‘Secret’ vote files available online
Students at Swarthmore College say they’re about to launch a web site devoted specifically to resisting attempts to keep information about a huge number of extremely confidential files circulating online, a secret.
Swarthmore students have already attracted national attention by taking on the RIAA, opposing the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and "similar expansion of intellectual property law" and fostering the spread of Linux and "other freeware programs".
But this time, their action has nothing to do p2p file sharing, although apps such as Freenet are being used to spread the word and keep the data available.
Rather, it centers on a site owned by Diebold Election Systems which makes and markets direct recording electronic (DRE) vote boxes, 33,000 of which are being used across the US, it boasts on its web page here, where it promises, "Our reliable and efficient system accurately and securely captures each vote."
The files in question are some of 40,000 emails and memos stored on an obscure Diebold ftp site and, "amounted to a virtual handbook for vote-tampering," says author Bev Harris.
"They contained diagrams of remote communications setups, passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and simulators, as well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software."
And, "According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs," says Harris, author of
Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century.
"But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system."
The files featured in Why War? – a Swarthmore college network, until cease-and-desist notices under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) compelled their removal.
But don’t let that worry you – they’re still available here, for the moment. And you can search them here.
And speaking of p2p:
- BitTorrent: http://cscott.net/Activism/lists.tgz.torrent
EDonkey/Overnet: [ed2k://|file|list.tar.bz2|7762005|c53855d1c5da1fec2da1548905bc689f|/]
Freenet:
CHK@sgOjWAy4g-0bf0m5biyqnEzWloENAwI,OXw8OfHPfsmLd068BtICKg/lists.tgz
CHK@fsatUAqLqJP91UTrCoReT3qciVYNAwI,whenOQbgnMLSo84zg1~~aA/lists.tar.bz2
Newsgroup postings: Help us do this
Archived file (tarred and gzipped):
http://eddie.ratm.net/johnkimble/lists/lists.tgz
http://www3.telus.net/swix/list.tar.bz2 (checksum, sig)
On a Windows PC, use WinZip or WinRAR; on a Mac just double-click the file
.edu hosts of the documents (both archived and full-text):
In the meanwhile, by the end of September, 30 other colleges and universities were also carrying, "more than 13,000 potentially damaging memos written by employees of a national voting machine corporation, all following the initial example set by a student at Swarthmore," says Matthew Fitting here in The Phoenix, Swarthmore’s online student newspaper."At their most potentially damaging to Diebold, the memos state that a smart card available for purchase to the public could change the number of votes registered by a machine," says Fitting.
"They also reveal that in one precinct in Florida in the 2000 Presidential elections, Al Gore received negative 16,000 votes, an impossibility on a paper ballot.
As of October 29, memos were hosted by students at schools including Amherst, Boston University, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Yale and, "A cease-and-desist order was sent to MIT on Tuesday and UPenn on Wednesday," he adds.
In a statement released on November 3, Why War? says:
"When American citizens step into the voting booth tomorrow, will their votes be counted? Today, with Diebold Elections Systems operating electronic voting in 37 states, the answer is a resounding ‘maybe.’ As a result of widespread security flaws and the lack of any verifiable check on their systems, Diebold cannot guarantee the accuracy of any election in which their machines are present.
"An electronic campaign initiated two weeks ago by Why War? has sparked students from fifty universities nationwide to host copies of internal Diebold memoranda which demonstrate the insecurity and unreliability of their voting machines.
"Why War’s website has been innundated with e-mails and visitors from individuals worldwide pledging their support and offering to defy Diebold’s attempts at suppression by hosting mirrors of the provocative documents.
" ‘We’ve been receiving more hits than ever before,’ said Why War? member Micah White, who originally found and posted the memos in October. ‘Our goal when we started this campaign was to provide public access to this information, and we’ve been so successful that Why War? recently had to purchase higher bandwith to accommodate the sheer number of people who wanted to read the memos.’
"Why War? has built a coalition of concerned citizens across the nation who will soon be taking charge of the campaign against Diebold. ‘This is not a partisan issue,’ said Ivan Boothe, another member. ‘The people who have taken the initiative to host these documents come from all parts of the political spectrum.’
"In response to growing national interest, the coalition will soon be moving its center of operations from Why War’s website, why-war.com, to a new location devoted specifically to voting issues and resisting Diebold’s attempts to keep this information a secret.
"Why War? believes that the Diebold documents are akin to the Pentagon Papers in their potential to reveal systemic corruption within the American election process. The task now at hand is to analyze the content of these documents."
