[Corporations] How to (Very Easily) Hack an Election, NYT editorial

[kster]

NOTE THE DATE..................

The New York Times January 31, 2004

TODAY'S EDITORIALS

How to Hack an Election

Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting
technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal
elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a
computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers
had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the
machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows
convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting,
starting with voter-verified paper trails.

When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines,
there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new
touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes
cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged
attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try
to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election.

They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they
reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote
multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting
terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw
and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote
location.

Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist,
but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem
almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have
identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by
any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making
duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved
unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately
10 seconds."



http://www.corporations.org/pipermail/corporations_corporations.org/2004-January/000149.html

[EFerrari]

1. OMFG.

"almost too bad to be true"

:thatshakingheadsmiliewhoseheadrollsoff:

[klebean]

3. in the mainstream

finally!

[kster]

4. Look at the date of the article again...nt

[kster]

5. Welcome to the DU........nt

[Kurovski]

2. K&R

I sometimes ponder just how much silence and fear a few envelopes of Anthrax bought for the right-wing.

Is that what did it? Were there more threats we don't know about?

The information about the ease of election theft was out there ahead of the event, and yet...it still happened.

[kster]

6. The RW or who ever has full control of the airwaves

because nothing is discussed about the election theft ON AIR( Kerry two days ago) but before that a certain amount of time after the actual election its MUMS THE WORD about the election theft machines.

If you are on the airwaves TV and or radio Republican or Democrat leaning everyone had to shut up about it ?????

[Peace Patriot]

7. The NYT, like all the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, went

along with DOCTORED exit polls--FALSIFIED NUMBERS on everybody's TV screens on election night--to hide strong evidence of a Kerry win. So their editorial about the voting machines was just hot air.

Neither they, nor other war profiteers, nor many Dem leaders wanted a president who would be beholden to a huge antiwar grass roots majority--the people who fought for and elected Kerry. That's my read on it. They want to kill more Muslims in the Middle East, in addition to the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis they've slaughtered. They're going to start bombing Iran this Christmas, it looks like--a nice holy season gift to Iranian children, blowing them and their parents to smithereens.

I am just sickened by this latter news, and I'm SO ANGRY at the enablers of this criminal junta. The NYT prime among them. What they have done is unforgivable. And if we ever get back our right to vote--that our Dem Party leaders gave away to Bushite corporations to tabulate our votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code--I'm thinking we should dismantle the NYT and every news monopoly and every U.S.-based global corporate predator in this country, and maybe the Democratic Party as well.

That's WHY they took away our right to vote--because we, the sovereign people of the United States, have. the. sovereign. right. to. dismantle. their. goddamned. corporations! And considering what they've done to us, they know they deserve it, and they fear the power of our votes to implement fundamental reform (--as is happening throughout South American, where they DO have the right to vote).

--------------

Not all Dems are bad on the election system: Russ Holt's HR 550 will stop the corporate privatization of our election system, and reverse it, by, among other things, banning undisclosed software. Sign the petition at: http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html. It has 169 co-sponsors (mostly Dems). But the truth is our party leaders let this FRAUDULENT election SYSTEM get into place, that kept the Bush junta in power. You may object to my being so hard on our Dem leaders, when it's the Repubs who have committed election fraud, but the Repubs are a lost cause. I no longer consider them to be Americans. And the Dems, and institutions like the NYT, have failed us catastrophically--because the most powerful among them LIKE Bush's war, and maybe like his tax cuts for the rich even more than killing and torturing Muslims. We make a very big mistake if we think that this pro-war Dem leadership--when IT gets installed in the White House--is going to anything but profit from Bush's war, and retain most tax cuts for the rich (THEY'RE rich, the lot of them!), and retain most corporate welfare, and continue to pass 100 BILLION DOLLAR "defense" budgets. No antiwar populist candidate will be permitted to gain the Dem nomination. We--the great majority in this country--have been deprived of representation. We have been disenfranchised. We have no say in the matter. So get used to it. Face this reality. And don't get bitter and disillusioned when nothing changes. Work on election reform! We can't get anywhere--and we do not have a democracy--without transparent elections.

[nicknameless]

8. Is this the same New York Times that belittled election fraud concerns

AFTER the Nov. 2004 election? I think garybeck might know something about that.

[snot]

12. You go, P.P.! nt

[nicknameless]

13. Oops -- You missed by one.

P.P.'s admirable rant was the post above mine.

:)

[MelissaB]

9. I'm thinking we documented this article or one similar in the "daily

thread," but I don't have time to go on an searching adventure right now.

[driver8]

10. "...able to change votes from a remote location." ????

Hmmm...that sounds vaguely familiar. I wonder what ol' KKKarl was up to on his computers on election night? He wouldn't do something like that, would he?? Certainly GW would not accept a victory that was handed to him in that manner...he has to much respect for the election process and the laws of our country.

I am sitting here at my computer with steam coming out of my ears!!

[kster]

11. All we got to do is count the paper ballots

oh wait there are no paper ballots.



http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_ts.htm

[OldLeftyTreeHugger]

14. "...steam coming out of my ears!!"

Me too!

They are in power only by fraud.

[autorank]

15. Highly REcommended. Great find...just great. We're rockin!

Time for the perps to confess: "Name it and claim it" or risk exposure as an enemy of democracy.