OT| U.S. democracy in peril

From: Andrew Nowicki (andrew_at_nospam.com)
Date: 11/12/04 

Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 01:12:47 +0100

"Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John
Hopkins University. He accidentally got his hands on a copy of the
Diebold software program -- Diebold's source code -- which runs
their e-voting machines.

Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up
this software. One line in particular stood out over all the rest:

#define DESKEY ((des_key*) "F2654hd4")

All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to
protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not
having the key. The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the
method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called
Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and
is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key
to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code,
all Diebold machines would respond to the same key.

I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the
reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake but a fixed
election."

Source: William Borgstrom, Mobile, Alabama, 251-580-3306, 251-379-5855

Dr. Avi Rubin's paper:
http://avirubin.com/vote/analysis/index.html

_________________________________________________________________________

...While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines
produced results matching the registered Democrat/Republican
ratios, Florida's optically scanned paper ballots which were
fed into central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking
favored Bush and seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters,
69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the
vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite
of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered
Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them
Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959
people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the
counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County,
77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County,
72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush...

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm
Data: http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
      http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.pdf
      http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/2004pppParty.pdf

_________________________________________________________________________

...Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry.
CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women
by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush
among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless
a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state...

Source: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php

_________________________________________________________________________

...Why have we let corporations into our polling places,
locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even
international election monitors and reporters are banned?
Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our
vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a
private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that
believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in
another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in
another case partly owned by Saudi investors?...

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm

_________________________________________________________________________

...But one thing really troubled me: Who was checking to make sure the
data contained in the digital memory cards actually matched the
voters' intentions marked on the paper ballots? Could we take the
accurate counting of computer votes for granted, since the CEO of the
leading voting machine manufacturer promised to "deliver" Ohio's
electoral votes for Bush?...

...We should have had trained observers - computer scientists, not
lawyers! - verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload
through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results. Somehow we
neglected the most vulnerable step in the vote-counting process,
leaving a gaping hole for error and fraud, casting in doubt the
validity of election results in many states...

Author: Ian H. Solomon, associate dean at the Yale Law School

Source:
http://www.ctnow.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-solomon1111.artnov11,1,4258929.story?coll=hc-headlines-oped

_________________________________________________________________________

Adherents to America's Christian fundamentalism are
concentrated in the Bible-belt which encompasses what was
once known as the lands below the Mason-Dixon line along
with the border states. In other words, America's
Bible-belt encompasses those areas where slavery was deeply
entrenched in the years before the American Civil War and
the surrounding areas. Many slave states seceded from the
Union and engaged in a bloody civil war against their
fellow Americans to maintain the institution of slavery...

...As the institution of slavery spread, so did this new
American religion. As the institution of slavery deepened,
so did the church's insistence on the justice of the rich
to the fruits of their slaves' labor. America's Christian
fundamentalism, then, is descended from the religion of
slave owners, slave traders, and slaves. Long before the
American Civil War, an ostensibly Christian religion arose
which completely neglected the hundreds of biblical
injunctions for social justice. In place of a message of
social justice, this new Christian religion demanded only
one thing: from the elite, money; from the rest of society,
obedience to the established order. To assist the church
in supporting the established power, the church demanded
two things from the faithful. First, the true believer
must have an unquestioning faith in the religious teachings
of their church, usually expressed as an unquestioning
adherence to the Bible as most helpfully interpreted by
that Christian church, even if that unquestioning faith
required one to suspend his willingness to reason and his
ability to accept reality and facts. Second, morality was
solely defined as (women's) sexual fidelity, augmented at
times with an injunction for men to support their wives and
children, in return, of course, for their unconditional
obedience. As always, the rich and powerful were exempt
from both of these rules. Gone were the strictures against
greed. Gone were the obligations of the elites to
ameliorate the plight of the least fortunate among them.
Gone were God's demands that humanity be wise stewards of
God's creation. Gone were the biblical injunctions to
bring justice into the world, to feed the hungry, to clothe
the naked, to tend to the sick, to assist the widow, to
protect the orphan, and to shelter the homeless. Gone were
the stories of God's wrath at Pharaoh for his refusal to
let God's people go. Gone were the stories of God
liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Gone were
the stories of God's mercy and God's love for all of her
creation. Using a theology of Social Darwinism in which it
was claimed that the rich and powerful are rich and
powerful as a sign of God's blessing, the rich and powerful
were seen as virtuous and deserving the riches which were
showered upon them by a just God. In reality,
nineteenth-century slave owners and robber barons became
rich because they were corrupt and ruthless. They had the
money to silence their critics, as well as, to reward their
flatterers...

Source: http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/essays/fundie1.html

_________________________________________________________________________

Diebold voting machine illustration:
http://homepage.mac.com/rcareaga/diebold/big_die/diebold_1.jpg

Some Say U.S. No Longer Feels Like Home:
http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=041110&cat=frontpage&st=frontpageleaving_america_041110&src=abc

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