In the interest of being fair and balanced :-)
I thought it was important to post the Official Statement on the vote switching allegations from Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI).
To: Friends of YEI and Other Interested PartiesRe: Clinton Curtis
Thank you for the many e-mail messages and telephone calls showing support for YEI during the past weeks. Your interest in and support of YEI is greatly appreciated!
The following statements reflect the position of YEI regarding Mr. Curtis and the allegations made by him against the corporation. Although it is YEI's position that the malicious allegations made by Mr. Curtis against private citizens have no basis in fact, those allegations are not addressed in this response.
1. The allegations made in Mr. Curtis's "affidavit" and elsewhere regarding YEI are categorically untrue and fail the most basic "smell" and logic tests.
2. Mr. Curtis's background includes sworn allegations by a former employer, other than YEI, implicating Mr. Curtis in a corrupt and dishonest scheme.
3. Mr. Curtis has unsuccessfully sued YEI in the past, making spurious and wild accusations, and none of his claims against YEI have been determined to have merit.
4. Mr. Nee has never been an employee of YEI.
5. Touch screen voting was first used in Florida in 2001 in a local municipal election. Mr. Curtis's allegations simply don't add up. A document regarding State of Florida elections can be found at
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/hava/index.shtml
6. YEI is not under investigation by the FBI, and no YEI owners, officers or employees have been arrested. In fact, the officers, including owners, of YEI possess Top Secret Clearances that require thorough investigation of an individual and his/her background.7. All of YEI's government contracts were awarded through open competition.
We are confident in our opinion that Mr. Curtis will ultimately be exposed as a fraud. Until then and always, thank you for your support.
I'm externalizing the vote-switching software thread into its own category.
I don't want this category to get bogged down in a vote switching software controversy.
Yet, the controversy is interesting, and worth tracking.
So there it is. Look here for stories about this from now on.
More Questions for Florida
By Kim Zettner for Wired News.
(via
Brad Blog)
A government watchdog group is investigating allegations made by a Florida programmer that are whipping up a frenzy among bloggers and people who believe Republicans stole the recent election.Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida...
He said his employer told him the code would be used "to control the vote" in West Palm Beach County, Florida. But a fellow employee disputed the programmer's claims and said the meetings he described never took place...
Curtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.
Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren't looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn't be found...
Many questions have been raised about Curtis, the 46-year-old programmer, who said he doesn't know if anyone ever placed the prototype code on voting machines. But this hasn't stopped frustrated voters and bloggers from seizing his story. Daily Kos mentioned the allegations, and Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog has written extensively about them.
Staff members for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) met with Curtis last week to discuss the election allegations. Representatives for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) inquired about other allegations from Curtis that his former company spied on NASA.
In September 2000, Curtis was working for Yang Enterprises in Oviedo, Florida, a software design firm that contracts with NASA, ExxonMobil and the Florida Department of Transportation, among other clients. According to Curtis, Feeney met with him and Lee Yang, the company's president, to request the voting software.
At the time, Feeney was Yang's corporate attorney and a registered lobbyist for the company as well as a member of Florida's legislature. A month later, he would become speaker of Florida's House of Representatives. In 2002 he was elected to Congress.
Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,66002,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2
Welcome to Wired News. Skip directly to: Search Box, Section Navigation, Content.
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More Questions for Florida
By Kim Zetter | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next »
02:00 AM Dec. 13, 2004 PT
A government watchdog group is investigating allegations made by a Florida programmer that are whipping up a frenzy among bloggers and people who believe Republicans stole the recent election.
Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.
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He said his employer told him the code would be used "to control the vote" in West Palm Beach County, Florida. But a fellow employee disputed the programmer's claims and said the meetings he described never took place.
Many questions have been raised about Curtis, the 46-year-old programmer, who said he doesn't know if anyone ever placed the prototype code on voting machines. But this hasn't stopped frustrated voters and bloggers from seizing his story. Daily Kos mentioned the allegations, and Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog has written extensively about them.
Staff members for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) met with Curtis last week to discuss the election allegations. Representatives for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) inquired about other allegations from Curtis that his former company spied on NASA.
The FBI in Tallahassee, Florida, has set up a meeting with Curtis, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said it was trying to corroborate his claims about possible election fraud and NASA spying.
The group hopes that even if the election allegations aren't proven, they will inspire legislators to pass a law requiring voting software to be open to public inspection to help deter fraud and restore public confidence in the election process. The software code used in voting machines is considered proprietary and it is protected from public examination -- an issue voting activists have been trying to address.
"I think Mr. Curtis helps make that issue a little more difficult to shunt aside," said CREW Executive Director Melani Sloan. "You don't even have to believe what he says (in order to be concerned about voting machines), just that he created a program. If he can do it, anyone can."
In September 2000, Curtis was working for Yang Enterprises in Oviedo, Florida, a software design firm that contracts with NASA, ExxonMobil and the Florida Department of Transportation, among other clients. According to Curtis, Feeney met with him and Lee Yang, the company's president, to request the voting software.
At the time, Feeney was Yang's corporate attorney and a registered lobbyist for the company as well as a member of Florida's legislature. A month later, he would become speaker of Florida's House of Representatives. In 2002 he was elected to Congress.
Curtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.
Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.
Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren't looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn't be found.
"Her words were that it was needed to control the vote in West Palm Beach, Florida," Curtis said. "Once she said, 'We need to steal an election,' that put me back. I made it clear that I could not produce code that could do that and no one else should."
Curtis says he left the company in February 2001 because he found its ethics questionable. He doesn't know if his code was ever used.
Neither Feeney's spokeswoman nor election officials in Palm Beach County returned calls for comment. But a man who identified himself as Mike Cohen, Yang's executive assistant at the time whom Curtis said was in the meeting, told Wired News the meeting never occurred. Cohen said Curtis was "100 percent" wrong and that Cohen didn't attend such a meeting. He added he knew nothing of any meeting on the topic that occurred without him.
Story continued on Page 2 »
More Questions for Florida
By Kim Zetter | Also by this reporter « back Page 2 of 2
02:00 AM Dec. 13, 2004 PT
Yang attorney Michael O'Quinn called Curtis' assertions "absurd and categorically untrue." He said Curtis is an opportunist and a disgruntled former employee furthering an agenda by telling lies. According to O'Quinn, Curtis tried the same tactic in 2002 when he leveled other charges against Yang and Feeney.
Some details of Curtis' statements don't check out. West Palm Beach city didn't use touch-screen machines in 2000, something Curtis didn't know when Wired News spoke to him. It was the pregnant chad controversy in that year's presidential election that led Palm Beach county, where West Palm Beach resides, to replace its much-maligned punch-card system with touch-screen machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems in December 2001.
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But Curtis said the program could have been adapted for use in the counting software used with punch-card machines and optical scan machines, or it could have been used on the new touch-screen machines in 2002, the year Feeney was elected to Congress.
Adam Stubblefield, a graduate student in computer science at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored a now-famous report (.pdf) about Diebold's voting machine code last year, thinks the chances that Curtis' code was used in a voting machine are nil.
"(Curtis) clearly didn't have the source code to any voting machine, and his program is so trivial that it would be much easier to rewrite it than to rework it," said Stubblefield.
Stubblefield also found fault in Curtis' statement that any malicious code would be detected in a source code review. This would be true only for unsophisticated malicious code, like Curtis' prototype.
Despite Curtis' concerns about statements Yang and Feeney supposedly made regarding election fraud, Curtis didn't tell the FBI or election officials in West Palm Beach about them, even after the 2000 election thrust Florida into the international spotlight.
He said he didn't worry about the code or Yang's statements because he believed if anyone installed malicious code on a voting machine authorities would find it when they examined the code. It wasn't until he read a news story last spring indicating that voting software is proprietary and is not open for inspection once it's certified that the earlier conversations began to concern him.
He claims he did later tell the CIA, the FBI, an investigator for Florida's Department of Transportation and a reporter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal about the voting issues when he gave them other information about Yang and Feeney. But so far this has not been corroborated. The FBI did not return calls for comment. The Department of Transportation investigator is dead.
And writer Laura Zuckerman who worked closely with Curtis on several stories for the Daytona paper, told Wired News he never mentioned the voting software code.
In 2002, Zuckerman wrote about allegations Curtis made that Yang Enterprises overcharged the Department of Transportation for work it never performed. In addition, Curtis told Zuckerman that Yang employed an illegal Chinese national while working on government contracts for NASA, and that the company was possibly spying on NASA by downloading documents from the NASA computer system.
"I didn't get a hint of anything like that at the time that I was writing any of these stories," Zuckerman (who no longer works for the newspaper) said.
However, other information provided by Curtis has been somewhat corroborated. The overbilling charge was confirmed by a Department of Transportation employee, although an official state investigation found no wrongdoing. Curtis thinks pressure from Feeney and others helped squelch the investigation, charges that Zuckerman did not find implausible from her own research.
And Last March, the Chinese national that Curtis discussed, Hai Lin Nee, was arrested in a 4-year-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement sting operation for trying to mail sensitive computer chips to Beijing in 1999 in violation of export rules.
But no one at Yang has been arrested for spying on NASA or stealing documents, despite a letter Curtis sent to a NASA investigator in February 2002 suggesting the company might be doing so. Curtis believes Feeney squelched that investigation as well to protect Yang. Both CREW and staff for Sen. Nelson's office are looking into those charges.
Curtis recently signed an affidavit (.pdf) and says he's willing to take a polygraph test. In the affidavit, Curtis stated that Feeney once "bragged that he had already implemented 'exclusion lists' to reduce the 'black vote'" and discussed ways of further impeding the black vote through strategic use of police patrols on Election Day.
His willingness to go on record with his vote fraud allegations is what makes some believe him.
Jon Kaney, a prominent Florida attorney who represents the Daytona Beach News-Journal and sparred with Feeney over articles the paper wrote about the lawmaker in 2002, said the affidavit does take things up a notch.
"You don't casually go around swearing under penalties of perjury unless you think you're right," Kaney said. "The affidavit struck me as something somebody ought to be looking at." But he said his first reaction to the affidavit was: "Gag. This can't be believed."
It remains to be seen if any new investigations can uncover the truth.
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 # # # # #
Update: this post now goes with this one. (Bev Harris weighing in on this story.)
Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software
By Wayne Madsen for the Online Journal.
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/120604madsen.html
December 6, 2004—The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.
An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.
Yang, an engineering and computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, was founded in 1986 by Dr. Tyng-Lin (Tim) Yang. Granted minority-owned "Section 8A" and woman-owned preferential status by the U.S. government, Yang's clients also include the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT). Yang's President, Li-Woan (Lee) Yang, is Tim Yang's wife. Feeney was the registered agent for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc., a company that was dissolved in 1988 and operated from the Yangs' residence on Merritt Island. The Yangs also serve as co-trustees for an entity called Yang of Merritt Island, Ltd., founded on January 31, 2000, and also run from their residence.
In the autumn of 1999, Curtis, who served as a sort of technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging. Curtis said at one meeting, Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" At the same meeting, according to Curtis, Feeney said he had "implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates" and that "a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent."
Feeney's desire to manipulate the vote would be manifested in his home base of Volusia County in the 2000 presidential election. According to The Washington Post, at 10 p.m. on election night, Al Gore was leading Bush in Volusia County by 83,000 to 62,000 votes. One-half hour later, Gore's vote total had been reduced by 16,000 to 67,000 and an obscure Socialist candidate saw a sudden surge to 10,000 votes in a precinct with only 600 voters. The information on the Volusia optical scanner voting anomalies came from a leaked internal Diebold memorandum. In the end, Bush won Florida and the White House by a mere 537 votes in the most controversial U.S. presidential election in history.
Feeney had long been a voice in Florida GOP politics. He was gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush's running mate in 1994, a race in which Democratic incumbent Lawton Chiles defeated Bush. Chiles once referred to Feeney as "the David Duke of Florida politics."
In 2002, Feeney asked Curtis if he could develop a touch screen voting machine "flip flop" program. According to Curtis, Feeney asked him, "Can you write a program to flip votes around on touch screen machines?" Curtis said Feeney wanted the program to merely reduce votes in heavily Democratic areas and flip Republican votes to 51 percent and keep Democrat votes to 49 percent. Curtis added that Feeney "did not want to win by a lot." In return, Curtis said Feeney offered him "big jobs." Curtis's main tasks at Yang were to develop the Florida DOT's Electronic Document Management System. He also worked on the Project Pipeline Information System at another one of Yang's major clients, Exxon Mobil's Coral Gables facility.
Curtis said he developed the voting program and eventually handed off his prototype to Feeney. The program was also reviewed by Curtis's senior coder, Hai Lin (Henry) Nee, who according to Florida Department of Transportation sources, was an illegal alien working in the United States. According Curtis, not only did Nee review the vote switching program code but he constantly downloaded sensitive data to his computer from NASA's computers. Nee, according to Curtis, moonlighted at an Orlando company called Azure Systems, described by The Orlando Sentinel as a "three person engineering firm" and one of a number of companies linked to Ting Ih-Hsu, a former Lockheed Martin employee. At the same time Nee was reviewing Yang's vote switching program, he was also being investigated by U.S. federal investigators for illegally shipping Hellfire missile parts to China. Oddly, although U.S. law enforcement agents had put Nee and his associates under surveillance for illegal exports of technology to China in 1999, he and his colleagues were not arrested until March of this year.
Curtis claimed that Yang's corporate bosses stressed that the company had "unlimited" sources of money that came "mostly" from China. According to Florida DOT employees, House Speaker Feeney pressured their agency to give money to Yang for nonexistent software. The sources also revealed that Feeney was aware that Yang was employing a number of illegal aliens on State of Florida and federal contracts.
Feeney's ties to Yang paralleled similar close ties to NASA. Feeney's wife Ellen has worked as an engineer for NASA's Kennedy Space Center since 1985. Jeb Bush ensured that Florida's 24th Congressional District was redrawn so that Feeney would have an easy time in his 2002 race against Democratic opponent Harry Jacobs. According to Florida state officials, who spoke on the condition anonymity, 500 Yang employees at the Kennedy Space Center were paid for their time when they agreed to picket against Jacobs. In addition, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, according to the same sources, lobbied extensively for Feeney within NASA. In addition, O'Keefe and his close friend and former Pentagon boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, made campaign appearances for Feeney at the Kennedy Space Center.
Feeney's close ties to Jeb Bush and Cheney paid off. In 2002, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a race that also saw the re-election of Jeb Bush. Early in "vote switch's" development stages, Feeney had told Curtis that he wanted the program "made to control Palm Beach" in 2002. Palm Beach County's Election Supervisor was still the controversial Theresa LePore, nicknamed "Madam Butterfly," who designed the infamous "butterfly ballots" in the 2000 election. LePore had once been an employee of Saudi multi-billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi link that is tied to a huge multi-billion tranche of money distributed throughout off-shore trusts, accounts, and corporations with interlocking directorships that are controlled by Bush interests in Houston. It was this Bush-controlled money cache, originating in the East, and known in Houston by the name "Five Star" and other cryptonyms that was, according to U.S. intelligence insiders, used to fund the rigging of the 2004 election.
When he arrived in Congress, Feeney was given a seat on the House Science and Technology Committee, which oversees NASA's operations. Feeney was also appointed to the important House Finance and Judiciary Committees. He was also given a clean bill of ethical health by Florida's Ethics Commission, a panel that has a Republican majority.
After Feeney's ascension to Congress, Yang's questionable billing activities with its Florida DOT contract came to the attention of Ray C. Lemme, a seasoned senior investigator with the Florida DOT Inspector General's Office and a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Lemme had a lot of evidence to suspect that Yang was overbilling the DOT for "millions." After discovering Yang's dirty laundry, Curtis went to work for the DOT. Mavis Georgalis, the DOT's contracting officer for the Yang contract, was also aware of improprieties with the contract. As a result of pressure from the Florida State House, both Curtis and Georgalis were eventually fired by the DOT because of their complaints about the Yang contract. Someone was obviously trying to send Curtis a message when, on August 14, 2002, he discovered that someone poisoned his pet Pomeranian dog, Emily. Lemme was forced to stop his official investigation of Yang for similar reasons. However, he decided to continue an "unofficial" investigation of Yang and its practices on the side. It was a fateful decision.
According to DOT employees familiar with the Yang case, Lemme was aware that it was Jeb Bush who personally shut down his investigation of Yang. Lemme also leaked details concerning his investigation to the Daytona Beach News Journal. The investigator had previously requested a full audit of the Yang contract with the DOT, a request that was denied. Lemme also became aware of something else outside the framework of the DOT contract—that Yang had been involved in producing a prototype vote switching program for use with touch screen voting machines and that Tom Feeney was in on the scam. The last time Clint Curtis spoke to Lemme, he remembers the silver haired investigator excited about where his case was leading. Lemme told Curtis that the cover up of Yang was coming from "as high up as I could imagine" and that he had "proof" that was "shocking."
On Sunday, June 29, 2003, evidence indicates that Lemme drove from Tallahassee to Valdosta, Georgia, the home of Moody Air Force Base. A motel receipt indicated that Lemme checked in at the Knight's Inn off Interstate 75 at 6:49 p.m. Lemme's wife said that her husband left home for work on Monday, June 30, at 5:15 a.m., an hour earlier than usual. According to a Leon County Sheriff's report, Lemme's wife said she received a voice message after she returned home at 6:45 p.m. on Monday. The message was from her husband's supervisor, Bob Clift, who informed her that earlier in the day, at 6:15 a.m., Lemme called into work, left a message, and said he would not be coming to work that day. Clift said he was checking up on Ray Lemme. Mrs. Lemme called Clift and told him that her husband was not at home. Mrs. Lemme told police that her husband was working on a "big case." Mrs. Lemme filed a missing person report with the Leon County, Sheriff's Office. Clift later determined that Ray Lemme made his earlier call to work at 6:15 a.m., one hour after he supposedly left his home for work, from a pay phone at the junction of Interstate 10 and Highway 1 in Jefferson County, Florida. Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 1, the maid assigned to clean Lemme's room—132—received no answer when she knocked. The door was locked. There was no response when the maid called the room's telephone. The hotel manager then called the police.
The following is from the Valdosta Police Detective Report filed by Detective Craig Spencer and dated July 1, 2003: "On July 1, 2003 at approximately 1330 hours, I received a page advising me to be en route to Knights Inn at 2110 West Hill Avenue in reference to an unattended death." When Spencer and other police officers and detectives arrived at the motel, the manager told them that the occupant of Room 132, Ray Lemme, was to have checked out by 11a.m. The officers yelled through the slightly ajar door but received no answer and they discovered the upper swing latch was locked. The officers used a special tool provided by the motel to open the swing latch lock. Spencer said that one of the officers entered the room and found a suicide note and then proceeded to the bathroom where Lemme was found dead in the bathtub. Police also discovered that the inside of Lemmes's left elbow—the cubital tunnel—was slashed. There were spurts of blood on the wall but no blood found on the floor. A belt possibly used as a tourniquet and a double- edged straight razor blade were found on the side of the tub. A bath towel was unfolded and neatly placed on the floor next to the tub.
Later on July 1, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Moultrie informed the Valdosta Police that based on the "suicide" details, no autopsy would be performed on Lemme. Unlike Florida, Georgia does not perform mandatory autopsies. A doctor, with 25 years' clinical experience, who was interviewed for this story claimed that the circumstances of Lemme's death appeared to him to be a classic "mob hit." If the Leon County Sheriff missing person report is to be believed, it is clear that someone other than Lemme checked into the Valdosta motel on Sunday evening using his name. Clearly, the Leon County Sheriff's report contains a number of details that directly conflict with facts found in the Valdosta Police report. In addition, the Lowndes County, Georgia, Coroner's report fails to indicate an estimated time of death based on a full medical examination—it surmised that the time of death was the same time as indicated on the suicide note: 8:10 a.m. on July 1.
An empty manila folder and a blank legal pad notebook were found on the hotel room's desk along with an undated and unsigned suicide note written on lined paper, which lacked any identifiable fingerprints, from Lemme's day planner. The note merely contained the time 8:10 a.m. with the following notation: "I love my family (family underlined once) with all my heart. I am sorry. I am depressed and in pain. Mary Ann (Lemme's wife), I love you." ("I love you" underlined twice). It was certainly not indicative of a person who was ecstatic that he was finally going to nail a long investigation that involved vote rigging, overbilling, and fraud abetted by the very top political leadership in Tallahassee. Interestingly, the last number on Lemme's pager (an 850 960-XXXX) ended with the number "911." It is also interesting that Lemme's watch, when discovered by the police, was stopped at 12:34 p.m. on June 30–a possible indication that Lemme was trying to convey the time of a possible in extremis situation. Also, Lemme's Florida driver's license was in his room while his wallet was in the glove box of his car, which was parked in front of the room. Two motel receipts were found in Lemme's room by the police. One was a check-in receipt dated June 29 and timed at 6:44 p.m. The other was a receipt, without a notation of check-in or check-out, dated June 30 and timed at 6:54 a.m. A witness told police that Lemme's car was parked in front of his room on the afternoon of June 30.
Sergeant Eugene Bell of the Valdosta Police Department interviewed a 39-year old female guest who was staying in Room 236 over the weekend. She and her daughter noticed three men standing in the parking lot across from Lemme's room at 8 a.m. on the morning of July 1. The behavior of the men made the guest suspicious enough that the woman initially believed the men were engaged in a drug deal. According to the police report, the camera used to photograph the crime scene was later discovered to have a defect in the flash memory card. The defect resulted in no usable photographs being submitted with the official police report.
Lemme was no stranger to Florida politics. His wife, Mary Ann, worked as a secretary for Martha Walters Barnett, a partner with the politically-connected Holland & Knight law firm in Tallahassee, where she specializes in campaign finance and election law and government contracts. Another Holland & Knight partner, Ginny Myrick, was appointed by Jeb Bush as the vice chair of the Florida Community Trust, a state land acquisition and grant program. Although officially a bipartisan law firm, even Democrats working for Holland & Knight largely support Jeb Bush. In addition, Bill McBride, Bush's Democratic opponent in the 2002 gubernatorial race and a Holland & Knight partner who had defeated former Attorney General Janet Reno in the Democratic primary amid reports of voting irregularities from around the state, commented that his race against Bush "may be the Democrats' race to lose."
The NASA connection to the money trail that is linked to the development of the vote switching program is of particular note. When the first sketchy details of the vote switching operation emerged, a Houston-controlled money tranche associated with an offshore entity called Five Star Trust, registered in the Isle of Man, was reported by high-level intelligence sources familiar with past Bush-related covert activities to be behind the operation. Five Star has been connected by these informed sources to have originated in 1983, when deposed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush were allegedly looking for a repository for an estimated $3 billion in looted Philippine gold and gems. Since that time, Five Star's accounts are said to funnel more funds from Saudi Arabia as well as cash reserves hidden away in offshore artificial shells by Enron before it collapsed. What is not yet certain is whether Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator and close Cheney friend who supported Feeney's and Yang's activities in Florida, facilitated the transfer of Five Star funds from Houston to Cape Canaveral using contract vehicles of both the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers to disburse the funds to the principal players. A NASA insider in Texas said he has long suspected large amounts of money have been moved into the United States and that these transfers involved NASA and Saudi and Chinese money sources.
There is additional information that the election rigging principals connected to the State of Florida and Jeb Bush may have also tried to use contractors tied closely to state contracts to parlay the touch screen software into Maine, which has proportional distribution of its electoral votes by congressional district, and Ohio, the key state in 2004. The information was provided by insiders in Tallahassee who are close to offices involved in procurement by the state government.
Sources close to U.S. intelligence pointed to a $29.6 million check supposedly issued on October 22, 2004, by Laurentian Bank in Montreal, Canada, that was rumored by intelligence circles to have been used to pay for the technicians who developed the software to rig the election. The computer voting machine technicians and maintenance personnel involved with the rigging were reported to have included Russians, Mexicans, and Brazilians.
According to Laurentian Bank, the check, a U.S. dollar "money order," is a bogus instrument tied to Nigerian scamming activities. Laurentian Bank said that a U.S. dollar money order would never be for amounts over $1,000 and any higher amount would be in the form of a bank draft that would require the signature of two senior bank officers. In addition, the bank would never use a cell phone number (514-588-5569) on their checks. The payer on the "check," Equity Financial Trust of Toronto, is said by the Canadian Fraud Office to be involved with Nigerian scammers. In fact, the Canadian Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions reports that Equity Financial Trust, Toronto, Ontario "may be violating provisions of the Bank Act (Canada) or other Canadian financial institution regulations" and "may also be conducting unauthorized banking transactions in the United States."
The payee on the "check," Five Star Investments, Ltd., once registered on the Isle of Man, is a Lexington, Kentucky-based entity tied to Marion "J.R." Horn, convicted in 2002 by Judge Joseph M. Hood of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Kentucky for wire fraud. He was also ordered to serve time in Butner Federal Penitentiary, North Carolina for a "mental study." He eventually served an unusually light 18-month sentence while on parole for another fraud case. When interviewed by a researcher for this article, Horn expressed surprise that the check his lawyer in Nassau was waiting to clear a bank in New York, was, in fact, a fake. According to CIA documents obtained from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Five Star Trust may have, in fact, had a past relationship with Horn. According to Offshorebusiness.com, Five Star Trust has been linked with an "illegal" bank.
The connection of Enron money and Nigerian scammers to Five Star is intriguing because of a September 23, 2004, Houston Chronicle report that said Enron was involved in an off-the-books deal to invest in Nigerian power generation barges. Tina Trinkle, a former Merrill Lynch banker, said she was asked not to do the normal background checks for such a business deal.
A former Justice Department prosecutor who investigated the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) said that the bogus check and those responsible for it are typical "feints" used to mask actual clandestine money movements from law enforcement investigators. In addition, the former prosecutor said the purported check lacked the necessary SWIFT codes in the numbers found at the bottom of the check to facilitate the movement of money through international financial networks. He said that in his experience as a prosecutor, the name "Five Star Trust" came up in relation to the covert activities of the Nugan Hand Bank, a CIA-connected activity that was involved in covert activities in Australia and South East Asia.
Five Star entities, active and dissolved, have been discovered in the Isle of Man, the island of Nevis, the Bahamas, Florida, Kentucky, and Texas. Other Five Star-related entities stored large sums of money in the Cook Islands, according to U.S. intelligence sources, and these funds were directly linked to Khashoggi and BCCI. Khashoggi also approached top Nigerian leaders in 1982 to set up a company there that would deal exclusively in minerals. According to knowledgeable insiders, Khashoggi used a company called Triad to hammer out lucrative international deals on precious minerals. In 1994, Five Star Investments, Ltd., the entity tied to Horn, attempted to buy International Standards Group ISG), Ltd., a consulting company based in Boca Raton, Florida. According to the Palm Beach Post, Horn was the person who proposed the acquisition. ISG was also the target of a bid by UMI, Inc., a mortgage banker based in Coral Gables, Florida. The Palm Beach Post was never able to determine the source of UMI's cash.
Phony checks are not the only telltale signs associated with some of the various Five Star entities. Another bogus document, a bogus UN customs declaration for a shipment to a "Counter Terrorist Unit" in Lagos, Nigeria, was also obtained in the investigation of this story.
Horn has had a running battle with the CIA over allegations that he is owed money for his past activities on behalf of the agency. Although Horn has produced a number of dubious documents to support his claims, one of the names mentioned in documents filed in U.S. court in Washington, DC is that of E. Warren Goss, an actual attorney in Boulder, Colorado. It has not been established if E. Warren Goss has any family connection to Porter Goss, the current CIA director.
In a September 17, 2003, declaration by Marilyn A. Dorn, Information Review Officer in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA, in response to Horn's Freedom of Information Act request, it was determined that the agency had no records containing the names "Five Star Trust" or a reported subsidiary, "U.S. Mortgage and Trust (Bahamas)." Dorn reported that no records containing references to either entity were discovered but that two documents, cables—"field traffic consisting of one and a half pages and eight partial lines of message text, respectively, dating from the early 1980s"—were responsive to Horn's request. It is interesting that the CIA admits the time frame because the genesis of Five Star Trust was 1983, when, according to U.S. intelligence insiders, then-Vice President Bush authorized a Boeing 747 with a special "carriage" to airlift several tons of gold bars from Clark Air Force base in the Philippines to LaGuardia Airport in New York.
The gold bars were then transported to the International Diamond Exchange Vaults near Rockefeller Center. A CIA proprietary firm called Oceaneering International of Houston was reportedly involved in airlifting some of the gold from the Philippines, in addition to sealifting the remainder to Oregon. After George W. Bush's victory in 2000, the last of the gold in New York was moved to UBS Bank in Zurich. Marcos and Khashoggi set about to create Five Star Trust in 1983 as a means to create a vehicle to use the Philippine wealth to create and funnel fungible assets. In 1989, Five Star Trust was officially established in the Isle of Man by a Houston-based attorney who was a close friend of the Bush family.
The CIA's explanation of its decision to withhold the release the two cables was partly based on the use of cryptonyms–artificial words used as substitutes for the actual name or identity of a "person, organization, or project." The CIA statement continues: "when obtained and matched with other information, a cryptonym possesses a great deal of meaning for those who are able to fit it into the proper cognitive framework." The denial of Horn's FOIA request also stated that the two responsive documents could "reveal the existence or location of covert CIA field installations in multiple foreign countries." In addition, the CIA stated that release of the documents in question would "reveal specific and sensitive subjects in which the CIA is or was interested." Finally, disclosure of the requested documents was denied because of "foreign relations." The agency emphasized that, "in carrying out its legally authorized intelligence activities, the CIA engages in activities that if known by foreign nations, could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to U.S. relations with affected or interested nations."
The story of this corruption is nothing new. What is new is the purpose. The use of this old and covert tranche of money for a special Bush operation to deny the American people their right to a free and fair vote was not the typical illegal sale of arms to a terrorist nation, the overthrow of a foreign government, or the payment of bribes to foreign potentates. It was a high crime in every constitutional sense. The target was the American political system and not just in 2004 but also in 2003, 2002, and 2000. The scandal goes right up to the White House and the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee. It involves an extremely crooked Florida national politician and other Florida state government officials. And, as with all modern American political scandals, we have at least one dead body, a number of whistleblowers and anonymous "Deep Throats," powerful but corrupt politicians, counterfeit and real documents, con men, and a money trail tied to off-shore foreign bank accounts.
People may wonder why a group of intelligence insiders would come forward to a non-major media outlet with such tantalizing information at this time. The corporate-beholden media cannot be trusted to report such a news story. A common theme from all the intelligence and ex-intelligence officials with whom I have communicated is that George W. Bush made a major mistake in attacking and purging the clandestine service of the CIA. The "agency," which extends far beyond the confines of Langley, Virginia, is having its revenge. It has willingly exposed a portion of a traditional clandestine CIA money route to expose the vote scam that was used to ensure Bush's election.
The clues, for example, the bogus check, were conveyed to us as exactly that—clues. Those markers pointed to the illegal nature of the covert money flows. The connections between NASA contracts, Texas, and Florida were additional clues to one of the major sources of the money used for the vote rigging. There were a number of roads that led to the same destination. But that is the nature of covert intelligence. Some patriotic and brave people, who have served in silence for a number of decades, have chosen their country over a corrupt family and administration. It is now time for the constitutional process to begin. Rectification of the criminal conspiracy that denied John Kerry and John Edwards the White House must begin in Ohio, and extend to Florida, California, Texas, Georgia, and other states where votes were flipped by computers from the Kerry to the Bush column. Past elections must also be investigated and those who were done in by this fraud, namely, people like Max Cleland, Gray Davis, Al Gore, and others must also have their day in court.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and syndicated columnist. He is the author of "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates."
