Dopo aver gridato ai 4 venti e minacciato decine di persone per la diffusione di alcuni "segretissimi" dati, la Diebold viene distrutta dai rumors interni e dall'inaffidabilità dei propri prodotti.

Mail interne di dipendenti della Diebold, la famigerata ed incazzosa fabbrica di macchinette per il voto, è investita da una pesante crisi.

Una serie di corrispondenze interne dei dipendenti sono state diffuse e formano un gravissimo atto d'accusa verso una impresa ed una dirigenza incapace e truffaldina.

Emergono test falsi, dati sul rendimento delle macchine inattendibili, le stesse operazioni di voto sembrano affidate più al caso che allo scrupoloso registrare la volontà dei cittadini.

Una moralità da gestori di videopoker, un atteggiamento rapinoso verso le amministrazioni che acquistavano le infernali macchinette.
Il tutto in un clima da subcultura sindacale, ben lontano dalla regola della sana impresa.
Ogni genere di scorrettezza pare consentita, gli stessi impiegati non esitano a definire "la peggiore impresa dove abbia lavorato" i furboni della Diebold (E con la mobilità che c'è in Usa non è male).
Ancora una volta una grande azienda, alla quale in questo caso era affidato nientemeno che il voto, viene denunciata nei suoi comportamenti scorretti e criminali dalla voce del nulla.
L'arroganza di questi grandi imprenditori evidentemente non spaventa proprio tutti.
Per i grandi media la Diebold non esiste, eppure gestiva direttamente il voto di milioni di americani.
Autotutela.
C'è da attendersi un terremoto.

Controllate, ridete, indignatevi, fate....è molto istruttivo.
Bel materiale per qualsiasi copione :-)

Diebold troubles deepen


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Eric A. Smith
Hot Damn! Design
81-03-3959-5371
snowdog at juno.ocn.ne.jp



Diebold email: "Make vote printouts too costly for MD"

-- Scandals deepen for e-vote manufacturer



ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, December 12th ? An internal memo has just surfaced
suggesting e-vote manufacturer Diebold planned to overcharge the state
of Maryland and make voter printouts "prohibitively expensive".



An employee named "Ken" wrote the Jan. 3 letter suggesting the company
charge Maryland "out the yin" if legislators insisted on printouts.



Referring to a University of Maryland study critical of the company's
machines, he added: "[The State of Maryland] already bought the system.
At this point they are just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that
as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to
change the rules now and legislate voter receipts."



He goes on to say "...any after-sale changes should be prohibitively
expensive."



Delegate Karen S. Montgomery dropped the bombshell on Thursday amid
negotiations with Diebold over its touchscreen voting machines.



Montgomery, who has written a bill mandating voter-verifiable ballots,
described pressure to drop the issue, saying "scurrilous remarks" were
being levelled against proponents of the measure. She said she believes
the cost is being driven up to prevent anyone from insisting on
verifiable printouts.



Steven T. Dennis of Gazette.net broke the story yesterday; he said
spokesman David Bear deflected criticism by claiming the comments were
"the internal discussion of one individual and [do] not reflect the
sentiments or the position of the company."



Diebold, whose primary business has until recently been ATMs and
ticket-vending machines (all of which produce paper printouts), made
headlines last week when it dropped copyright-infringement suits against
Swarthmore students who had published thousands of its internal memos on
the Internet.



Prominent among the leaked memos is a missive to Global Election Systems
(now Diebold) -- baldly stating that 16 thousand Gore votes were
"disappeared" during the 2000 election. Author Lana Hires frantically
asks how she should explain the problem to an auditor:



<I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I
have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why
Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 [votes] when it was uploaded.
Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give
the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb."



Additional memos are equally candid and suggestive:



-more-





<For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Program them both so they
look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is
what we did in the last AT/AV demo.



<Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its
contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new.



<Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things
right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss
[sic] managed.



<Johnson County, KS will be doing Central Count for their mail in
ballots. They will also be processing these ballots in advance of the
closing of polls on election day. They would like to log into the Audit
Log an entry for Previewing any Election Total Reports. They need this,
to prove to the media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they
did not view or print any Election Results before the Polls closed.
However, if there is a way that we can disable the reporting
functionality, that would be even better.



Initially brought to light by activist Bev Harris, these and other
alarming disclosures have added weight to the arguments of computer
security experts and legislators nationwide, who say that Diebold's
machines (as well as those of rivals ES&S and Sequoia) pose a grave risk
to America's elections.



Harris received over 7,000 of the Diebold memos from an undisclosed
source in early September. For the past three years, she has been
arguing for greater security and accountability in electronic voting,
last year weathering a similar unsuccesful gag lawsuit from e-vote firm
ES&S.



A month after Harris recieved the memos she went public with them;
Diebold immediately launched a gag lawsuit, and Harris's ISP shut down
her activist site. A group of Swarthmore students and other activists
responded by spreading the memos across the Internet.



When Diebold threatened to sue under the auspices of the DMCA,
litigators from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU stepped
in to defend activists. Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich added
significant support by hosting the memos on his own website. Last week,
Diebold withdrew its lawsuits.



With a new ISP, Harris has resumed her activism, and her book "Black Box
Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," can currently be
downloaded for free from the site blackboxvoting.org.



Meanwhile, on Capital Hill, Congressman Rush Holt has also raised the
issue of security, sponsoring the "Voter Confidence and Increased
Accountability Act of 2003" (H.R. 2239), which calls for paper ballots,
surprise recounts and auditable software in voting machines.



But while Holt's bill adds a significant level of transparency to the
process, Harris says it doesn't go far enough. In a recent Buzzflash
interview, she said:



"The problem area, and it is a whopper, is that this bill doesn't attack
the crux of the issue, which is proper auditing -- and that is something
that is needed for any computerized system, including optical scan
machines.



The very first thing we need to do is get solid input from auditors who
are experienced in fraud detection.



While we are designing amendments to the bill, we also must get some
people with a solid grasp of history, because we need a voting system
that is in keeping with the vision of our founding fathers -- and this
is a public policy issue, not a computer issue. The most important thing
that we keep forgetting is that the founders, especially Thomas
Jefferson, felt that it was critical -- not "important," but CRITICAL to
democracy, to keep the vote directly in the hands of the people
themselves. Any solution which requires us to trust a handful of experts
will, sooner or later, result in the demise of our democracy.



-more-



That means we need to retain (and enforce) policies to tally the votes
at the polls, in front of observers. In some countries, they let as many
regular citizens as can fit in the room in to watch the physical
counting. It is this neighborhood tallying, and the open and public
nature of it, that is the embodiment of democracy."



In July, Harris demonstrated just how insecure a Diebold machine could
be, showing in a step-by-step expose how to reverse a federal election.
New Zealand's Scoop Media posted the illustrated account online.



Author Faun Otter and others have also raised the issue of impartiality
on the part of Diebold's board, which has contributed hundreds of
thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns. National headlines were
made when CEO Michael O'Dell, who recently hosted a $600,000 fundraiser
for Vice President Dick Cheney, announced in a Republican fundraising
letter that he was "committed to delivering Ohio's votes to the
President".



But controversy doesn't end with Diebold alone. Rival voting machine
company ES&S also came under scrutiny when it surfaced that it was run
by Chuck Hagel until two weeks before his own election. Senator Hagel
won by the biggest landslide in Nebraskan history; a victory the press
characterized as a "stunning upset". His company, ES&S, counted 83% of
the votes.



Hagel left out details of his ES&S involvement in his SEC filings, and,
when the discrepancy surfaced, two days after a closed-door meeting with
Hagel SEC legal counsel Victor Baird resigned and the matter was
dropped.



And Hagel, who prior to his stewardship of ES&S was head of the Private
Sector Council for George H.W. Bush, has bigger plans: Harris says the
domain name "Bush-Hagel2004.com" was purchased last year but
subsequently released and the Senator has already bought the rights to
"hagel2008.com" and "ChuckHagel2008.com".



Meanwhile Hagel campaign manager Michael McCarthy owns over 30% of
ES&S's parent company, and even the Senator hasn't fully divested
himself of ownership -- he still has a $5 million stake in ES&S parent
company the McCarthy Group.



Harris says there are firms offering comparatively secure systems --
competitors Avante, Accupol and Vogue, for example -- but some activists
say any machine offers an opportunity for vote tampering. They're
calling for a return to simple ballots, though such a solution is
unlikely -- Bush's Help America Vote Act mandates a nationwide migration
to electronic voting by 2006.



Secretary of state Kevin Shelley's recent declaration that all
California voting machines must provide printouts may prompt the rest of
the country to follow the west?s lead. But it may end up being a matter
of too little, too late, as Diebold, ES&S and Sequioa systems are
already in place in 37 states.



Harris, for one, is calling for a legal injunction to halt the use of
any insecure systems prior to the 2004 primaries. If her instincts are
right, a fierce battle may loom on the horizon -- a battle for the very
heart and soul of America's democracy.



Officials to phone, fax and email about secure voting:

Congress
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/



State elections boards:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/htdocs/dcforum/DCForumID29/47.html



State Attorneys General (party affiliations listed):
http://www.naag.org/ag/full_ag_table.php



-more-



State Election Officials
http://www.nased.org/



Members, Natl. Assoc. of County Recorders, Election Officials and
Clerks: http://www.nacrc.org/leadership/st_coord.htm



Penelope Bonsall, national director of the Office of Election
Administration Office of Election Administration
Federal Election Commission
999 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20463
vss at fec.gov
(202) 694-1095 (phone)
(202) 219-8500 (fax)



Online e-petitions EFF and VerifiedVoting.org:
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2821
http://www.verifiedvoting.org



Media Contacts:
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Television/News/
http://newslink.org
http://www.cantufind.com/american_newspapers.htm
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Radio/Formats/Talk_Radio/Networks/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Radio/Formats/Talk_Radio/Stations/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Television/Networks/Cable/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Television/Networks/
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Broadcasting/Information/