[Sosfbay-discuss] ALL CA voting machines FAILED official security test. Decertification possible

[cls at truffula.sj.ca.us]

All of us in the trustworthy voting movement were jazzed to
see this story finally make it to the front page.

I'd also like to mention I've sat in on a discussion
with Debra Bowen and some of the leaders of our movement.
I believe she has a real engineer's understanding of
things like threat assessment and vulnerability characterization,
things I really wish I could find in the "blogosphere"
or streams like KPFA's.  She's good enough that she's
an actual threat to the national election theft conspiracy.

But before we "forward it to all your friends" let's be
aware of the significant bias in the story, as told here
and as it will be told across the corporate media if
it turns out to have "legs."



>Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 23:43:34 -0700 (PDT)
>From: JamBoi <jamboi at yahoo.com>
>To: usgp-media at gp-us.org, scc <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
>Subject: [Sosfbay-discuss] ALL CA voting machines FAILED official security
>	test. Decertification possible

>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/28/VOTING.TMP&tsp=1
>Most vote machines lose test to hackers
...

>Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to
>say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to
>computer hackers,

Of course they weren't.  "How vulnerable?" is a question
with practically no meaning.  When someone asks you
a question you know is meaningless, the only *responsible*
answer is to point out the meaninglessness of the question
and the impossibility of answering it.  Bravo!


> especially because the team of
>computer experts from the UC system had
>top-of-the-line security information plus more time
>and better access to the voting machines than would-be
>vote thieves likely would have.

And there's the spin.  It's the reporter's opinion,
pulled straight out of his backside, and it's right there
in the same sentence as the statement from the experts,
so you'll think the experts said it.  And I'll bet
less than one percent of the people who read that article
noticed it.

A security expert would, instead, point out that the
most dangerous and best-equipped attackers *are* insiders.
In particular, the threat to balloting equipment which
concerns the experts most is hidden, intentional vulnerability
built into the systems *by their designers*.
"Would-be vote thieves" with no inside information is
a straw man concocted in the reporter's imagination.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, it was due to
his lack of understanding of the problem.  But knowing
the way Bowen talks about these things, I'd be surprised
if she didn't point that out early in the interview, and
the reporter dropped it because it didn't fit his
intended spin.



>"All information available to the secretary of state
>was made available to the testers,'' including
>operating manuals, software and source codes usually
>kept secret by the voting machine companies, said Matt
>Bishop, UC Davis computer science professor who led
>the "red team" hacking effort, said in his summary of
>the results.

And that's more spin.  It's only a sentence fragment.
I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the sentence
untwists the spin a little bit and that's why it was cut.
All of that "inside" information and more is available to the
kind of attacker who is actually in a position to exploit
the vulnerabilities to actually steal an election.

>[...]

>"The testers did not evaluate the likelihood of any
>attack being feasible,'' he added.

Another quote included to support the reporter's spin,
not to make the story more complete or informative.
The implication is the attacks being considered are
"theoretical" or infeasible, and it's baloney.


I hope everyone who tries to "read between the lines"
in our biased news media gets a chance to read
my favorite essay on the subject,
"Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias"
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1978
The author uses anthropogenic climate change as his
example, but the same problem exists in the coverage
of pretty much every public issue.



Cameron