Justice Department Decides To Break Up E-Voting Company

~~ I really , really do not like electronic voting. I feel it could threaten the functioning of our democracy. Anything electronic can get hacked . ( See other posts on this topic.)

Re-counting electronic votes needs techie geeky types. I still like paper ballots , marked in hand by the voter. Primitive , yes ; slow yes ' but it is easier and truer to recount. The less that can go wrong , the less that will go wrong ~~~

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Justice Department Decides To Break Up E-Voting Company

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100308/1919058469.shtml

from the how-about-just-opening-the-source-code? dept

As was rumored at the end of last year, the US Justice Department has decided to break up Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the dominant e-voting provider in the country. You may recall that just a few months earlier, ES&S (who has a long and troubled history of inaccurate, buggy and insecure e-voting machines) had purchased the remains of Diebold's e-voting business for just $5 million. Of course, Diebold also had a long and troubled historyof inaccurate, buggy and insecure e-voting machines, so the two made a perfect match. In both cases, the companies relied on security by stonewalling -- insisting that nothing was wrong, despite lots of proof to the contrary, and refusing to let third party security experts ever look at their machines. Rather than breaking up the companies, why don't the feds just require that any e-voting machine use open source software that can be tested by anyone?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100308/1919058469.shtml

You would think “Freedom of information” would mean “Free Information”, right ? ~ TP

~~~: You would think “Freedom of information” would mean “Free Information”, right ? ~ TP

Feds ask group to pay almost $373,000 for records
By The Associated Press
02.01.05

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department says a group that wants to see secret documents about the detention of people jailed after the Sept. 11 attacks first must pay nearly $373,000 to cover the cost of searching for the information.

And the advance payment won’t guarantee anything that’s found will be released.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, government agencies must provide the public with access to government documents, unless the information falls under certain exemptions. The first two hours of a search are free. Agencies then charge for searches, the rate dependent on the level of the employees who do the work.

People for the American Way Foundation, which sued for the records last year, accused the Justice Department of making the cost exceedingly high to deter its request.

“Unfortunately it’s part of a pattern of the Justice Department trying to foreclose access to this kind of information,” Elliot Mincberg, the group’s legal director, said yesterday.

More info at : http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/


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