This goes with this post.

There has been a bit of a tinfoil hat alert with regard to the story I posted the Repubs hiring a programmer to write "vote switching" software.

I still have not personally had a chance to investigate the article, but Bev Harris had this to say on her blackboxvoting.org website, and it seemed important to take her stance into consideration while reading the article.

While MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and I had a run-in recently, I agree
with Olbermann's earlier critique of the Madsen homeland security
story, and this new Madsen story is just as weak. Most of both Madsen
stories are bait and switch. Madsen wanders all over the place,
recapping unrelated information from real news agencies, piggybacking
onto their credibility, with only the most tenuous ties to what he is
actually trying to prove. The work done on BradBlog is much more
focused, and Brad seems to be a responsible researcher.

========================================

In my original critique, I raised questions about the Feeney
vote-manipulation story; some of them related to Madsen's work. Brad
Friedman, the author of BradBlog and the primary researcher for more
credible work on Curtis, answered my original questions here. I have
updated this section.

1. Madsen's article implied that Curtis's vote-rigging program was
used in elections. Brad Friedman correctly points out that the Clint
Curtis affidavit explains that he designed a prototype and did not put
it into machines. (Many people have written vote-rigging prototypes,
and the writing of a program doesn't prove anything about the
integrity of the 2004 election.) The issue then becomes: Are Curtis's
allegations about Tom Feeney correct?

- Documents do confirm that Curtis worked for Yang Enterprises, and
that Feeney was involved with Yang. Documents do not confirm that
Curtis met with Feeney and discussed vote-rigging. Curtis names
witnesses in his affidavit, which is a good sign. The witnesses have
not confirmed the story, yet.

from: http://blackboxvoting.org
------------------
TUESDAY DEC 7 2004:
Why the Feeney vote-rigging story sounds like disinformation, as Wayne
Madsen writes it

The story hangs together better at BradBlog.com.

ABOUT DISINFORMATION: Like a good lie, it has elements of truth.
Trouble is, the truth in Madsen's story doesn't relate to the nuts and
bolts of the story.

DISINFORMATION IS DANGEROUS TO THE CLEAN VOTING MOVEMENT: Getting the
facts is tedious, unexciting work, consisting of auditing and personal
interviews, and it takes time. Many Americans want a magic bullet, a
single shot that will blow the lid off everything at once.

That's risky. If the mainstream media continues to be bombarded with
stories that sound credible, but aren't, when the real thing comes
down the pike it will be ignored.

While MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and I had a run-in recently, I agree
with Olbermann's earlier critique of the Madsen homeland security
story, and this new Madsen story is just as weak. Most of both Madsen
stories are bait and switch. Madsen wanders all over the place,
recapping unrelated information from real news agencies, piggybacking
onto their credibility, with only the most tenuous ties to what he is
actually trying to prove. The work done on BradBlog is much more
focused, and Brad seems to be a responsible researcher.

========================================

In my original critique, I raised questions about the Feeney
vote-manipulation story; some of them related to Madsen's work. Brad
Friedman, the author of BradBlog and the primary researcher for more
credible work on Curtis, answered my original questions here. I have
updated this section.

1. Madsen's article implied that Curtis's vote-rigging program was
used in elections. Brad Friedman correctly points out that the Clint
Curtis affidavit explains that he designed a prototype and did not put
it into machines. (Many people have written vote-rigging prototypes,
and the writing of a program doesn't prove anything about the
integrity of the 2004 election.) The issue then becomes: Are Curtis's
allegations about Tom Feeney correct?

- Documents do confirm that Curtis worked for Yang Enterprises, and
that Feeney was involved with Yang. Documents do not confirm that
Curtis met with Feeney and discussed vote-rigging. Curtis names
witnesses in his affidavit, which is a good sign. The witnesses have
not confirmed the story, yet.

2. I mentioned a second problem, in that several of the Florida
counties used different software in 2000 than they do now, and that
various Florida counties use different manufacturers and different
systems. Writing one program that would tamper with ES&S punch cards
and Diebold optical scans at the same time is unrealistic. However,
since Curtis says he did not insert the software into any voting
system, this is (almost) a moot point.

- The counties Curtis alleges Feeney wanted to rig were Miami-Dade,
Broward, Palm Beach. The first two used punch cards in 2000, switched
to ES&S touch-screens in 2002, and used ES&S touch-screens in 2004.
Palm Beach County used the infamous "butterfly ballot" in 2000, and
switched to Sequoia touch-screens in 2002, and used those also in
2004. The Sequoia system has significant differences from the ES&S
system, and the same software would not likely work for both

- Note that the Wayne Madsen article does a bait and switch when he
discusses Volusia County. He starts by saying it is Feeney's district,
and then actually goes on to report a story broken by Black Box Voting
in October, 2003, about minus 16,022 votes for Bush in Volusia --
which appears to have nothing to do with the Feeney story. BradBlog
takes care not to draw conclusions that aren't supported.

3. The techniques used to program a vote-rigging system in the
affidavit by Clint Curtis still have some technical problems.
Candidate-switching is not difficult, and there are a number of ways
to accomplish it. Programmers have pointed out the the use of VB5
doesn't match use of Unix systems, but several programmers I spoke
with were unaware that the Sequoia touch-screens, used in Palm Beach,
create their ballots from WinEDS, and that program runs on Windows,
and is so replete with security problems that the state of Texas
refused to certify it. Now, when I get a high-speed document scanner,
I'll post the Texas FOIA documents that show how susceptible the
Sequoia WinEDS program is to tampering.

4. Most political shenanigans are not conducted by the candidate
himself, but by operatives. It is certainly possible for a politician
to hold several meetings in which he commits a felony in front of
several witnesses, but that's not usually how it is done. A more
common technique is an envelope full of cash left in a drawer of an
operative, with at least one, sometimes more, buffer layers between
the operative and the politician.

Clint Curtis says Feeney himself had meetings to directly discuss
election rigging software. Could happen, certainly, but this seems
unusual.

But this gets a bit more interesting. As I was checking this out, I
got a report from someone completely unrelated, on an entirely
different kind of vote-manipulation endeavor, and Feeney's name came
up in that, too. So the issue of Feeney's behavior is about as clear
as mud.

5. The author says it will be difficult to write a program that will
escape notice if the source code is examined. That's not quite true.

I originally wrote that putting a trigger into a program can involve a
very small amount of code, hard to detect -- and you can comment the
code such that it looks like it is there for another purpose. Also,
the certifiers do a slipshod job of code analysis, and you could
probably drive a greyhound bus through their examination of the source
code.

But I've been receiving e-mails from programmers that point out
something even more obvious: by slipping the rig into a .dll, a
program that runs in the background in the operating system (which is
never examined at all) you can certainly achieve vote-rigging and
survive a source code review.

Programmers pointed out to me that Curtis, as a programmer, should
have known that. However, according to his affidavit, Curtis got his
degree in Political Science and History, not computer science. He was
apparently a self-trained programmer. I won't go into the technical
merits more here, because if he didn't put the program into voting
systems, they aren't relevant.

6. Now, my most significant objection to the story, which goes to
Curtis's credibility, still involves his statement on the affidavit
saying that he filed a "QUITAM" whistleblower suit, that is "pending."
First, he doesn't spell it correctly. The correct spelling is two
words, "Qui Tam." Next, Qui Tam cases MUST be filed under seal. If a
Qui Tam is filed in Florida, both the evidence and the existence of
the case must be sealed, and only the Florida Attorney General can
unseal it.

People have written to me to explain that Curtis did file a
whistleblower suit, but did so a day after the deadline. That is not a
Qui Tam, but an employment-related suit. In his affidavit, Curtis
refers to filing lawsuits two different places. One is an employment
suit, the other is a "QUITAM" suit. I found documentation of the
employement suit and its dismissal, but saw no documentation at all
about a Qui Tam suit. That means it's either still under seal, and
therefore, by talking about it, Curtis just invalidated the suit and
violated a court order, or there is no Qui Tam suit.

Please do show it to me, if you can find it in the dockets and it has
been unsealed.

Black Box Voting board member Jim March and I filed a Qui Tam suit in
California in November 2003, against Diebold Election Systems. Using a
California law, we refused to seal the evidence, but still had to keep
the existence of the case under seal. It did not come out from under
seal until the California Attorney General got the court to unseal it,
and the Associated Press covered the unsealing of the case. You cannot
keep the unsealing of a Qui Tam case away from the press. The press
has mentioned no FDOT Qui Tam.

This goes directly to Curtis's credibility. I was not able to get hold
of him today, and I will keep trying tomorrow, so that we can learn
the answer to this.

There are two other credibility-checking questions I need answered.
First, a small scrambled egg on my face: I wrote "Court documents
refer to a judgment against Curtis for copyright infringement.
Actually, the court documents referred to might have been papers filed
by an opposing party, i.e. Yang Enterprises, alleging the copyright
infringement without proving it. According to the Daytona
News-Journal, Yang says Curtis was "successfully sued" over copyright
infringement.

Parsing words here: "successfully sued" may mean there was a judgment
entered, but according to Brad Friedman, Curtis says the case was
settled out of court without either side paying the other. ("Each side
paid their attorney's fees and went their merry way.") "Successfully
sued" could also mean an out-of-court settlement in which Curtis paid
a settlement to the other party. It is really stretching it to
interpret "successfully sued" as simply filing a case. The term
"successfully sued" could be a smear by Yang or Feeney, or it could be
that Curtis didn't fully disclose the problems with the copyright
infringement case.

Because this goes to credibility, and in this case credibility is
extremely important, the next two questions that must be answered are:
Who was the former employer and what were the real terms of the
settlement or judgment?

One more credibility test: When Curtis lived in Illinois, he ran for
office as a Republican. While discussing his run for office in a
letter to the Bloomington Pantagraph he accused a local attorney of
stealing $28,000. The accusation might be accurate, since it
apparently was an embezzlement, and those are much more common than
people realize. I'd like to know the names of the attorney and the
injured party.

My gut tells me -- but this is only speculation -- that Curtis was
correct in blowing the whistle on the attorney for misappropriating
$28,000. I say that because I've seen written up several financial
fraud cases, met the embezzlers, it happens frequently. If he blew the
whistle on a $28,000 theft and his charges were correct, that would
shore up his credibility on the Feeney story.

I announced on a national radio show Friday that I will be happy to
take what you folks throw at me, if I am wrong on these points. In the
mean time, because the implications of this story are so significant,
I think we need to continue to exercise caution and get the story to
the point where it is truly bulletproof.

-- Bev Harris # # # # #