Diebold Shocks Iowa Computer Scientist! Voting Machine Emergency Declared–Again
Just as states are beginning to grasp the implications of the Hursti hack in a mock Florida election in December (Iowa has recently adopted “emergency” rules to protect against a Hursti hack in the upcoming primary), ANOTHER EMERGENCY has been declared in the last few days.
University of Iowa computer scientist and voting machine expert Doug Jones told a California newspaper,
“All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design.”
This time the experts are not telling us what the problem is in any detail. They just stick to metaphors as Jones did here:
“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental. In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door, Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”
Even the news reporter for that story withheld some of what he learned in writing the story, because “exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.”
The story is about Diebold touchscreen machines. More than a thousand Iowa precincts now have these so-called voting machines.
The security hole was discovered by Blackboxvoting.org with the help of an intrepid election official in Nevada named Bruce Funk. Funk asked BBV and Security Innovation to examine his Diebold equipment when he became suspicious of it.
According to Insidebayarea.com, a California source on which this post is based (the link is not working for me but everyone else is using it, so maybe it will work for you)
Pennsylvania, California and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital.
I have asked the Iowa Secretary of State to confirm this.
The association of the various state election directors (NASED) has a voting systems board chaired by the Iowa election director, Sandy Steinbach. They are looking into this latest revelation, according to NASED chief Kevin Kennedy of Wisconsin. Just recently Steinbach issued a NASED memo regarding the previous Diebold security hole uncovered by Harry Hursti in December.
May 11th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
I hope before these machines are all reloaded with a new bootloader and OS that somebody takes a moment to backup those items. It would be interesting to see how the loaded copies of both compare to original copies…just to see if and how widespread tampering may happening.
May 13th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
[…] Iowa is jumping head first into the shallow end of the voting pool.* Just like their zoning tendancies, some short-sighted Iowa planners are going Diebold because they’re enamoured with anything new and nifty. […]
August 11th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
And this happens just after Ron Paul’s supporters tried to take them to court in order to block the use of Diobold machines due to their proven inaccuracy and ability to be hacked.
A federal judge of course overruled on the case in favor of the voting machines.
And it just so happens that we have an error on one of the machines??
Are we to believe this is all coincidence? How naive do you have to be!
This is an outrage, and a blatant slap in the face to American voters everywhere.
This should put the final nail in the coffin for anyone who think electronic computerized voting machines are reliable!
A very concerned citizen,
-Nathan