Dr. Herbert H. Thompson was ready to hack democracy, but he had to wait an extra two hours.
Thompson was sitting outside the California Secretary of State’s Office, ready to demonstrate that electronic voting machines could be fooled into miscounting ballots, but there was a glitch. A “60 Minutes” camera crew was on site and eager to film the demonstration, but state officials balked at the melodrama and refused to allow the crew in. The meeting was almost canceled.
After some tense negotiations, Thompson and a group of electronic voting detractors were allowed inside – sans the cameras.
That didn’t make the meeting any less dramatic. Over the next hour, Thompson, an adjunct professor at the Florida Institute of Technology and author of four books on computer security, virtually undressed California’s new voting tabulation machines.
He showed how easy it would be for someone with access to the hardware that counts votes to launch Microsoft Access, edit the table containing the totals, clean up any traces of his vote-rigging and close the program.
When a state official suggested removing Microsoft Access from the machine to foil hackers, Thompson showed how to do the same thing with a five-line program written on Microsoft’s basic text-editing program, Notepad.
Open Notepad, hack democracy. It is that easy, Thompson said.
MUCH more
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/11/post.html
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