A group of students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has launched an “electronic civil disobedience” campaign against voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems.
The students are protesting efforts by Diebold to prevent them and other website owners from linking to some 15,000 internal company memos that reveal the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software for years but sold the faulty systems to states anyway. The memos were leaked to voting activists and journalists by a hacker who broke into an insecure Diebold FTP server in March.
Diebold has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to force websites and ISPs to take down the memos, which the company says were stolen from its server in violation of copyright law. It has been using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, to force ISPs to take down sites hosting the memos or sites containing links to the memos.
These memos really need to stay available — the systems that Diebold is pushing are not secure, and are ripe for exploitation and hacking. This is not what we need in our voting process, and Diebold’s repeated attempts to stifle their own shoddy practices needs to be made known.
More information on the memos and the campaign can also be found at Why War?