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Copyright law, and specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are being abused by Diebold, said Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. Copyright is supposed to protect creative expression, Ms. Seltzer said, but in this case the law is being evoked “because they don’t want the facts out there.”
The foundation is advising many students informally and helping them to find legal aid, and it is representing the Online Policy Group, a nonprofit Internet service provider that got a cease-and-desist letter from Diebold after links to the documents were published on a news Web site that the group posts.
Diebold has become a favorite target of advocates who accuse it of partisanship: company executives have made large contributions to the Republican Party and the chief executive, Walden W. O’Dell, said in an invitation to a fund-raiser that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.’’
He has since said that he will keep a lower political profile. Diebold has been trying to stop the dissemination of the files for months with cease and desist letters, but the number of sources for the documents continues to proliferate. Then in July, the first evaluation of the purloined software from recognized authorities in the field — a team involving experts and Johns Hopkins University and Rice University — found several serious holes in the software’s computer security which, if exploited, could allow someone to vote repeatedly, or to change the votes of others. A later review of the software for the State of Maryland agreed that the software flaws did exist, but that in the practice of real elections, other safety nets of security would keep the vulnerabilities in the code from being exploited. Diebold has said it has been working to fix problems.
As Diebold continued to deal with the headache resulting from its leaked code last week, hackers released software from another of the three major high-tech election companies, Sequoia Voting Systems. Reports of that leak first appeared in the online news service of Wired magazine, which suggested that the company’s software also suffered from poor security design.
