sporadically produced odds, ends, and essaylets on any number of topics from programming to politics, paramecia to puff pastries.
We had control of everything.
This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.
A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity.
I hope that we got it right in my precinct, but I know that there is no way to know for sure. We cannot do recounts.
FDR was right. Fear itself is the enemy. It makes you do stupid things. It makes you close your eyes because you think it'll make the monsters in the closet disappear, too. Wallowing in fear does nothing. Feeding that fear is a true crime. Lying about it to entertain the masses or make a political point, however...well...that's just a sin.
It's incumbant [sic] upon us as citizens to get it right, and you can't get it right if you're selective with the facts. The only way to get the facts is to listen and investigate. We as a nation have yet to do either in any satisfactory way.
[Generally, in the United States, it is very difficult for a public figure to win a libel case.] Plus, libel claims based on fiction are obviously much harder than claims based on assertions in supposed non-fiction. But neither of these bars is insurmountable. And on the facts as reported, they could be surmounted surprisingly easily.
As one New York court put it not so long ago, a claim of "libel by fiction" requires that "the description of the fictional character must be so closely akin to the real person claiming to be defamed that a reader of the book, knowing the real person, would have no difficulty linking the two." The novel Primary Colors didn't meet that test as it didn't use real names, nor were the physical description of any character like the plaintiff in that case. But the 9/11 show differs from Primary Colors in a very basic way: It uses actors portraying real people with their actual names involved in activities that are a blend of real things they did and of the partisan imagination. I suspect it wouldn't be hard to get a court to see the difference from Primary Colors-like facts. Furthermore, even if ABC were to run a big disclaimer with the episode, that wouldn't necessarily suffice.
It's even harder to make out a case of libel when the victim is a public figure. Basically, to win you have to show that the author of the libelous work demonstrated a "reckless disregard for the truth." Given the public nature of the warnings that various scenes are false, if in fact they are false then I think this part of the case should be pretty easy.
If I were at ABC or Disney I'd be having a serious talk with my lawyers right about now.
As I first noted yesterday, I have the entire "Path to 9/11" video. And one of the very first scenes makes it explicitly clear that American Airlines had Mohammad Atta in its grasp, warning lights flashing on the computer screen, yet the airline simply blew off the threat and helped Atta kill 3,000 Americans.
Unfortunately, it's a total lie.
She was operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit of the Counterproliferation Division of the clandestine Directorate of Operations. For the two years prior to her outing, Valerie Wilson worked to gather intelligence that would support the Bush White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was loaded with WMDs. This means that Armitage--as well as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby--leaked classified information about a CIA officer whose job it had been to look for evidence of Saddam's WMD programs. During this part of her career, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas to monitor operations she and her staff at JTFI were mounting. She was no analyst, no desk-jockey, no paper-pusher. She was an undercover officer in charge of running critical covert operations.
[S]he had spent two years trying to find proof of the administration's claims that Iraq posed a WMD threat. She and the Joint Task Force on Iraq, of course, came up empty-handed.
That's real fear. It's real fear when you immediately notify authorities (whoever is closest) when a bag is abandoned on the Metro or in front of a building or in the Dulles Airport. It's ever-present. It's livable, but it's always there and it's tied to real-life concerns.
So it really fucking pisses me off when the terror alert level is raised, right before and election, based on information that is four years old.
Bush said on Wednesday the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had interrogated dozens of suspects at undisclosed overseas locations and 14 of those held had now been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
A leader of Europe's chief human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said the revelation vindicated the investigation the body had conducted after the Washington Post reported last year that the CIA had run secret prisons in Europe and flown suspects to states where they could be tortured.
• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?
• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?
• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply "law enforcement" problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?
• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world's troubles?
Permission to excerpt or reprint granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org
See photos below - a couple of 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace. This experiment shows that the seals do nothing whatever to protect against access by insiders after testing, and the seals also are worthless in jurisdictions like Washington, Florida, California, and many other locations where voting machines are sent home with poll workers for days before the election.
The Busby-Bilbray contest in San Diego now has proof that the optical scan machines sent home with poll workers subjected the tamper-friendly memory cards to an non-recoverable lapse in chain of custody. The recipe for tampering has been on the Internet for over a year: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf
The photos below blow apart claims by elections officials that voting machine "sleepovers" -- sending voting machines home with poll workers for days or weeks prior to elections -- are secure because of seals over the memory card.
Two Black Box Voting studies in Leon County, Florida proved that election results can be altered in such a way that the supervisor of elections cannot detect the tampering. Not to worry, we were told by elections officials. The memory cards are sealed inside the machines.
But then Black Box Voting purchased an optical scan machine and obtained discarded voting machine seals from King County, Washington. Here's what we found:
(photo)
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-door-inside-nut.jpg
The cover can be removed without detection by removing five screws. Inside, all that stands between a pollworker (or an insider at the warehouse or elections office) and the open-for-business memory card is a washer which you can unscrew.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-card-put-in.jpg
See the memory card: It is the item in the slot that says "this side up." Diebold's first line of defense is a metal door that pivots down over the memory card slot.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-door-in-out.jpg
See how the door works: The hole in the right side of the door is over-large, so you can move the right-side bolt in and out at will. Therefore, they seal the right-side bolt.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-card-door-hole-in-bolt.jpg
See the hole in the top of the right-side bolt: The plastic seal is threaded through that.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-sealed.jpg
See the plastic seal: This plastic seal was used by King County. It had been broken and discarded, so we used the high-tech method of putting an orange rubber band on it to hold it together for this demo. The seal is pointless anyway, as you'll soon see.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-screws.jpg
See the screws holding the Diebold AccuVote optical scan machine together: There are five. We tried a Phillips-head screwdriver on the thing.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-unscrew-case.jpg
See the screws come out: What's inside?
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-card-unfasten.jpg
See the left-side bolt. Can you remove it? We stuck a small Allen wrench into the bolt.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-door-inside-nut.jpg
See that nut on the screw: (Red arrow) We got out a pair of pliers.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-remove-memorycard-door.jpg
Is it possible that Diebold does not know this??? Grasp nut with pliers, twirl Allen wrench and see what happens.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-card-seal-cracked.jpg
See the bolt come off. But can you get the memory card out?
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-card-opened.jpg
See the metal door pivot to the right: Remove the memory card.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/accuvote-memory-card-out.jpg
We then put it all back together without leaving a trace. Cost for materials: $12. Time: 4 minutes to open, remove card, re-insert card and re-seal everything.
San Diego, June 6 2006: Sent these voting machines home with poll workers for sleepovers. They said the seal on the memory card bay made it secure.
STILL GOING HOME FOR SLEEPOVERS in King County, Washington: King County elections officials told citizens on Aug. 29 2006 in a videotaped statement that they are using the door and plastic tab seal as shown in these pictures, and they are sending the voting machines home with poll workers for the September primary election.
WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT:
Black Box Voting has prepared a Citizen's Tool Kit -- basically a brain dump of the things that worked during our last three years in the field. It is organized into modules, each only a few pages long, bullet points, easy to follow.
Two modules can help you address this issue in your area:
Media Module: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit-media.pdf (tips to get this into the media in your location)
Adopt a public official module: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit-adopt-an-official.pdf (tips to educate, persuade, and hold public officials accountable)
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Full 20-Module Tool Kit is FREE: It is a Declaration of Independence for Citizens. You can download it here: (Adobe Acrobate 7 or higher recommended)
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.pdf
- It's time for you to recognize your own power.
- You don't need us.
- You don't have to find someone to follow.
- Pick any module. Pick a single action in it. See it to its completion.
- You've just opened the door to an unexpected evolution.
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." -– Declaration of Independence
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Black Box Voting is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501c(3) elections watchdog group supported entirely by citizen donations. We refuse funds from any vendor or vested interest.
To support Black Box Voting: click to http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or send to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98055
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