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Students Fight E-Vote Firm
(Wired News, October 21, 2003)
A group of students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign against voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems. . . . The students are protesting efforts by Diebold to prevent them and other website owners from linking to some 15,000 internal company memos that reveal the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software for years but sold the faulty systems to states anyway. The memos were leaked to voting activists and journalists by a hacker who broke into an insecure Diebold FTP server in March. . . . Bev Harris, owner of the Black Box Voting site and author of a book on the electronic voting industry, was one of the first people to post the memos before a letter from Diebold threatened her with litigation. . . . Half a dozen other people hosting the memos in the United States, Canada, Italy and New Zealand also have received letters forcing them to take the material down. . . . Why War?, a nonprofit student organization at Swarthmore, and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, also composed of Swarthmore students, announced plans to defy Diebold and their college ISP. . . . The college notified the student, who wishes to remain anonymous, that it would disconnect his Internet service if he didn't remove the memos. But Luke Smith, a sophomore, said students are planning to bypass that threat by hosting the memos on different machines. Each time one machine is shut down by Diebold, they will move the memos to another machine, passing them from student to student. . . . "They're using copyright law as a means of suppressing information that needs to be public," Smith said. "It's a great example of how copyright law can be against the public good rather than for it, as it was originally intended." . . . He added, "It's not like people are reading these memos in order to steal Diebold's election system. (The company is) trying to use this law, and specifically the mandatory take-down section, to conceal flaws that directly affect the validity of election results. This is a threat to our democracy." . . . Doherty and the EFF launched their own resistance campaign last week after a news site, the Independent Media Center, and its Internet provider, the Online Policy Group, received a cease-and-desist letter from Diebold. In addition to his position at EFF, Doherty is executive director of the Online Policy Group, a nonprofit organization that focuses on digital privacy and rights issues. . . . "These documents indicate the potential for widespread election fraud in the U.S. or wherever else Diebold voting machines are being used," he said. . . . The Diebold memos contain a trove of information about the internal workings of the electronic voting machine manufacturer, which has been criticized for poor programming practices. . . . Among the revelations in the memos was news that the Microsoft Access database used by the Diebold system to count votes was not protected by a password. This means anyone could alter votes by entering the database through an insecure backdoor, via physical access to the machine or remotely, via the phone system. . . . The memos also reveal that the audit log, which records any activity in the Access database, could be easily altered so that an intruder could erase a record of the intrusion. . . . These security flaws were pointed out to Diebold in 2001 in memos from a firm that was being paid to audit and certify the software. A Diebold engineer responded by saying the company preferred not to password-protect the database because it was easier for them (presumably Diebold employees) to go into the software and do "end-runs" in the system -- a term that describes when someone changes software to fix or work around coding problems. . . . "If I were Diebold I wouldn't claim copyright protection; I'd claim I hadn't written the memos," he said. "They knowingly created a system that doesn't even have a semblance of security. And then they pass it off on the American public in the name of modernization." . . . Smith said his group plans to launch a campaign this week to recruit more students to participate in the revolt. . . . "We're advocating freedom of information and open-source standards," he said. "If there's anything the public has an inherent right to look in on, it's voting technology. That's why we're pushing this."

Updated links to the Diabold secret files

posted by LoZo 1:34 PM