Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines source code leaked again

Diebold source code leaked again
Another breach on the e-voting front as elections near
Robert McMillan
Computerworld
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=government&articleId=9004339&taxonomyId=13&intsrc=kc_top

October 21, 2006 (IDG News Service) -- Source code to Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines has been leaked once again.

On Wednesday, former Maryland state legislator Cheryl C. Kagan was anonymously given disks containing source code to Diebold's BallotStation and GEMS (Global Election Management System) tabulation software used in the 2004 elections. Kagan, a well-known critic of electronic voting, is Executive Director of the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Olney, Maryland.

The disks were created and distributed by two federal voting machine testing labs run by Ciber Inc. and Wyle Laboratories Inc. They had been testing systems on behalf of the state of Maryland, Diebold said in a statement.

This is not the first time that Diebold source code has been leaked. In early 2003, Diebold critic Bev Harris uncovered similar source code while conducting research using Google Inc.'s search engine.

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They found, for example, that it would be easy to program a counterfeit voting card to work with the machines and then use it to cast multiple votes inside the voting booth.

Diebold says it has since introduced security enhancements to its products, but the fact that the company's sensitive source code has again leaked out is not a good sign, according to Avi Rubin, a computer science professor with Johns Hopkins and one of the authors of the 2003 report.

Good to see this story being disseminated throughout
the news outlets....

of things, changeable as can be. And yet they insist on treating it like it was engraved in steel plates so they can pretend it is a form of "property" like land or an automobile. Unless you give it physical form, a printout, it is even more ephemeral than a book, you can change it any way you like and nobody can tell what you did or why you did it.

...or, it could be a Rovian plant. How so, you may ask?

Imagine that there is found on those disks no evidence of diebold 'bad programming'.

So, there's that.

Otherwise, should the computer wizards uncover such damning information that we know would nail diebold to the wall, this could be just the thing that brings it all to a rapid boil.

"you can change it any way you like and nobody can tell what you did or why you did it."

Several studies have shown that code can be altered after the machine is loaded with the source code. So, we still have them by the short hairs.

Still, I don't trust that Rove and diebold didn't cook this up. Hope I am way off base, tho.

Somehow we will get screwed!!

'bad' code...that at least is not 'bad' news (to us, anyway), right? (assuming it can be properly and honestly evaluated...source code isn't all that hard to decipher)

And if some flaky stuff, back-doors, dynamically alterable or otherwise suspicious is found, that's good (for us) too, isn't it?

it doesn't follow that what is actually running on the machines is good. What's on the machines could have been compiled from different source code, or there could be additional code besides what was compiled from that source, or the operating system could be compromised in some way, or the hardware could be compromised in some way, or God only knows what else.

Told me to vote absentee ballot. We have these machines for the first time and there is going to be plenty of confusion besides the problems with the machines themselves.

You are correct. Either way, the fact that its in the m$m is good for us and bad for them.

The entire look and feel by redeveloping if you already have thier code, you can just change it.

These machines are so bad on so many levels. I'm ashamed of Maryland and the history of these machines here.

-Hoot

You could live in Georgia. Believe it or not Georgia is infected by diebold even worse than Maryland. At least in Maryland they have a clue.

Yeah, yall have just about convinced me that rove, even if he cooked this one up, ain't gonna like the way its served.

if your in GA. I still don't know if they made that clear yet.