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election news. this is lengthy but YOU MUST READ IT ALL.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972

14 October 2003 Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

...But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

...When the Georgia secretary of state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was black women. There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state.

...Weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia there was an extra reason to be suspicious. Last November, the state became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54,000,000.00 on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic.

The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable... In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 10 days. In neighbouring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken out of service. It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all.

...The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly.

There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.

Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election officials around the country.

...Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party... Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into last November's election to see whether there was any chance the results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated. Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.

First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and component parts must be certified before use in an election... Clifford Tatum, assistant director of legal affairs for the election division, wrote back: "We have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it was possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an official at the Georgia Technology Authority... Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what you mean by the words 'please provide written certification documents' ".

...The investigating citizens then considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly after the election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch".

Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet. That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security precautions... Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer with 20 years' experience... did a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".

"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the programme was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".

Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work."

...She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1.

...Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by individuals with little real-world experience". But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning flaws".

These included putting the password in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote; and other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access. Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information and "a multitude of false conclusions".

Substantially similar findings, however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf of the state of Maryland, in which a group of computer security experts catalogued 328 software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high risk of compromise".

...Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election package. The claim cannot be independently verified, because of the trade-secrecy agreement.

...A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft Windows, and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them senior Diebold executives, were involved in this aspect of the system. One of these, Diebold's vice-president of research and development, Talbot Iredale, wrote an e-mail in April 2002 - later obtained by the campaigners - making it clear that he wanted to shield the operating system from Wylie Labs, an independent testing agency involved in the early certification process.

The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to make the software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system used for handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could be manipulated from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle [sic] reviewing and certifying the operating systems," the e-mail reads. "Therefore can we keep to a minimum the references to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."

In an earlier intercepted e-mail, this one from Ken Clark in Diebold's research and development department, the company explained upfront to another independent testing lab that the supposedly secure software system could be accessed without a password, and its contents easily changed using the Microsoft Access programme. Mr Clark says he had considered putting in a password requirement to stop dealers and customers doing "stupid things", but that the easy access had often "got people out of a bind".

Astonishingly, the representative from the independent testing lab did not see anything wrong with this and granted certification to the part of the software programme she was inspecting - a pattern of lackadaisical oversight that was replicated all the way to the top of the political chain of command in Georgia, and in many other parts of the country.

Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now openly accessible on the internet.

...In Dallas, during early voting before last November's election, people found that no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat button, the Republican candidate's name would light up. After a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with apparent misalignment problems... Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling station but not voting, even when a single race with just two candidates was on the ballot.

...Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by touchscreen systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which the same candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in. She calls her model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is available online at www.wheresthepaper.org.

It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable. An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas, last November erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had in fact won.

In Comal County, Texas, a computerised optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly suspicious.

In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida - which had switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore - more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone "missing" on election day. The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was not adequately explained. One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing".

Most suspect of all was the governor's race in Alabama, where the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner. Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly "discovered" that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 7,000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials talked vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the state's Republican attorney general refused to authorise a recount or any independent ballot inspection.

...If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years... Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organisation that espouses theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.

The chief executive of American Information Systems in the early Nineties was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for elective office and became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected to the Senate from Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper which also happens to be a big investor in ES&S... 80 per cent of Mr Hagel's winning votes - both in 1996 and again in 2002 - were counted, under the usual terms of confidentiality, by his own company.

...Under the Help America Vote Act, the Bush administration is supposed to establish a sizeable oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine standards for new voting machinery. The four commission heads were supposed to have been in place by last February, but so far just one has been appointed. The technical panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines it is supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities.

...One of the conditions states have to fulfil to receive federal funding for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is a consolidation of voter rolls at state rather than county level. This provision sends a chill down the spine of anyone who has studied how Florida consolidated its own voter rolls just before the 2000 election, purging the names of tens of thousands of eligible voters, most of them African Americans and most of them Democrats, through misuse of an erroneous list of convicted felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state doubling as George Bush's Florida campaign manager. Despite a volley of lawsuits, the incorrect list was still in operation in last November's mid-terms.

...Meanwhile, the administration has been pushing new voting technology of its own to help overseas citizens and military personnel, both natural Republican Party constituencies, to vote more easily over the internet... The administration has gone ahead with its so-called SERVE project for overseas voting, via a private consortium made up of major defence contractors and a Saudi investment group. The contract for overseeing internet voting in the 2004 presidential election was recently awarded to Accenture, formerly part of the Arthur Andersen group.

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and now, back to steve austin. from the counterpunch interview by merlin chowkwanyun

http://www.counterpunch.org/merlin08162003.html

...MC: What was the exact charge? Its not just that information about explosives was on the server, but there was also this clause on intent.

SA:: From what I've heard, it's not illegal to distribute information on explosives. What's illegal is the intent part. It's such a weird charge because it's almost like thought crime. How do you prove that someone has intent? I can go on to tons of other websites that have explosives information on them, especially white supremacy web sites. We obviously know they have intent because they've used that type of information before against people. They're not being prosecuted for it.

...MC:: In addition to the one-year sentence in federal prison, there are also three years of probation. When I read these probation provisions, I was quite shocked. These are very strict and draconian provisions. Can you tell us what they are?

SA: One of them is that I can't associate with any group or persons who advocate violence or political or social or economic change. Basically, I can't associate myself with anarchists. It actually says that on the pre-sentencing report, that I can't associate myself with anarchists or anarchist associations.

If I have to use a computer for work, I have to consult with the probation officer, but I can't use a computer for any type of political organizing or any type of political use. It's just obvious that they're just trying to keep me away from a computer.

As long as I'm using it for work to make money for income, for a job, it's fine, but even with that, I'm going to have very intense restrictions. I'm going to have my computer probably seized at least once a week or once every two weeks. I'm going to have to have tracking software installed on my computers. I'm going to have to surrender DSL phone bills and everything like that.

...MC: What techniques did the FBI use to watch you?

SA: They were packeting my Internet line, which is basically monitoring all incoming and outgoing information-- all data going in and out of my DSL connection. And through that, they were able to get passwords and things like my e-mail accounts, my instant messenger accounts. On numerous occasions, they blocked me out of my e-mail accounts, changed the passwords, used the e-mail accounts to change the domain name server [DNS settings] on my domain and make it non-accessible on the Internet...and then playing around with me, sending me an instant message, using my own screenname online, and telling me the password of the e-mail account and warning me not to change it, saying that they were watching me.

They've gone into my instant messenger accounts, completely taken control over them. They would start instant messaging people, "You're next," and stuff like that. I remember one time they came into my account, and I caught them one time, and they threatened me like, "Your ass is going to jail." They said a bunch of stuff. It was pretty obvious they were packeting my line and looking through, basically downloading all the information they were getting that was coming in and out of my DSL connection. When they would talk to people on my screenname, they'd use the exact same wording that I'd use. They tried to impersonate me word for word, use the exact same wording I was using. It was pretty obvious they were monitoring my conversations pretty extensively on a daily basis, and they were watching everything pretty closely.

MC: I understand you were also able to look at logs of IP addresses [personally identifiable numbers assigned to computers on the Internet] and things like that and that was a second way of confirming they were packeting your line. Is that correct?

SA: Exactly. When they were getting onto my screennames, I was able to get their IP addresses, and I remember tracerouting the IP address to a location in Los Angeles down to a zip code, and within that same zip code was a federal building. This happened on a lot of occasions. Once I started getting their IPs, I noticed they kept changing their IP addresses. I was able to find out they were the same people going into my e-mail address and using that to knock my domain offline. I remember when I was blocked out of my e-mail address, I was assuming someone was in there checking all the e-mails I was getting. I sent an e-mail to the e-mail address with a little script that logged the IP of anyone who opened up any message, and it was the same IP address of the people that I was logging who were on my screenname, so that meant it was the same IP address of the person who logged into my e-mail account and then used my e-mail to knock my domain offline by changing the DNS servers.

...MC: People are stunned at how calm you manage to be through this. The FBI, the prosecutors, were treating you at some points like the most dangerous man in America. I know some of your friends and your mother in the courtroom were shocked. How are you so calm, and what's going through your mind right now?

SA: I guess I'm so calm because I've probably gotten used in the past few years to all the harassment and all the things that have been going on, constantly in this legal limbo, having to go back and forth to court, having the thought that I'm potentially going to be facing a long time in prison just there in my mind for a while now. I've gotten so used to it that I pretty much expected them to come down on me the way they did. I wasn't really surprised when the judge gave me a 12-month prison sentence in federal prison.

If you really look at it, that's the nature of this government. This government has been persecuting people for their political beliefs ever since the day it was founded. Its been persecuting people for the color of their skin ever since the day it was founded. Look what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. They completely annihilated political organizations. They assassinated political organizers, framed them up, locked them up in jail. Some people just disappeared. They infiltrated organizations. It's not surprising to see what they're doing. That's the nature of this government. It's going to be the nature of this system unless we continue to fight back and do whatever we have to do that's necessary to put an end to it.

The most important thing is just to stay focused and have determination. I don't want them to scare me into thinking that I can't continue doing what I'm doing. The more they're going to come down on me, the more I'm going to organize and continue do things within the community and raisethefist.