Posted on 05/21/2004 6:03:54 AM PDT by vannrox
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May 19 - 25, 2004
www.bigbrother.gov The feds want to know who?s been visiting the Web site of voting watchdog Bev Harris, and they?re likely to get what they want.
In the past 20 months, Harris has become America?s leading critic of electronic voting (see ?Black Box Backlash, March 10). Her reporting on the problems with new computer voting machines has been a key component in a national, grassroots movement to safeguard voting. Her astounding discoveries have resulted in important studies by distinguished computer scientists. She has been leaked thousands of pages of internal memos from Diebold Election Systems, one of the country?s leading electronic voting companies. She is frequently cited by newspapers across the country and is a guest on national and local television and radio stations. Thousands of people visit her Web site and participate in its reader forums. Now, Harris claims, the government wants our names, forum messages, and computer addresses. Following the advice of her lawyer, Harris will not talk publicly about the government?s investigation. Seattle Weekly used postings from Harris? Web site and interviewed other people involved with the investigation to put together this account. The investigation began last October, when VoteHere, an electronic voting software company in Bellevue, reported that a hacker broke into its computer network. VoteHere founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Adler says, ?We didn?t think it was a big deal. Adler confirms, however, that the FBI and the Secret Service are investigating the matter. ?A crime is a crime is a crime, he points out. Adler says there was evidence that the hacker was politically motivated and was involved somehow in the leak of internal documents at Diebold?although he will not discuss specifics, at the request of federal law enforcement agencies. Last September, Harris was the first person to publicly post the Diebold memos, which contain a variety of emÂbarrassing internal e-mails, on the Internet. The resulting furor produced a wave of bad publicity for the company. (On April 30, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned the use of Diebold?s voting machines in four California counties and called on the state attorney general to investigate the corporation for allegedly lying to public officials about testing and federal certification of its products.) On blackboxvoting.org, Harris writes that in October, a month after she posted the Diebold memos, she was e-mailed a link that would take her to stolen VoteHere software. She didn?t click on the link, because she thought someone was trying to entrap her. Four months earlier, VoteHere had announced their intention to release their software for public examination. ?Why would anyone in their right mind grab the stuff in some clandestine manner when it was being released into the open momentarily? she writes. VoteHere?s Adler says the company isn?t sure whether the hacker made off with its source code. He, too, however, expresses confusion about why somebody would steal something that was about to be publicly released. Despite her reservations, Harris did follow up with a person who claimed to be the VoteHere hacker. She conducted a telephone interview with him but afterward felt even less sure of the veracity of his claims to have possession of the VoteHere source code. ?I did not find him to be credible. It appeared to be an entrapment scheme, she states. Harris also says the VoteHere hacker and the Diebold memo leaker are not the same person. ?I am dead certain of this, she writes. On Jan. 9, Harris says, she had her first meeting with Secret Service agent Michael Levin about the hack. Levin would not confirm that he met with Harris, but he does acknowledge that there is an ongoing investigation and refers to Harris by her first name. Levin is the supervisor from the Secret Service for the Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force, an interagency law enforcement group that includes the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Washington State Patrol, and the Seattle Police Department. To date, Harris writes, she has had five meetings with Levin. By April 29, she was completely fed up. ?This investigation no longer passes the stink test, she writes. ?I?ll tell you what it looks like to me: a fishing expedition. Harris states that the Secret Service claims it is investigating the VoteHere hack but never spends much time on it while interviewing her. ?Most of the time is spent on the Diebold memos, which they claim they are not investigating. Harris sounds the alarm about what the government wants her to turn over. ?They want the logs of my Web site with all the forum messages and the IP [Internet protocol] addresses. IP addresses are unique, numerical pointers to one or more computers on the Internet, making it possible to identify, or narrow the search for, a computer that has visited a given Web site. Writes Harris: ?This has nothing to do with a VoteHere ?hack? investigation, and I have refused to turn it over. ?So, yesterday, they call me up and tell me they are going to subpoena me and put me in front of a grand jury. Well, let ?em. They still aren?t getting the list of members of blackboxvoting.org unless they seize my computer?which my attorney tells me might be what they had in mind. Harris also says Levin told her that he was on the same plane as her on one of the activist?s recent speaking tours. ?What?s that supposed to do? Scare me? she asks. Harris obviously hopes that the information on her computer can be kept private because she considers herself a journalist. ?[Y]ou can?t investigate leaks to journalists by going in and grabbing the reporter?s computer, she writes. But Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C., isn?t so confident. Harris faces two key questions, explains Dalglish. First, is she a journalist? And second, can a journalist successfully resist a subpoena from a federal grand jury? Dalglish says that federal appeals courts, including the Ninth Circuit that has jurisdiction in Washington, have defined a journalist as someone who is collecting information to disseminate it widely to the general public. Certainly Harris is doing that. That she is not an employee of a traditional news organization?and that her Web site focuses on a very specific subject, voting security?would work against her legal claim of being a journalist, Dalglish says. But she thinks Harris could overcome those issues with a good lawyer. When it comes to a federal grand jury subpoena, however, being a journalist doesn?t give you any immunity, Dalglish says. U.S. attorneys, the federal government?s chief prosecutors, can convene grand juries to present evidence to indict someone for a crime. In a grand jury proceeding, explains FBI Supervising Special Agent Greg Fowler, who oversees the Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force, there are no judges or defense attorneys. The U.S. attorneys present evidence and call and question witnesses in front of the jury, says Fowler. The jurors do not reach a verdict of guilty or innocent, he says, but, rather, vote on whether the evidence and witnesses presented support the indictment sought by the federal prosecutor. Since the proceedings of grand juries are secret, Fowler will not comment on whether Harris will be subpoenaed, as she predicts on her Web site. If Harris is subpoenaed, however, Dalglish says being a journalist doesn?t mean anything. ?In a federal grand jury investigation, there is almost no protection, she says. ?There is nothing more difficult to quash than a federal grand jury subpoena. Dalglish says if Harris refuses to cooperate, she will almost certainly face judicial sanctions. ?This is the classic situation where you get fined or go to jail, she says. Dalglish says that if Harris is served with a subpoena, a good attorney would try to get it tossed out for reasons of relevancy?that Harris? records have nothing to do with the VoteHere hack?rather than claiming journalistic immunity. If that argument failed, the identities of those of us who have visited blackboxvoting.org might wind up in the files of federal law- enforcement authorities. In her last public summary of the investigation, Harris wrote, ?Yeah, I?m not a happy camper. Taking the pulse of our democracy nowadays, it doesn?t feel very healthy, does it? |
First of all, she has no legal obligation to retain any of this information. She could set up her web site not to record IP addresses. Then she could legitimately go before the grand jury and say, 'I don't know'.
Secondly, any kind of computer-savvy hacker is very unlikely to visit such a site with an identifiable IP addy. There are many ways to be anonymous.
Biography of Lucy A. Dalglish
Lucy A. Dalglish is the Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a voluntary, unincorporated association of reporters and news editors dedicated to protecting the First Amendment interests of the news media. Based in Arlington, Va., the Reporters Committee has provided research, guidance and representation in major press cases in state and federal courts for 34 years. Prior to assuming the position in January 2000, Dalglish was a media lawyer for almost five years in the trial department of the Minneapolis law firm of Dorsey & Whitney. Her clients included ABCNews and Gannett Co. From 1980-93, Dalglish was a reporter and editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. As a reporter, she covered beats ranging from general assignment and suburbs to education and courts. During her last three years at the Pioneer Press, she served as night city editor, assistant news editor and national/foreign editor. Dalglish was awarded the Wells Memorial Key, the highest honor bestowed by the Society of Professional Journalists, in 1995 for her work as Chairman of SPJ's national Freedom of Information Committee from 1992-95 and for her service as a national board member from 1988-91. In 1996, she was one of 24 journalists, lawyers, lawmakers, educators, researchers, librarians and historians inducted into the charter class of the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C. Dalglish earned a juris doctor degree from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1995; a master of studies in law degree from Yale Law School in 1988; and a bachelor of arts in journalism from the University of North Dakota in 1980.
Dalglish serves on the advisory board of the Center for Courts & The Media at the National Judicial College in Reno, Nev., and as a member of the American Bar Association's Conference on the Media and the Law. Her recent speaking appearances have included speeches and presentations before journalists, judges, lawyers and citizens in Washington, D.C., New York, Houston, Minneapolis, Nashville, Chicago, Seattle, Tacoma, Denver, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Reno, Las Vegas, Banff (Alberta) and Puerto Vallarta, Mex. |
There is only one problem with electronic voting. You cannot vote twice and that would screw the RATS.
Electronic voting can work. If we can put a tonka toy on mars we can build a voting machine that will not violate anyones constitutional rights.
The way they test the machines is so bogus. They basically cast a fixed number of ballots for each candidate and see if it totalizes correctly. However, it is VERY easy to write a bit of code that would examine the number of votes for candidates A and B at ONE SECOND BEFORE the polls closed and swap them if the "wrong" candidate is ahead.
Their tests would NEVER detect the bug, either before or after the election. Only a detailed examination of the code, line by line, would detect it.
Yes, we could. But did you know that the computer code for recording and tallying the votes is SECRET?
The only way I would ever trust the voting machines is with complete disclosure of ALL the code (both soft ware code and hardware imbedded code) both vefore and after the election that would be freely available to ANYONE who wanted to examine it. And then the voting machine would have to make a paper copy of every ballot that could be examined by the voter.
The answer is simple. The RAts plan to use electronic voting with secret code and little "gotcha" bits of code and no hard records to make sure they never lose another election.
My strategy will be to always cast a written absentee ballot in the future.
We could just go back to paper ballots. Each precinct could tally the votes and report the tally. It wouldn't take but a few hours for each precinct.
What's Hitlery up to now? We all know of her sneaky tatics.
How to divide the spoils?
One of us was designated to split it into two halves, knowing that the OTHER guy would have first choice in selecting his share.
The system kept both men honest simply by using "rational self-interest" (as Ayn Rand would say)
I would set up a joint venture overseen by both parties.
I would trust that in a heart beat.
I'm with you on the paper ballots. So what if it took 3 or 4 days to get some of the results. It's the only way voting could be made honest.
I don't want this country to EVER rely on machines to hold THE VOTES of it's people.
We MUST HAVE a paper record.
I'm for machines counting the votes but these machines should not be printing out how I voted, I want PEN TO PAPER VOTING!!!!
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