| CamChicks |
07-14-2004 05:34 PM |
How E-Voting Threatens Democracy
link from WIRED magazine:
How E-Voting Threatens Democracy
6 pages, but worth the read.
highlights:
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Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files.
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Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.
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A few voting company employees have been implicated in bribery or kickback schemes involving election officials. And there are concerns about the partisan loyalties of voting executives -- Diebold's chief executive, for example, is a top fund-raiser for President Bush.
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Diebold's programmers had written the key for unscrambling the system's encryption directly into the code. This meant the key would never change, and anyone reading the source code (including anyone who downloaded it from the FTP site) would know it. The same key unlocked the data on every machine. It was the equivalent of a bank assigning the same PIN to every customer's ATM card.
"Oh man, we thought, this is horrible," said Kohno. "We realized that the system was written by novices and we weren't really surprised then by anything else we found."
Initially, they thought they might find malicious code in the software that would allow the results of elections to be changed at will. Computer scientists had long contended that anyone with access to a voting system could slip the code in and no one would know.
"We found a system that was so vulnerable in itself that you didn't need to put malicious code into it to rig an election,"
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Quote:
Embarrassed by the Rubin report, Maryland commissioned its own audit of the Diebold system, hoping to dispel concerns about the machines. But that report confirmed that the machines were poorly programmed and "at high risk of compromise."
Six months later, Maryland officials hired a group of researchers from Raba Technologies -- some of whom were former employees of the National Security Agency -- to hack into the Diebold systems during a simulated election. Again, they confirmed what the Johns Hopkins researchers had found.
"We could have done anything we wanted to," said William Arbaugh, a University of Maryland assistant professor of computer science and one of the hackers. "We could change the ballots (before the election) or change the votes during the election."
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WIRED is obsessed with this issue:
E-Voting Undermined by Sloppiness
Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?
E-Vote Machines Drop More Ballots
Legislators Urge E-Voting Halt
E-Vote Snafu in California County
Time to Recall E-Vote Machines?
want more sources? supporting info?
how about MSN?
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"Common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected,"
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copy from NY TIMES
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When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms.
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In Boone County, Ind., last fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters,
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PC Magazine
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I won't claim that Diebold's voting machines are deficient, but I think that building a voting machine (or a medical machine or a space probe) on PC hardware and the Windows operating system is a terrible idea. Give me a microcontroller and burned-in code that can't do anything but what I program it to do, not a general-purpose environment that is universally and routinely hacked.
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This is our system now - and nothing will change before the November election. :warning
You don't have to believe in conspiracys to be concerned. It may only take one.
Smokey The Bear might pick the next president and we would never know. :helpme |
