Free Culture @ NYU

Diebold in the news again…

Thursday, 03.09.2006  –  Category: News

Diebold, the company who threatened to sue Nelson and Luke at Swarthmore in 2003 for posting leaked memos regarding the disfunctionality of Diebold’s voting machines in the 2000 election, is making news again. Nelson, Luke and Lawrence Lessig eventually and sucessfully sued Diebold for attempting to use copyright law to silence free speech and consequently won an important victory against using the DMCA to abuse legitimate speech. Read more about their case here. Soonafter, the Free Culture movement was born.

Free Culture has been going strong since, but Diebold has suffered some significant blows. A while ago, Ion Sancho, a Leon County of California election supervisor took Diebold to task and hired a hacker to demonstrate the widely suspected vulnerabilities of Diebold’s machines. Various politicians in Diebold-friendly-Florida (where the original leaked internal memos described substantial voting inconsistencies in 2000) have attempted to discredit Sancho, but California has stood behind him and defended his original report of the voting machines’ massive vulnerabilities. There are more details currently emerging to this story, so read up in the Miami Herald here and keep your eyes peeled. Sancho is looking to take some serious heat from politicians in Flordia who stand to gain financially and politically from Diebold’s incompetence, so he needs all the support he can get.

To that end, Free Culturewants to step out and say: Ion Sancho, we’re behind you 100%.