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Harris has found critical flaws in Diebold's voting software, and she's uncovered internal Diebold memos in which employees seem to suggest that the vulnerabilities are no big deal. The memos appear to be authentic

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I have to say I'd be more concerned if a) this wasn't from salon and b) they told us what these "critical flaws" were.

Hobbes

Posts: 10602 | Registered: Oct 1999  |  IP: Logged | 

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An open invitation to election fraud

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its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.

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But according to Bev Harris, a writer who has spent more than a year investigating the shadowy world of the elections equipment industry, the replacement technologies the court cited may be worse -- much worse

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The problems Harris found in Diebold's system are perhaps the best proof yet that electronic voting systems aren't ready for prime time

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It seems to me that they really are getting pretty doomsdayish for an article whose only proof is a set of "internal memos" that say the problems aren't very bad.

Hobbes

Posts: 10602 | Registered: Oct 1999  |  IP: Logged | 

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Tell me about the flaw you uncovered in the Diebold system.

Well, we uncovered a few problems in the memos, but the first one that we published specifically supported the flaw that I wrote about in July of 2003. And to my surprise these memos admitted they were aware of the flaw, and it was actually brought to their attention by Ciber labs -- which is a certifier -- in October 2001, and they made a decision not to fix it.

So it was brought to their attention two years ago?

Right.

So what was the flaw?

Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.

So you can break in and then hide your tracks.

You don't even need to break in. It will open right up and in you go. You can change the votes and you can overwrite the audit trail. It doesn't keep any record of anything in the audit trail when you're in this back door, but let's say you went in the front door and you didn't want to have anything you did there appear anywhere -- you can then go in the backdoor and erase what you did.

Who would have access to this? Are we talking about elections officials?

A couple situations. Obviously anybody who has access to the computer, whether that's the election supervisor, their assistants, the IT people, the janitor -- anybody who has access to the computer can get into it.

Where is this computer -- is there one per county?

Yes, there's one per county.

The other situation would be supposing someone gets in by either hacking the telephone system or by going backwards in through the Internet, because the Internet does connect to these GEMS computers, even though they deny it. A lot of the press watches election results come in on the Web and what they're watching is actually being uploaded directly off the GEMS computer.

These computers in the counties are connected to the Internet, and someone can go through the Internet --

-- and just go into it, correct. It would be as the results are uploading. You see, they make a big point of the fact that there's no Internet connection to the voting machine, but that's sort of parsing the issue. That's true, in the polling places there's no Internet connection, but the voting machines connect into the GEMS machine through modem. And the GEMS machine then connects to the Internet, and that's what the press watches.

And somebody who knows about this can go to each one of those GEMS machines and have access to the vote and change the results?

Yes, as they're coming in.

What led you to believe that there might be this flaw in the first place?

Well I work with about 22 computer programmers who have been looking at this stuff -- I'm not that brilliant. Immediately when they began looking at the GEMS program they began commenting on the fact that it has no -- it's something called referential integrity. And what that means is that there are many different ways that it can become vulnerable to hacking. It has to do with how one part of the database is hooked into the next part.

I got a call from one of our more brilliant computer programmers -- he's got quite a few advanced degrees -- and he called me on a weekend and he said, "I want you to go to your computer." And he walked me through it just like a support tech does -- open this panel, click this, do this, do that. And as I'm doing this it was appalling how easy it was. Once you know the steps, a 10-year-old can rig an election. In fact it's so easy that one of our activists, Jim March in California, put together a "rig-a-vote" CD. He's been going around showing it to elections officials, and now this CD has been making its way to Congress members.

It's shocking. All you do is double-click the icon. You go backwards through the Internet to that county computer, and if you have Microsoft Access on your machine you can walk right into that election database while it's open. It's configured for multiple access at the same time. You can be in there changing things and you can change anything you want.

There's nothing -- no security in this?

No, in fact in the memo, [Ken Clark, an engineer at Diebold] says specifically that they decided not to put a password on it because it was proving useful. They were using the back door to do end runs around the voting program. And he named two places where they were doing this, Gaston County, N.C., and King County, Wash.

Right, in the memo he says, "King county is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before." What does that mean? Why would the counties find this useful?

I have no idea what they were doing. [But] because you can change anything on the database, they could have been doing anything, whether it was nefarious or just fixing a stupid thing that they had done. The problem is this: You should set up the program so that anything you do is going to be recorded and watched and audited -- it's official. There's nothing you can do that's legitimate by going into a back door that never records anything. If you need to go change some vote total because they came out wrong, that needs to be done publicly and the candidates should be aware of it. You don't do that by going into a back door.

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Posts: 81 | Registered: May 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

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OK, so we should talk about how Diebold responded to your posting these memos.

As soon ... a few days after we posted them they sent us a cease-and-desist letter -- interestingly authenticating the memos and laying claim to them, telling us that they were copyrighted. So they claimed copyright and they told us to take them off the Web.

Right. By claiming copyright they're saying they own them, so that seems to indicate they are authentic memos.

Exactly.

So what's your response to their copyright claim?

Well, I don't believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they're copyrighted.

Do you really think that their memos show intent to break the law?

Oh yes, yes. The Ken Clark memo is absolutely clear. It says they have been aware of these security flaws for years and they have chosen not to correct it. He says something to the effect of, find out what it will take to make this problem go away. [Referring to a voting equipment certifier, Clark tells a colleague to "find out what it is going to take to make them happy."] He says if you don't mention [a problem] you may "skate through" certification. And talking about doing "end runs" is not a good thing either.

And what's disturbing is the very same thing that these memos are talking about -- overwriting the audit log -- in the presentation in which they sold their machines to the state of Georgia they specifically bring up the audit log and say that no human can change it. This shows they made fraudulent claims, frankly.

There's a thing called a Qui Tam suit which citizens can file if they feel that federal money has been spent based on fraudulent claims. I haven't done it because it gives you a gag order and I refuse to be gagged even for billions of dollars, but these things are wide open for such a thing. If you go and look at the sales documents, they made one claim after the next.

So because the memos show what you say is clear intent to break the law, that's why you don't think that they have a valid copyright claim.

Well, the other issue is an overriding public interest. We are told that we are to depend on these systems in 37 states and yet they are admitting that they are easy to tamper with.

Are you going to respond to them?

Well, these memos are on the Web in so many locations that we took them off and put a link to someone else who put them up. So that fulfills our requirement under the law.

But do you know if it's possible for you to face any --

-- any retaliation? It's certainly possible that they will try retaliation, and if so I will use the full extent of the law available to me for full discovery of everything. And I think that going through discovery will become a very uncomfortable process and perhaps put some people in jail ... Not on our side, by the way.

At this point activists are now taking these memos from various places on the Web into their state attorneys general and asking for an investigation, and since Diebold has now authenticated them it's no longer, "I found this on the Web," it's, "I found this on the Web and Diebold says they wrote them."

When Diebold is put to greater scrutiny, won't the elections officials say, "We won't go with Diebold, but we'll use touch-screen systems from this company or this company?"

Well, I think that won't fly in the long run because the same illness is afflicting all of them, and that is that they are not auditable and secret. The solution is pretty simple and obvious, and that is to get properly auditable machines. A lot of the security stuff goes away -- the most bulletproof system that I know anyone has come up with is one that is a touch screen but then prints a ballot that the voter verifies.

Whatever the software is doing, if you have something with a really bulletproof audit -- the voter verifying the paper, and the computer tally -- if those two things match, you've got a pretty good confidence level.

If Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia want to come up with a nice paper trail, voter-verified paper trail that's a touch screen, I'm supporting them. But right now they're fighting it tooth and nail.

How are they fighting it?

For one thing they had a meeting on Aug. 22 -- the voting machine manufacturers and the Election Center [a nonprofit management division of the National Association of State Election Directors, which handles part of the voting-machine certification process] and a lobbyist. The whole purpose of this meeting was to try to get the public to figure out how to accept machines without a paper trail.

How did you find out about this meeting?

Actually, this is kind of funny. My publisher found out about this. It was a teleconference and he just called in under his own name and nobody asked him where he was from, and he sat in on the whole meeting. [Harris' publisher, David Allen, posted notes on the meeting on his Web site.]

The meeting had quite a few things of concern in it. They were being told that as an industry they had to come up with $200,000 in seven days in order to come up with a P.R. campaign to whitewash their P.R. problem, as they put it.

So apparently they feel they have a problem?

Yeah, they do. And in this particular meeting, one of the things they discuss is, they say, "Now we need to make sure the press never finds out this because we don't want them to know we have a problem." [According to David Allen, Harris Miller, the president of the Information Technology Association of America, said, "We just didn't want a document floating around saying the election industry is in trouble, so they decided to put together a lobbying campaign."]

Was there anything discussed about addressing the problem?

Absolutely, what they want to do is not fix the problem, but they agreed to fix the perception of the problem.

Did they indicate what they thought would be a problem with printing paper ballots?

No. It was a foregone conclusion that we don't want paper.

But they say that they would try to convince the public that having no paper is fine?

Right.

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Posts: 4482 | Registered: May 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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The transparency of the open-source community is exactly why their software will never be adopted for something like this. There is still a prevailing notion that having the source available is an extremely dangerous security hazard, as anyone will be able to examine the code for vulnerabilities. I fear hat notion will remain prevelant as long as campaign finance is legal.

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Posts: 4482 | Registered: May 2000  |  IP: Logged |