How to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.

Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters.  Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:

  • The physical lock of your voting machines can be picked in 10 seconds.
  • Your voting machines can then easily be infected with a computer virus, since they are general-purpose computers running specialized election software.
  • It only takes about one minute to infect one of your machines using a single memory card.
  • The virus can easily be spread among numerous voting machines by innocent users updating the software with a memory card.
  • Virus software can easily make all of the diagnostic and double-checking software in your machines illusory and meaningless, therefore dangerous.
  • The infected machine can be made to spit out (electronically or on paper) any faked election result, regardless of the voting conducted on the machines.
  • Your machine, which is already in use in some jurisdictions, thus has serious design flaws.

If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here.  Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed.  You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.

Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …

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Big Media’s monopolistic cravings lead to more corruption at the FCC

If this Common Dreams report on FCC corruption doesn’t make you angry, no media issue will:

Last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer rocked the re-confirmation hearings for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin when she released a suppressed FCC study from 2004 – leaked to her by an FCC whistleblower – that indicated locally owned television stations did far more local news programming than TV stations owned by big conglomerates. A former FCC lawyer acknowledged that agency officials ordered the report and all supporting material be destroyed.

Martin, who was on the FCC in 2004 but not yet its Chairman, said he had no idea the report had been done in the first place and knew nothing about its disappearance. Then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell also claims he knew nothing about it, and, in classic Bush-era fashion, he took no responsibility for what transpired under his command.

In their minds, this was some sort of clerical error — and the sooner everyone forgot about it, the better. The FCC could go back to its time-honored job of doling out tens of billions of dollars in monopoly privileges to massive media and communication firms in relative anonymity.

That PR approach collapsed this week on Monday, Sept. 18, when another repressed FCC study was leaked to Senator Boxer by an FCC whistleblower. This study demonstrated that independent radio ownership plummeted after the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, even though the number of commercial radio stations actually increased. As with the first study, by

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They rule. Really.

To say that the corrupted interests of massive corporations have twisted and perverted the social and political system into a flimsy chessboard sounds, of course, paranoid and highly cynical. No wonder then that casual observers of the democratic process scoff at claims of widespread corporate corruption as an outlandish conspiracy…

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Bush Administration required applicants for rebuilding Iraq to first prove loyalty to Bush

A new Washington Post article reveals that the feckless Bush administration blew off rebuilding Iraq in 2003.  Instead of securing the country and providing water and electricity to the Iraqis, the administration doled out billions to inept applicants demonstrating political and philosophical loyalty to Bush: After the fall of Saddam…

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Where is fast cheap broadband? Not in the U.S.

According to Free Press, the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, "the United States continues to lag behind the rest of the world in accessible and affordable broadband service, with no signs of closing the digital divide at home."  The current dysfunctional policies promulgated by the FCC have left Americans…

Continue ReadingWhere is fast cheap broadband? Not in the U.S.