MEDIA MATTERS: CA newspapers side with rigged electronic voting machine makers NOT voters

[yurbud]

The last time California had a Democratic secretary of state who took on the electronic voting scam, he was chased from office by virtually every newspaper in the state for being "a mean boss."

Now that the current secretary of state is taking the correct action by decertifying the machines, the newspapers are after her.

stay tuned.

Numerous media outlets publish misleading attacks on decision to limit electronic voting

Summary: While reporting on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's decision to decertify the state's electronic voting machines in light of a study that found the systems are vulnerable to security breaches, numerous media outlets attacked the study's "unrealistic" methodology or uncritically reported criticism of the study's premise, without noting the researchers' explanation for their methods.

In his August 8 Sacramento Bee column, Dan Walters criticized California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's (D) decision to decertify most of the state's electronic voting machine systems following a state-commissioned study that found the systems are vulnerable to security breaches, as Courage Campaign founder Rick Jacobs noted in a blog post at The Huffington Post critical of Walters' argument. Walters asserted that it "is not surprising" that the systems were found to be vulnerable, given the "unrealistic circumstances of the tests. Among other things, the hackers were supplied with source codes and other confidential information, and they ignored the security procedures that election officials employ." But in simply repeating this criticism, Walters and numerous media outlets that reported criticism of the study's allegedly "unrealistic" methodology -- including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle -- did not address the explanation given in the report itself for the conditions under which the testers worked.

After discussing "techniques" by which hackers "can discover secrets that companies and organizations wish to keep hidden" and providing examples of "organizations," such as the DVD Copyright Control Association, being "unaware of their own leaking of information," the University of California, Davis researchers who conducted the study concluded: "Thus, the statement that attackers could not replicate what red team testers do, because the red team testers have access to information that other attackers would not have, profoundly underestimates the ability and the knowledge of attackers, and profoundly overestimates the infallibility of organizations and human nature." In other words, the research was conducted under the presumption that potential hackers would have access to sensitive information relating to the machines, given hackers' proven adeptness at obtaining protected information.

According to the UC study:

The California Secretary of State entered into a contract with the University of California to test the security of three electronic voting systems as part of her top to bottom review. Each "red team" was to try to compromise the accuracy, security, and integrity of the voting systems without making assumptions about compensating controls or procedural mitigation measures that vendors, the Secretary of State, or individual counties may have adopted. The red teams demonstrated that, under these conditions, the technology and security of all three systems could be compromised.

FULL TEXT:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200708090007

vote this up on digg.com, buzzflash.net, netscape.com, & newsrankers of your choice:

http://digg.com/political_opinion/CA_newspapers_side_with_rigged_electronic_voting_machine_makers_NOT_voters

http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=21531

http://news.netscape.com/story/2007/08/11/ca-newspapers-side-with-rigged-electronic-voting-machine-makers-not-voters/

[formercia]

1. The Great Wurlitzer in action. n/t