Guest Blogged by John Gideon
As was expected the corporate media picked-up the latest in Diebold’s sordid story — which we reported first here last Friday — with articles by Ian Hoffman yesterday and today and even the Associated Press stepped in as well.
Unfortunately the headline of Hoffman’s article yesterday characterized the security hole as being a ‘glitch’; which this certainly is not. It is also not a ‘flaw’ as it was characterized by today’s Hoffman and AP articles. (Ed note: Hoffman has been very good at reporting on all of these related stories, so we don’t wish to be overly critical of him, but rather point out the inaccurate characterization.)
This is a ‘feature’ that was knowingly installed by Diebold. It was not a mistake or something that was overlooked in the design of the software. It is not a ‘bug’, ‘glitch’, ‘flaw’, ‘error in programming’ or any other simplistic name. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor and veteran voting-systems examiner for the state of Pennsylvania has said this:
Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin, who published the first security analysis of Diebold voting software in 2003 had this to say:
In the meantime the state of Georgia has decided that there is nothing that they have to do because their administrative rules already mitigate the problem. Of course, they made that statement without knowing what the full problem is.
A redacted copy of the Hursti “Critical Security Alert: Diebold TSx and TS6 voting systems” can be found at BlackBoxVoting.Org. Bev Harris guarantees that the redaction only resulted in 50 words being removed from this copy of the report.
Finally, I would be remiss in not pointing to this final line of Dan Goodin’s article for AP:
Uh, Dan, you could have had a more timely article, and probably scooped Ian Hoffman if you had read The BRAD BLOG on Friday, where you would have found the whole story posted exclusively that day.
It’s about time that the corporate media begin looking to the blogs as a source instead of ignoring us like we aren’t here. Or at least admitting that they’re looking to the blogs as a source, instead of only attributing those in the MSM.
Will Dan Goodin or the AP post a clarification to their story? We’re not holding our breath.
With the apparent coup d’etat and war with Iran coming, this may all be a moot issue – getting way scary out there!
While the AP makes money selling their "glitched" stories to newspapers etc., i find that their stories tend to misinform the reader especially if the reader has no previous knowledge of what the AP author is writing about AND tend to be in favor of the Bush administration’s position from the slant they put on the story. This can be illustrated by recent articles i read by AP writer Becky Bohrer on Yellowstone brown bear delisting. There was a long article of Bushit in the Orange County Register about a month ago. For example, while Wild Bears Project Director Louisa Willcox submitted a paper stating 57 IMPORTANT REASONS AGAINST DELISTING THE ISOLATED YELLOWSTONE POPULATION OF BROWN BEARS SUFFERING FROM INBREEDING, Ms. Bohrer mislead the reader by skimming over the important reasons against delisting and many other fact, such as the importance of the bear. She ended her story with the following quote: "If we do not delist now when can we delist>." So, if there is a way for AP to screw up a story, when and if they finally write it, the article can twist the story away from the truth and and mislead the American people under the disguise of being written by an unopinionated 3rd party.
Uninformed 3rd party perhaps.
Grizzly – it’s off topic, but I thought you would like it – at least part of it:
DNA Test Confirms Hybrid Bear in the Wild
The bad part is it was shot by a hunter and will now be a "Trophy" – that part disgusts me!
My sincere thanks to Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, and everyone else involved in this battle.
John
Thanks, Brad and John Gideon, for your persistence in covering story after story illustrating the need for real election reform.
As of 8 a.m. this morning I was doing final edits on a 23-page report. You may notice that it is only 12 pages.
Harri had hoped to split the report into two — one concerning the devastating and inexcusable flaws, and another "laundry list" of secondary issues, some of which are also quite troubling.
Then we put the whole thing into one report. Harri and I were both up pretty much the whole night making final decisions as to what to redact and who needs to receive the unredacted portion and so forth. I left to get coffee around 8 a.m. and realized that the "laundry list" was very easy for reporters to understand, lots of photos and so forth. Problem is, the devastation is in the triple-play (bootloader/operating system/files) and that part is harder to understand.
If we kept the whole report together, reporters would pick up the easy stuff and use that instead of the really important story on the triple-play.
Therefore, we pulled the laundry list for Monday publication. It has a concise but very interesting section on macros, as well as some other disturbing news.
It is time for all communicators and activist groups to truly work together to pull these beasts out of elections.
When are we going to do something? Why have we let them get away with fraud, stealing the election, then one crime after another?
Do we have to put a comedian into office to get something done?
Kay In L.A>
This reads to me like they built in an intentional backdoor. Keep looking people. Likely there are more.
In the computer world, redundancy is A Very Good Thing.
RELEASE THE HACK TO THE PUBLIC!!
That is the only way they will listen. Public exposure has been used many times with security exploits involving software like Microsoft Windows. The vendors cannot ignore a serious security flaw that is in the wild and nor can election supervisors.
Wow! Things really seem to be converging into something tangible, even for the MSM.
The press has been guilty of ignorance until now. It’s VERY maddening to see this plagiarism of the brave people who cared enough to do something about this years ago!
At least there are hundreds of us who know who the real hero’s are, and we will NEVER forget you!
The way I’m reading this,
Are we only able to talk about vulnerabilities in the future tense , and not past election hacks to be noticed by the Corporate media ?
Just wondering
to Simon Magus:
"RELEASE THE HACK TO THE PUBLIC!!"
We have released the hack to the public. Fewer than 50 words were redacted from a 12 -page report. Quite possibly it would violate the Patriot Act to release the names of the files to the public before CERT, EAC, NIST and the secretaries of state of Florida, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Virginia, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio have the opportunity to pull the machines out of use.
However, if they do NOT act promptly to remove these machines from service, and they have had time to do so, it is quite likely that we will release the filenames needed to hack the system.
Really that’s all we redacted. Specific filenames. The road map is in the report, but at this time we did not put gas in the car.
A "deliberate security vulnerability" in this context is a deliberate attempt to destabilize the American government.
If the people, for any reason, cannot change their government thru their vote, then we have by definition a dictatorship.
A republican dictatorship. Big brother is a republican.
In theory there are only 3 IT managers at the big 3 election machine companies. Diebold has a head of IT in its election systems division, ES & S has one, and Sequoia has one.
Massive destabilization of the ability to change the government, transparently and honestly, has taken place.
Wake up and smell the republican dictatorship.
In tribute:
"The citizenry owes an immense debt of gratitude to Bruce Funk, the Emery County Clerk for Emery County, Utah who, upon noticing anomalies in the Diebold TSx machines delivered to his county, requested an independent evaluation of this voting system." (Bev Harris and/or Black Box Voting)
Thank you Bev. I was worried the details would remain secret. That is a relief.
Wow, these comments are taking a long time to register tonight! That was redundant!
Floridiot #11
Good point, I think you’re probably right.
Floridiot #11
Good point! I think you might be right on that.