I saw Barney Frank on Bill Maher this week and while it's no surprise he destroyed the token conservative, I took particular note of how Barney spoke about the issue of Habeas Corpus. The conservative (I forgot his name and just remember his green tie - and he's not worth even Googling thanks) shocked me when Bill brought up the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - you know, the one that allows King George to pick up anyone off the street, imprison them forever and torture them to the point of organ failure if he deems them enemy combatants.
Green Tie laughed and said something like, oh come on. This is Jack Bauer justice! Who wouldn't want that? You know, Jack grabs a terrorist, shoots him in the leg and says okay, where's the bomb? The audience actually booed loudly which gave me hope for America.
And Barney spoke. He didn't use the high falutin' word Habeas Corpus. He didn't talk about shredding the Constitution or any other abstraction. He simply said something like this: People make mistakes. And if you're innocent and get picked up and locked up, there is simply no forum where you can appear and say, 'you got the wrong guy. I didn't do it and I can prove it.' That's it plain and simple in layman's terms. That's what's lost.
Which brings us to voting. We are about to vote on a system with no security and no paper trail. And the companies who manufacture the voting machines simply says they're safe and then refuse to let anyone look inside them and see if they are.
We all know this.
And that's the point. We know it and allow it. But the part that's truly amazing to me is not that the system is hackable and we're about to conduct another election with them despite problems in the past. That's something that must be fixed by process over time.
The amazing part to me is that no politician has INSISTED that private macufacturers of voting machines can have no proprietary rights that protect their voting machines from examination prior t their use in an election.
No politician considers our sacred franchize, the vote, to be important enough to protect and defend.
From the Star Ledger
http://www.nj.com/...
The sleuths who showed how to steal your e-vote
Princeton team's find intensifies concerns
Sunday, October 22, 2006
BY KEVIN COUGHLIN
On a warm Friday afternoon last May, Alex Halderman double-parked his Cadillac STS near a New York hotel, left the motor idling and ducked into an alley for a secret rendezvous.
Moments later, the Princeton University grad student emerged with a black attaché case containing what he feared was a grave threat to the United States:
A Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine.
Working in secrecy bordering on paranoia, Halderman and fellow grad student Ari Feldman and Professor Ed Felten spent the summer meticulously analyzing their prize -- and hatching a computer program they refer to simply as The Virus.
Now they have shown -- on the Internet, in Congress, and for anyone else who will watch -- how easily a popular electronic voting machine, long off-limits to public examination, can be rigged to steal elections without leaving any electronic fingerprints.
Six years after Florida's hanging chad debacle, nearly 40 percent of the American electorate will cast ballots next month on electronic voting machines, many of them bought with $3 billion provided by Congress for technology upgrades.
snip
Diebold executives downplay the Princeton trio's feat, saying they hacked an old model that won't see widespread use this year. But Diebold won't let the Princeton team peer under the hood of its newer AccuVote-TSx. And Sequoia has thus far resisted such calls from the computing community.
"Our voting technology is proprietary, and that is something the company needs to be protective of. That's our asset, that's our business," said Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer. In the future, though, Shafer said her company would be "open to reviewing ways" for academic researchers to examine its machines.
snip
Yeah, Diebold, be open to ways bloodless academics can sift through the arcania of your unverifiable vote counts. Meanwhile more and more of us will ask, do android presidents dream of electronic votes?