“Most everyone who lived through the presidential election of 2000 would agree that it’s important to have public discussion about the integrity of voting systems in America. Most everyone, except Diebold.
And Diebold sold electronic voting machines to at least 37 U.S. states in the last four years.
Computer experts have been fretting about the security of Diebold’s electronic voting technology for years. In 2003, a controversial scholarly review cataloged 328 possible security problems in Diebold’s systems. California decertified Diebold’s touch-screen voting machines, citing security reasons. California’s attorney general has sued the company for misrepresentation….
About a year ago, a rather large set of documents written by Diebold staff appeared online. Exactly how the memos got there is disputed. The 13,000 or so documents revealed internal concerns about many of the issues that had worried the computer scientists.
Diebold moved quickly to block the publication of the documents online by sending “cease and desist” letters to a woman who had posted the material, Bev Harris, and her Internet service provider.
Students at Swarthmore College, aware of the threat to the documents, copied the documents to their own Web sites. An undergraduate at Harvard, Derek Slater, among others, followed suit. The students contended that the accessibility of the documents contributed to an important civic debate and asserted that their actions were shielded by the fair use doctrine, an important exception in the copyright law. Nonetheless, the students and their schools heard promptly from Diebold’s lawyers.”