Slashdot Mirror
Hotel Minibar Key Opens Diebold Voting Machines
Billosaur writes, "As if Diebold doesn't have enough to worry about! On the Freedom To Tinker blog, Ed Felten, one of the co-authors of the recent report 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine', reveals an even more bizarre finding related to the initial report. It turns out that you can gain access to an AccuVote-TS machine using a hotel minibar key. In fact, the key in question is a utilitarian type used to open office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and the like. They might as well hand them out like candy."
A more relevant question is: What are the penalties (criminal or civil) for using a key to open a voting machine during polling and doing nothing else.
You don't have to actively fsck things up to get the machine pulled. IMHO, merely opening the machine up would make for a good act of civil disobediance.
If the punishment is not something trivial, videotape yourself in the act and release it anonymously onto the internet the same day.
Even if the election officials do absolutely nothing, it'll show up on the evening and nightly news. That will be good or bad, depending on your perspective, but will definitely be noticed.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That's bullshit, and you know it.
Really, do you think so? On the surface, that's a perfectly rational response, I mean, everyone has the same access to these machines, right? What's the point of deliberately making a system everyone can cheat at?
Perhaps not everyone does have the same access. Peerhaps certain voting machine companies favor one party or the other, and provide detailed instructions to their favored candidates. Perhaps something is going on further behind the scenes, giving certain favored groups privileged access to the counting machines themselves, making cheating at the machine level a moot point.
It just seems odd that a company with the skills to make ATM machines nearly impenetrable can't make a voting machine as secure. The track record of ATMs seems to rule out incompetance. Despite your scanty anecdotal evidence to the contrary, ATMs are on the whole very secure. Banks are notoriously picky about that sort of thing, and any company that could not make a secure ATM would find themselves out of the ATM market very quickly, and probably facing massive lawsuits.
What, then, is your explanation of why these machines are so insecure?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The phrase you are looking for is "Plausible Deniability". If you design a machine that can only be comprimised by a single party then you're clearly a crook. If it can be hacked by a pre-school class with plastic hammers then you can claim to be merely hopelessly incompetant.