George Bush: Hack

While we're on the subject of the miserable failure and the consideration that last week's election was rigged, there's a rather interesting discussion going on at the DailyKos about it, instigated by this email, supposedly from an encryption expert:

Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He "accidently"got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines.

Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software. One line in partictular stood out over all the rest:

#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"

All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key..The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure prograns.F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked.

I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasen't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed election, plain and simple.

This second coup d'etat is either stopped now or America ceases to be.

Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman interviewed BlackBoxVoting.org's Bev Harris, who has filed a Freedom Of Information Act petition for the internet audit logs from the electronic voting machines, and Professor Aviel Rubin, reported author of the above email.

While not claiming fraud, Rubin had this to say when asked if he was convinced that Bush had "won the election":

I don't know. I think that as long as we use systems where you cannot really tell what's going on inside the machine -- you know, when I was an election judge, I watched people walk into the precinct, walk up to Diebold machines, vote, and walk out. And at the end of the day we printed results. And I was thinking if I had written that program that's running on those machines, I could have made any outcome that I wanted come out. So, you know, do I believe that Bush really won? Well, I don't know.

While in my heart of hearts I believe that the Republicans rigged the election, I wasn't quick to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon and I'm still waiting on what Bev Harris is able to turn up. But if indeed this turns out to be Bush's Watergate, I hope that the American people who apparently have been able to forgive his failed first term get disgusted enough to make it hurt. If they allow him to slip through this like he has slipped through everything else he has screwed up, I will have lost faith in America's ability to lead the world in anything but sheer, utter stupidity.