Diebold Must Die

Reprinted by permission:
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Worst security flaw ever - 3 states invoke Diebold emergency procedures

Permission to reprint or excerpt granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org

- The Oakland Tribune scooped other newspapers yesterday on the story.
- Pennsylvania's Michael Shamos sequestered all Diebold touch-screens.
- California is invoking emergency procedures.
- The state of Iowa is trying to figure out a way to scrub Diebold clean.

Harri Hursti has just come out with Hursti Report II, a Black Box Voting project.

Here it is:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf

A second study with 12 more defects will be released Monday May 15.

WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS?

Back doors were found in three separate levels. They can be used one
at a time or combined for a deep attack that can permanently compromise the
Diebold touch-screens.

Almost nothing will work to ensure that machines that have already been
delivered have not been contaminated -- the very forensic procedures that
MIGHT identify tampering also wipe clean any evidence.

The procedures being used in Pennsylvania, California, and Iowa will not
necessarily work if the system has already been contaminated. Worse, the
very procedure needed to cleanse the system can just as easily re-contaminate
it.

Next week, Black Box Voting will release recommended solutions in conjunction with a
recommendation to pull all Diebold touch-screen machines off the shelf.

For more information, visit the following links:

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/27675.html

and to see what the Diebold lawyers are trying to do to Bruce Funk, click here:

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/27671.html
(Scroll past the Georgia cluelessness to a transcript of the retaliatory
meeting held to try to force Funk out of office.)

Diebold lawyers are also retaliating against Stephen Heller, trying to put
him in jail for leaking documents that have been compared in importance to
the actions of famed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsburg. Click here
for the latest on Heller:

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/27423.html

and click here to donate to his defense fund:

http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com

(Diebold lawyer's vindictiveness has cost Heller his job and very nearly
his home. His courage in fighting for YOUR right to vote needs your support.

* * * * *

Black Box Voting is a nonprofit nonpartisan 501c(3) organization dedicated to
fighting for your right to accurate and fair elections. We are supported entirely
by citizen donations.

(We realize we just hit you up twice -- But really. Stephen Heller is one of our
personal heroes, and we put him first for a reason. Please read the story about
Diebold's attempt to put him in prison for leaking documents showing they were
planning a criminal defense budget for carrying out actions they had already
been told were illegal.)

If you can support our work (Hursti Reports etc) here's how:

click here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html
or mail to:
Black Box Voting, Inc.
330 SW 43rd St Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98055

* * * * *

-Black Box Voting

Stealing Power from Congress

Glenn Greenwald hits it right on the nose. This isn't "just" about tapping phones. This is about usurping Congress' legislative power, and that is a violation of the Constitution.

No need for Congress, no need for courts

This continuous evasion of judicial review by the administration is much more serious and disturbing than has been discussed and realized. By proclaiming the power to ignore Congressional law and to do whatever it wants in the area of national security, it is seizing the powers of the legislative branch.

But it gets worse.

But by blocking courts from ruling on the multiple claims of illegality which have been made against it, the administration is essentially seizing the judicial power as well. It becomes the creator, the executor, and the interpreter of the law. And with that, the powers of all three branches become consolidated in The President, the single greatest nightmare of the founders. [Emphasis added.]

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

This database collection may -- may -- be arguably legal. I don't know. Even though Bush lied and said only international calls were targetted by the NSA. "'In other words,' Bush explained, 'one end of the communication must be outside the United States.'"

But again, and again, the Executive has refused to find out if something is legal. Refused to argue legality before the branch charged with interpreting the law: the courts.

The Legislature makes law, the Executive implements law, and the Judiciary interprets it. That's the way it's supposed to work. And this is not the first time the Bush Administration has tried to circumvent that.

Fun With Surveillance

THE Undergrad Experience

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.

Beautiful Smackdown on some Clueless Creationists

If there's a better word, I'll use it, by the way. I don't object to people who believe a god created the universe, per se, I object to their insistence that such blind belief be taught in schools as if valid scientific theory.

A theory in science has a predictive capacity enabling you to test and refine it.

Has anyone made predictions based on "creation theory" or "intelligent design", that can then be tested?

How many fallacies can [Intelligent Design] pack in one article?

"I Never Said There Were WMDs" "Yes, you did. Here."

Rumsfeld Called Out On Lies About WMD (includes transcript)

Speaking in Atlanta today, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sharply questioned about his pre-war claims about WMD in Iraq. An audience member confronted Rumsfeld with his 2003 claim about WMD, “We know where they are.” Rumsfeld falsely claimed he never said it. The audience member then read Rumsfeld’s quote back to him...

when he spoke quite clearly about them at the time:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Second, the [audio glitch] facilities, there are dozens of them, it's a large geographic area.

Secretary Rumsfeld Remarks on ABC "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"

Ex-Head of F.D.A. Faces Criminal Inquiry

Ex-Head of F.D.A. Faces Criminal Inquiry

This is the guy who sat on Plan B.

Dr. Crawford resigned in September, fewer than three months after the Senate confirmed him. He said then that it was time for someone else to lead the agency.

The next month, financial disclosure forms released by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that in 2004 either Dr. Crawford or his wife, Catherine, had sold shares in companies regulated by the agency when he was its deputy commissioner and acting commissioner. He has since joined a Washington lobbying firm, Policy Directions Inc.

Since you, sir, went away

It's poetry night here at Parenthetically Speaking.

There's a lovely poem by Hsu Kan called A Wife's Thoughts, of which the second stanza has been the basis for several others. (This is not uncommon in Chinese poetry, to write something "in the style of X".)

Since you, sir, went away,
My bright mirror is dim and untended.
My thoughts of you are like flowing water;
Will they ever have an end.

And the same volume of Chinese poetry I have that this is found in, has several of its homages in it as well.

For example,

Wang Jung,
In imitation of Hsu Kan

Since you, sir, went away,
My golden burner has had no incense,
For thinking of you I am like the bright candle,
At midnight vainly burning itself away.


So, I planted tongue in cheek and wrote one of my own.

Since you, sir, went away,
My computer has lost all free memory,
My thoughts of you are like the overworked application,
An hourglass turning constantly.


*bows to audience*

Booksigning

I'll be signing copies of Writers of the Future v. 21, at the Borders bookstore in the Cambridge Side Galleria, on May 15, from 7pm-on. (An hour or so, is my understanding.)

For our not-so-regular readers, WotF is the fantasy/science fiction anthology containing my story, "My Daughter, the Martian".

I'll definitely be signing, possibly reading from "My Daughter, the Martian", or perhaps from an upublished work.

If you're interested, come by.

Otherwise, we're a hedge, move along.

The Simplicity of Plan B

Pharyngula explains Why Wingnuts Hate Plan B

Quelle Suprise

I'm so completely not shocked that the Bush administration lies and lies and lies, I really don't know what to say.

Newsflash! Lies! More lies!

Libby Testimony shows a White House Pattern of Intelligence Leaks

Libby Prosecutor Outlines Effort At High Levels: Fitzgerald Aims to Show An Organized Plan Led To Leak of CIA Agent's Name

Oh, and I laughed reading this one.

Leak-Hating President As Leaker-In-Chief?

A president better mean what he says? This from the guy who, what, didn't mean what he said, ever? Wasn't he just quoted a couple weeks ago saying one thing but apparently just trying to lift people's spirits?


I'm not complaining. (Well, in a more general sense, of course I am! Geez! My Vitale grandfather, lo, many years ago, told me to go into public service. "People like you need to", he said, or something to that effect. People like me. Honest people, who want to make a difference. As opposed to most politicians.)

I'm just not surprised.

Insightful Discussion on the Meaning of Gang Rape in a Patriarchy

Read it here. Be sure to read the comments, too.

One writer disagrees with Amanda's characterization of gang rape as the essential scene of patriarchy, but I think they're talking past each other. Amanda seems to be saying that gang rape epitomizes patriarchy, is patriarchy in a nutshell. I agree completely.

Michael Crichton's "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous"

I just read Appendix I to Michael Crichton's "State of Fear", titled "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous", for a class of mine.

Once again, MC has managed to piss me off -- though I'm sure he doesn't do it to me personally on purpose.

I have three problems with the parallel that he's trying to draw in this essay, between the eugenics movement circa WWI/WWII and climate change:

1. I don't know much about the eugenics movement as a movement, but just reading the quotes provided in MC's text, and knowing about the time at which they were written, it's obvious that we're reading ideas steeped in the extreme laissez-faire attitude of the late 19th century/early 20th, and interconnected with the racist justifications for past and current colonialism, as well as fears about *cultural* integrity. To ignore this application of capitalist ideals and racism to some combination of biology, evolution, and genetics, overlooks the actual "politicization" that made eugenics as a movement possible.

Crichton seems to be pointing at the end result -- that people, prominent people, took to this idea of eugenics at all, publicly -- without saying anything about how it really happened.

2. He also seems to be comparing eugenics as a movement and climate change itself, and I think it's literally apples and oranges. Valid understandings (of the time) of evolution and genetics provided the basis for eugenics, but it was a social movement, a co-opting of those understandings for other purposes, that took place. I don't understand, and Crichton doesn't state, what the social movement is, or its motivations, that is allegedly co-opting our current understanding of climate change for its own purposes. The analogy of science plus social movement is incomplete.

I also fail to see the "claims of moral superiority used to justify extreme actions" he mentions.

Further, I think he's inaccurate when he says that "the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science." The only measures I can think of that he's criticizing with that statement are the eminently reasonable ones of "if humans pumping loads of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is connected to shifts in climate (with the caveat that we don't fully understand the system we're affecting, we can't model it fully accurately) *stopping* some of that pumping might be wise".

3. Crichton seems to be proposing that a scientific consensus is a bad or suspect thing. The thing he points out about climate change -- that (though there's argument over "how") there's not a lot of naysayers in the scientific community -- could just as easily be applied to the imagined debate over evolution. It sounds like he's criticizing what scientists actually do -- which is build and try to prove models that satisfy the available data and, in turn, the available critics of the last model.

The response to the fact that there's little debate on a subject is not necessarily "debate is being suppressed", it can also be "there's a lot of consensus developed".

Lastly, and this is a criticism of Crichton directly, not a perceived gap in this reading or the analogy he's trying to make: he does a disservice when he implies, as I think this work does in a general sense, that any time a scientific theory is widely propagated in the general population of the world, that that's somehow automatically suspect, as if it's now a "fad" rather than a valid idea. Rational thought is not the sole province of "scientists", and, culturally, when you suggest that only scientists can talk intelligently about some concept, or are the only ones who can engage in any discourse, you help maintain the wall between "science" and the "the rest of the world". But scienter, knowledge, belongs to everybody.

Unexpected Warming in Antarctica

Winter air temperatures over Antarctica have risen by more than 2C in the last 30 years, a new study shows.

Torture Nation

Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees

and Jim Macdonald lays some truth down on the idiots who say they "don't care" that we torture.

Mighty Conqueror of Straw Men!

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.

Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

I've decided to call Bush the Incomp-ident. Actually, he's quite good at articulating a straw man position and then rebutting it. Alas, I'd be more impressed if he rebutted the real position of someone.