Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Stamp of reproval for e-voting systems.
By Robert Lemos
CNET News.com,
October 28, 2004.

As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Tuesday, weak and outdated federal voting standards have emerged as a major cause of e-voting security concerns. Over the years, state election officials have approved purchases of thousands of e-voting machines, relying on their compliance with federal guidelines that fail to address critical problems.

Voting machines remain unsecured, expert warns.
By Chappell Brown
EE Times,
October 28, 2004.

With the election only a few days away, news of the insecurity of electronic voting continues to come out
with alarming consistency.
A government study of voting machine security issues was cancelled because the conclusions by the panel of computer scientists were so negative.

Computer experts are questioning the security of the all-electronic voting machines being used in this year’s presidential election, but the problems posed by this new approach to recording the vote run much deeper than vote tampering or lost data.

National Academies’ RSS News Feed

Copy this to your RSS reader:
http://www.nap.edu/rss/na.xml

The National Academies RSS feed provides daily access to news releases, publication announcements and public statements.
The National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council.

Expats blocked from official Bush website
27 October 2004.

This story points out that “American expats are unable to visit the official website of US President George W. Bush.”
It notes a similar block on an official government web site:

The block follows a similar ban on some overseas visitors to a US government-run expat voting information site.

In October it was revealed the Pentagon had blocked access to its voter information site (www.fvap.gov) by some foreign Internet Service Providers, including Wanadoo in France and Telefonica in Spain.

The block was removed following uproar among voter registration advocates. The US Defense Department at first said the block was placed on Pentagon websites to prevent attacks from hackers, but later said the barricade on the voter registration site had been left on inadvertently.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Attack prompts Bush website block

While not an official government web site, this seems all too consistent with current administration information policies. Interestingly, the Bush campaign is able to do this by making use of the exact same service that GPO has just announce plans to use: Akamai EdgeScape.

The policy of trying to stop overseas visitors viewing the site is thought to have been adopted in response to an attack on the georgewbush.com website.

Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign said: “The measure was taken for security reasons.”
He declined to elaborate any further on the blocking policy.

Those White House Links to Nothing,
by Helen Dewar and Brian Faler.
Washington Post, October 25, 2004 Monday
Final Edition.A Section; A06.

The list of names of countries supporting the U.S.-led military action in Iraq has been removed from the White House Web site. Blogger Brad Friedman, who
noticed the disappearance, believes this is part of a widespread “scrubbing” of documents on the government site. Gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush’s statement that “I’m not that concerned” about Osama bin Laden, a Q&A when Bush said “misunderestimate” and Bush’s acknowledgment that his decision making on stem cell policy was “unusually deliberative for my administration.”

The White House explanation?
“When we republish pages and move files, some links are bound to go down, and there are bound to be dead pages.” And, “This coalition list was dated and inaccurate.”

So, has anyone at the White House heard of history?
Is GPO saving these and making them permanently available? Is GPO depositing these with depository libraries?
Are we better informed?

Michael Copps: An FCC Commissioner taking on Big Media

Read on to learn more about what FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is doing about media consolidation. The quote below just makes one want to *sigh*!

Indeed, Copps says his town hall meetings were mostly ignored by news media, including cities where they took place. At a hearing in Phoenix, Copps recalls asking someone in attendance how he got the word. “He said, `I heard about it on the BBC.’ It’s a real conspiracy of silence, and I think it goes all the way to the top.”

Senator Carl Levin Releases Report on Pre-War Intelligence

Levin’s report (in PDF) is a page turner. It “focuses on 1) the establishment of a non-Intelligence Community source of intelligence analysis in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and 2) the extent to which policy makers utilized that alternative source rather than the analyses produced by the Intelligence Community with regard to the issue of any relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda before the Iraq war.”

The report demonstrates how intelligence relating to the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was exaggerated by high ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the Administration’s decision to invade Iraq when the intelligence assessments of the Intelligence Community did not make a sufficiently compelling case. The Intelligence Community’s analysis of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship as a relatively weak one was as definitive as reliable reporting would permit, and their conclusions were subsequently supported by the 9/11 Commission and the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq.

Add to this report George Tenet’s speech last night before the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan where he called the “war on Iraq “wrong”" as well as posts on LAZ over the past couple of days regarding the administration’s and republican Senators’ stonewalling on the release of key documents — CIA’s 2004 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate (”NIE) and Richard CLarke’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee — and we have a smoking gun, not in Iraq, but pointing directly at the president. It seems like the wheels on the administration’s little red wagon are falling off.

“Separate Reality of Bush/Kerry Supporters (pdf)

This new report out yesterday from the Program on International Policy Studies (PIPA) shows that Bush and Kerry supporters live in totally different universes where Bush supporters believe it is a fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass estruction; Kerry supporters don’t. Bush supporters believe Saddam was supporting al Qaeda; Kerry supporters don’t. Bush supporters believe most people in other countries approve of the war in Iraq; Kerry supporters don’t.

PIPA has some other valuable online reports on such hot-button issues as global warming, Iraq, Israel-Palestinian conflict, and Americans’ role in the world.

[Thanks to Electoral Vote for referring me to the report!]

Archive Sues CIA for Speedy Review of Key Iraq Document

The National Security Archive today filed suit against the Central Intelligence Agency (”CIA”) seeking the expedited processing and release under the Freedom of Information Act (”FOIA”) of the 2004 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate (”NIE). As the New York Times reported on September 16, 2004, the NIE spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq. The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war.