All your vote are belong to us
This bit of news is absolutely idiotic. Diebold, the largest manufacturer of electronic voting machines in the United States, uses a single master key for every voting machine they make. Wait, it gets worse. It’s not even a good key; it’s a standard low-security filing cabinet-type key, which can typically be picked in under ten seconds by someone who knows what they’re doing. The key guards access to the memory card. Get access to the memory card, and it can easily be swapped out for different votes, loaded up with a virus to throw off vote totals, etc.
But here’s the part where it gets downright criminally negligent. Diebold offers this key for sale on its online store to “authorized personnel”, but much, much worse, is that they included a picture of the actual key. Keys are very simple devices; the only thing that matters is their shape. Using just the image of the key on the website, a man successfully reproduced the key, which successfully opened a Diebold voting machine. So now you don’t even need to know how to pick locks to tamper with elections; simply make the key at home at your leisure, walk into the voting booth with a key and a replacement memory card, and within no more than ten seconds, an election can be stolen.
Do you feel safe about your Democracy now?
