Former delegate gets purported Diebold code

[deminks]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-te.md.voting20oct20,0,5237249.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's polls in 2004.

Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland's elections chief, says the fact that the computer disks were sent to her - along with an unsigned note criticizing the management of the state elections board - demonstrates that Maryland's voting system faces grave security threats.

The availability of the code - the written instructions that tell the machines what to do - is important because some computer scientists worry that the machines are vulnerable to malicious and virtually undetectable vote-switching software. An examination of the instructions would enable technology experts to identify flaws, but Diebold says the code is proprietary and does not allow public scrutiny of it.

Diebold has not confirmed that the code received by Kagan is authentic, said Mike Morrill, a spokesman for the company in Maryland. But Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Aviel Rubin reviewed one of the disks and said he believed it was genuine. If it wasn't, he said, "someone went to great lengths to make it look like it was."

[Mr Rabble]

1. When is this going to get traction with lawmakers?

At what point are all of our elected reps going to finally demand paper ballots?

Or, is it being left undone so that the republicans can cry foul when we take the house and senate?

[peacetalksforall]

2. Yep, this is it. October surprise. And Diebold's exit=excuse out

of the business. They can say both - that what was sent wasn't their code - that their code is now vulnerable. Look for them to exit without official examination and rulings of any kind except in the speculation and propaganda world.

All the lemmings calling in to WJ can say that some traitorous American ruined the votes and destroyed a company because they were friends of the President. ???

[peacetalksforall]

3. If this release is a plan they probably already have 19 ways to spin it.

[leftchick]

4. The person who did this is a real patriot

Diebold is in deep doodoo. Or should be....

<snip>

"My feeling is that it may have come out of the testing labs, which means that if that's true, their procedures for protecting their clients' valuable proprietary information have failed," said Rubin, who in 2003 published a report on Diebold security flaws after discovering a copy of the code on the Internet.

"If it came out of Diebold, it's like Coca-Cola having their recipe exposed and then not learning their lesson," he said. "If it came out of the testing labs, then it's hard to blame the manufacturer."

Kagan, a former state Democratic delegate from Montgomery County who is now executive director of the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, said the disks were delivered to her office Wednesday.

An accompanying letter refers to the State Board of Elections and calls Kagan "the proud recipient of an 'abandoned baby Diebold source code' right from SBE accidentally picked up in this envelope, right in plain view at SBE. ... You have the software because you are a credible person who can save the state from itself. You must alert the media and save democracy."

[Gman]

5. I am still just absolutely jaw dropping amazed that the code is

"proprietary". If no other code in the world was open, this should be the ONLY code that is open source.

[texpatriot2004]

6. Agreed! nt

[librechik]

7. Yikes! It Burns! It Burns!

please don't lose this HOT HOT HOT Item in the Friday News Dump!!!!


KICK


:kick:


KICK



:kick:


KICK


:kick:

[librechik]

8. I'm going to keep kicking this--WAPO picked up the story!

bastards!

[keepCAblue]

9. Kick and recommend!! eom

[Qutzupalotl]

10. Kick

nt

[Sydnie]

11. Mailed disks raise voting machine fears - "accidentally picked up"

from the board of elections office. Accidentally???

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Disks containing what appears to be software code used in Maryland's touchscreen voting machines in 2004 were delivered anonymously to a former state legislator, raising fresh concerns about the reliability of the voting system.

<snip>

A statement issued by Diebold said it would "take years for a knowledgeable scientist" to break the encryption used on the software disks delivered to Kagan.

But Ari Rubin, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University who reviewed the disks for The Washington Post, said the data files were not encrypted on the disk containing the software that runs the machines.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061020/ap_on_re_us/maryland_voting_machines

[truthisfreedom]

12. hahahaha. what a burn... diebold caught in a lie bold again.

[petronius]

13. What he probably meant was that the files were readable,

but it would take years to figure out exactly what part of the code contains the back-door election-altering processes. He's just reassuring his Republican masters that the plan is still a 'go'...

[Up2Late]

17. No, the guy is just, flat out, lying. If these disks were, in fact...

...encrypted, they would NOT be readable without the de-encryption program.

This guy is just lying, and should be in prison with all his other Vote stealing co-conspirators at Diebold.

[petronius]

19. I was trying to make a joke

I guess it wasn't funny... :(

[Up2Late]

20. OHHH, O.K.!

No, it's just really hard to convey Sarcasm and jokes in text, which is one of the reasons I use so many different Smilies. These are a crutch (:sarcasm: :evilgrin: :silly:), but they usually work.

[zbdent]

14. Hmm ... "take years for a knowledgeable scientist" to break

the encryption ...

I remember a news story a few years back where someone was saying that they had developed an encryption that would withstand an exceptionally long time before someone could crack it ... "exceptionally long time" must have meant a few days, because it was ...

Again, I smell Bullshit ...

[Sydnie]

15. I agree

Nothing is that secure ... nothing! It's a hackers wet dream to have those disks.

[krispos42]

24. Yeah, I imagine it would take a while for a biologist to figure it out

But a cryptographer just might be able to do it a wee bit faster. :sarcasm:

[damntexdem]

16. Ohh, fiendishly clever of Diebold:

claiming that unencrypted programs were encrypted. Experts could have driven themselves crazy trying to unencrypt what wasn't encrypted. Now who could have possibly IMAGINED that someone would check first to see whether the disks were actually encrypted? LOL!

[Up2Late]

23. It IS quite amazing how stupid they seem to think we are, huh.

Man, am I going to be glad when those Jerks finally go to Prison.

[krispos42]

21. But don't worry! It's 100% accurate! Swear to Lucifer!

Here is the friggin' voting system that we, the people, need to demand.

The voting machine is a touch-screen model, which you use in the normal fashion with the normal information displayed. Name, nickname, party, incumbent status, and office being running for. Referendums, voter initiatives, constitutional amendments, etc.

After you pick all of your candidates, you are taken to a summary screen, which displayes the names and parties of the people you've picked and how you voted on the initiatives.

If you like what you see, you press a button marked "Print Preliminary Ballot", and a laser printer behind the console prints out a piece of standard-sized paper with all the races and names you voted for. The ballot slides out of the printer and down a chute and stops at a backlit window next to the screen. At this point, you can physically review the ballot, complete with time, date, precinct, district, county, state, ballot serial number and machine serial number stamps on it. If you like it, you hit "Approve", and the ballot slides into a chute with a manual lever and a message comes up (and perhaps a beep) reminding the voter to press the manual dump lever. Pressing the manual lever dumps the ballot into a clear plastic box which is also visible from the booth.

But, if you see a mistake, you press the "Reject" button on the screen. A message will display telling you to take a marker and fill in a circle on the ballot through an appropriate hole in the glass. Once you do that, you press "Discard", and the ballot drops out into an external tray, where you remove it and wave over a poll worker (a discreet light and audible tone at the top of the booth may help). The poll worker and the voter both sign it and date it, then clip a corner and put it the "reject" box. The poll worker then enters a PIN in the machine confirming the ballot was rejected, and the voter can then select the vote(s) to change and print out a new ballot.

The ballots are then hand-counted, which would not be a problem because the ballots would be written in plain English. No hanging chads or other bull.

I would appreciate the smart and savvy DUers to look at this system. I think it's tamper proof.

If you press "Candidate A" but "Candidate B" prints out, you can reject it and try again, and if it keeps happening the poll workers can fix it immediately.

If you press "Candidate A" but "Candidate B" prints out, you press "Reject", mark the ballot, but then the machine tries to dump it in the ballot box instead of the external tray, the manual lever will hold the ballot in abayence until a poll worker can remove the voided ballot.

If you press "Candidate A" but "Candidate B" prints out, you press "Reject", but the machine tries to dump the ballot in the box before you can use the marker on it, the mechanical lever will still hold the ballot in abayance until the poll worker can remove it and it can be properly voided.

The system is sealed, so people can't print out ballots at home and stuff the box. Poll workers can't add votes after the fact because the ballots have a date and time stamp. A hundred ballots cast in three minutes on one machine is cause for investigation and rejection. If one machine has an unusually high number of ballots cast compared to other machines, that will also signal a red flag. The ballots can also be serialized, so if there are ballots cast where the serial numbers don't match the time sequence, they can be discarded.

The voting machines would also not keep any sort of electronic tally, either. And no vote-counting machines, either. You gotta sit there with a stack of paper and slog through it yourself. It's once every two years, deal with it!

[dethl]

18. Those disks should have been tossed onto the net...

There are a lot of hackers out there who would be ecstatic to have their hands on this. Even if its just a binary you can still disassemble it and look at the assembly code.

[Rambis]

22. Kicker

:kick:

[PassingFair]

25. Christ on a Trailer Hitch!

What MORE do we NEED!

THESE machines WERE RIGGED!

I'm SICK!

If we don't take the house and the senate.....

I'm wearing the tin-foil as a fashion statement.

[darkism]

26. Dear Kagan: TORRENT PLEASE!

:D

[IndianaGreen]

27. Why do Bush and Cheney show so much confidence about the midterms?

Answer: Diebold and ESS.

[Wilms]

28. K & R n/t