Students Fight E-Vote Firm

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. Diebold did not respond to Wired News' requests for comment. Bev Harris, owner of the Black Box Voting site and author of a book on the electronic voting industry, was one of the first people to post the memos before a letter from Diebold threatened her with litigation. Half a dozen other people hosting the memos in the United States, Canada, Italy and New Zealand also have received letters forcing them to take the material down.