:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 10.29.2003 ::
:: Diebold update ::
From Wired News:
E-Vote Protest Gains Momentum
By Kim Zetter
Swarthmore College students embroiled in a legal battle against voting machine-maker Diebold Election Systems have received a ground swell of support from universities and colleges nationwide.
The memos suggest the company knew about security problems with its voting machines long before it sold the machines to various states, including California, Georgia and, most recently, Maryland. The memos have popped up on numerous websites since August, despite attempts by Diebold to force ISPs and webmasters to remove them from the Internet.
Last week, Swarthmore students launched a civil disobedience campaign against Diebold after the company sent a student and the college's ISP a cease-and-desist letter demanding they remove the memos, which the student had posted online. Diebold cited copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.
The Swarthmore campaign aims to keep one step ahead of Diebold's cease-and-desist letters by moving the memos and links to the memos from one computer and one website to another.
(Ivan Boothe, of Why War?) said his group had received supportive e-mails from lawyers and professors from various schools, as well as Swarthmore alumni. He is encouraging more students and schools to post links to the sites that contain the memos.
Members of a group in Maryland called the Campaign for Verifiable Voting is calling on officials in their state to amend its contract with Diebold to require machines recently purchased by the state to offer a voter-verifiable receipt. "We want integrity in our election process," said Robert Ferraro, director of the Maryland campaign. "If you're going to use these machines then the only way to verify is with a voter-verified paper trail. How can the electorate trust an election if you don't have the ability to do a recount?"
Activists also want voting machine manufacturers to open their voting systems to public scrutiny.
Since the companies are privately held, they are allowed to keep their software proprietary and closed to the public.
"The public should know how these machines work and be able to do independent analysis on them every step of the way," Boothe said. "A lot of us are still uncomfortable with private companies running something so basic to democracy."
posted by me
:: 10:51:00 AM [+] ::
...
