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Edited on Wed Mar-10-04 05:33 PM by BevHarris
This is worth the $4.50 cover price, folks. Go buy it -- lots of interview quotes never before seen, including one with a Finnish hacker and a whole new rendition of the Phil Foster (Sequoia) indictment, with details from his own brother-in-law.
* * * * * *
"Strangely, another function allowed anyone with access to the GEMS central server to create minus votes. Why...would there ever be cause to record negative votes in an electronic voting machine? Later, Diebold spokesman David Bear would offer this response:
"'Yes, negative votes can be entered into GEMS. If for some reason an election administrator determines they have a need to enter negative votes, that is for them to determine, and we do not believe the system should prevent that.'"
* * * * * *
"Here was a Diebold engineer admitting that the system was not secure. Not to mention encouraging the recipient of his memo to hide information from the labs. ('We don't have another version ,' says Diebold's David Bear when asked about Clark's memo. 'I don't know what he specifically meant..')
"Who was 'Jane'? And what did he mean by saying that the Access back door got 'people' out of a bind, and that 'King County is famous for it'? Did this mean that the back door through Microsoft Access could be used to tinker with vote tallies?"
* * * * * *
"If O'Dell was guilty of poor judgment, no one could accuse him of being a criminal. The same could not be said, Andy Stephenson soon determined ... of everyone who worked for Diebold Election Systems and the company it had purchased in 2002, Texas-based G.E.S.
"One director of G.E.S., Michael K. Graye, was arrested in 1996 in Canada on tax-fraud and money-laundering charges that involved $18 million. Before he could be sentenced, he was indicted in the U.S. for stock fraud. He shuttled between prisons in New York and Ontario for 18 months, before pleading guilty in April 2003 to the tax-fraud charges in Canada.
"After Graye had left G.E.S., it operated without further taint for some time. but strangely, in 2000, G.E.S. hired Jeffrey Dean as a senior vice president, according to S.E.C. filings, despite the fact that he had served time on 23 felony counts of embezzlement involving, as a court document cites, 'a high degree of sophisticattion and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system that defendant maintained for the victim...
"one of Dean's realms of responsibility was King County, Washington. Was it the same King County famous for 'fancy footwork,' according to Diebold engineer Ken Clark? Almost certainly, given that this was the only King County served by Diebold machines..."
"'Now, imagine,' says Harris, 'there's only about 20 guys in Vancouver. If (G.E.S.) wanted to clean up their act, why hire another shady character? And then his friend, John Elder? At that point you've lost me.'
"Elder...is a convicted cocaine trafficker who served nearly five years in the same prison where Dean was incarcerated. Not long after Dean joined G.E.S., his fellow ex-con came aboard to oversee the printing of paper ballots and punch cards produced for several states.
* * * * * *
(and, quoting Georgia's Rob Behler):
"'They had stacks and stacks of machines on pallets that had failed, bombed out. I went down to the DeKalb County warehouse, one of the larger ones, with Greg Loe, second in charge to Diebold president Bob Urosevich, he and I together, because he wanted to see the machines. I had explained, 'Don't expect a lot--they're broke, man. They do crazy crap, and they don't do the same crazy crap twice.'
"...at the company's direction, he assembled two "SWAT" teams of five or six people each to go in vans...to debug the machines before Williams and his team got to them. 'Wherever they were headed,' Behler says, 'we'd get ahead of them and try to lower the failure rate...'"
* * * * *
"'Think of D.E.S. as a door-key system,' (Dr. Doug) Jones explains. 'Everyone who wants to use my door needs a copy of the same key.' That, he explains, is the issue of 'key management.' Other doors would need keys of their own. But not Diebold's.
"'Diebold was using the same key for every bit of encrypted code,' he marvels. 'In other words, my office-door key was being used for every door in the university!'"
(By the way, the issue of the hard-coded password and the inappropriate use of D.E.S. was FIRST exposed right here on Democratic Underground. One of the people who first posted a detailed description of this was someone I've seen posting here in the last couple days. Democratic Underground "broke" the news on this more than a month before the famous Johns Hopkins/Rice report with Avi Rubin et. al.)
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