Posted 8:45 AM

Black Box Magic

A new bunch of seriously misguided do-gooders have gone to Washington to question eVoting security according to PC World. And once again, another group has forgotten the first rule of computer security:

If there's no physical security of the box, then there's no security at all.

According to the Chicken Luddles at blackboxvoting.org, "You simply open any text editor, like 'Notepad,' and type a six-line Visual Basic Script, and you own the election." Of course, to do this you need:

1) physical access to the computer
2) the ability to close the application and open Notepad
3) the ability to save the VB script
4) the ability to run the script against the database
5) the ability to erase your 'fingerprints' (both logical and physical)
6) the ability to re-boot the machine

That's physical access plus administrator access -as Diebold, the voting machine vendor, said: "what was presented [by Black Box Voting] was a magic show." And a not very good magic show at that!