VOTE: Diebold Source Code: Corruption!

The Association of Computer Machinery, one of the oldest "techie" guilds, had been a very vocal proponent for verified paper trails e-voting. They have also been super critical about any attempt to do it otherwise. This is why: source code that was never fully QA tested, never given to Federal oversight, was to tabulate too large a portion of key state votes. Here is proof that it was designed to be corrupted by using DES encryption - an industry standard abandoned 7 years ago as being unsound and breeched.




I strongly recommend speaking with any friend or family member in the IT field; particularly any that are programmers. The development of proprietary source code and processes is what my industry's financial solvency is predicated on. Any product is put through stress testing and Quality Assurance before it ever gets to the Beta stage. That a company with contracts totaling in the 100's of millions of dollars would somehow use an encryption that is covered in Applications Programming 101, is completely unbelievable.
This was an intentional flaw.
As by the link provided, DES encryption was easily broken with off the shelf hardware over five years ago - we're much further along now. Here's further expert commentary : "DES is a standard that was created in 1975 but it was kept artificially weak by the NSA. The authors wanted it to be 128 bits or more, but they kept it at 64 bits (54 actual key bits, the rest is parity, I think). It was safe at the time and stayed relatively safe for a few decades. Banks & government agencies used it for classified (but not top secret) stuff. The only entities with enough crunching power to break it were probably the NSA, the KGB, etc.. It is trivial to break it with modern hardware and nobody uses anything less than tripleDES anymore. DES is a very obsolete standard. Even with a good implementation, it would be pretty trivial to brute-force the key of a DES system if you put a little resources into it (off the shelf hardware), although it could've posed a problem of dealing with the sheer number if all voting machines had had a different encryption keys. But it was not the case."



Related News Links:
www.eff.org

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Thanks Bout Time. Excellent hard information. Ya gotta wondah, dontcha? ...Should we assume Kerry's lawyer knows this? FYI - according to an email going around

Cameron KERRY, John Kerry's brother at his law firm at the address [email protected]

Cynthia L. Butler
BUTLER LAW FIRM, P.C.
1717 K St. NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036


www.johnkerry.com...

Wow, how convenient that is. I'm sure 'they' knew this would be found it. But as we can see, who would actually listen. This is just too perfect for 'them.'

Great post Bout Time!

I'm not very impressed by this article for a number of reasons.

First, the line of C code as presented would not compile, perhaps there
are some typo's present?

DES is still widely used in comercial software. The systems that take
your credit card transactions at most stores across the country use DES
(with only a small percentage using tripple DES). So the statement that
DES is no longer used is false.

The line of code (which is actually a macro) by itself means nothing. If
this is all they could come up with that is suspect then I don't think they
have anything. This does not explain how GWB was getting more votes
than he should have.

If the Diabold software was "leaked" then it is likely that the version
released does not reflect the actual version used for voting. What better
way to spread disinformation: Release a doctored version with the
bias removed to cover the fraud.

Actually, a pre-compiled version of the software can be downloaded
at www.blackboxvoting.org.... It uses Windows CE, so you will need
an emulator to get it running. Search for WinCE embedded Device Emulation, the tools you need are on the M$ site no less!
I have yet to finish downloading it so I don't know if it has been prepped to operate on an emulator or not.

The line of code is a fragment, naturally it won't do anything.
On the other hand, I do agree that they should have posted more of the
source code than merely a value declaration.. :-/

The original source code and binaries were found by Bev Harris off of an FTP site sometime around January last year.

[edit on 12-11-2004 by Crysstaafur]

Fair election huh? Democracy what? Your vote counts? I think that if you voted, especially if you voted on an electronic voting machine, that you should be ashamed of yourself. You helped contribute to the problem by putting faith into corruption...