BuzzFlash Interviews - BuzzFlash.com

09.30.03 - BUZZFLASH: Electronic voting machines, including touch-screen voting, have been touted as the salvation of a fair voting process. Your tenacious research over the last year has shown that this idea may be the Trojan Horse of voting machine reform, allowing elections to be stolen more easily than in the past. What are the basic reasons that you argue that electronic voting machines pose a threat to democracy?

BEV HARRIS: Four reasons:

[...]

] HARRIS: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws,
] in the Internet world, are almost as controversial as the
] Patriot Act, because they tread on rights, contain
] draconian penalties, and can be abused in order to shut
] people up. What DMCA does is criminalize copyright
] issues. They were pushed in by the recording industry to
] prevent music piracy, but they have since been used for
] many other things.
]
] The provision that was used against us was an abuse of
] the DMCA pull-down-demand- process. Using this, a company
] can claim they own copyright to something, write a letter
] to your Internet service provider (ISP), demand that the
] offending page be removed. The ISP must pull the page
] immediately or risk losing everything. These pull-downs
] almost always take place without a court order.
]
] Now, in our case, Diebold didn't even claim we had a
] copyrighted document on our site, they complained that we
] had a LINK to an unrelated site which, in turn, had LINKS
] to documents which they claimed copyright to. And in our
] case, our ISP overstepped its bounds. We do not know the
] extent to which it was pressured to do so by Diebold or
] whether there were other types of political pressure. Our
] ISP not only pulled the offending link, it pulled the
] page the link was on, then it pulled our whole site down,
] then it removed access to the files on our FTP site so
] that we couldn't even relocate the files to another
] location. We have been told the site must remain down for
] 10 days, and we need to file a letter disputing their
] claim and bleed lawyer's fees to litigate this.
] Fortunately, David Allen, who knows about these things,
] had a techie-to-techie conversation with a rep at the
] ISP, and they decided their attorney had been wrong and
] granted us access via FTP, though the site is still not
] up.