hava birdmad http://fecweb1.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) The purpose of this law was, ostensibly, to avoid any repeats of the Florida election fiasco (some might say "election theft") of 2000. Legislation was oassed in 2002 to move elections operations from obsolete punch-card voting to newer, more automated means. Interestingly enough, of the four dominant companies in the election machine business, all are backed or run by people with overt partisan political ties, Three Republican and one Democrat. Of these four, the two most domninant are both linked to the Republican party. Ominously, Walden O'Dell, one of the chief executives of Diebold, the largest of the elections systems manufacturers, said at a meeting for George W. Bush's high dollar fundraisers/contributors ("Rangers" and "Pioneers" who raise or generate from $100K up to and above $200K respectively) to Bush's re-election campaign that he was commited to delivering the electoral votes from Ohio (O'Dell's home state) to the (p)Resident. State governments were under pressure to adopt and implement voting system upgrades to get a share of Federal funds under HAVA and more than anyone else's Diebold's system software has proven it susceptible to potential tampering at several levels, a fact that Diebold has been anxious to keep out of the public eye. This would have worked if a hacker from New Zealand hadn't stumbled upon an unsecure Diebold FTP server and found several gigabytes of data in the form of company memos and e-mails (as well as a complete copy of a version of the system's source code) wherein frequent topics of discussion are the various security vulnerablilities of the system software itself. Couple this with the fact that there is no verifiable accounting/audit trail in their Direct Report (DRE) system set-up, it means that either from within or without, anyone who knows what they are doing could potentially compromise election results. Between the partisan politics of a key figure within the industry leader, the vulnerability of their system and the heavy handed legal tactics they attempted, until recently, to use on activists who tried to raise public awareness about the potential problems with Diebold equipmen, one could almost stand to wonder if HAVA shouldn't more honestly be called HAVFBWTWTONA (Help-America-Vote-For-Bush-Whether-They-Wanted-To-Or-Not Act) [Up until earlier this week, Diebold, through its lawyers attempted to supress the memos and documents through what has been perceived by some as an abuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and trying to claim that the materials were protected under intellectual property clauses of the DMCA, to this end, ISP's and website operators who published the the material were threatened with legal action and monetary penalties and their sites were forced down in compliance with the "demand-pull-down" of the "offending" (to Diebold) sites in accordance with the DMCA. Only through a campaign of aggressive circulation of the material including having it posted on his campaign site by Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, with a challenge to Diebold to back off of their attempt to cover up the issue through copyright law did the company relent and drop the threat of legal action against the universities and activist sites who had posted the documents. Oddly enough, this story has been buried in the business and tech-science sections of most major news outlets. Sad, really, people are more interested with the fucking Michael_Jackson case than they are with the potential that somebody might be stealing what's left of American democracy right out from under their fucking noses --www.blackboxvoting.org --www.workingforchange.com 031205 ... ... get_out_the_vote 031209 what's it to you? who go blather from