EFF Represents the Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Inc.

EFF and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School are seeking a court order against Diebold. Diebold, the maker of an eVoting system that many a Registrar have purchased, including our own Alameda County, has, as noted here before, lost control of some internal memos (someone hacked into get them). Diebold has been serving C&D's (Swarthmore, as well as one here at Berkeley, and Derek Slater/Harvard received one) to ISP's of hosters of the memos, and students have been protesting, because they, we, believe Diebold is in the wrong in trying to suppress information about security flaws in the eVoting system. The memos are all over now, and on file sharing networks. Diebold has even claimed DMCA copyright violations for those linking to the memos. And finally, after two+ weeks, big media is paying attention.

John Schwartz/NYTimes front page today: File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech.
Steven Levy/MSNBC and Newsweek: Black Box Voting Blues.

/.ing, and Donna Wentworth has all the links.

Update: Declan McCullagh/C|Net: Students buck DMCA threat. Also, Parker Thompson has started blogging with Minfesto. He's one of the students posting Diebold memos, and has this: Brittney Spears Don't Vote. Parker also writes that California is reconsidering Diebold's touch screen system. In particular, check out this CA Task Force Report (pdf) on the systems. Glad to have you in the blogosphere, PT!

Update 110403: Siva Vaidhyanathan has this on Diebold: voting problems in Houston, and a write up on Brian Lehrer's public radio story. He says that the story was poorly done, with a National Journal reporter as the expert interviewed. I just read the CNN/AP article: California delays certification of some electronic voting machines, and found it missed the context of the past few weeks, where students at various schools have been mirroring the Diebold memos and keeping this issue out front, at some personal risk, which I think has helped push questions of Diebold's security. When media point out that younger readers don't read papers anymore, and then I see this, I think, why should younger readers read the paper, when their involvement it totally left out, or when it is included it's often dismissive in tone of those covered (I do know why they should read papers, but still, you get my point). This is not always true, and certainly Declan's article is not written this way. But really, if you want readers of a certain demographic, think about including them, because they are apart of the story!

Posted by Mary Hodder at November 03, 2003 04:02 PM