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Someone posted here the other day about the CIA's involvement in fixing elections. I came across this on the net tonight. What do you think? Friday, September 26, 2003 The Military-Industrial Connection to E-Voting What's SAIC Spelled Backward? 1. Suspected bio-terrorist Steven Hatfill worked, or works, with SAIC WASHINGTON POST - took a consulting job with the behemoth government contractor Science Applications International Corp., better known as SAIC. With a sprawling campus in McLean, it did work for a multitude of federal agencies. Many projects were classified, and SAIC's tight relationship with the CIA had led to a standing one-liner: "What is SAIC spelled backwards?"
At SAIC, Hatfill designed and taught bioterror preparedness courses, but his responsibilities also included "black," or classified, biowarfare projects. One of Hatfill's major roles was working with the Joint Special Operations Command, which handled U.S. military counter-terrorism operations. At Fort Bragg, N.C., Hatfill led gruelling training for Army commandos preparing for covert missions to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction, according to friends and former colleagues. He conducted counter-terrorism training for Defense Intelligence agents and did a "super job," says DIA spokesman Don Black.
Hatfill designed programs and training equipment for Navy SEALs, and SAIC colleagues say he often sat at his desk designing mock bioterror training devices, including a backpack that could be used by enemies to spray germs on the battlefield. He trained CIA agents in counter-proliferation, and shuttled to U.S. embassies abroad to teach bioterrorism preparedness.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49717-2003Sep9.html
2. Maryland used SAIC to justify the use of Diebold machines
MARYLAND USES HUGE CIA-DOD CONTRACTOR TO JUSTIFY E-VOTING SYSTEM
TOM STUCKEY ASSOCIATED PRESS - Maryland will go ahead with plans to buy $55.6 million worth of electronic voting machines, relying on a consultant's report that state officials say shows numerous potential security problems can be fixed before the presidential primary next March. "We remain very confident in this voting system," James "Chip" DiPaula, state budget secretary said Wednesday. He said Diebold Election Systems of North Canton, Ohio, has already incorporated three new security features to correct problems that critics of the touch-screen machines say made them vulnerable to massive election fraud.
Other "vulnerabilities" cited by the consultant, Science Application International Corp., will be corrected by security procedures to be implemented by state and local election boards, DiPaula said. . . The report did not satisfy Avi Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, whose study released in July prompted national debate over the security of electronic voting systems. Rubin, lead researcher on the report, said at the time that the Diebold system was so flawed it could be easily manipulated. . . David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor, said he still has concerns about the machines, including the possibility that a malicious code could be inserted by a programmer at Diebold. . . Thomas W. Swidarski, president of Diebold Election Systems, said the SAIC study "verifies that the Diebold voting station provides an unprecedented level of election security."
3. SAIC a major US mercenary
LESLIE WAYNE, NY TIMES - Mercenaries, as they were once known, are thriving - only this time they are called private military contractors, and some are even subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies. The Pentagon cannot go to war without them. Often run by retired military officers, including three- and four-star generals, private military contractors are the new business face of war. Blurring the line between military and civilian, they provide stand-ins for active soldiers in everything from logistical support to battlefield training and military advice at home and abroad. . .
Motivated as much by profits as politics, these companies - about 35 all told in the United States - need the government's permission to be in business. A few are somewhat familiar names, like Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company that operates for the government in Cuba and Central Asia. Others have more cryptic names, like DynCorp; Vinnell, a subsidiary of TRW; SAIC; ICI of Oregon; and Logicon, a unit of Northrop Grumman. One of the best known, MPRI, boasts of having "more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon."
4. SAIC exec involved in propaganda drive in favor of e-voting
SCOOP, NEW ZEALAND - On the board of the Enterprise Solutions Division of the Information Technology Association of America - a lobbying organization bidding to provide a $200,000+ public opinion manipulation campaign on electronic voting - is a senior vice president of SAIC, the company tasked with investigating the security of the Diebold voting machine technology in the states of Maryland and Ohio. The revelation that Ronald J Knecht, Senior Vice President, SAIC, and a former defense intelligence chief, is connected to the proposed voting machine whitewash push seems certain to fuel public concerns about the number of conflicts on interest in the voting machine industry.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00173.htm
5. David Kay—Bush/Cheney's latest "weapons inspector" in Iraq—is on the SAIC payroll
GUERILLA NEWS - Kay has also been involved with one of the nation's major defense contractors, serving as a Senior Vice President for the San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation. The company's Web site proudly describes itself as "the nation's largest employee-owned research and engineering company, providing information technology, systems integration and eSolutions to commercial and government customers." According to a mid-August report by Katrin Dauenhauer and Jim Lobe in Asia Times, "Of the six billion dollars it earned in revenue last year, about two thirds came from the U.S. Treasury, mostly from the defense budget."
SAIC, heavily involved with homeland security projects, has already acquired several reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and Kay and a number of other former company employees are firmly planted in country. The company "has been running the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council since the body was established by the Pentagon in February," Dauenhauer and Lobe reported. "SAIC is also a subcontractor under Vinnell Corporation, another big defense contractor that has long been in charge of training for the Saudi National Guard, hired to reconstitute and train a new Iraqi army." And SAIC is also running the recently established Iraqi Media Network project, whose charge was to "was to put together a new information ministry, complete with television, radio and a newspaper, and the content that would make all three attractive to average Iraqis."
http://www.guerrillanews.com/sci-tech/doc2946.html
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