http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0420/040519_news_blackboxvoting.php
May
19 - 25, 2004
www.bigbrother.gov
The feds want to know
who’s been visiting the Web site of voting watchdog Bev
Harris, and they’re likely to get what they want.
by George Howland Jr.
[Photo]
Bev Harris of Renton runs a Web site that is a
clearinghouse in the fight against electronic voting.
(Rick
Dahms)
Computer-voting
watchdog Bev Harris is squaring off with federal
authorities over the government's request for information about visitors to her
internationally renowned Web site, www.blackboxvoting.org. While Harris is
determined to resist the government's investigation, a national expert on press
freedom says the Renton muckraker will almost certainly face extensive fines or
jail time if she refuses to cooperate.
In
the past 20 months, Harris has become America’s leading critic of electronic
voting (see “Black Box Backlash,” March 10). Her reporting on the problems with
new computer voting machines has been a key component in a national, grassroots
movement to safeguard voting. Her astounding discoveries have resulted in
important studies by distinguished computer scientists. She has been leaked
thousands of pages of internal memos from Diebold
Election Systems, one of the country’s leading electronic voting companies. She
is frequently cited by newspapers across the country and is
a guest on national and local television and radio stations. Thousands of
people visit her Web site and participate in its reader forums. Now, Harris
claims, the government wants our names, forum messages, and computer addresses.
Following
the advice of her lawyer, Harris will not talk publicly about the government’s
investigation. Seattle Weekly used postings from Harris’ Web site and
interviewed other people involved with the investigation to put together this
account.
The
investigation began last October, when VoteHere, an
electronic voting software company in Bellevue, reported that a hacker broke
into its computer network. VoteHere founder and Chief
Executive Officer Jim Adler says, “We didn’t think it
was a big deal.” Adler confirms, however, that the FBI and the Secret Service
are investigating the matter. “A crime is a crime is a crime,” he points out.
Adler says there was evidence that the hacker was politically motivated and was
involved somehow in the leak of internal documents at Diebold—although
he will not discuss specifics, at the request of federal law enforcement
agencies.
Last
September, Harris was the first person to publicly post the Diebold
memos, which contain a variety of embarrassing internal e-mails, on the
Internet. The resulting furor produced a wave of bad publicity for the company.
(On April 30, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned the use of Diebold’s voting machines in four California counties and
called on the state attorney general to investigate the corporation for
allegedly lying to public officials about testing and federal certification of
its products.)
On
blackboxvoting.org, Harris writes that in October, a month after she posted the
Diebold memos, she was e-mailed a link that would
take her to stolen VoteHere software. She didn’t
click on the link, because she thought someone was trying to entrap her. Four
months earlier, VoteHere had announced their
intention to release their software for public examination. “Why would anyone
in their right mind grab the stuff in some clandestine manner when it was being
released into the open momentarily?” she writes.
VoteHere’s Adler says the company isn’t sure
whether the hacker made off with its source code. He, too, however, expresses
confusion about why somebody would steal something that was about to be
publicly released.
Despite
her reservations, Harris did follow up with a person who claimed to be the VoteHere hacker. She conducted a telephone interview with
him but afterward felt even less sure of the veracity of his claims to have
possession of the VoteHere source code. “I did not
find him to be credible. It appeared to be an entrapment scheme,” she states.
Harris also says the VoteHere hacker and the Diebold memo leaker are not the
same person. “I am dead certain of this,” she writes.
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.”
Harris
also says Levin told her that he was on the same plane as her on one of the
activist’s recent speaking tours. “What’s that supposed to do? Scare me?” she
asks.
Harris
obviously hopes that the information on her computer can be kept private
because she considers herself a journalist. “[Y]ou
can’t investigate leaks to journalists by going in and grabbing the reporter’s
computer,” she writes.
But
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C., isn’t so confident.
Harris faces two key questions, explains Dalglish.
First, is she a journalist? And second, can a journalist successfully resist a
subpoena from a federal grand jury? Dalglish says
that federal appeals courts, including the Ninth Circuit that has jurisdiction
in Washington, have defined a journalist as someone who is collecting
information to disseminate it widely to the general public. Certainly Harris is
doing that. That she is not an employee of a traditional news organization—and
that her Web site focuses on a very specific subject, voting security—would
work against her legal claim of being a journalist, Dalglish
says. But she thinks Harris could overcome those issues with a good lawyer.
When
it comes to a federal grand jury subpoena, however, being a journalist doesn’t
give you any immunity, Dalglish says. U.S. attorneys,
the federal government’s chief prosecutors, can convene grand juries to present
evidence to indict someone for a crime. In a grand jury proceeding, explains
FBI Supervising Special Agent Greg Fowler, who oversees the Northwest Cyber
Crime Task Force, there are no judges or defense attorneys. The U.S. attorneys
present evidence and call and question witnesses in front of the jury, says
Fowler. The jurors do not reach a verdict of guilty or innocent, he says, but,
rather, vote on whether the evidence and witnesses presented support the
indictment sought by the federal prosecutor. Since the proceedings of grand
juries are secret, Fowler will not comment on whether Harris will be
subpoenaed, as she predicts on her Web site.
If
Harris is subpoenaed, however, Dalglish says being a
journalist doesn’t mean anything. “In a federal grand jury investigation, there
is almost no protection,” she says. “There is nothing more difficult to quash
than a federal grand jury subpoena.” Dalglish says if
Harris refuses to cooperate, she will almost certainly face judicial sanctions.
“This is the classic situation where you get fined or go to jail,” she says. Dalglish says that if Harris is served with a subpoena, a
good attorney would try to get it tossed out for reasons of relevancy—that
Harris’ records have nothing to do with the VoteHere
hack—rather than claiming journalistic immunity. If that argument failed, the
identities of those of us who have visited blackboxvoting.org might wind up in
the files of federal law- enforcement authorities.
In
her last public summary of the investigation, Harris wrote, “Yeah, I’m not a
happy camper. Taking the pulse of our democracy nowadays, it doesn’t feel very
healthy, does it?”
ghowland@seattleweekly.com
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1998-2004 Seattle Weekly
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