Disaster Waiting to Happen

Via Dan Gillmor comes this report by four computer security professionals on the massive problems with an electronic voting system by Diebold already used in Georgia and just sold to Maryland.

Even with this restricted view of the source code, we discovered significant and wide-reaching security vulnerabilities in the AccuVote-TS voting terminal. Most notably, voters can easily program their own smartcards to simulate the behavior of valid smartcards used in the election. With such homebrew cards, a voter can cast multiple ballots without leaving any trace. A voter can also perform actions that normally require administrative privileges, including viewing partial results and terminating the election early. Similar undesirable modifications could be made by malevolent poll workers (or even maintenance staff) with access to the voting terminals before the start of an election. Furthermore, the protocols used when the voting terminals communicate with their home base, both to fetch election configuration information and to report final election results, do not use cryptographic techniques to authenticate the remote end of the connection nor do they check the integrity of the data in transit. Given that these voting terminals could communicate over insecure phone lines or even wireless Internet connections, even unsophisticated attackers can perform untraceable "man-in-the-middle" attacks.

Not really the kind of thing to inspire voter confidence. Looks like Florida 2000 might have been just a clumsy dress rehearsal.

Washington Intern Gone Bad

Is Jason Buckley psychic? When it comes to the subject of Washington interns gone bad, it's hard to say no.

Now We Know the Why

We know the "what" — Bush lied about Iraq's efforts to purchase uranium in Africa in his State of the Union speech. We can be fairly confident we know the "how" — the White House pushed back against the CIA and attributed the uranium claim to British intelligence, thinking that would make the statement "techically accurate" and mollify the critics. And now Walter Pincus in the Washinton Post gives us the "why":

In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa — although now almost entirely disproved — was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.

To put all this in perspective: Leading up to war, Bush knew he needed to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States. The only compelling way to do this was to claim that Iraq was close to obtaining nuclear weapons. The yellowcake claim was the only piece of evidence of Iraqi nuclear ambitions that hadn't been publically called into question. Thus, this "one sentence", these "16 words", became absolutely foundational for Bush's claim that Saddam needed to be taken out, and taken out right now.

New Blood

I can't say yet whether these changes are good ones or not, but given the track record of the previous crew running the SC Democratic Party, it would be hard to do worse. Good luck, folks!

Always the Last to Know

The White House has admitted that the Iraq/uranium story is bunk. Tenet admits it. Condi admits it. W kinda-sorta admits it. Now, can someone please let the White House webmaster know?

Disclaimer

Pure Talent:

Bush: …it's time that we give the American people their money back.

V/O: (spoken quickly) The Bush plan will not help anyone but the richest of the rich. If you think that George W. Bush or anyone else in the Republican party cares about you or anyone else in your income group, it is suggested that you read the newspaper more.

Bush WMD Lies

Meanwhile, at my day job, this new bit of multimedia fun about Bush's lies and the uranium/Niger/SOTU story.

Calpundit is also on the case, and has the obvious take on Colin Powell's bad attempt at apologia.

Blaming It on Bill

If there is something the Republicans are willing to claim isn't Bill Clinton's fault, I've yet to hear about it. But Bush's latest line about inheriting the recession reaches a new level of hypocrisy and dissembling. According to this story in the Washington Post:

The trouble is it's a case of what the president has called, in another context, revisionist history. The recession officially began in March of 2001 — two months after Bush was sworn in — according to the universally acknowledged arbiter of such things, the National Bureau of Economic Research. And the president, at other times, has said so himself.

Of course, as the Post kindly points out, Bush has also been having a fun time revising his opinions on affirmative action and sodomy laws, too.