Largest investors in electronic voting are defense contractors?!?

[AtLiberty]

If anyone has more documentation, please provide... Thanks!

Democracy Fails: Corporations Win

Michael Miller
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Public Domain Progress

*snip*

The real winners November 2 are the military industrial complex, who will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar military trough and the corporate media, whose coffers were filled with billions of dollars for campaign ads.

And can we be sure we actually had a fair election among those who did vote? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including:

- Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council
- Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
- Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

So we have a CIA/military private firm that programmed the security in the voting machines for companies owned by some of the largest military contracts in the country.

*snip*

http://www.publicdomainprogress.info/2004/12/democracy-fails-corporations-win.html

[ElsewheresDaughter]

1. more importantly all memebers of SIAC board are also Republicans!

[Chi]

3. A fine bunch indeed!

Apparently...they all owe H.W. Bush a great deal of thanks!
A fine bunch indeed!

- Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council
- Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
- Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

=========
Robert Gates -- He served as assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser at the White House from Jan. 20, 1989, until Nov. 6, 1991.

=========
Bobby Ray Inman -- In 1981, Inman was nominated by President Reagan to be the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.

Since leaving the Navy, Inman has been involved in several
business ventures, served on a variety of corporate boards, and acted
as an outside advisor to three Presidents, the State Department, and
Congress.

========
Army Gen. Wayne Downing -- President Bush named retired Army General Wayne Downing as Assistant to the President and National Director for Combating Terrorism, on the National Security Council staff.

(Not so patisian on this one)
(me = Richard Clark)
Within months of replacing me, Wayne Downing quit the White House in frustration at the administration's continued bureaucratic response to the threat.

========
Adm. William Owens -- Between 1988 and 1991, Owens served as senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney, the senior military position in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Let me say it again ---

They are fascists. The interlinking of fascist economics with fascists politics, supported by fascist military.

Not everyone in the military is fascist. Most are good Americans, and many are good liberals. But the military/industrial complex is as fascist as Krupp. The fascists can't rule without the military, which they use to generate profits for their corporate arm, which profits they plow into the fascist politicians who support the growth of military contracts -- a closed circle.

Just what Ike warned us about.

[AtLiberty]

4. This is why we should promote meaningful election reform...

...this weekend at peace gatherings.

VVPBs are the path to the peace.

[Peace Patriot]

5. "VVPBs are the path to peace." Lots of evidence that this is true---

---that the will of the majority--which wants peace--is not being done.

57% of Americans oppose the Iraq war, now, today. (Feb. poll)
63% of Americans oppose torture under any circumstances. (Feb.)
63% disagree with Bush domestic policy in general (March)
58% disagree with Bush foreign policy in general (")
50% (vs 31%) say Democrats right on Social Security (")
63% (inclu 48% of conservatives) disapprove of Bush on the deficit (")
90% say deficit is very serious or somewhat serious problem (")

I think these numbers represent Kerry's margin over Bush. Bush does not represent the majority, on war policy or anything else. And when you put these opinion polls together with the invalid election we just held (non-transparent, non-verifiable), and the evidence of a wrong result (Kerry won the exit polls; odds of 10 million to one that the Bush official tally is correct, etc.), you are forced to conclude that, if Americans had their way, Bush would NOT be president; that their votes cannot have been counted accurately; and that the only way to get an accurate count is to remove these private, war profiteering, voting machine companies from the equation.

But I think VVPB is what we have to settle for, for the moment, not what we ultimately need. It will mean tremendous effort by the grass roots to get recounts. The official tallies will continue to be wrong. Maybe VVPB will put some check on the fraud but it won't stop it entirely. Too much $ at stake. So they'll put all their marbles into preventing recounts and auditing. And if they have the courts sewed up by the next election--which they might--it will be very hard to get any justice on recount issues. VVPB is just a tool. How do we reconstruct our democracy?

[Peace Patriot]

6. Thanks for this info, AtLiberty! -meant to say. n/t

[brindis_desala]

7. Maryland is a perfect example of why SAIC et al

should be BARRED from running our elections. The Maryland Election board approved their evoting systems EVEN THOUGH the had been proven to be highly vulnerable to tampering, satisfied with a wave of the hand from SAIC who managed to convince them that "everything was AOK"

The facts speak for themselves: Avi Rubin:
"The Maryland plan of action is seriously out of whack with the SAIC risk assessment," he added. "This is a system with serious problems. I would expect them to suspend plans to use the Diebold machines until SAIC releases a report that says the system is safe to use."

Rubin said elections in states that have already used these systems were open to compromise. These include Georgia, which used more than 20,000 of the Diebold machines in its gubernatorial election last November, as well as counties in Maryland and California.
http://www.votescam.com/Marylandevoting.php

The New York Times reports that "electronic voting machines from Diebold Inc. have computer security and physical security problems that might allow corrupt insiders or determined outsiders to disrupt or even steal an election." According to the NYTimes the report found these flaws:

Security experts found that the touch-screen voting machines all used the same key to two locks that protect them from tampering. With handheld computers and a little sleight of hand, they also found, the touch screens could be reprogrammed to make a vote for one candidate count for another, or results could be fouled so that a precinct's vote could not be used.


Dr. Avi Rubin,"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:
#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"

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. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked.

[AtLiberty]

8. Thanks, brindis

[garybeck]

9. WOW KICK