UK And US Involved In Selling Illegal Weapons To Iran And Iraq, As 55 Million Pounds Traced to Government Coffers

Both the White House and 10 Downing Street trying to cover financial tracks in the illegal arms trade, showing governments on both sides of the Atlantic are facilitating the sale of weapons in the Middle East, weapons used to kill American and British soldiers.

17 Apr 2006

By Greg Szymanski

British sources close to the undercover financing network of the illegal arms trade have traced payments totaling 55 million pounds during a seven year period during the Margaret Thatcher era, money going from government coffers to the arms dealers for weapons sent to Iran and Iraq.

For years, investigators have been trying to connect the dots to overseas companies fronting the arms trade despite a press and government black out, naming the Astra Group as one major player.

Generally, sources tracking the money claim the marching orders come from Washington to10 Downing Street, both governments then utilizing overseas accounts and companies to ship arms to Iraq and Iran to fuel the ongoing Middle East conflict, an illegal operation being traced back to the Iraq-Iran conflict and Gulf War I.

According to observers overseas banks and arms companies are the "bank weapons of choice," being used since it keeps the illegal dealings under the American public's radar screen, where scrutiny is still more intense due to severity of Britian's Official Secrets Act. For a good overview of the illegal arms trade, complete with a list of companies and illegal commissions paid, see the Arctic Beacon's four part series, Blood Money: The Illegal Arms Trade at www.arcticbeacon.com

New information now surfacing, according to a confidential source close to the British government, claims the 55 million pounds used to fuel the Middle East provided by the UK and the U.S. for weapons used against British and American soldiers, was money transferred covertly from UK coffers via BMARQ of the Astra Group.

"It would apear that the Dept. of Trade and Industry (DTI) inspectors missed this schedule when they raided Astra and took files in the run-up to the Scott Inquiry that looked into the Arms to Iraq scandal," said the British source this week.

The source also verified significant amounts of money during the Thatcher era was laundered to a company called Casalee, a company moving arms to the Middle East owned by John Bredenkemp, an international arms and tobacco dealer operating out of an office at Sunningdale, UK.

"His principal operating company there is Breco," the source said. "They say that Bredenkamp also now has a London residence in Chester Sq., Belgravia that is just 3 doors away from Baroness Thatcher.

"It seems unlikely that a possible link will not be drawn between John Bredenkamp as an arms and tobacco dealer and the two sets of high-profile Party Political donations, including the1million pounds that Tony Blair tried unsuccessfully to return immediately to Bernie Ecclestone on becoming Prime Minister in May 1997. The donor was said to be the tobacco industry."

New developments in the July 2003 murder of scientist and arms inspector, David Kelly, reveal one of the many reasons he may have been killed was due to his knowledge of covert research of the "black only bomb" in South Africa.

Although this has been reported on before in a Sunday Express 2004 article, new information is now linking the connection to his assignment directly from Thatcher and former Prime Minister John Major.

Kelly was said to be involved in the apartheid regime's most secret project. According to a previous London press account, Kelly was involved in Code-named Project Coast, trying to create a genetically engineered weapon to attack only the country's black population and to develop a vaccine to block human fertility in blacks.

Dr. Kelly had visited the project's headquarters soon after he was appointed in 1972 to be head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, Britain's top-secret biological warfare establishment in Wiltshire.

Another reason for Dr. Kelly's murder surrounds his knowledge of the B52 incident in Iran, where the U.S. is said to have drop-shipped or lost nuclear weapons in 1991 without reporting the incident to the United Nations authorities.

The British source provided new information about what Dr. Kelly really knew about the lost nuclear weapons, suggesting Vice President Dick Cheney had a very strong motive to keep Dr. Kelly silent about the B52 incident.

"We now know that Dr. David Kelly did in fact not know about the loss of the very big nukes from the B-52 plane," said the source. "Kelly only ever knew about the smaller battlefield / tactical nuclear bombs that were made by Armscor in South Africa and covertly shipped in 1990 from SA to Oman where they remained during Gulf War-1.

"In July 2003 when Kelly was murdered the fear in The White House (USA) must have been Kelly would claim that the WMD not found in Iraq during Gulf War-2 were in fact the (smaller) lost nukes. The media would then have deduced that the rumour of the B-52g plane having lost the very big nukes in 1991 was probably valid.

"This revelation would have been most untimely for The White House in summer 2003. It would have killed-off the campaign to re-elect GW Bush for 2004, just as it was about to start. It seems more likely that Kelly's assassins were U.S. Navy SEALS under the direction of Dick Cheney?

"At the time of Kelly's death, Tony Blair was in the USA being lauded with the announcement of a Congressional Gold Medal. It seems that Tony Blair is now having second thoughts about taking that medal. It could be interpreted as 'Judas-money' for Kelly's death. Tony Blair even now nearly 3 years on has never gone back to collect that Gold medal.

"I occasionally speak to Michael Shrimpton the International lawyer who claims to be a devotee of the Neo-Cons. This could explain why Shrimpton is always trying to shift the blame for Kelly's murder away from the USA and onto French military intelligence."

For more informative articles. go to www.arcticbeacon.com

Are The Masters Of Deception Setting Up Americans For Genocide?

Beware when Church and State combine in the enterprise of genocide, as de-arming the population is a necessary step.

1 May 2006

By Greg Szymanski

Throughout the course of history, more people have died in the name of God than for any other reason.

And usually when a mass murder or genocide takes place, the masters of deception and spiritual controllers of the New World Order are not far behind, waiting like vultures to pick through the blood, guts and bones of the millions of innocents slaughtered needlessly.

According to Webster's Dictionary, genocide is the "deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.' According to Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of the book The History and Sociology of Genocide, it is "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other (religious) authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator"

And if history be the guide, according to researcher Darryl Eberhart, a former military officer and New World Order combatant, beware when Church and State combine in the enterprise of genocide since the purveyors of evil in firm control of the U.S. government are now planning to add unsuspecting Americans to their long list of genocidal victims.

"Americans absolutely must get informed about the numerous genocides that have been documented throughout history - including the many genocides of the 20th Century," writes Eberhart who has compiled horrifying statistics about the hundreds of millions killed in modern day genocides, adding Americans could be next on the list if they don't wake up fast.

"And, Americans absolutely must get informed about the role that "gun control" played in many of these "more recent" genocides! Why do we need to be informed about such grisly, barbaric events? We need to be informed because history has a very nasty (and frequent) habit of "repeating itself".

"For some reason, many Americans have been "conditioned" to believe that such things as genocide, a holocaust, or other types of barbaric mass slaughter could never happen here in America. Such thinking as this on the part of these Americans is not only unreasonable (showing a tremendous ignorance of history), but it is also extremely dangerous! It is extremely dangerous because an apathetic, complacent, and ignorant population is very easy to control - and when the authorities decide - to slaughter, especially after massive "gun control" has been implemented!"

Eberhart recommends viewing the highly informative documentary film, Innocents Betrayed, revealing the history of modern-day genocides.

"Other than the well-known Nazi German Holocaust, most of these genocides are unknown or forgotten," said Eberhart. "According to the documentary, with the complicity of mainstream media, the perpetrators have concealed some of these mass murders, and global humanitarian organizations seemed to have ignored others. Most of these horrors - which have killed some 170,000,000 innocents - have one thing in common. They fit the 'Genocide Formula' which is 'Hatred + Government + Disarmed Citizens = Genocide'.

"The film delivers the facts that show how governments have deliberately murdered or enslaved their own people or have left them helpless to defend themselves against outside aggressors. In each case, the victims were first disarmed. History can't tell us how effectively victims would have or could have protected themselves if they had possessed firearms. But it can tell us that disarmament is necessary to make possible the mass murder of helpless citizens."

The Innocents Betrayed documentary discussed the following modern-day genocides, as compiled by Eberhart at www.tacklingthetoughtopics.net . Here are the gruesome statistics with Eberhart's comments, warning Americans they could be next in line:

A. Turkey (1915-1917): "Calculated Genocide"

TOTAL NUMBER MURDERED: 1,500,000 (targeted group: Armenian Christians)

The new rulers in Turkey say that "they want to rid the country of wrong and lawless ideas." They also say that "they want to protect national security." Translation: They want to "eliminate the Armenians in Turkey - by killing the Armenians."

"In February 1915 Turkey's political leaders and Moslem religious leaders make a detailed, secret plan to annihilate the largely Christian minority."

The "Innocents Betrayed" documentary film by JPFO goes on to let us know that this brutal genocide that was committed against the Armenian people took place in carefully planned steps/stages. In the first step, thousands of Armenian men were drafted into the Turkish Army - and then separated from their military units and sent to labor camps "where they [were] worked to death, starved, and murdered in groups". In the second step, Armenian civilians were relieved of their firearms - i.e., disarmed by "gun control". And, in the final step, the deportations of Armenian civilians to remote camps in the desert began in earnest on June 26, 1915. Only a small percentage ever made it to these remote camps, since large numbers of Armenian men, women, and children were slaughtered and butchered on the way. Three quarters of the Armenian population in Turkey would perish in this brutal genocide.

((Ed. Note: A key point concerning this genocide is that the religious authorities cooperated with the government in planning this genocide!))

B. [The] Soviet Union (1929-1936):

TOTAL NUMBER MURDERED: 10,000,000 (mainly by State-orchestrated starvation; targets: independent farmers - the majority of them in Soviet-controlled Ukraine)

In this brutal genocide we see the Communists using "starvation as a murder weapon". The main regions affected were "the Ukraine, the Volga Basin, and the Caucasus".

The Communists took power in Russia in 1917, and immediately "passed laws making it almost impossible for non-party members to own firearms". Then, in 1929 Soviet dictator Josef Stalin "decrees that all livestock, produce, and farmland belong to the State. Farmers are ordered to surrender their land and livestock, and to move to government-owned collective farms."

"First, to terrorize the rest into submission, several million of the most prosperous farmers are sent to forced labor [camps] or killed outright. These 'Kulaks' are demonized [by the Communists]. Because of ten years of firearms confiscation, farmers can only fight back with farm tools." ((Ed. Comment: The U.S. government is aware of this history of "gun control" leading to horrible genocide, so WHY does our government push "gun control" so vigorously?))

"By 1932 [Soviet dictator] Stalin controls food supplies. He can cut off food distribution and starve entire regions. Because he controls all travel with internal passports [Ed. Note: just like "national identification cards"], his secret police can force starving millions to remain within the devastated areas."

"Grain rots on the ground. The powerless people can do nothing to stop their master. �10 million defenseless lives [are] wiped out by starvation."

By the way, here is a great example of how America's mainstream media has been tightly controlled for decades: While millions starve to death in the Ukraine, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty assures the world (and especially the Western press) that there is NO famine in the Soviet-controlled Ukraine. We indeed have an extremely controlled mainstream media in America, and if you doubt this, then please get a copy of the 381-page hardback book Into the Buzzsaw (which is edited by Kristina Borjesson). It deals with many journalists who had their stories "suppressed" by powerful individuals above them. This book is $29.45 postpaid. To order it by credit card, please call "Radio Liberty" at 800-544-8927. Or, make check or money order payable to "Radio Liberty" and mail it to: Radio Liberty // P.O. Box 969 // Soquel, CA 95073.

C. China (1934-1976): "Decades of Death"

TOTAL NUMBER MURDERED: 35,000,000 (minimum) ((possibly as high as 100,000,000))

"In 1935 the Nationalist government prohibits the private ownership of firearms."

((Ed. Comment to preceding quote: Just as the German Weimar Republic's "gun control" laws and lists of registered gun owners would later be used by the Nazis when they took control of Germany, so the Chinese Nationalist government's "gun control" laws would later be used by the Communists when they took control of China! Beware of gun registration lists!))

"1942-1944: Four million die in famine aggravated by government confiscation of crops."

The "Innocents Betrayed" documentary film by JPFO then goes on to show us a very horrible result of a disarmed civilian population: In 1937 the Chinese troops flee the city of Nanking without offering any kind of resistance to the advancing Japanese Army. The disarmed civilian population of Nanking is left to the "cruel mercies" of the Japanese soldiers. "Hundreds of thousands of children, women, sick, and old people are left to the Japanese [soldiers] - without self-defense." [They are] "raped, buried alive, burned alive, used for bayonet practice, and forced to watch as their own organs are cut out of them."

"The Communists take over in 1949 - they keep the population disarmed. During 38 years of Communist violence and economic 'experiments', they wipe out an additional 35 million Chinese - and possibly as many as 100 million. [And during all this time Red Chinese dictator] Mao [Tse-Tung] controls all the guns."

D. Germany (1933-1945): "The Master Murderers"

TOTAL NUMBER MURDERED: more than 11,000,000 die in concentration camps (targets: Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and political and religious opponents)

((IMPORTANT Ed. Comment: Most of the so-called nominal 'Christians' in Germany (both Catholic and Protestant) either actively supported the Nazi killing machine or failed to speak out against it. Only a few Protestant ministers (such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed by hanging), and a few Catholic priests, had the courage to speak out against Hitler and his thugs. The Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy, in fact, supported both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, signing Concordats with both of these wicked, totalitarian regimes. Additionally, the German Roman Catholic Zentrum Party was Hitler's main political power base in Bavaria, and, under orders from the highest levels of the Catholic Church, helped put Hitler and his Nazi thugs into power. One of the key men in bringing Adolph Hitler to power was Jesuit-controlled Knight of Malta Franz von Papen.))

((Note: The 207-page hardback book Hitler's Cross by Erwin W. Lutzer tells the sad story of the Christian Church's failure, for the most part, to stand up against the murderous regime of Adolph Hitler's Nazi thugs. It also includes stories about a few of the very small number of Christian clergymen who did have the guts to speak out against this monstrous, totalitarian regime. It is $15.45 postpaid. To order it, please make check or money order payable to "Radio Liberty" and mail it to: Radio Liberty // P.O . Box 969 // Soquel, CA 95073. Or, to order via credit card, please call toll-free 800-544-8927.))

1. Here's what the JPFO documentary film "Innocents Betrayed" had, in part, to say about the genocide in Nazi Germany and Nazi German-controlled territories during World War II:

"In January 1933 Hitler [comes to power]. The 1928 gun registration lets the Nazis know who already owns guns."

"In 1938 the Nazis create their own gun control law. Jews are forbidden to possess firearms, clubs, or sharp-edged weapons. Jews turn in their weapons or Nazis or police storm in to seize them. The disarmed Jews await slaughter - the National Identification cards and census data tell them just who is a Jew! A few days later 30,000 to 90,000 Jewish men - mostly leaders - are arrested and sent to concentration camps."

((Ed. Question: Should we Americans be concerned about the tremendous database that has been compiled on us, and the push for every American to possess and show on demand his/her national identification card?))

"Three million German political opponents are imprisoned in concentration camps from 1933 through 1945. Five million Jews are slaughtered. [Those slaughtered also include] Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled� More than eleven million total die in concentration camps."

2. The following are some additional comments that Editor of TTT would like to make to the Nazi German genocide of World War II:

a. The papacy was up to its eyeballs in complicity with the totalitarian regimes in Germany , Italy, Croatia, and elsewhere in Europe. If you don't think so, then you need to read the book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. This book was written by John Cornwell, a Catholic historian and journalist. (The book's publisher is the Penguin Group; its ISBN is 0-14-029627-1. This New York Times "Bestseller" is currently out-of-print. Check your local library or try the Internet to locate a used copy.) Cornwell exposes Pope Pius XII's instrumental role in negotiating an accord that helped the Nazis rise to power in Germany. Here is what the back cover of this 426-page paperback book states, in part:

"In [the book] Hitler's Pope, award-winning journalist John Cornwell shows that Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, was instrumental in negotiating an accord that helped the Nazis rise to unhindered power - and sealed the fate of the Jews in Europe.

Drawing upon secret Vatican and Jesuit archives to which he had unprecedented access, Cornwell tells the full, tragic story of how narcissism, long-standing personal antipathy for the Jews, and political and 'spiritual' ambition combined to make Pius the most dangerous churchman in history. Not just a firm and final indictment of Pius XII's papacy, Hitler's Pope is also a searing exploration of its lingering consequences for the Catholic Church today."

For more informative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com

Diebold voting systems critically flawed

Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus | May 14 2006

Michael Shamos remembers that the call came late at night, during the last week of April.

The call - from election watchdog BlackBoxVoting.org - described a critical vulnerability in Diebold Election Systems' touchscreen voting systems that could allow any person with access to a voting terminal the ability to completely change the system code or ballot file on the system. As a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and adviser to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on electronic voting, Shamos realized that, at the very least, a workaround for the flaw needed to be in place by Pennsylvania's next election - at the time, less than three weeks away.

"This one is so bad, that we can't do just nothing," Shamos told the state's election officials at the time. "Any losing candidate could challenge the election by saying, 'How do I know that the software on the machine is the software certified by the state?'"

Late Thursday, BlackBoxVoting published a redacted version of a paper describing the design flaw in Diebold AccuVote TSX and TS6 touchscreen election systems. Because of the seriousness of the flaw, the full report detailing the issue has only been distributed to a limited group of computer scientists, state and federal election officials, and security groups.

"We have elections every single week this month, and there is no way to do meaningful remediation at this point," said Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.

Three states have already issued alerts on the flaws to election officials. The Pennsylvania Department of State told county clerks to reinstall the software on election devices and then lock them up in a secure location until the May 16 general primary.

"The Department of State will furnish the authorized software to the counties on a PCMCIA card along with instructions for its installation," a copy of the memo seen by SecurityFocus stated.

Both Iowa and California have also issued alerts, according to the Associated Press.

The incident represents the most major failure of the federal process to create secure election technology to date. While researchers and civil rights groups have voiced strong criticism of electronic voting technology - and in particular the systems' security - the national elections held in November 2004 saw only small problems (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/9718) that would likely not have impacted the outcome of the election (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/9854).

However, trust remains a significant issue. Voting machine makers and the certification labs that have tested election systems have been secretive about the technology. And, while older machines and the method for counting votes tallied by the older technology were easily understood by the average voter, electronic voting systems have become more impenetrable (http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/198) and have not undergone significant and public testing, according to computer scientists that have called for more rigorous security testing (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11336).

Diebold has had a more turbulent relationship with states and security experts over e-voting. The company's CEO stepped down in December, a day before a law firm filed a shareholder suit against the company (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/81), claiming - among other issues - that the company misled investors about the state of its e-voting technology. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week that it has opened an inquiry into how Diebold reports revenue, following the company's admission in SEC filings that its election business overstated revenue and understated deferred revenue.

A representative of Diebold Election Systems could not immediately be reached for comment on the SEC inquiry or the design flaw, but Pennsylvania's memo to election officials stated that the company had confirmed the vulnerability and acknowledged that the issue could be used to load malicious software on an election system.

"The probability for exploiting this vulnerability to install unauthorized software that could affect an election is considered low," the memo to election officials stated. "To exploit this risk, physical access is required to the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) slots on the machine during system startup."

Other computer scientists do not believe the threat to be theoretical.

"It is like the nuclear bomb for e-voting systems," said Avi Rubin, computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. "It's the deal breaker. It really makes the security flaws that we found (in prior years) (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6727) look trivial."

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When Bruce Funk called in BlackBoxVoting to look at some strange memory issues with Diebold voting systems in Utah, finding the "nuclear bomb" of e-voting security was not on his agenda.

As the auditor and clerk for Emery County, a large rural bite out of the middle of Utah, Funk had noticed that the county's voting machines - provided by Diebold - were having various maintenance issues. Because Utah had adopted a requirement for a verified voter paper audit trail - essentially a printout of a person's vote - Funk needed the printers to work flawlessly. However, they frequently jammed. Moreover, electrical cords had pulled out from the machines with components attached. Those issues made Funk believe the machines may not have been new, but refurbished.

A Diebold technician told the county auditor early this year that any components with problems would have to be replaced. Funk decided to do a manual check of the systems to find any other issues and discovered that the machines had a variety of different file sizes on backup memory. Uncertain why that should be and wanting an independent opinion, he contacted the e-voting muckraking group BlackBoxVoting to come and look at one of the systems, he said.

In March, BlackBoxVoting flew in Harri Hursti, a Finnish voting-machine security expert with whom the group had frequently collaborated. Funk remembers that he was surprised by what Hursti could do with only poll-worker-level access to the machine.

"He was able to - from the keyboard that appears on the machine - create a macro that doesn't even show up that you created it, go and pickup a program through the modem, and run it," Funk said during an interview with SecurityFocus from his home in Clawson, Utah. "I was thinking that this was not right."

As Hursti got more familiar with the machine, he and members of BlackBoxVoting, who were videotaping the process, became more concerned, Funk said.

"It became so serious, that my concern about memory was minor," he said. "They told me that the information that they'd found had to go to certain federal agencies and certain things had to be done before the issues were made public."

Officials in Utah apparently were not concerned with the security of the systems, but with what they considered a breach in authorization. State officials and representatives of Diebold told Funk that he had cost the county more than $40,000 in damages because Diebold technicians would have to return to the county and recertify the systems, according to transcripts of the public parts of an April meeting in Emery County published by BlackBoxVoting (http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/27671.html).

"The reason that we’re here today is because Mr. Funk, on his own, has gone outside that system and compromised the integrity of not only Emery County’s elections, but also the State of Utah and any other jurisdiction of the United States that is using this equipment, simply because he wouldn’t call and ask these questions that these people and the Lieutenant Governor’s staff know the answers to," said Utah's State elections director, Michael Cragun, according to the transcript. "It seems to me it’s inappropriate to be in this meeting now answering these questions he should have asked before he compromised the integrity of this system."

The officials asked for Funk's resignation, which he gave verbally at the meeting.

"They basically said that they have people that want to have you removed," Funk said. "This whole weight fell on me and I said, 'I'm so tired, just let me out.'"

By the next morning, he decided to fight the process, but he was informed that a verbal agreement to resign was enough, he said. Calls to both Diebold and the office of the governor of Utah by SecurityFocus were not returned.

Meanwhile, Funk maintains that he did what the county's voters elected him to do: Look out for their interests in a fair election process.

"Basically, (Utah officials) tried to portray BlackBoxVoting as some radical organization, and they portrayed me as a renegade villain," he said. "They don't want this to come out, but it needs to come out at a national level."

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Members of BlackBoxVoting did not look to go national at first, but searched for a state that might take action on the issue. With that in mind, their first choice was not Pennsylvania, but California.

The selection was understandable. The Golden State had plenty of battles with election systems makers and even decertified Deibold's touch screen systems (http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=120825) in April 2003. Yet, three years later, BlackBoxVoting did not make much headway with state officials, possibly because California's Secretary of State is elected, where Pennsylvania's is appointed, said BlackBoxVoting's Harris.

"There is a lot less politicking that can happen in Pennsylvania than in California," she said. "The very people that are responsible for remediation are running for election right now, and it adds more complexity to the issues."

With little interest from California, Harris turned to Carnegie Mellon's Shamos and Pennsylvania.

After hearing the details of the issue, Shamos knew that he needed to get Pennsylvania officials involved. Within a week, the state held a conference call with Diebold and, under threat of decertification, asked the company to come clean on the security issue. Diebold acknowledged the issue, but classified the threat as low, Shamos said.

The computer scientist's estimation of the flaw is less charitable.

"There are two types of security holes," he said. "The ones that are designed in and which you didn't think about the security implications beforehand or a bug- a mistake - in the program code. This is the first kind: It is not a bug; it's a horribly designed feature."

Other independent sources and the report released this week by BlackBoxVoting (http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/27675.html) also called the security issue a design flaw. To ease system upgrades for Diebold technicians, the company allowed anyone with a memory card and knowledge of certain file names to upgrade any of three levels of system software: the boot loader, the operating system and the application itself.

"There seems to be several backdoors to the system which are unacceptable from a security point of view," stated BlackBoxVoting's report, penned by computer security expert Hursti. "These backdoors exist in each of these three layers and they allow the system to be modified in extremely flexible ways without even basic levels of security involved."

Shamos cautioned against overemphasizing the threat. Poll-worker-level access to the machines is needed for several minutes to accomplish the attack. More importantly, an insider's knowledge of the source code of the machines would be needed to actually attempt to impact an election, he said. With that said, the threat should be taken seriously, he stressed.

"It is a feasible exploit," Shamos said. "You don't have to dip into the realm of science fiction to figure out how someone could make use of this."

Shamos, as often a critic of BlackBoxVoting as not, said the organization did well to approach election officials quietly about the flaw rather than go public with the details.

Based on the findings in the report, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issued an order last week to election officials to sequester any systems until a statewide election on May 16 and reload the machines with an authorized copy of election software to be provided by the Department of State for Pennsylvania.

Already, Iowa and California have warned their election officials of the flaw, according to the Associated Press (http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/14552458.htm), and Shamos expects more to come.

"Once Pennsylvania does something, then the other states have to follow," he said. "The dominoes have started falling. States cannot sit on this forever."

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While state election officials are scrambling to ensure that this month's primaries go off without a hitch, the real deadline is the mid-term elections in November.

Tens of thousands of the AccuVote systems have been deployed by Diebold to various states. Almost 40 per cent of voters will cast ballots on "digital recording-electronic" (DRE) systems - a class that included the AccuVote touchscreen terminals - in 2006, according to a report from Election Data Services (http://www.electiondataservices.com/home.htm). Only optical-scan voting systems, which account for about 41 per cent of voters, exceed the popularity of touch screens, according to the report.

Many states will not be able to remediate the problem by elections this month, said BlackBoxVoting's Harris. Moreover, those that are doing some sort of workaround for the problem are not doing enough.

"None of the states are doing a mitigation that is going to address the bootloader issue," Harris said. "If the bootloader has been contaminated, you cannot clean it through software, and they are taking a software approach to fixing this."

Instead, the systems need to be opened up, the on-board system rewritten, and the machines need to be sealed up permanently, she said. Otherwise, the bootloader could again be compromised.

The move to electronic voting systems has largely been due to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 (http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm), which requires that states who want federal funding to modernize their systems adopt certified voting machines, adhere to certain election standards and provide citizens with disabilities the power to vote without aid. Yet, the latest security incident could lead to greater scrutiny on systems that many election officials had given passing marks in the 2004 general elections. The insecure design of Diebold's touch screen systems is only the latest problem flagged this year.

In West Virginia, the Secretary of State filed a complaint this week against e-voting machine maker Election Systems & Software, citing numerous problems counting ballots that "place great hardship" on election officials during primaries on May 9, according to a statement (PDF (http://www.wvsos.com/pressoffice/051006essproblems.pdf)). At the end of March, Florida's attorney general subpoenaed voting systems makers (http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060329/voting_dispute.html) to testify as to why they refused to sell machines to one Florida county whose election supervisor is an outspoken critic of the reliability and security of the machines.

For Diebold, however, the incident is the latest blow to the image of its voting systems. The company faces shareholder lawsuits (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/81) and the exit of its CEO. In 2003, a leak of Diebold's source code resulted in a highly critical independent security report (http://news.com.com/2009-1028_3-5429534.html). And, in a February letter to the Election Assistance Commission, the governor of Maryland--which has committed to move statewide to Diebold's AccuVote terminals--lambasted the company for the high costs of the deployment, which jumped 78 percent over initial estimates, and a staggering 1000 percent increase in maintenance costs.

"The cost of Maryland’s Diebold voting machines has skyrocketed as our confidence in the system has plummeted,” Maryland governor Robert Ehrlick Jr. stated in the letter (PDF (http://www.bradblog.com/docs/EhrlichLetter_021506.pdf)).

Shamos also criticized Diebold's engineering of their product. While he believes that the severity of the flaw is offset by the ease with which he believes a workaround can be put in place, the computer scientist did not let Diebold off the hook. Between now and the November election, the company has to fix all the systems in the field.

His message? "Go back, and for the first time in your life, think about security," Shamos said. "It is clear that they might not be able to do that by themselves."

Already, the company has engineers in the field implementing fixes. This week, Diebold technicians were in Emery County, Utah, completely replacing the system software and recertifying the machines, according to news reports.

"Over the past few months we have been out in the counties in Utah, training and helping with machines--we are just doing it all here in Emery County at one time," Diebold technician Bryan Simpson told the Emery County Progress (http://www.ecprogress.com/index.php?tier=1&pub=2006-05-09&page=news#2). "One of the big issues the former county clerk had was the amount of memory the machines have. We have been erasing the operating system software and reinstalling everything on these machines."

As for Emery County's former clerk, he still feels he made the right call.

"You do create a few enemies when you do your job correctly," Funk told SecurityFocus. "I feel what was done was the most important thing to do, and I have not regretted it."

And now, he is just happy to be away from the to-do of county politics.

"I'm trying to catch up on things that I haven't been able to do for years," he said

Tower block floors shut after brain tumor alert

The Australian | May 12, 2006
By Lisa Macnamara

THE top floors of a Melbourne office building were closed down yesterday and 100 people evacuated after a seventh worker in as many years was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

But Telstra insisted the mobile phone towers on the roof of the 17-storey RMIT University building were not linked to the cancer cluster.

Five academics - who worked on the top floor - and two general staff have suffered brain tumours since 1999. Six of the seven staff had worked at the Bourke Street premises for more than a decade. Two of the cases were malignant.

"We have briefed the staff and suspect further cases will be brought to our attention," RMIT vice-president of resources Steve Somogyi said yesterday.

The academics' union has demanded that RMIT pay for medical examinations of all staff working in the building after learning of a number of suspected new cases late yesterday.

"We're starting to get anecdotal reports of one or two other people who have passed away who have worked in the building," said Matthew McGowan, Victorian branch president of the National Tertiary Education Union.

RMIT recently called in a Melbourne doctor to assess information from the staff diagnosed with the tumours but he found no obvious link with "any specific environmental hazard", a university statement said.

Telstra, which along with Optus reportedly has mobile phone equipment on top of the building, said yesterday it would co-operate with the university's investigation. "This equipment complies with strict health and safety standards, and is regularly tested to ensure ongoing compliance," the phone company said.

While staff were "anxious and concerned", the university was initially reluctant to close the top floors, Mr McGowan said. "They were reluctant at first because they didn't want to create a panic."

The university has started notifying students at the building, many of whom are from overseas.

However, serious concerns were not held for the students.

RMIT investigated radio frequency and air quality after the first two cases emerged in 1999 and 2001, but all the results were well below the recommended Australian standards, a university spokeswoman said.

"It was thoroughly tested," she said.

Yesterday's action was prompted after a third case was reported by the institution's occupational health and safety unit a month ago, when it emerged that other academics had also fallen ill.

"We're looking at everything around the area," the spokeswoman said.

But Mr McGowan said the university must be accountable for health and safety checks "across the board" after the initial testing in 2001 was not followed up.

"These cases have only coincidentally come to people's attention rather than through some systematic monitoring process," he said.

The results of the RMIT investigation are expected in two weeks