Thursday, May 20, 2004

Black Box Voting

Bev Harris, who scooped the e-voting fiasco, has been harrassed in various ways ever since. The latest is a supposed hacking case that the FBI and Secret Service claim they need Bev's web visitor information to crack.

On Jan. 9, Harris says, she had her first meeting with Secret Service agent Michael Levin about the hack. Levin would not confirm that he met with Harris, but he does acknowledge that there is an ongoing investigation and refers to Harris by her first name. Levin is the supervisor from the Secret Service for the Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force, an interagency law enforcement group that includes the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Washington State Patrol, and the Seattle Police Department.

To date, Harris writes, she has had five meetings with Levin. By April 29, she was completely fed up. “This investigation no longer passes the stink test,” she writes. “I’ll tell you what it looks like to me: a fishing expedition.” Harris states that the Secret Service claims it is investigating the VoteHere hack but never spends much time on it while interviewing her. “Most of the time is spent on the Diebold memos, which they claim they are not investigating.”

Harris sounds the alarm about what the government wants her to turn over. “They want the logs of my Web site with all the forum messages and the IP [Internet protocol] addresses.” IP addresses are unique, numerical pointers to one or more computers on the Internet, making it possible to identify, or narrow the search for, a computer that has visited a given Web site. Writes Harris: “This has nothing to do with a VoteHere ‘hack’ investigation, and I have refused to turn it over.

“So, yesterday, they call me up and tell me they are going to subpoena me and put me in front of a grand jury. Well, let ’em. They still aren’t getting the list of members of blackboxvoting.org unless they seize my computer—which my attorney tells me might be what they had in mind.”
  Seattle Weekly article

So, if you've visited Bev's website, you may eventually be in Secret Service and FBI files. Secret Service handles cyber crime?

I've certainly visited her site. I've got her site linked on my own webpage. But, hey, I'm pretty sure I'm already in the FBI files (and perhaps the CIA after that trip to Venezuela), so why not the Secret Service files, too?