Mass Eavesdropping and Easily Altered Elections

Welcome to America! Land of the free! Where our citizens conduct their daily lives without the fear of Big Brother watching over their shoulders!

Or … not.

USA Today (finally) gave front-page coverage to one of the most sinister stories in recent memory: with the full cooperation of America’s telephone companies (with the single exception of Qwest), the government has built the “world’s largest database.”

What’s in it? Your home and cellular call activity. When you call. Who you call. Where they live.

Earlier, government officials lied to us, claiming the monitoring effort, as part of the “War on Terror,” was directed only at individuals making international calls. As recently as January 2006, President Bush assured you, “We will not listen inside this country.”

In February, Michael Hayden, your new CIA director (appointed earlier this week by President Bush), said, “This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States.” He went on to stress that monitoring efforts were strictly focused on international calls among suspected terrorists, claiming, “We don’t have the time or the lawful authority to do anything except that.”

So what are we going to do with liars like these? Vote ’em out?

Um, no. Because, in other news today, there’s more evidence than ever that our voting system — the cornerstone of American democracy — is completely and totally broken.

The wonderful people at BlackBoxVoting.org just discovered a security flaw in Diebold voting machines so big, so fat, and so quick and easy to manipulate, they won’t completely disclose the details of it to the public. Why? Because monkeying with the machines is apparently so easy, a high-school student with $45.00 for a USB-based thumb drive and off-the-shelf software could manipulate the outcome of local poll results.

While some recently-elected officials (ahem) are telling their constituents, “There’s nothing to be concerned about,” a few states (California, Pennsylvania, and Iowa) are moving to sequester their voting machines, reprogram them with “approved software,” and seal them with tape in locked rooms until election day.

According to Douglas Jones, a computer scientist and voting system examiner for the state of Iowa, “All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design,” he said.

Welcome to America: where our government lies to us … monitors our every move … and, apparently, espouses a voting method designed from the ground up to allow for easier manipulation of election outcomes.