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Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack
mcgrew writes "PC world is reporting that Diebold's super-popular voting machines are coming under even more scrutiny. A security review has revealed that they are simply 'not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election.' This is according to a report from the University of California Berkley, who did a two-month top-to-bottom review of all California e-voting systems. That's a subject we've discussed before, but Diebold's setup is truly unsettling. An attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an entire election using viruses. From the article: 'The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said. The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.' Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails (at least in my county) and according to Black Box Voting doesn't use Diebold anywhere."
The even scarier part is that the Diebold machines have not been decertified.
The revolution will be mocked
As someone who had been contracted by Diebold, the machines are running Windows, the software is written in Visual Basic, and the database is Access. And no, this isn't a troll.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
god help the future of democracy.
Here is my idea for an absolutely secure voting machine. Each person who goes into vote gets a token. Made of radioactive material. This material is heavily controlled, and outside the voting machine you have SWAT teams with geiger counters, and obviously anyone wearing a foot of lead is busted.
Voting consists of dropping the Uranium into one of several lead boxes which contain giant magnets to keep someone from trying to alter votes by moving tokens from one box to another. At the end of the day, you read the results digitally with a geiger counter. Every party can be there with representatives, disagreements can be sorted out on the spot with a manual count in front of a multiparty committee. 100% foolproof.
Basically, I got the idea from Bruce Schnier, who observed that it's not such a bad idea for people to keep their passwords written down on a piece of paper in their wallet. After all, people already know how to keep their wallets secure.
The US Military already knows how to keep weapons-grade plutonium secure. Basically, my idea is to just piggy-back on that, to keep voting secure.
A lot of people like to stick with old, low-tech stuff, don't have the will to try anything new. "What about the radiation poisoning" they would no doubt whine. Well I say progress consists in throwing out what's old and "safe" and being bold.
A corp that makes secure ATM machines designs and builds machines using ZERO of their ATM experience or technology which is on par with a high school student project (I saw the leaked software many years ago; that was totally under reported.)
This is not the typical play stupid situation that sells so well in the USA. This is clear-cut intentional negligence and I shouldn't need to go into the many possible motives for anybody to pull such scams. This isn't even that other large voting machine company who elected their own OWNER!
The difficulty is NOT making a computer COUNT or securing the totals, they distract you with the irrelevant technical details. Its in WHO YOU TRUST to implement, maintain, and secure the system that is the unsolvable difficulty (I for one, will welcome our evolved computer overlords when they take over...)
The ultimate purpose for Rube Goldberg designs is POWER (job security and customer lock in being most common motives.) When you place the power in the hands of a few you always run into trouble. IRONICALLY, the purpose for democratic voting is totally being forgotten in this pseudo debate about how the publicly inaccessible voting system operates!
Canada figured it out; however, I'd like to see a weighted voting system well implemented. Also, I would like to see a new kind of elector system so my friends can just give me their votes; its hard enough to get them to the polls on a WORK DAY... (yes, the pro-"democracy" USA never respected democracy enough to make election day on par with memorial day. Irony has become redundant.) While I'm at it, I'd like senators to go back to state appointment because the intent was to prevent an all powerful federal government.
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