as payback for comments critical of the administration. Any investigation of Navak is going to be for show
Bev was exposing a weakness in the voting system the administration could have used to steal another election, may well have been planning to use for just such purposes (remember Diebold's promise to "deliver Ohio" to Bush?), and quite possibly used during the last election (remember the 80,000 votes that disapppeared from Diebold machines in Florida and were never accounted for?).
This is standard Bush administration intimidation tactics, using the tried and true method of unleashing the FBI's overly broad investigative authority (even pre-9/11 it was overbroad, now it is doubly so) to harrass, intimidate, and even destroy the lives of troublesome pests who still insist on democracy in Bush's America.
While she should get the best lawyer possible, I suspect we are seeing the full weight of the federal government come down on her not because her web site might have been used by someone breaking into another server, but because she shined the light of publicity on one of their dirty little secrets. In the current environment, no amount of legalese is going to protect someone from an administration with a demonstrated willingness to step outside the law whenever it suits them.
Now cue the neo-con right's accusations of tin-foil hats and weeping democrats sore of having an election stolen from them (HINT: I didn't vote for Gore last time around, but that doesn't change the shameful facts of the 2000 election one bit).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy