Sleepycatz

Well, its been several months since I have had a chance to update this journal; hopefully, this absence is at an end. In the past few months things have been quite hectic at work: We have added a new OC-12 ring, and added and removed transit peers. As with all projects, nothing ever goes as smoothly as it should. Nonetheless, life goes on, and we can only hope for a better tomorrow. ..

Like many of you, I got up this morning, put on a pot of coffee, and heard the news that former bad guy and scapegoat Saddam Hussein had been captured by American forces outside of Tikrit. My first reaction was more then a little mixed: I am glad to see any butcher brought to justice; yet, I am quite aware that many will seize on this event as some great victory in the War on Terror, and a final justification of America’s belligerent actions in Iraq. After watching the morning pundits expertly pontificate on the subject this morning, I remain generally ambivalent on the event. My wife, however, expressed what I believe to be the definative statement regarding the capture. She has little interest in current events and a low tolerance for politics. When I told her that they had captured Saddam, she simply said: “Took them long enough” and went off to drink her coffee. . .

Among the various outrages which have been occuring in the past few months only a few rise to the level of the Diebold debacle. Diebold Corp. — a manufacturer of cash registers and POS equipment, and a major contributor to Geoge Bush’s campaign and the RNC — has been trying to rid the Internet of some of it’’s internal memos which suggest that its electronic voting software is neither secure nor accurate. A number of questions have been raised as to the reliability of the Diebold machines, and some have suggested that Diebold machine have been responsible for implausable victories of right wing candidates in some recent local elections: see www.blackboxvoting.com.
Diebold’s desire to protect their memos under the guise of copyright infringment indicates the depths of corporate depravity our electoral system has subcomb to. Within any Democratic system two elements must exist for that system to remain viable: 1) Free and open debate rearding issues of public interest, and 2) A trust in the accuracy of the voting system itself. By invoking the contemporary shield of copyrights and trademarks, Diebold has tried to subvert both of these bedrocks of Democracy. As voters we must have faith in our voting systems, and how those votes are cast and counted is an issue of high public interest. I have called for in the past, and do so again, laws requiring that source code for any public voting software be available for public review, and that all software and electronic ballots be encypted and verfied by polling officials upon election day deployment. Many would suggest that software vendors would not bid on such projects were they forced to disclose their proprietry code. To this argument, I suggest that government contracts have always been highly sought by all manufacturers and, up until recently, blueprint and specifications for most non-military projects were available for public review. I also suggest that an open source code provides greater review and more security then propriery systems — one need only look at the number of GPL security projects and their successes. By hiding the inner workings of these systems behind copyrights and trademarks, Diebold and others force us to question the authenticity of our Demorcatic in
stitutions, and thus devalue them.

BTW you may plow through the Diebold memos here, if you are so inclined.

This entry was posted by sjk on Sunday, December 14th, 2003 at 11:06 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.