Reply #26: A quick recap of events..... [View All]

[ParanoidPat]

.....The blackboxvoting.org site was taken down by the ISP (Internet Service Provider) after they received a letter of complaint from Diebold's attorney. The letter alleged a breech of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) due to links to another site that contained internal memos and e-mail from Diebold personnel that outlined a number of illegal practices that Diebold was engaged in. The over 14,000 documents, obtained from a Diebold employee, gave explicit instructions on everything from how their Canadian employees should cross the border into the United States without work permits to work in U.S. elections supporting their equipment to instructions on how to fake demonstrations for elections officials when the promised software release was not ready in time. There were also instructions on how to get certain security flaws past the ITA (Independent Testing Authorities) certifiers of the election systems and software. There is no provision anywhere in the DMCA to pull down a site over links contained within it.

The Blackboxvoting.com site was pulled off line by another ISP after so called 'spam' e-mails containing a story about Black Box Voting was sent out by a web site totally unaffiliated with Bev or her publisher David at Plan 9 Publishing. If what I'm hearing from my friends in the legal department is correct, Bev's ISP and SpamCop may have opened themselves up to a 'restraint of trade' lawsuit for having pulled the site down without checking their logs first to determine whether the offending e-mails were in fact sent by her from her site. :)