Take Only Memories

And leave no fingerprints. Washington Post (01.22.06):

"As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself. Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques." As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security

Believe it or not, "Diebold and some officials have criticized Sancho's experiments and said his conclusions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems are unfounded." "What Sancho did 'is analogous to if I gave you the keys to my house and told you when I was gone,' said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. As Bear sees it, Sancho's experiment involved giving hackers 'complete unfettered access' to the equipment, something a responsible elections administrator would never allow." But as to an irresponsible, dishonest or negligent elections adminstrator? For that matter, you don't even have to be an administrator to job the system. "Was it possible for a disgruntled employee to do this and not have the elections administrator find out?' Sancho asked. 'The answer was yes.'" The computer guys working with Sancho down in Florida are Harri Hursti and Herb Thompson. They've been tormenting poor Diebold for some time now. It'd be interesting to see the coders at Diebold lock up with either Harri or Herb over the issue of security. Herb is the "Director of Security Technology for Security Innovation where he leads teams of security penetration testers on contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense. He is also Principal Investigator on many U.S. DoD grants to find new techniques to penetrate software." Harri can reprogram Diebold's memory cards with "a $500 scanner used to measure crop moisture", which says all you need to know about Harri's skills.