I apologize to readers for the down time. An improved RealConspiracyTheories.com is coming soon!
There was a problem with the database (sometimes referred to as PEBCAK by computer geeks), so I republished some older articles and they are appearing as June articles even though they are from last year.
Stay tuned…
ComputerWorld.com is running an article about how Maryland has voted against Diebold electronic voting machines:
"The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections. . . .
If the bill becomes law, the state’s Diebold systems will be placed in "abeyance" and the vendor will be required to equip them so that they provide the requisite paper trail, she said.
Healey said the law would require that the machines provide a paper trail before the 2008 elections or Diebold would risk losing its contract with the state."
Spying on your email without evidence has been officially approved by the US government.
NewsForge reports on the movement to make the US election voting machines open-source.
Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places. In the US, however, the effort to bring open source systems — and other aspects of trustworthy voting, including voter verified paper receipts — is made more difficult by the entrenchment of the major vendors: Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and others.
The Secret Service has secretly made a deal with several printer manufacturers to track everything that comes out of your printer. Do you own a color printer? It may be secretly applying a near-invisible series of dots to each print that identify your printer’s serial number, the time and date of prints, and possibly other identifying information. Rigged printers include certain models made by Xerox, Dell, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Toshiba, and IBM, among others. The EFF has published a list of known affected printers. If you find this too hard to believe, check out this tutorial on how to read the secret tracking code that your printer may be applying to your prints.
This raises some serious questions. If the government has secretly made deals with printer manufacturers to spy on you, what other kinds of deals have been made, or will be made? Does the government have other secret deals with computer manufacturers? Software manufacturers? Cell phone manufacturers? The recent revelation of cell phone tapping by the NSA shows that your electronics are without a doubt spying on you. This can only get worse as we move into the age of RFID chips. More about RFID coming soon.
BlackBoxVoting.org continues to investigate the electronic voting machines used in the 2004 Presidental Election. They found that:
"The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote."
Reuters reports that the New York Times is suing the Pentagon about the recent domestic spying by the NSA.
“The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.”
For readers not familiar with the domestic spying program, more information can be found on Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is written by the viewers and is normally a very good resource, but always be aware that it is easily edited by anyone.)
Contrary to suspicions that were reported in BBC, Microsoft claims that they will not put a secret government backdoor into their new Vista operating system.
US News & World Report published aninteresting article about unwarranted searches of Americans.
The White House says spying on terror suspects without court approval is ok. What about physical searches?
RealConspiracyTheories.com previously covered the news about how the UK is planning mandatory biometric identity cards, with a punishment of a £2,500 (US $4,350) fine for not registering.
The Guardian reports that the battle is not over yet:
The government suffered another defeat on its controversial ID cards bill tonight when peers voted by a sizeable majority in the Lords to ensure the planned identity cards were voluntary.
