Hacking The Machines

The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru

Maxim Magazine

Wednesday 02/10/2010 by Simon Worrall

"while the rumors, innuendos, and allegations continue to swirl through the ether, evidence has recently emerged that suggests the Ohio vote may have been hacked, and that Connell was involved."

Computer Scientists Take Over Electronic Voting Machine

with New Programming Technique

San Diego, CA, August 10, 2009 -- Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed “return-oriented programming” to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes.

The suspicious, disturbing death of election rigger Michael Connell

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The Free Press

December 20, 2008

Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.

Raw Story>>

Why Al Franken should NOT be riding private planes

The Smirking Chimp

by Harvey Wasserman | December 24, 2008

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The tragic and suspicious death of Karl Rove's election thief in chief should send a clear message to Al Franken and other key liberals: don't be riding in any small private planes.

Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia

AVC Advantage 9.00H DRE Voting Machine

by Andrew W. Appel1, Maia Ginsburg1, Harri Hursti, Brian W. Kernighan1, Christopher D. Richards1, and Gang Tan2

1Princeton University 2Lehigh University

"….What you need to know:

The AVC Advantage [electronic voting machine made by Sequoia Voting Systems] contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It's easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party's candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It's easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic "audit trail" in the computer…."

Evaluating the Security of Electronic Voting Systems

Are your votes really counted?

The Computer Security Group at UCSB

"Electronic voting systems have been introduced to improve the voting process. Since their inception, they have been controversial, because both the technologists and the general public realized that they were losing direct control over an important part of the voting process: counting the votes."

Are Your Votes Really Counted?

Testing the Security of Real-world Electronic Voting Systems

D. Balzarotti, G. Banks, M. Cova, V. Felmetsger, R. Kemmerer, W. Robertson, F. Valeur, and G. Vigna,

in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Seattle, WA July 2008.

[PDF]

View the associated videos

Part 1

Part 2

Information above reprinted with the permission of The Computer Security Group at UCSB.

Black Box Voting & Hursti Hacks

A series of voting machine red team tests, organized and produced by Black Box Voting, with Finnish security expert Harri Hursti (2005 & 2006).

Hursti I report -- Critical security flaws in the Diebold [precinct based] optical scan (2005):

The Hursti I report is the one that was shown in the HBO special "Hacking Democracy"

Hursti II report -- Critical security flaws in the Diebold TSx (2006):

Hursti II Supplement (2006):

Hacking Democracy

A must see Emmy nominated documentary by Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Robert Carrillo. It was produced by Sarah Teale and Sian Edwards, and aired on HBO yearly since 2006.

This cautionary documentary exposes the vulnerability of computers - which count approximately 80% of America's votes in county, state and federal elections - suggesting that if our votes aren't safe, then our democracy isn't safe either.

"HBO: Why do you think people have such a hard time grasping this subject?

Sarah Teale: I think people don't like to even contemplate how easy it is for people to access our election systems, and change the vote. I think it's a very scary concept for people. I mean, how did they do it? It's a technical puzzle. But the most basic thing is that, in fact, our election systems are now privately owned, and privately managed. And that basic fact does get people interested…."

Read the entire interview

Visit the HBO web page on this documentary

Visit the official Website and DVD

The DVD may be ordered from Docurama

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten

Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University

September 13, 2006

"This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates…."

The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru

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