The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
AlterNet
By , Velvet Revolution
Posted on August 13, 2008, Printed on August 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/94895/
In an interview from October, 2006, that has only now seen the light
of day, Stephen Spoonamore, one of the world's leading experts in
cyber crime and a self-described "life-long Republican" destroys
Diebold's already non-existent credibility.
Spoonamore lays it out for anyone to see and understand. If you care
about America and it's survival as a democratic republic, you'll
watch this interview.
The interviews are on YouTube and are being carried by a new site
created by Velvet Revolution, RoveCyberGate.com.
Read below the fold for details and background.
There is a civil suit pending in Ohio, King Lincoln Bronzeville v.
Blackwell. We covered a July 17 press conference about this case
here. The issues in this case are complex, but in a nutshell, some
Ohio voters filed a lawsuit about the 2004 election. These voters
want to get the deposition of Mike Connell, a Republican IT expert
who set up Ohio's computers for the 2004 election while
simultaneously running the IT network for the Bush/Cheney 2004
campaign.
Connell's allegiance is clear; he is the co-owner of Connell
Donatelli Inc., the company that was the registrant, administrator,
and tech organizer of the website for the so-called Swiftboat
Veterans for Truth. Connell has also been called "a high-tech
Forrest Gump" who was "'at the scene of every crime' for numerous
questionable elections since 2000."
The plaintiffs are working with an expert witness, Stephen
Spoonamore. Spoonamore, according to Arnebeck, "works for credit
card companies chasing data thieves, identity thieves around the
globe, and also consults with government agencies including the
Secret Service, the Pentagon, and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in criminal matters. [He's] really one of the top, and
in fact the top private cop in the world on the subject of data
security."
In this interview, "Spoon," as his friends call him, cuts through
the lies and dissembling of Diebold and explains in language that
anyone can understand how our elections have been stolen and how
they are going to be stolen again. Even though this interview is
almost two years old, the issues are still, unfortunately, germane
to our elections.
The interview is broken into eight segments, and each segment is
only a few minutes long. We urge you to watch each segment for
yourself, which won't take very long. It is only through an
electorate that is educated about the problems with electronic
voting and the lies told by the e-voting companies that we will have
a chance to take our elections back from the crooks who are
currently in control of them.
Following are some excerpts from the interview, but we urge you to
watch the entire thing.
In segment one:
Spoon explains that Diebold "refuse[s] to show the architecture [of
their voting machines] or allow it to be exposed to any kind of
significant expert." He says, "The people who … they claim have
certified their machines have no knowledge of architecture
whatsoever."
Spoon continues, "The fundamental structures that Diebold has used
to set up their voting machines are inherently flawed. They are what
I would consider IT junk."
He explains how a Diebold ATM is set up with checks, double checks,
triple checks, and even quadruple checks to ensure that the machine
works the way it is supposed to. And, adds Spoon, "Those people [the
people who check a bank's ATM] are not from Diebold. One of them is
from the installation group and one of them is from the bank.
Otherwise, the [ATM] machine is not certified for use."
When the interviewer says, "So what you're saying is there's more
security regarding the dispensing of a $20 bill and the fact that if
you don't get that $20 bill, there is more of an audit system set up
[as compared to any audit system for the counting of our votes],"
Spoon replies, "Of course."
Regarding the 2000 elections, he says, "There is a very strong
argument to be made that the 2000 election was electronically
stolen, the hanging chads were just a distraction."
In segment two:
Spoon talks about the Department of Homeland Security's warning via
the US-CERT Center (the United States' Cyber Emergency Response
Team) "warning that the way Diebold systems are architected in the
way the tabulators communicate to the central state tabulation
center is subject to foreign national hacking [as well as hacking
from within the U.S.]. They put out a warning about it. To the best
of my knowledge, this is still the case." He explains how this can
happen.
On to segment three.
In talking about memory cards, which hold the electronic votes and
are fed into tabulation machines and which have extensive security
flaws, Spoon explains a serious issue regarding negative vote
numbers.
Spoonamore:
There has been repeated issues [sic] where people have said they've
seen votes backing up in tabulators as cards are put in [meaning
votes are being subtracted instead of added]. Okay, well that would
indicate that something in that program is not adding cards forward,
it may be adding cards backward.
…
There is no reason in the world a negative number should ever be
able to exist on a voting card. And yet, in all the voting card code
that I've looked at, Diebold has a negative field that allows a
negative number to be entered in a vote total. Why? Why would you
want -- to steal votes. That way you can start with a card that has
negative a hundred votes for somebody, then it takes them a hundred
votes before they're even back to zero.
Interviewer:
And yet Diebold does not allow, for proprietary reasons, anyone to
review the vote tabulation software?
Spoonamore:
They let us work on their cash machines, but no, they won't let
anybody see their software.
Interviewer:
Any thoughts as to why?
Spoonamore:
Because they're stealing elections.
Referring to the 2002 election results in Georgia, where Republican
Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Senator Max Cleland, Spoon says,
"If you look at the case of Saxby Chambliss, that's ridiculous. The
man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max
Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day."
Spoonamore continues:
"I do not believe George Bush won [in 2004], I believe Kerry won.
And I'm a member of the GOP. But I want to make it clear: we need to
live in a place where your [a candidate's] election actually is
reflected in the vote. I want my candidate to win, but if my
candidate loses, I care a lot more about the process than I care
about the victory."
Would that all Americans thought that way.
And segment four.
Spoon discusses the infamous Georgia patch from the 2002 election.
"I've personally reviewed a number of pieces of code from Diebold.
It's garbage. Some of the code is awful. I reviewed the patch that
they put in Georgia, 2002, that many of them claimed is a clock
function. It's not a clock function, it's a comparator function. …
If it were me and I were to guess what that code is, it's a vote
flipping code. It's not a clock function, that I know."
Segment Five:
Interviewer:
So this is not a partisan issue?
Spoonamore:
It shouldn't be. This is a fascist issue. People who don't want
voting and want fascist control but have people think they're
voting. I mean, people forget the fact there was voting in Hitler's
Germany. Guess what? He won with 90% of the vote all the time. There
was voting in Saddam's Iraq. And guess what? Saddam won the vote all
the time. Well, did they win? Was that actually the will of the
voter? Was that the way the votes were even cast?
Spoonamore goes on to explain that with credit cards, at least 2.5%
of all transactions are fraudulent, and that they cannot get that
number any lower. He believes that electronic voting, no matter how
transparent and secure, will also have an error rate, whether from
fraud or flawed technology or both, of at least 2.5%.
Do you want to have a system in place where there is a permanent
background of electronic voting fraud of 2-and-a-half percent? That
means you have to win an election by a minimum of 3% to know that
you've won? I don't. Paper ballots, please. That's the only thing
that can be secure.
Segment six:
Interviewer:
[Regarding the Harri Hursti hack] Diebold has come back every time
and said, "Well, you know, that hack can't happen."
Spoonamore:
They're lying. They're lying. Diebold is lying.
Interviewer:
What, their systems can't be hacked?
Spoonamore:
There is no system, electronic, in the world that cannot be hacked.
I've spent my entire life building or hacking electronic systems. …
There is no system in the world -- none -- that cannot be hacked. …
End of discussion.
Interviewer:
Then how do you secure such a piece of equipment then?
Spoonamore:
You don't. You use paper ballots. I can't make it any clearer than
this. You cannot have secure electronic voting. It doesn't exist. …
You must have paper ballots.
Spoon continues: "There are people out there -- and there is [sic] a
lot of them -- who don't really want to win elections. What they
want to do is they want to steal them. … I don't want to have a
society where we're not sure who won. I want to live in a democracy
where there is a valid capacity to audit the entire trail."
Well said, Mr. Spoonamore.
Segment seven:
"I think they [the Diebold machines] are brilliantly designed.
They're designed to steal elections. … There are back doors in the
tabulations machines, which is what the US-CERT warning is about.
There's a backdoor communication that allows secondary computers to
talk to the actual tabulators electronically from a distance." Spoon
goes on to describe some of the technical details of electronic
voting machine election fraud.
And lastly, segment eight:
Interviewer:
Many people who are denying problems, they're saying, "Oh well,
these are just Democrats signaling alarms -- "
Spoonamore:
I'm a Republican. I'm a Republican, I worked on Giuliani's campaign,
I worked on Bloomberg's campaign, I worked on John McCain's
campaign. I've been a life-long member of the party. This is not a
Democrat/Republican issue. This is not a partisan issue. This is a
democracy issue. If you actually care about a constitutional
democracy in which each person votes, that vote is validated, and
the people who end up in office are reflected on the basis of the
way people voted, you care about this issue.
If you don't want people to vote, if you don't want people's vote to
count, and you want to rule without owning it by a mandate, then you
are very supportive of Diebold.
Relative to this statement from Mr. Spoonamore, please watch this
youtube clip of Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation
and the Moral Majority, talking about voting:
That's a rare and candid admission of a still on-going strategy to
prevent Americans from registering and/or voting.
The interview continues:
Interviewer:
I mean, who's stealing the votes? If what you say is true, who wants
to steal the elections?
Spoonamore:
I certainly know that in all the statistical information, it seems
that in every single bizarre circumstance where exit data, polling
data, or informational data swings, it has all been in favor of
Republicans. But not the sort of Republicans who I want to see in
office at all. These are people who lie and people who cheat. That
is not the conservative way. Conservatives conserve things. We are
respectful and we are constitutionally based.
You know what the real problem is? People do not want to believe
that people want to steal elections in this country. I've done
extensive work over the years for voting monitoring overseas. If we
had a variance in the exit polling of even 2% from what actually was
tabulated -- which is exactly how the Orange Revolution came about
in Ukraine -- we would be in there explaining to people something is
wrong.
We have had numerous elections in this country now in which -- where
you use Diebold Election System machines -- that what happens with
the vote is way off, five, ten, as much as twelve percent from the
exit polling and the actual survey. These statistical numbers are
impossible.
And the problem is Americans do not want to believe that we have
people stealing our elections. And they must come to the realization
there are people in this country who want to steal elections, and we
must stop them.
If you've read this far, you clearly care about this issue. Please,
we implore all Americans to contact their state's secretary of
state, their House representative, and their Senators and DEMAND
they ban the use of electronic voting machines. Demand that all
elections in the United States be conducted:
1) with a hand-marked paper ballot for every vote;
2) the ballots counted publicly and transparently at each precinct;
3) citizens allowed by law to observe the ballots being counted;
4) precinct results posted publicly before being sent to the central
tabulator.
© 2008 Velvet Revolution All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/94895/
