Diebold voting machine code mailed to legislator

[radfringe]

Diebold voting machine code mailed to legislator
by Chris in Paris - 10/20/2006 04:17:00 AM
http://americablog.blogspot.com/

Nothing to see here, keep moving. Diebold machines are completely safe, so they keep telling us. Can someone please stick a fork in those damned machines so we can move on. The experiment with Diebold has failed so it's time to find another solution with another company who wants to be serious about modern democracy because Diebold seems unable and/or unwilling to protect their code or build serious products for e-voting. Their close ties to the GOP are also reason for concern since we still live in a two party system. It's been an expensive experiment - something the GOP really likes - but it is time to look elsewhere for a solution.

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.

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

[kurth]

1. The code should be posted for everyone to examine

Better yet, Diebold Election Systems Inc. should be banned from every public contract.

[rock]

2. I'm a programmer and I ask the question

Just how frickin' complicated can the code be to do counting? Maybe I learned the wrong way, but this is not rocket science and should not be difficult code nor so secret you don't want someone to find out how you add 1 to a counter (unless you're up to something nefarious).

[stellanoir]

3. I'm a cyber ninnie but I recently heard that each

touch screen machine costs $2700. Ummmm people can buy a fairly sophisticated laptop with a multiplicity of functons for about 400 bucks. Printers are really cheap. Ink is not.

How come they're so pricy and they "don't even work."

Or so said a family acquaintence who works for the CIA.

It's one of those things that "makes you go hmmmmmmmmmmm."

[Cassandra]

5. I'm not a programmer and I've been wondering the same thing.

Bev originally said that the files she downloaded took up 7 large storage discs. How complicated can counting be made to be?

[FormerDittoHead]

6. The Fed gov't should HIRE some programmers, write it, publish it, etc.

WHY THE HELL do we CONSTANTLY have to pay some 'contractor' dollars on the penny when we'd be perfectly capable of simply hiring a team of programmers to write the damn program in open source, make it available to all states to run on regular PC's...

(same goes for tax software, but that's me)

[EST]

4. So someone risked his or her will-being and professional status

perhaps, in order to obtain this code and send it to this crap head, who, instead of taking it seriously and putting some people to work on it, starts yelling, "Oh looky what I got!"

Dumbasses...

[marions ghost]

10. what's wrong with this?

the legislator is sympathetic to the cause of election theft and she is publicizing her opinion about it. And how do you know she isn't "taking it seriously."

Your objection seems weird.

[EST]

13. I do not know for a fact that she is not taking this seriously,

however, one of the biggest frustrations has been the unavailability of the software for examination.

The election fraud of 2004 included many circumstances whose only explanation seems to be faulty software or code deliberately designed to miscount votes in favor of the organized criminals.

Although I am not privy to all the facts surrounding this story, it seems that a thorough analysis is called for and it also seems that the opportunity to carry out this analysis has been thrown away.

How is the notion "weird?"

[marions ghost]

14. and who would you make the software

available to, for analysis? Who would you trust? The legislator has not thrown away any opportunities for analysis as far as I can see. To suggest that she has seems weird to me.

[MadAsHell]

11. Perhaps, the point is ....

after all of Diebold's protests that their code is so private, so well guarded, so un-hackable, someone was able to mail a copy of the source to anyone they wanted. And perhaps "someone" has already worked on it for, say, the '04 elections. But then maybe I read to much into this.

[EST]

12. Perhaps I do as well.

The code that Diebold uses should be open source.

That code, by law, is supposed to be available for analysis by election authorities or their designees yet Diebold has refused to do this.

In my opinion, this code, or a copy thereof, should be analyzed for backdoors and other vote manipulative traps and it seems that analysis has been short-circuited.

[leftchick]

7. Avi Rubin....

<snip>

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."

"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."

[hobbit709]

8. The hell with sending it to a legislator

I would have posted it on the internet, then hundreds of millions of people would have gotten a look at it.

[LiberalEsto]

9. I know Cheryl Kagan; she's decent

and she's been having an uphill fight against the Diebold cheating machines in Maryland.