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Diebold Chases Links To Leaked Memos
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Oct 29, 2003 06:47 AM
from the whack-a-mole-weeble-wobble dept.
from the whack-a-mole-weeble-wobble dept.
bllfrnch writes "Mary Hodder, over at The Berkeley School of Journalism's bIPlog, reports that electronic voting bigwig Diebold has begun sending cease-and-desist letters to universities whose students are linking to hijacked internal company memos that elucidate the company's level of respect for citizens' right to vote. Particularly shocking is the line: "If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.""
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Stupid Quote (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course voting can change things, for example I'm sure the people of Iraq would have loved to vote a new leader when Saddam Hussein was in power, but couldn't. People have died for the right to vote. I think that things like the above quote are very dangerous things to say.
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so annoying how people blow these things out of proportion - dude works for a voting machine company and has a sarcastic signature about voting - it's a joke - lighten up - it's like people are looking for things to whine about and then jumping on anything remotely sensational - [grumbles and moves back under bridge]
Parent
Absolutely (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the guy just had a sense of humour. It's a shame to think that he must be getting hell for trying to lighten up his job.
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:3, Funny)
No need to put that in the past tense. I'm sure the people of Iraq would still love the chance to vote for their own leader.
Re:Oh really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, it's a good thing everybody agreed on American independence. Imagine how things would have went if some people would have been sympathetic to the king.
News Flash... (Score:5, Informative)
It was similiar to what continues on today between North and South Korea, those two countries are at war and have been at war for over 50 years. Yes, 50 years. There was never a declaration of peace between North and South Korea, just a cease fire armistice.
I can't blame you for not knowing. I have the impression that most people aren't really taught such truths in school anymore. These days, for one to actually learn the truth, they have to hunt for it themselves.
Parent
Re:News Flash... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, can you define 'a while'...what period of time is this? Are you saying basically, that if you wait out, and welsh on an agreement long enough...everything just transforms to 'ok nevermind, we didn't really mean it'...and you don't have to do it. By that logic, we shouldn't have given the peaceful inspector method as long as we did.
Saddam surrendered Gulf War 1. He agreed to terms. He got a chance to abide by them....and basically did everything he could not to. After awhile, as you say, you get fed up with this, and come down on him. Otherwise, there is no deterrent to other rogue nations. Sometimes, all that is understood is swift, blinding violence and force. Grant it, you want it to be a last resort, but, your words of peace have no teeth if you aren't willing to back them up.
This is not a utopian world, will never be one as long as there are humans. There are by default, some bad seeds out there, and on occasion, you have to show one what the consequences are for bad behavior, otherwise they will run rampant.
Parent
Re:Stupid Quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Any idiot can fight - it takes guts not to be dared into a fight.
Parent
Re:that isn't the fault of democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't belive in marketing and backup by large companies that would be true. Do you have a clue how much money it's needed to run for president? How would average Joe with the solutions to all problems reach out to the millions of people needed to get him elected if he wasn't backed by a large company or a largy party? And when he got elected with the help of thoose, owning everything to them how could he be any better than what's running now?
In the best of worlds your statement would be true but unfortunately are we living in a dump, with too many uneducated people to be able to have democracy.
Parent
Don't vote .. (Score:4, Funny)
Why don't the idiots use the DMCA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply send a counter notice stating that the documents do not breach copyright, and put the website back up. This moves the obligation to Diebold to bring suit!
Re:Why don't the idiots use the DMCA? (Score:5, Informative)
Day Eight, Oct. 28: Amherst and MIT have received cease-desist letters (copy of MIT cease-desist letter). New mirrors are now up at UNC, Duke, Berkeley, NCSU and U Penn.
Diebold has publicly admitted that leaked memos do not meet DMCA standards for copyright infringement. In the Associated Press article, a Diebold representative declares:
Ernest Miller explains that the DMCA requires that documents be authentic; if the documents aren't authentic, it isn't copyright infringement. Our position is that even if the memos are authentic (which we believe they are, or Diebold would be pursuing a libel campaign), they are not copyright infringment as they are covered under DMCA fair use guidelines .Since some of you have been asking, yes, Swarthmore College is still enforcing its policy of cutting off network access to students who link to information about the memos (or the memos themselves). There have been many discussions of this absurd policy -- see, for instance, LawMeme's analysis -- and we appreciate the letters that are being sent to Dean Gross and The Phoenix (e.g. Seth Finkelstein's). We hope that by expanding to other colleges and universities we can broaden the campaign while minimizing the impact of our own institution's refusal to take a stand. (If other educational institutions encounter such policies, this script may be of help.)
Parent
irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Illegal voteing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Illegal voteing (Score:3, Insightful)
Email, web pages, newsgroup posts, whatever.
You may think it is funny now, but others might not get your humor one day when your name pops up in a google cache or email archive.
More mirrors needed (Score:5, Insightful)
mirroring inside the US (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, Newsweek carried a piece by Steven Levy about Diebold this week.
!shocking (Score:4, Insightful)
This line belongs to a
This is taken out of context.
mirrors (Score:4, Informative)
http://cultcom.com/mirror.html [cultcom.com]
Distributing the Diebold memo with apt-get (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the power of apt-get could be used to form a type of ad-hoc distributed network for the distribution of the Diebold memo, without fear of a single server being shutdown making the document disappear. What we did for the Fed was to create a set of apt.sources files which contained the addresses of a bunch of mirror servers which contained the documents of interest. When a user needed to find a document, they would simply issue an apt-get instyall Document command at their workstation, and apt-get would do the rest.
It gets better. When a new revision of the document was released, it was a simple task for the user to perform an apt-get upgrade Document, and the latest version was dragged across from what ever server happened to be available from their apt.sources file. We even spent a couple of weeks hacking dselect to launch OpenOffice when necessary to create a kind of crude distributed document management system. The users loved it! It's the UNIX way!
But anyway, back to the problem at hand. What is needed are a bunch of Debian servers to host the offending Diebold memo which has been leaked, and for people to start adding these to their apt.sources files. That way, Diebold won't be able to shut down any servers, and if they leak new information, it can easily be upgraded with apt-get upgrade Diebold! apt-get just continues to amaze me.
apt-get free speech!!!
Re:Distributing the Diebold memo with apt-get (Score:3, Informative)
Re-inventing the wheel (Score:5, Informative)
How to distribute documents across a whole organisation in an available manner? I could install Usenet News servers and have them do it, or I could waste weeks writing wrappers round apt-get, hacking dselect and tie myself directly to Debian, and spend time installing apt on hundreds of machines.
Or I could just post the document to a newsgroup... DOH!
Parent
Diebold (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's how you build a real voting system.
- You get the best brains to really think about the problem. Forget the Diebold cubicle workers, you get someone like Rivest and pals to design the system. They solve the problems of audit trails, accountability, how to trust the machine etc.
- You get a collaboration of the top research institutes and universities to implement the system. Implementation must be done completely in the open. Every party and faction will have a great interest in eyeballing the system, so that no other faction can exploit it. With enough eyes, every bug is shallow.
- You don't design 52 systems, you design one or two. A well designed system will be used and paid for by virtually all the states. Done right it might cost as much as 30 bad systems, but it'll be worth it.
- You maintain the system troughout the year, not just 2 months before each election. You reuse improved versions of the system with each election.
Re:Diebold (Score:3, Informative)
They are evidently good showmen and salespeople.
Now, I've been to demostrations... and I've
What's wrong with pencil and paper voting? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's what we use here in the UK.
You go into a little booth with a ballot paper, where you will find a pencil. Mark an X in the box next to the candidate you want, fold up the paper and post it in the ballot box.
It's more auditable and even if the paper, pencils and boxes are manufactured by a company who make no secret of their support for one particular political party, it's difficult to see how it could make any difference.
I'm not trolling - if someone could explain, please do.
Parent
For our non-US readers' edficiation (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no country wide standard of how voting is conducted.
People outside the US may not be aware of this, but local governments (cities, counties and states) are extremely important in our system. US states are pretty much exclusively in charge of setting standards on how voting is conducted. For example, while every state has secret ballots, this is only a widely accepted custom; well into the nineteenth century people voted in some places by testifying publicly at the local courthouse. States typically don't have very stringent standardization. Local municipalities or counties (depending on the part of the country) actually conduct the polling and have a great deal of leeway in how they do it.
Combine this local autonomy with the typically frugal funding of municipal functions compared to what a European would expect, our entrepreurial spirit and our love of technological quick fixes, it's pretty much inevitable that there should be an array of half baked systems out there. The Diebold system in question is only the latest.
I wonder whether this chaos has a kind of protective effect, at least on the national and statewide level. Think about this: barring a knife edge result like the last presidential election, the only way to rig a statewide or presidential election would require undermining a variety of systems in a variety of places, using a variety of methods. The chancs of avoiding detection decrease hyperbolically in the number of exploits attempted.
The real danger with electronic voting is that in our post-Florida mania for a technical quick fix, a de facto electronic voting standard will emerge. This has happened in the past, for example in states adopting the secret ballot. However, electronic voting provides a single point of vulnerability, in which a rogue staffer with sufficient skills could conceivably change the composition of the US government. Americans tend to dismiss the possibility of voting manipulation by corporate interests as class warfare paranoia, but think of the opportunity this presents to certain foreign intelligence agencies.
What we ought to do is something that has never been done in the US: set real standards for polling methods, especially (but not limited to) electronic ones. I think most people here understand what this should include: things like auditabiliy, indepedent security analysis as part of system acceptance, etc. These standards could be implemented by multiple vendors, and for security reasons we would probably want to have at least four or five major players, and set maximums for the percentage of an electorate in a state voting on a particular vendor's machines.
Parent
They're confirming the validity of the documents (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nope, never seen those before. Guess somebody thinks it's funny to try to discredit a reliable, trustworthy company like us."
Insead, they've chosen "arrgggh, give those back! You can't show people those - they're secret!". Hmm...
"Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" (Score:5, Interesting)
This is House Resolution 2239 which requires a paper trail and bans the use of non-open software.
Here's a story about it: link [indymedia.org]
Copy of cease & desist letter (Score:5, Informative)
James Bruce
Vice President for Information Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 10-219
Cambridge, MA 02139
XXXXXXXX@mit.edu
Re: Copyright Infringement
Dear Mr. Bruce:
We represent Diebold, Incorporated and its wholly owned subsidiaries Diebold Election Systems, Inc., and Diebold Election Systems ULC (collectively "Diebold").
Diebold is the owner of copyrights in certain correspondence and other material relating to its electronic voting machines, which were stolen from a Diebold computer ("Diebold Property").
It has recently come to our clients' attention that you appear to be hosting a web site that contains Diebold Property. The web site you are hosting infringes Diebold's copyrights because the Diebold Property was reproduced, placed on public display, and is being distributed from this web site without Diebold's consent.
The web site and Diebold Property are identified in a chart attached to this letter.
The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients' rights and to seek your agreement to the following: (1) to remove and destroy the Diebold Property contained at the web site identified in the attached chart and (2) to destroy any backup copies of the Diebold Property in your possession or under your control.
Please confirm, in writing, that you have complied with the above requests.
To the best of my knowledge and belief the information contained in this notification is accurate as of the time of compilation and, under penalty of perjury, I certify that I am authorized to act on behalf of Diebold.
Our clients reserve their position insofar as costs and damages caused by infringing activity with respect to the Diebold Property. Our clients also reserve their right to seek injunctive relief to prevent further unauthorized use of Diebold Property, including reproduction, distribution, public display, or the creation of derivative works, pending your response to this letter. We suggest you contact your legal advisors to obtain legal advice as to your position.
We await your response within 24 hours.
Very truly yours,
Ralph E. Jocke
INFRINGING MATERIALS POSTED ON:
XXXXXXXXX.net
Re:Copy of cease & desist letter (Score:5, Interesting)
I will promptly remove this document as soon as you send me an official statement stating it is Diebold copyrighted material"
Parent
Shocking?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst I'm posting, my take on this whole thing: I still cannot understand why on earth the US moved away from the pencil-and-paper, put-an-X-in-the-box system used (AFAIK) by the rest of the world (certainly that's how it works here in the UK.) Simple, cheap, robust, reliable, transparent... why complicate a system that's already a model of simplicity and correctness? Can someone explain to me what the problem is that 'voting machines' (of any sort, including the mechanical punched-card type) are trying to solve, exactly?
I actually worked as a volunteer in a General Election back in 1987 - this included sitting outside the polling station politely asking voters how they voted as they were leaving, aka 'exit polls' done to give the parties an idea of how things are going. Of course people don't have to answer and many didn't. At the count, all the candidates and their agents, pluys local party workers, official observers etc can all stand around watching the ballot boxes coming in, being emptied out, counted & sorted. If there's a close result, the losing candidate has the right (which is often exercised) to call for a recount. Because the bits of paper are all still there it's easy to do this. Organised, mass tampering with ballots is for all practical purposes impossible in this system - there's too much oversight, checks & balances & transparency. Of course, the first-past-the-post electoral system itself sucks, and we should have proportional representation :), but the simple question of how many votes each candidate got is pretty much a solved problem. It's just, y'know, counting, really...
If voting changed anything... it would be illegal (Score:3)
So this person's (perhaps random) e-mail fortune sig has much truth to it? (And dual meanings, on which
So why is voting legal in the States? Perhaps because people cannot change the really important things?
-ponder-
When last has voting really had a profound effect? When last have we voted about issues and not FOR parties? A total swing in the political rulers have not had any noticable effect on the country... hence the opinion that there had been no real need to vote.
More interesting reading HERE [spunk.org].
Gore (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not pro-Gore or anti-Gore or Republician or Democrat. But the quote cracks me up...
No matter if he won or lost, quotes like this now make me understand why he at least wanted a recount.
Davak
Don't you see? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Diebold is claiming copyright infringement, they are admitting that the memos are real!
I hope people don't focus so much on the
Mod parent up. (Score:4, Interesting)
I heard a story once about WWII. --It went like this; when the German death camps were discovered by the Allied forces, one high ranking General, rounded up as many people in his command as possible and marched them through the scene, telling them, "Look at this and do not forget it. People are going to try to deny that this has happened."
You watch. Two years from now, when all the links and documents have been rounded up, there will be people swearing up and down that this Diebold thing is just another loony conspiracy. Just wait. The PR spin will put a rationalized face on it and raise lots of reasonable doubt, etc.
Newsflash: Conspiracies bloody well exist. Those who swear they do not are chumps who think that watching television documentary 'science' shows makes them smart. And amazingly, many of them can also tell you who Joseph Goebbels was as well! (Cuz they learned about it from a television documentary.)
-FL
Parent
My favorite line from their files.... (Score:5, Informative)
First off, I'd like to thank Wired News [wired.com] for linking me a couple of days back regarding this, and Why War? [why-war.com] for providing a way for me to get at these files.
Now, then, from a January 2002 memo titled, Nearterm AVTS 4.x roadmap [chroot.net], discussing the classification of a major update as a bugfix:
These are just the sort of people I want in charge of the machines that people vote on in my election. No, really. [/sarcasm]
Letter to my representative in Congress (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a constituent in your district. I am writing to thank you for supporting HR 2339 and to tell you how important this issue is to me. When I saw you had co-sponsored the bill, I was very pleased. I recently moved to this area, and previously had the pleasure of Rep. Nadler of NY as my representative. Your voting record indicates that you are representing us very well.
HR2239 is very important to me for two reasons:
As a citizen, I was ashamed of Florida 2000 and found the whole mess reminiscent of a third world country. We are still paying the price of that election with GWB's policies. I fear that next time we won't even know we have had an election stolen.
As a professional, I have been in the computer security business for over 12 years. I currently lead a global consulting practice specialising in computer security (we are based in NYC). I was very supportive of the analysis conducted by John Hopkins and I was glad to finally see someone discuss this serious issue. In my business I am responsible for securing some of the most sensitive systems such as banks, pharmaceutical R&D etc. I have a lot of experience both in securing and in "testing" systems. In our business we call this "ethical hacking" and we get paid to try to break into systems. I have seen how easy it is to subvert the security of many commercial systems. After reading the Johns Hopkins analysis of the Diebold system I was shocked at the level of risk these systems would introduce. I seriously believe that it is possible not only to compromise them, but to do so en-mass in a way that could subvert an entire presidential election. Even worse, I believe this can be done with subtlety so that it is undetected. This means our very system of democracy is at stake. In a way I wonder whether I should be surprised at the fact that republicans do not worry about this, or whether I should be concerned that they have reasons not to worry.
Your actions in this matter are admirable and of great importance. You have my support.
Sincerely,
We, The Mirrors, Need Help (Score:5, Interesting)
I expect that BU will receive a DMCA notice in the next day or two, and ask me to remove the memos. Although I would very much like to find this, I simply don't have the resources to get into a legal battle (and it's doubtful BU would stick its neck out for me).
But that's not even necessary. If I could just find two people willing to put up mirrors once my mirror goes down (I've already found one), than their takedown notice will have the net effect of putting another copy of the memos online. This seems to be the best overall strategy for those who can't fight this legally.
If a willing mirror could email me, and let me know what the url of your mirror is, I'd really appreciate it.
chrisn1 [at] bu [dot] edu
More conflicts of interest (Score:4, Informative)
Occasionally, politicians have used their ties to voting machine companies for fraud and illegal activities:
- Former Louisiana State Elections Official Jerry Fowler (D), is currently serving five years in prison for charges related to taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from voting machine scandals.
- Bill McCuen (D), former Arkansas Secretary of State, pled guilty to felony charges that he took bribes, evaded taxes, and accepted kickbacks. Part of the case involved Business Records Corp. (now merged with ES&S) for recording corporate and voter registration records.
Full Story here [gregpalast.com].Re:That's absolutely right (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait, that's called communism, socialism...that's what we want right?
You should go back to school. Communism is concerned with collective ownership of land and property, Socialism looks towards equality via state control of the economy. Neither precludes the use of democracy within a society.
You're thinking of a dictatorship which could be of a left (think USSR) or right (eg Chile under Pinochet) persuasion.
--Parent
Re:That's absolutely right (Score:5, Insightful)
No, thats called a totalitarian dictatorship Einstein.
Socialism, Fascism and Communism are merely political ideologies, intolerable ideologies yes, but thats all they are.
Socialism doesn't tell people to stop thinking and to starve your population, people that supported it did(Monsters) but the original texts encourages the people to think of freedom and how to make society work better for the majority.
Fascism didn't tell people to kill millions of Jew, Homosexuals, Gypsies and Disabled People, just to think of how to work together, the people that supported Fascism did commit some of the most horrific crimes humanity has ever encountered but what they preeched originally was togetherness what they did was disgusting.
I hate the Nazis as a rule and the Soviets only slightly less, but I also hate ignorant wankers from any nation that seem to think that sticking a label like "Fascist" or "Socialist" on anything they don't like and claiming a moral high ground by beating to death a strawman sent from the un-edited nightmares of Anne Coulter is pathetic.
The exception to this is Rick from The Young Ones.
Parent
Re:"If voting could really change things" (Score:3, Insightful)
And the corollary quote, with Diebold in mind (Score:5, Funny)
"Those who vote change nothing. Those who count the votes change everything."
Parent
Re:civil disobedience (Score:5, Insightful)
A law made by "the people" is made to represent the best interest of "the people" in general. It should be fair and in proportion, and that should be the basis for obedience to that law. Making theft illegal is in everone's best interests, because it should protect your posessions.
When a law is out of proportion, unjust, or in any other case plain wrong, it is no longer in the best interest of the people in general, and thus should be void. "The people" ignore (break) the law, because they in general do not agree with it.
The ability for the public to act this way should prevent government agents from making laws for their own benefit (corruption). The public has a means of protecting their public interest.
If the voting system is corrupted, it's in the publics best interest to expose this. I'm not aware of who leaked the memos in the first place, but linking to material available on the web should not be punished IMHO.
I think it's utterly wrong to place responsibility of the counting of votes in the hands of a commercial enterprise, not if they don't give full and in-depth insight in the process, and allow auditing at every level at any time. Not because I'm an open source zealot or "liberal", but because I trust a commercial enterprise as far as I can throw them, and that's not very far...
Parent
Re:I used one and I am HORRIFIED (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad that someone made that point. People often forget that voting is just as much a responsibility as it is a right. It is not something you should do haphazardly.
Parent
The obvious flaw: (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure there are probably flaws with this.
There's one flaw: if you let the voter take a human readable receipt out of the booth, it's no longer a secret ballot, and it becomes possible to bribe, blackmail, or simply pressure someone else into voting the way you want.
If that was the price we had to pay for untamperable elections, I'd willingly pay it; but it's not. Plain old pen-and-paper voting is untamperable within a couple percentage points, which is good enough for me; I don't care too much if someone gets elected by 24% of the voting age public instead of the usual 25%.
Even electronic voting can be made untamperable: now that their website's back up (if it goes down again, check Google's cache) I'd like to post Yet Another Plug for vreceipt.com [vreceipt.com]'s white paper on verifiable voting receipts. Basically you give the voter a receipt which:
Then, as long as nobody is adding votes to the final tally (so yes, we still need honest poll workers to make sure that the number of people walking into booths is the number of votes reported by the computers), the election results will be instantly countable, completely verifiable, and perfectly accurate. The only drawback is that it would require lots of expensive custom printers.
Granted, I don't expect to ever see this system in use; I suspect public-key encryption may be next to Condorcet voting on the list of "stuff too complicated to explain to the politicians"... but just reading about the possibilities puts all the "why is my broken smart card sending out negative numbers?" incompetence at Diebold in perspective.
Parent