Venezuela poised to hack our elections?

Something for the conspiracy theory buffs out there. Yeah, it's the New York Times, but they're not *always* wrong. Besides, the Miami Herald got there first.

Excerpts:

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm's operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said...

Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country's elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chavez as president in August 2004...

But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.

'The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a national security concern,' said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.

'There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company,' Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview yesterday. 'The Cfius process, if it is moving forward, can determine that.'

...The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chavez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chavez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent.

Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.

At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said. 'They did it all wrong,' one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview...

'No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any stake in Smartmatic,' Mr. Stoller said. 'Smartmatic has always been a privately held company, and despite that, we've been fully transparent about the ownership of the corporation.'

Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the shares the Venezuelan government received in it were 'the guarantee for a loan.'

Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia's electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal and state election agencies.

But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic's new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help with the vote.

Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer, that was developed in Venezuela.

I say:

I'm sure it's nothing.

And now, from conspiracy theory to bad horror flick: the dead are voting in New York

Excerpts:

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File." That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937...

Tales of votes being cast from the grave are part of election lore. Last year, at least two dead voters were counted in a Tennessee state Senate race that was decided by fewer than 20 votes. As a result of that and other irregularities, seven poll workers were fired, an entire precinct was dissolved and the election results were voided by the state Senate, forcing the removal of the presumed winner. Three elections workers were indicted for faking the votes.

In 1997, a judge declared a Miami mayoral election invalid because of widespread fraud, including dead voters.

And in one of the more notorious examples, inspectors estimated that as many as 1 in 10 ballots cast in Chicago during the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election were fraudulent for various reasons, including votes by the dead.


Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

Is small really beautiful?

I recently jumped into the discussion on the forvm (just how do you pronounce that, anyway?) on what sort of system there should be for selecting articles. In the course of that, Aurelius made a comment that he wants a system based on honor and trust, and therefore wants the site to stay small.

I didn't pick up on that at first, because the idea is so alien to my thinking. The problem with trust and honor is they don't scale well. He knows this, but instead of giving up on the idea, it seems he'd rather put the whole site on a bed of Procrustes just to keep the honor system.

I must disagree strongly with his priorities.

First off, keeping the site small defeats the the network effect. The bigger and more active a network is, the better it functions. The Internet is an ocean, of information, opinion, and, er, dross. A small, contained site would be more like a stagnant pond. Instead of a fruitful intellectual exchange, we'd have groupthink, clubbiness, tired old inside jokes. Some people like that. I have no idea why.

(Concerned about spammers and other time wasters? I think I have a solution to that which doesn't involve throttling the baby.)

In nature, as on the Internet, if something isn't growing, it's dying. Why? Think it over. Dying means a negative rate of growth. Neither growing nor dying means a zero rate of growth. Now the positive and negative take up nearly all of the range of real numbers, but zero is a mere dimensionless point. What are the odds of a rate of growth hitting zero by chance? Infinitesimal.

And as Kierkegaard has observed, the old tacitus.org site was slowly dying. That's the alternative to growth. Is that what we want?

Now, if you want to go about it deliberately, you might just come up with a scheme that artificially holds the site to a certain narrow size range. You have to go out of your way to make it happen, and even then it might not work. I can think of ways to try to do this, but I won't share them, because I don't think we should even want a small site.

Small is not beautiful. Small is just small. The network effect is what's beautiful.

Anyway, that's my take on it.


Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

NYT begins to come clean on SWIFT falsehoods

Still a lot of explaining to do

Excerpt:

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone's private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of 'the most substantial argument against running the story,' but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

The source of the data, as my column noted, was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. That Belgium-based consortium said it had honored administrative subpoenas from the American government because it has a subsidiary in this country.

I haven't found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven't been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program. The lack of appropriate oversight - to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention - was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight.

In addition, I became embarrassed by the how-secret-is-it issue, although that isn't a cause of my altered conclusion. My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a 'secret' program was being exposed. (If one sentence down in the article had acknowledged that a number of people were probably aware of the program, both the newsroom and I would have been better able to address that wave of criticism.)

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press - two traits that I warned readers about in my first column.

I say:

No, Mr. Calame, it wasn't Bush's fault. It was yours. And it was *not* a close call. Everyone directly involved in this is exposed to treason charges. You all knew what you were doing, and you just didn't care.

This is far too little, and too late.

Affinity for the underdog, you say? What underdog is that? Just who was harmed by this program? Just who was helped by you defeating its purpose?

I'd suggest you grow up, and start taking responsibility for your own actions, but it's way too late for that. Instead, I suggest you leave for a country that has no extradition treaty.


Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

Sandy Berger redux

This is the dox-in-sox guy from a year or so ago. He got off with a slap in the wrist. Well, now it's October surpise season, with everybody exposing everybody. So he's fair game again.

Excerpt:

A group of House Republicans called Wednesday for a congressional investigation into the improper handling of classified documents by President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger.

Berger admitted last year that he deliberately took classified documents out of the National Archives in 2003 and destroyed some of them at his office. He pleaded guilty in federal court to one charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and was fined $50,000.

Ten lawmakers led by House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., and Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., released a letter calling for the House Government Reform Committee to investigate.

They asked the committee to determine whether any documents were missing from Clinton administration terrorism records, to review security measures for classified documents and to seek testimony from Berger.

Hunter's spokesman, Joe Kasper, said the Justice Department had asked Congress to hold off on any oversight until the legal case concluded.

I say:

Is this politically motivated? Of course it is. Just like his original crime was. Just like his lenient sentence may have been. Just like... anything you see in the political section of the news is. Got a problem with that?


Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

Harry Reid's shady land deal

What's going on here?

Excerpts:

WASHINGTON -- Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is awaiting word from the Senate ethics committee on whether he failed to properly account for a business deal that allowed him to collect a $1.1 million windfall on land he hadn't personally owned for three years.

Reid sought the opinion after The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the senator didn't disclose to Congress that he first sold the land to a friend's company back in 2001 and took an ownership stake in the company. He didn't collect the seven-figure payout until the company sold the land again in 2004 to others.

Reid reported the 2004 transaction as a personal sale, never disclosing his earlier sale or the stake in the company.

The Nevada Democrat's deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations. Brown has never been charged with wrongdoing, except for a 1981 federal securities complaint that was settled out of court...

The complex dealings allowed Reid to transfer ownership, legal liability and some tax consequences to Brown's company without public knowledge, but still collect the payoff nearly three years later.

Reid hung up the phone when questioned about the deal during an AP interview last week.



Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

The latest on voter fraud in Missouri

A development you may or may not have been following

Excerpts:

At least 16 local democrats have been sentenced for election violations since 2004...

The ACORN Group, the same group that was telling Missourians to vote for Claire McCaskill while registering them to vote, is now in trouble for turning in 1,492 fraudulent voter cards of dead people and teens.

And here's the AP covering the story. In October surprise season no less!

Excerpt:

Four ACORN workers were fired over a September 2003 incident after the St. Louis board pointed out more than 1,000 questionable new voter registration forms collected by ACORN.

ACORN registered more than a million U.S. voters in 2004, when it also had to defend itself against fraud allegations. That year, unreadable cards, duplicate registrations and other invalid or potentially fraudulent registrations turned up in Ohio, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia.


Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)