'Civil disobedience' campaign targets Diebold

'Civil disobedience' campaign targets Diebold:

"By Paul Hales: Wednesday 22 October 2003, 01:25

STUDENTS at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania have got the right raving hump with Diebold, a maker of electronic voting systems.

So much so that they have initiated what they call a 'campaign of civil disobedience' to maintain the right to link to memos leaked from Diebold that seem to highlight weaknesses in their electoral counting systems.

The students formed the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC), which vents its spleen on the why-war.com website, and today announced that they are 'rejecting Diebold Elections Systems' cease and desist orders and are initiating an electronic civil disobedience campaign that will ensure permanent public access to the controversial leaked memos.'

The memos they refer to originate from Diebold and seem to indicate certain irregularities with their vote-counting equipment. Why War? member Micah explains: 'These memos indicate that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection.'

Diebold had earlier initiated its own campaign in which it attempted to stop anyone linking to the memos, by threatening their ISP. Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared it would defend the right of Online Privacy Group, the Internet service provider for San Francisco Indymedia, to host links to the controversial memos.

Why War? and SCDC members say they 'are the first to publicly refuse to comply with Diebold's cease and desist order by continually providing access to the documents, which you can find here, by the way.

In a statement issued moments ago, the two groups maintain that 'the public availability of these documents must be protected at any cost"