Civil rights group fears effect of e-voting company's threats
By Rachel Konrad for the Associated Press.
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued in federal court Monday that North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold Inc. should be barred from sending cease-and-desist letters to activists, who are publishing links to leaked documents about alleged security blunders at one of the nation's biggest e-voting companies.Judge Jeremy Fogel is expected to issue a ruling as early as this week.
Free speech advocates at San Francisco-based EFF compare the case to the groundbreaking Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was leaked to The New York Times, sparking a 1971 Supreme Court battle pitting the government against the media.
"I'm not making a judgment about which is more important, Vietnam policy or the future of voting in a democracy," Cohn said after the hearing in federal court in San Jose. "But this is important to the public debate ... and you can't squelch it."
Computer programmers, ISPs and students at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received cease-and-desist letters. Many removed links to Diebold documents, but some - including San Francisco-based ISP Online Policy Group - refused, and sued Diebold.
They say the leaked documents raise serious security questions about Diebold, which controls 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide. They argue they have a right to publish the data under the "fair use" exception of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
OPG, which hosts at least 1,000 Web sites of nonprofit groups and individuals on 120 computer servers, also argues that the volunteer organization cannot be responsible for every link of every client.
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Civil rights group fears effect of e-voting company's threats
RACHEL KONRAD
Associated Press
SAN JOSE, Calif. - A civil rights group fears that legal threats from an electronic voting company are having a "chilling effect" among Internet service providers, students and voting rights advocates.
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued in federal court Monday that North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold Inc. should be barred from sending cease-and-desist letters to activists, who are publishing links to leaked documents about alleged security blunders at one of the nation's biggest e-voting companies.
Judge Jeremy Fogel is expected to issue a ruling as early as this week.
Free speech advocates at San Francisco-based EFF compare the case to the groundbreaking Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was leaked to The New York Times, sparking a 1971 Supreme Court battle pitting the government against the media.
"I'm not making a judgment about which is more important, Vietnam policy or the future of voting in a democracy," Cohn said after the hearing in federal court in San Jose. "But this is important to the public debate ... and you can't squelch it."
Computer programmers, ISPs and students at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received cease-and-desist letters. Many removed links to Diebold documents, but some - including San Francisco-based ISP Online Policy Group - refused, and sued Diebold.
They say the leaked documents raise serious security questions about Diebold, which controls 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide. They argue they have a right to publish the data under the "fair use" exception of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
OPG, which hosts at least 1,000 Web sites of nonprofit groups and individuals on 120 computer servers, also argues that the volunteer organization cannot be responsible for every link of every client.
Robert A. Mittelstaedt, who represents Diebold, said the company didn't intend to stymie free speech or place onerous burdens on ISPs. He emphasized that Diebold objected to the activists and student groups' "wholesale reproduction" of 13,000 pages of internal documents.
Mittelstaedt said the file - still available on dozens of Web sites, including several overseas - gives rivals an inside look at proprietary data. He suggested voting advocates were ideologically opposed to Diebold, which refuses to publish source code.
"The plaintiffs advocate an open-source code system for elections code," Mittelstaedt said. "These materials were intended to be secret and private and proprietary."
Diebold's battle began in March, when a hacker broke into the company's servers using an employee's ID number, and copied company announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails dating back to January 1999.
The majority of the 1.8-gigabyte file contains banal employee e-mails, software manuals and old voter record files. But several items raise security concerns that Silicon Valley programmers and voting rights advocates have been trying to publicize for more than a year.
In one series of e-mails, a senior engineer dismisses concern from a lower-level programmer who questions why Diebold lacked certification for the operating system in touch-screen voting machines. The Federal Election Commission requires such software to be certified by independent researchers.
In another e-mail, an executive scolded programmers for leaving software files on an Internet site without password protection.
"This potentially gives the software away to whomever wants it," the manager wrote.
In August, the hacker e-mailed data to voting activists, who published information on their Web logs. Wired News published an online story. The documents have been widely circulated.
Ka-Ping Yee, 27, a computer science graduate student at Berkeley who attended the hearing, said the documents make him skeptical about the U.S. elections process.
"These documents get people talking about the legitimacy of voting in America," said Yee, whose personal sites link to the data. "If a company can silence speech about a topic of extremely great importance, it could have a huge effect on all of our futures."
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