The Blog of Lon

140,000 “warrants”. No probable cause, no judicial oversight. When the Patriot Act was passed, I remember well the eye-rolling that went on in some areas whenever it was pointed out how easily it could be abused. If you even mentioned that the FBI might abuse the incredible power, you were ridiculed, despite the Justice Department’s long, sordid history of abusing their powers. They promised us all that they’d not abuse this power. And the very minute they got it, the abuse began. (more…)

A couple of years ago, when Virginia started rolling out electronic voting machines, I began telling all who would listen about the potential problems, and why the machines should be resisted until their source code had been released for full inspection and they had been modified to produce audit trails.

To me, even a surface review of the situation was enough to arouse significant suspicion: The government was pushing as hard as possible to make the switch to the machines, even paying for them for local precincts. And every computer scientist not on the government payroll (or the payroll of the companies producing these systems) was warning everyone as loudly as they could about the problems. To what avail? While the general public has the excuse that the mainstream news media refused to give much publicity to the opposition to the machines, election officials cannot claim that they weren’t told, repeatedly, by people with actual credentials and experience in the appropriate fields. (more…)