strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
Sep 1 04: angry
The city is awash in Republicans and their detractors. Crossing Times Square yesterday en route to the office, I had to wade through a knot of middle-aged white women sporting red power suits (gold W pins on their lapels) and big bouffant hairdos. I’m doing everything I can not to pay any attention to the convention, on the grounds that all it will do is amplify the ambient feelings of constant, simmering outrage. The city buzzes with indignation. Instead, I edit science textbooks at my desk on the seventeenth floor and watch long black limousines pull up in front of Fox News (next door) and CNN (three blocks north of us). Clouds of policemen whizz up the Avenue of the Americas on bicycles, in vans, on motorcycles.
I am tired of being angry about the state of our government. I am tired of reading about how its political leaders smear private citizens who oppose them, outrageously and with impunity. I am tired of allegations that my existence somehow undermines the society of “good” and “normal” people. I am tired of demagoguery. I am tired of trying to shake the persistent worry that those in power have rigged the system so thoroughly at this point that we’ll never be able to rid ourselves of them. I want this man and his handlers to go away now.
With that in mind, let’s try to spread the word on a piece of news, okay? An election-technology watchdog group is trying to publicize the rather terrifying results of a study they’ve done:
Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.
When we started hearing about the possibility of using Diebold machines to steal elections, I thought it sounded far-fetched. Now…well, now I still want to believe that this country doesn’t engage in such behavior. But maybe this isn’t really my country anymore. That I find myself thinking this makes me angrier still.
Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing this one out.