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Programmer Built Vote-Rigging Demo for Florida Politician
Syre writes "therawstory reports that a programmer named Clinton Curtis says in a sworn affidavit (mirror) that he developed prototype vote-rigging software at the request of then-Florida state representative Tom Feeney. The affidavit has been turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, of which Feeney is now a member. Should we call for inspection and disassembly of all the voting machine code to see if it contains any of these secret vote tampering functions he was asked to include in his prototype?" A follow-up interview is available. A point to emphasize: he's not making any claims of actual fraud occurring in the Florida elections.
Goverments have been overthrown for less than this.
-Dipster
...as programming the american public to be a bunch of scared sheep to vote for you.
The trouble with blogs, is that no-one writing them has the time to follow up these stories. If a mainstream journalist breaks them there's a chance (albeit not much of one in the present climate) that they'll keep digging away, and uncover a Watergate-style conspiracy (which isn't to say that this is necessarily one of those).
But if Woodward and Bernstein were bloggers, they'd've been happy to publish the skimpy information that started their investigation -- smug that they put one over on the press -- and let the whole thing degenerate into a partisan "Nixon Sucks!" style-flamewar.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Legitimate things like this go on all the time. It is commonly referred to as "white hat" hacking, as we all know. That may not be the case here, but it sounds more to me like the programmer is disappointed with election results and wants to pretend he's a whistleblower.
They're not required to validate the allegations.
Simply reporting that allegations exist and specifying that some of these allegations are in an affidavidit is responsible journalism. That there are allegations is a point of fact. When a tornado hits a trailer park, journalists are not required to look for a second opinion or go into background as to why that trailer park seems to attract tornadoes.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
This infuriates me for a different reason - the lack of vision of law-makers. I cant believe voting machines are not force to have open source code. I said personally many moons ago this would happen and ...
Its the only way to defraud fake conspiracy theories and protect peoples voting rights. People desserve to know exactly how their vote is being processed. Is mankind that stupid. Do we want revolutions and rebellions because people are too stupid to make voting (a fairly important task to be fair..pff) transparent, honest, whatever you want to call it..
You mean you don't have access to any copy of the source code, let alone every revision of a system used to determine elections? In that case the spec needs to be rewritten and the bank accounts of those responsible for making such a cretinous decision examined for evidence of taking bribes. This is one of the points where the "are you stupid, are you corrupt, or don't you care about doing your job" question needs to be asked, since there does not appear to be any other options available.
Forget the shiny new technology, if the entire voting process is not open to scrutiny it is open to abuse. A few jobs with a quick and nasty software company in a marginal electorate is not worth the potential for abuse. Perhaps a Federal election organisation running free, fair and consistant elections (two out of three is not good enough) like you see in other countries is the way to go - instead of things being down at the state or county level. There are a lot of countries that have built on a combination of the USA and Swiss election systems over the last century that may be worth looking at.