Thursday, November 06, 2003
Diebold's pesky memos
Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company’s internal communications about its electronic voting machines.
The students say that, by trying to spread the word about problems with the company’s software, they are performing a valuable form of electronic civil disobedience, one that has broad implications for American society. They also contend that they are protected by fair use exceptions in copyright law.
Diebold, however, says it is a case of copyright infringement, and has sent cease-and-desist orders to the students and, in many cases, their colleges, demanding that the 15,000 e-mail messages and memorandums be removed from each Web site. “We reserve the right to protect that which we feel is proprietary,” a spokesman for Diebold, David Bear, said.
The files circulating online include thousands of e-mail messages and memorandums dating to March 2003 from January 1999 that include discussions of bugs in Diebold’s software and warnings that its computer network are poorly protected against hackers. Diebold has sold more than 33,000 machines, many of which have been used in elections.
Advocates and journalists have mined the trove of corporate messages to find statements that appear to suggest many continuing security problems with the software that runs the system, and last-minute software changes that, by law, are generally not allowed after election authorities have certified the software for an election.
Keep in mind that Diebold hasn't actually denied the authenticity of these emails and memos,they just want them stopped. In fact, by claiming copyright infringement, they're essentially verifying them. The memos include information like this:
* I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 [votes] when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb."
* For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo.
* Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new.
* Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed.
Thanks to Tom Tomorrow.
posted by chris at 2:02 PM
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