| Date: | Tuesday December 02, @08:41AM |
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| Author: | ewing2001 |
| Topic: | |
| from the AP dept. | |
Diebold once shut down BlackBoxVoting.org and threatened GlobalFreePress
Update: Paul Krugman/NY Times: "The credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake" (12/02)
Kucinich supports anti-Diebold campaign
Photo: AP's "example" of an e-voting activist website by "Joe"
AP -Tue Dec 2,12:22 AM ET
SAN JOSE, Calif. - In a major victory for free speech enthusiasts on the Internet, Diebold Inc. has agreed not to sue voting rights advocates who publish leaked documents about the alleged security breaches of electronic voting.
A Diebold spokesman promised in a conference call Monday with U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel and attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that it would not sue dozens of students, computer scientists and ISP operators who received cease-and-desist letters from August to October.
Diebold also promised not to file lawsuits against two Swarthmore College students and a San Francisco-based Internet service provider for copyright infringement, according to a motion that company attorneys filed Nov. 24 in San Jose's federal court.
...Diebold did not disclose specifics on why it had dropped its legal case, but the decision is a major reversal of the company's previous strategy. North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, which controls more than 50,000 touch-screen voting machines nationwide, had threatened legal action against dozens of individuals who refused to remove links to its stolen data.
"This is a huge victory that shows we have weapons on our side to protect free speech from overbearing copyright laws so that the Internet remains a forum for public discussion," said EFF staff attorney Wendy Seltzer. "We're trying to hammer home that you can't go around making idle threats that aren't backed up by the law."
Diebold spokesman David Bear emphasized Monday that while the company had dropped its case, it will continue to monitor the online proliferation of the leaked documents, and may file lawsuits against others who publish the data....
...EFF plans to continue with its case against Diebold, arguing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Diebold must pay damages for intimidating Internet service providers. The hearing is scheduled for Feb. 9.
"The implicit threat was, 'If you don't take this material down, we might sue,'" (EFF staff attorney Wendy) Seltzer said. "Without them ever needing to file a federal complaint, they got these documents taken down from a huge number of sites. It was a chill on free speech that stopped discussion of electronic voting issues without ever getting before a judge."
EFF.org - For Immediate Release: Monday, December 1, 2003
Court Schedules Mediation and Hearing in Electronic Voting Case
Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release
San Jose - Voting machine company Diebold Systems, Inc., agreed today in federal court not to sue or send any further legal threats to anyone who publishes their corporate email archive indicating flaws in Diebold's voting machines and irregularities with certifying the systems for actual elections. Diebold also agreed to send retractions of its earlier legal threats to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who received them.
The nonprofit ISP Online Policy Group (OPG) and two Swarthmore College students are seeking a court order to clarify that publishing or linking to the Diebold email archive does not violate copyright law and that ISPs should not face any penalty for hosting users who publish or link to the archive. "We're pleased that Diebold has retreated and the public is now free to continue its interrupted conversation over the accuracy of electronic voting machines," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "We continue to seek a court order to protect posters, linkers, and the ISPs who host them."
U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel ordered the case to mediation and set out a schedule to finalize remaining issues in the case with motions due on January 12 and January 30 and a hearing scheduled for February 9, 2004.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School are providing legal representation in this important case to prevent abusive copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting, the very foundation of our democratic process. Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith published the Diebold email archive, which contains descriptions of flaws in Diebold's electronic voting machines written by the company's own employees.
Diebold threatened not only the ISPs of direct publishers of the corporate documents, but also the ISPs of those who merely publish links to the documents. The ISP OPG refused to comply with Diebold's demand that it prohibit Independent Media Network (IndyMedia) from linking to Diebold documents. "As an ISP committed to free speech, we are affirming our users' right to link to information that's critical to the debate on the reliability of electronic voting machines," said OPG's Colocation Director David Weekly.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by Congress in 1998, provides a "safe harbor" provision as an incentive for ISPs to take down user-posted content when they receive cease-and-desist letters such as the ones sent by Diebold. By removing the content, or forcing the user to do so, for a minimum of 10 days, an ISP can take itself out of the middle of any copyright claim. As a result, few ISPs have tested whether they would face liability for such user activity in a court of law. EFF has been exposing some of the ways that the safe harbor provision can be used to silence legitimate online speech through the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich has posted excerpts of the Diebold documents on his website and sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee requesting hearings to investigate abuses of the DMCA by Diebold.
The case, called Online Policy Group v. Diebold, is Case Number C-03-04913 JF.
About EFF:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at eff.org
NY Times -December 2
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell — who says that he wasn't talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you know?" he asks.
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.
Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software — which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary — on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so.
An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.)
Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.
Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story — not as a potential political scandal.
This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues, like the Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately prevented many citizens from voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be that questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best, paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of dissociating themselves from "conspiracy theories." Instead, they focus on legislation to prevent future abuses.
But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press.
This admission — contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability — came on the same day that the Senate police announced that they were hiring a counterespionage expert to investigate the theft. Republican members of the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how those specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches took place. I wonder why.
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to temptation?
I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.
...Diebold's retreat in the courtroom comes as U.S. congressional representative Dennis Kucinich, who is seeking the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, jumped onto the anti-Diebold bandwagon by providing links to the Diebold e-mail correspondence from his House of Representatives Web site.
...Kucinich also asked the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to investigate Diebold's DMCA takedown notices.
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printed from Diebold Inc. has agreed not to sue Voting Rights Advocates on 2004-05-01 00:09:42