Delightful. Diebolical. Tom Paine is laughing.
VERY IMPORTANT!
Associated Press: "Despite lawsuit threats from one of the nation's largest electronic voting machine suppliers, some activists are refusing to remove from Web sites internal company documents that they claim raise serious security questions. Diebold Inc. sent ``cease and desist'' letters after the documents and internal e-mails, allegedly stolen by a hacker, were distributed on the Internet."
Posted on Mon, Oct. 27, 2003
Diebold threatens publishers of leaked electronic-voting documents
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Despite lawsuit threats from
one of the nation's largest electronic voting machine
suppliers, some activists are refusing to remove from
Web sites internal company documents that they claim
raise serious security questions.
Diebold Inc. sent ``cease and desist'' letters after
the documents and internal e-mails, allegedly stolen
by a hacker, were distributed on the Internet.
Recipients of the letters included computer
programmers, students at Swarthmore College and at
least one Internet provider.
Most of the 13,000 pages of documents are little more
than banal employee e-mails, routine software manuals
and old voter record files. But several items appear
to raise security concerns.
Diebold refused to discuss the documents' contents.
Company spokesman Mike Jacobsen said the fact that the
company sent the cease-and-desist letters does not
mean the documents are authentic -- or give credence
to advocates who claim lax Diebold security could
allow hackers to rig machines.
``We're cautioning anyone from drawing wrong or
incomplete conclusions about any of those documents or
files purporting to be authentic,'' Jacobsen said.
But the activists say the mere fact that Diebold was
hacked shows that the company's technology cannot be
trusted.
``These legal threats are an acknowledgment of the
horrific security risks of electronic voting,'' said
Sacramento-based programmer Jim March, who received a
cease and desist order last month but continues to
publish the documents on his personal Web site.
In one series of e-mails, a senior engineer dismisses
concern from a lower-level programmer who questions
why the company lacked certification for a customized
operating system used in touch-screen voting machines.
The Federal Election Commission requires voting
software to be certified by an independent research
lab.
In another e-mail, a Diebold executive scolded
programmers for leaving software files on an Internet
site without password protection.
``This potentially gives the software away to whomever
wants it,'' the manager wrote in the e-mail.
March contends the public has a right to know about
Diebold security problems.
``The cease-and-desist orders are like a drug dealer
saying, 'Hey, cop, give me back my crack.' It's an
incredible tactical blunder,'' he said.
The documents began appearing online in August, six
months after a hacker broke into the North Canton,
Ohio-based company's servers using an employee's ID
number, Jacobsen said. The hacker copied company
announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails
dating back to January 1999, Jacobsen said.
In August, someone e-mailed the data to
electronic-voting activists, many of whom published
stories on their Web logs and personal sites. A
freelance journalist at Wired News, Brian McWilliams,
also received data and wrote about it in an online
story.
The data was further distributed in digital form
around the Internet and it is not known how many
copies exist.
Wendy Seltzer, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, said she has been contacted by about a
dozen groups that received cease-and-desist letters.
Among them is Online Policy Group, a nonprofit ISP
that hosts the San Francisco Bay Area Independent
Media Center, which published links to the data.
Seltzer encouraged them to defy the Diebold
cease-and-desist letters.
``There is a strong fair-use defense,'' Seltzer said.
``People are using these documents to talk about the
very mechanism of democracy -- how the votes are
counted. It's at the heart of what the First Amendment
protects.''
Although Seltzer believes Diebold's legal case to be
weak, she worries about a chilling effect.
Angered last week after Swarthmore College told them
they could not link to the documents from
college-sponsored sites, some students at the liberal
arts school near Philadelphia found Internet providers
abroad to host the content. Others took down the
offending material at their dean's request, but they
promised to put the documents back online if Diebold
doesn't provide a more detailed explanation within two
weeks. Branen Salmon, 22, president of the Swarthmore
College Computer Society, said Diebold's threats put
the documents in the spotlight.
``A week ago, this was still a murmur,'' Salmon said
last Thursday. ``Now this is front page stuff that
people are talking about.''