Truthout exposes how 2004 vote was hacked for surprise Bush win

It looks very much like the electronic vote counting in Ohio in 2004 was hacked in order to change a Kerry win to Bush win. This is from Truthout based on documents provided to the court in a lawsuit.

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."

Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."

Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.

Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. "Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you," he wrote to Arnebeck.

Read the email correspondence here [pdf].

The conservative Republicans are a voting minority. Any win they have on a mass basis probably involves a stolen election. This is another indication of their criminal behaviors.

A Man-in-the-middle attack is a classic method of hacking into a system and changing or stealing data.

British computer hacker to be extradicted to U.S. for hacking US military computers

British computer hacker Gary McKinnon has admitted that he has hacked into numerous U.S. government computers, but claims he has done no damage to them. He has just lost an appeal to the British High Court to an earlier court order that he should be extradited to the U.S. He can still appeal to the House of Lords. From Reuters:

Gary McKinnon was arrested in 2002 following charges by U.S. prosecutors that he illegally accessed 97 government computers -- including Pentagon, U.S. army, navy and NASA systems -- causing $700,000 worth of damage. [Snip]

"We do not find any grounds of appeal against the decision," said one of the judges, Lord Justice Maurice Kay.

"Mr. McKinnon's conduct was intentional and calculated to influence and affect the U.S. government by intimidation and coercion."

"As a result of his conduct, damage was caused to computers by impairing their integrity, availability and operation of programs, systems, information and data on the computers, rendering them unreliable," Kay said.

McKinnon's lawyers had argued that sending him to the United States would breach his human rights and should not be allowed on the basis that his extradition was sought "for the purpose of prosecuting him on account of his nationality or political opinions."

The American Prosecutors claim that McKinnon conducted the "biggest military hack of all time." I hope that when the trial occurs the defense attorney has sufficient computer knowledge to challenges this, or that the Prosecution can expand the facts behind it to explain the reasons for the claim. But that is probably just the technician in me. At times like this, I hate seeing technical details concealed behind political rhetoric.