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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.
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.
...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...
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.
That's why it's illegal to give receipts at the polls. Actually not so much for the "we'll buy your vote for $345.67" reason as the "you vote for Ronald R. Ronaldson and bring me the receipt or I'll fire you" reason.
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.
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.
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.
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