The Case of the Diebold FTP Site [View All]

[Andy_Stephenson]

On Feb. 4, 2003, employees of Diebold Election Systems admitted that they had been using an insecure FTP server to exchange and update some part of Diebold's software. Bev Harris wrote this up in the on-line journal Scoop. This FTP server was taken offline on Jan 29, and it is alleged to have contained files with names like "rob-georgia.zip", large parts of GEMS (the Global Election Management System), and unknown other software.

Not surprisingly, this disclosure fueled considerable speculation about some vast conspiracy undermining democracy. On April 23, 2003, Britain J. Williams, chair of the NASED Voting Systems Board Technical Committee, wrote a rebuttal to the charges raised by Bev Harris. This letter is as a defense of the procedures used by the State of Georgia and the FEC/NASED certification process on which Georgia certification rests. It shows, among other things, that Georgia has stronger defenses, in some respects, than my own state of Iowa.

The Williams letter assures voters that whatever was found on Diebold's FTP site is irrelevant to the conduct of elections in Georgia because the only path from that site into a voting machine is through the FEC/NASED process and Georgia's certification tests. The letter also contains a bit of denial, for example, a statement that "the contents, or even existence, of the 'rob georgia' folder has not been established."

On July 8, 2003, Bev Harris posted the results of a preliminary examinaton of the files lifted from the Diebold FTP server. The accompanying editorial, by the operators of the web site, included the the Internet address of a server from which this material could be downloaded and advice on how to crack the passwords. The editorial urges people to make copies of the Diebold files and discuss what they find, and Harris created an on-line forum for this discussion of what was found. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi>

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldftp.html#whatcanwelearn