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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?"
They can't subpoena something that doesn't exist...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.
I'm surprised they don't do this already.
Thanks for the link, you dirty rotten #%@&@$#!!
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...
Actually, if this were a slashdot article eons ago, it probably got slashdotted, and thus have lots of slashketeers on their list. Those that cared to RTFA, anyway...so that drops it down to a handful. :)
Guess here's one of those instances where it pays NOT to RTFA. Like we ever do anyway.
How about the feds crack down on the companies that make this terrible software in the first place?
So how would they prosecute this if the blame falls on VoteHere via BlackBoxVoting? Is this something that would be considered industrial espionage and prosecuted under trade secret law? What about BlackBoxVoting being labeled the "middleman" in the leak?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Glad I gave up cracking for Lent. I wouldn't want THE MAN to rain on my parade.
...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.
Bev Harris Speaks on Secret Service Issue
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.
Apparently a judge somewhere has been shown enough information to think that a search of the site is warranted...
Not judge. Grand Jury.
"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.
Because their proceedings are (allegedly) secret and the details of their deliberations do NOT become either public record or evidence usable at a trial, claims of privilege and immunity to search do not pull much weight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...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...
Now you are; shouldn't have clicked that link.
Traditional Republicans yes, but the neo-cons in power are anything but traiditional Republicans. And thanks to them, the USA is a lot closer to fascism than we think:
Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
OK, the control is there, the suppression of opposition through terror and censorship is growing, belligerent nationalism is very evident, racism has always been there and now is more prominent in the "war" against terror. The only thing lacking is the true centralization of authority, although the way the President was given a free hand to declare war it's not too far off. We're just one more major attack, followed by a declaration of martial law, away from fascism.
Furthermore, as Mussolini said, fascism should more properly be called corporatism. Corporatism. Ring a bell in today's USA?
From the VoteHere site (http://votehere.com/vhti.html):
"VHTi proves that electronic voting machines worked correctly and did not cheat in every election. "
So . . . only in a few elections?
You misunderstand the purpose of these "reciepts". They stay at the ballot box, and are availiable for recounts and audits. The voter does not take them home, and thus cannot prove how he voted. Futhermore, they do not identify who the voter is. They may have an ID that corresponds to the vote in the electronic database, but this is also not linked to the voter. A piece of paper printed by a machine and checked by the voter is just as good as on filled in by hand.
You are right that taking hardcopies home would be a stupid idea, but I have honestly not heard a single person suggest that. Unfortunately, someone started calling them reciepts, and it caught on and now everyone is all confused because they think these hardcopies are used the same way as a normal reciept. Damn it, I knew this was going to happen the first time I saw that word in a major article.
"We have to Slashdot the site in order to save it."
She dismisses open source software as a solution to electronic voting because bugs can remain hidden even after many reviews. While this is true, it misses the point that we should assume no system will provide a complete answer and therefore use a combination of source code auditing (best if the code is open), certification and what I believe is the most important: paper ballots that can be re-counted to provide an alternative to the electronic counting.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
My name is 63.161.169.137, and I approve this message.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Excellent point you just made, and if people are really paying attention, the Steve Jackson case is only one of MANY such instances in the "computer crimes" saga.
There's a pretty amazingly large list of computer bulletin board systems that listed "FBI raid/seizure" as their reason for finally going offline - yet no prosecutions were made in the vast majority of these cases. People simply dialed up one day, got a "number has been disconnected" message, and assumed the sysop didn't want to run his/her BBS anymore.
I first realized this when looking over one of the old collections of BBS numbers found on the Internet. (I think this was someplace on the www.bbsdocumentary.com web site, but as I look there right now - I only see lists of BBS names with phone numbers and sysops, but no notes as to why they went offline.)
It seems to me that right before the Internet really went mainstream, the feds were spending an awful lot of time seizing people's BBS hardware and software, with no real motivation other than attempting to break up the "BBS scene".
With the number of U.S. slashdotters out there, we can certainly bump this in the thousands, go sign the petition:
h tml
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BlackBoxVoting.org.
Go and show that it's not just a dozen paranoid freaks out there that think the system is broken.
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.
If it becomes a trend that users get in trouble for visiting specific websites, I could screw over everyone I hate just by lugging my laptop within range of their unprotected wireless network
I think I just had a lightbulb go off in my head. This is how I shall eventually rule the world... eliminating my enemies via paranoid government... muhahahaha!
I not only visted her website on several occasions but I also purchased a copy of her book. It is titled "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century." I look forward to reading it soon. I also once listen to her when she appeared on on a radio talk show. I even went so far as to write to my elected representatives on this subject. Does that mean that I will soon be on the FBI's long list of suspects?
I first started following what she and others had to say when the Swathmore College sudents launched their electronic civil disobedience campaign against Diebold. The students were trying to bring attention to internal Diebold memos which showed that Diebold employees knew how insecure their voting machines and the software was. The students were fighting Diebold's cease-and-desist letters that were forcing websites to take down the memos. For a few hours at a time websites would appear with the information and then the would quickly be shut down and dissappear. The websites not only had the internal Diebold memos but some even had the actual GEMS software and sample voting data files to play with.
The webpages included instructions on how to intall the software on your Windows computer and then use Microsoft Access to easily bypass the all security features. As I recall, it also explained how to modify the "AuditLog" and bypass the audit trail. Keep in mind that the internal memos showed that Diebold knew about most of those problems and did not seem to want to bother fixing the security flaws. Many polling places are now using Diebold voting machines here in the United States.
I did not downlaod the GEMS election software and the memos from the websites. The files would have been to large to be downloaded with my slow dial-up connecton. But, I am sure that many people around the world did. I have not kept up with what is going on lately but apparently the FBI claims to be investigating an alleged break-in at the VoteHere electronic voting software company. The FBI also seem to still be interested in the Diebold memos.
What Bev Harris and others want is for us to use voting machines that print out a stub which can be inserted into the ballot box as a backup in case a recount is needed. Machines of that type exist now but for some reason there has been less of a push for using them. Correct me if I am wrong but, I have heard that several of the voting machine companies have several lobbyists busy in Washington and have made a number of political contributions. Perhaps the main problem is that Bev Harris is trying to bring all that to everyone's attention. She and others are guilty of trying to protectly the integrity of the voting process here in the USA.
Lazy, paranoid and helpfull.
wget -m http://www.blackboxvoting.org ; chmod -R a+rx *
At your service. As we speak. Univeristy-class hosting.
You might notice a slight glitch, but I'll have that corrected.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Grand Juries aren't about doing whatever the Prosecutor wants. Usually, they're about doing whatever the citizens want - the Prosecutor can ask them to investigate something, but there is no requirement that they do so. The Prosecutor can present all sorts of evidence that a crime has occurred, and the Grand Jury can vote not to indict (we did, in one case), and the Prosecutor can tell the Grand Jury not to indict someone, and have them indicted anyway (we did that too).
The reason Grand Juries are secret is that there are no Fifth Amendment protections when facing a Grand Jury. Yes, a Grand Jury can require you to answer a question you'd rather not (like, "Did you kill your wife?"). That said, testifying before a Grand Jury grants immunity to prosecution for any crimes discussed in your testimony. So, we had to be VERY careful about who we "invited" to talk to us. Wouldn't do at all to accidently invite the murderer to testify, thinking he was just a material witness....
It should further be noted that the Grand Jury concept came about to protect people from abuses by the government. No matter what the government says, the Grand Jury can indict or not at its whim - and if it refuses to indict, the Prosecutor/DA is just SOL, no matter how bad he wants a trial.
And finally, even if this person whose logs are being subpoena'd is considered "one of the good guys", and even if Diebold and the Republicans are "bad guys", stealing things is still illegal, so the Grand Jury investigation may be warranted.
And even more finally, why are you people whinging about this? The lady is a journalist, which means she can invoke Source Protection laws, if applicable, and refuse to turn over any information....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"