Election can be stolen in “under a minute” with Diebold machines

By Michael Hampton at Homeland Stupidity.com

Researchers at Princeton University announced Wednesday that common electronic voting machines can be subverted by installing software which undetectably alters vote totals and, as a computer virus, spreads itself from one voting machine to the next.

Computer science professor Edward Felten, along with graduate students Ariel Feldman and J. Alex Halderman, published a paper in which they demonstrated the ease of installing malicious software onto a Diebold AccuVote-TS touchscreen voting machine which would alter vote totals in a real election, but be undetectable to election officials by allowing the logic and accuracy tests to pass, and by deleting itself from the voting machines at the end of the election.

“This report should finally put to rest the myth that the current generation of e-voting machines adequately protects the integrity of the electoral process,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Matt Zimmerman.

And to add insult to injury, the team posted videos of the entire process of hacking a Diebold touchscreen voting machine.

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures. — Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

Diebold Election Systems marketing director Mark Radke said the researchers should have contacted the company, because they have since updated their system to address some of the issues raised.

“I’m concerned by the fact we weren’t contacted to educate these people on where our current technology stands,” Mark Radke said.

Radke also question why Felten hadn’t submitted his paper for peer review, as is commonly done before publishing scientific research.

Felten said he and his colleagues felt it necessary to publish the paper as quickly as possible because of the possible implications for the November midterm elections. — Associated Press

Considering that Diebold election equipment is about as secure as Swiss cheese, as confirmed by numerous reports over the last couple of years, that the company doesn’t care about election security, and that that’s why they were run out of North Carolina, I don’t think it will mean all that much that the researchers didn’t wait for peer review. You can peer review it for yourself by watching the researchers’ video of the process.

Now don’t you feel good about your vote last Tuesday? The Brad Blog has documented instances all over the country where elections have gone haywire and election officials have been sent scrambling to implement emergency security measures because of security problems such as this.

“The challenges presented by the introduction of electronic voting are systemic and require a systemic response,” Zimmerman said. “Paper trails, regular audits, and robust physical security are a good start, as are improved pollworker training and radically upgraded machine certification requirements and procedures. H.R. 550, making its way through the House of Representatives, would go a long way towards implementing many of these fixes on a nationwide basis.”

As for Diebold, one funny YouTube video seems to sum it up:

Update: Felten writes on his blog that the locks on the Diebold AccuVote-TS machines which allow access to the memory card slot can be opened with a key anyone can buy on the Internet, such as the key to a hotel minibar.

Planets and stars by size...

Lakota secede from the U.S.

From news.com.au:

THE Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the US.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,'' long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said.

A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department, and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the US, some of them more than 150 years old.

The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free - provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Mr Means said.

The treaties signed with the US were merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists said.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.
"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution,'' which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

``It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,'' said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because ``it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row,'' Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

``We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,'' Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US ``annexation'' of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere ``facsimiles of white people,'' said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies - less than 44 years - in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 per cent above the norm for the US; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

Ron Paul stands up to Neil Cavuto, Fox News.

Ron Paul stands up to Fox News trying to make him look bad. Finally, someone with common sense and the ability to think on his feet.

You sir, have no business being President.

Dr. Ron Paul cured my apathy.

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US Army spreads good will.

I'm sure now these Iraqi civilians understand how helpful we're being in renovating their country.