Terminally Incoherent

Here are some interesting links I picked up from an assortment of my feeds:

• Electronic voting machine failures cause delays in hundreds of precincts
• GOP candidate uses Federal Emergency Alert system to air his advertisement on stations who were not airing his advertisements
• GOP breaks law to trick voters into thinking robocalls come from Democrats
• African Americans are getting phone calls telling them if they voted for Harold Ford Jr. in the August primary, they don’t need to vote for him again now
• Election Fraud Suspected In Utah. Four Times The Population Registered To Vote.
• Tere is evidence of organized GOP effort to suppress Democratic vote, including calls to citizens claiming they will be arrested if they vote.
• San Diego County Registrar Assigns High School Students as Touchscreen Inspectors and Sends Thousands of Diebold Machines Home with the Students on ‘Sleepovers’ for Weeks on End
• FBI looking into possible voter intimidation in VA
• Greg Plast explains how GOP will steal the Election
• Denver precincts suffer from Diebold machine failures: some are running out of provisional ballots; voters must wait at least 2 hours in line.
• Diebold machines in NJ only allow to vote for incumbent
• Minority voters threatened with arrests if they show up at the ballots in Colorado
• Irritated voter smashes Diebold machine in a fit of rage
• Mislabeled sample ballots labeling GOP candidates as Dems handed out in Maryland
• Big Oil and Tabaco companies distribute phony misleading voter guides
• Conservative radio host urges listeners to flood the Democratic hotline for reporting voting problems with crank calls
• State by state rundown of election issues

And this is just some of the stuff that has been uncovered and reported today. I’m sure we will find more evidence of corruption, ballot stuffing, and dirty play in the days to come (on both sides of the aisle).

The main issue here seems to be the fact that Diebold boxes are unreliable, to say the least. They are also not being maintained and supervised correctly.

It seems that voters casting early ballots using the Diebold machines in Florida already have reported persistent bugs and glitches preventing them from casting their votes correctly. Apparently most of the faulty machines would assign the votes cast for Democratic candidates to Republicans:

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

Heh… How convenient. But you know what is really scary? This is apparently a very common issue, and the poll workers are actually expected recalibrate these machines on the spot to realign the screen and correct these issues:

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it’s not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot — essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

So let me get this straight. The Diebold machines are so unreliable that their touch screens go out of sync all the time, registering the wrong votes. The poll workers are expected to frequently reboot and recalibrate them when the voters complain… But how many voters will notice these glitches? How many will bother to stick around and wait while the machine is calibrated? These machines are crap! Why the fuck do people insist on using them?

Besides, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to notice that this flaw could be abused. After all, if you want to install a stealth vote stealing program on one of these machines you simply need to insert a specially prepared memory card into the slot on the side of the machine and reboot. Loading malicious patch takes 20-30 seconds tops, not counting the time to open the lock protecting the card interface. Of course we now know that the key used in Diebold machines is a standard office furniture key design used in mini-bars and desk drawers. You can buy Diebold compatibile keys on ebay or from your local office furniture store.

So, in order to rig a machine a poll worker simply needs to “notice” that the screen sync is out of whack, and then simply slip a card carrying a vote stealing code into the machine using a key purchased on ebay, and reboot while pretending to do the calibration steps.

Logistically speaking, rigging elections in Diebold districts is easier than ever. It is relatively hard to loose or destroy hundreds of paper ballots without anyone finding out about it. It is extremely easy to do the same with electronic votes, provided that you can prepare a vote stealing patch similar to the one Ed Felten and the Princeton crew developed during their testing projects.

In other words, if you live in a Diebold district, cast an absentee vote instead of using the machine, just to be on the safe side…

This is possibly the scariest thing that you will read this Halloween: Bush just signed a provision which will remove any limits over military involvement in domestic law enforcement effectively allowing him to declare martial law at any time and for any reason.

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which (…) will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Step by step we are getting closer and closer to becoming a totalitarian fascist state. We really need to get these idiots out of the government. Come on people - vote Democrat. Elect some people who can start fixing up this mess. Stop this descent into madness now.

Oh, and if your district is using diebold machines just do the absentee ballot instead - the machines in swing states are bound to be rigged. After all it only takes 20-30 seconds to flash the firmware of that thing.

Here is a story for you:

1. In 2003 a security researcher Bruce Sheiner pointed out that the anyone can print a fake boarding pass at home
2. In February of 2005 the Slate magazine published an article describing the same security problem in detail
3. In April of 2006, NY Senator Charles E. Shumer mentioned these security issues on his website and sent multiple letters about the issue to TSA.
4. In October of this year, Christopher Soghoian a PHD student at Indiana U created a web application allowing people to print fake passes directly from his website
5. Finally, after 3 years someone in the government notices the issue. Congressman Edward Markey totally freaks out and… demands that Christopher Soghoian to be immediately arrested.
6. Today, FBI paid Christopher a visit and politely told him to take down his site.
7. Boarding passes remain insecure…

Apparently, Christopher was not labeled an enemy combatant, and he was not sent to a secret torture prison without a sentence. But he came very close to it. The next person who implements an application that exploits known vulnerabilities in the airport security systems may not be so lucky.

Can someone explain to me how in the hell did we manage to make airline travel 90% less convenient in the last few years, but we haven’t fixed the most fundamental, rudimentary security issues that have been publicaly known since 2003?

The sad part here is that if Christopher’s app would not end up on the front page of digg, slashdot and boingboing and in the wired magazine no one would care about this. The only reason anything has been done is because some jackass in congress felt embarrassed that the story of the gigantic failure to secure our airports is making rounds in the tech news networks.

The response to the problem is also a classic - punish the security researcher, make his findings inaccessible to general public and then just hope that no other programmer in the world can figure out how to exploit the same vulnerability.

With an attitude like that, we will never have good airport security.

Update Sun Oct 29 22:14:53 EST 2006 → apparently FBI busted Christoper’s door in the dead of the night, ransacked his house, confiscated all his computers and other personal belongings. This is after he took down the website, and was interrogated. This sucks. Sigh…

tags: security, airports, flying, boarding pass, fbi, stupid, government, tsa, politics

Given the two following political scandals, please tell me which one is more significant, and disturbing:

1. George W. Bush killing hebeus corpus and gaining despotic powers
2. Mark Foley sending dirty emails to congressional pages

If you will look back on the media coverage of these two events, you can clearly see that the Foley story was huge. It even warranted the use of the much maligned -gate suffix. Media was raging on about Foley-gate for weeks digging up dirt, and retelling the juicy details over and over again.

The outrageous presidential power grab, or a sound-byte. What has happened to our priorities?

comic © idrewthis

Sex, sells - we all knew that. But why are we so fucking obsessed with it? How come every time one of or elected officials does something sexual it is a national crisis? How come we care more about the sexual preferences and perversions of our officials, than about how good of a job they are doing running this country on our behalf?

The nation freaks out about things that are quite meaningless in the long run, but chooses to ignore when really important shit goes down. We have become a complacent community of self congratulating, celebrity obsessed, sex driven couch potatoes. Gray’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives and American Idol take precedence over the pursuit of freedom, liberty and happiness. We need to wake up, shape up, and take our heads out of our asses.

One day your child or grand child will ask you: “Where were you when they took away our freedom?”. What are you going to tell them then?