USA: ELECTRONIC VOTING

WIRED: Diebold Backs Off Legal Challenge

Diebold Election Systems is withdrawing legal threats against voting
activists and Internet service providers for publishing copies of
internal staff e-mails that the company says were stolen from its servers. The
documents pointed to security flaws with Diebold's computerized voting
machines and suggested the company knew about those flaws long before
it sold machines to several states, including California, Maryland and
Georgia.

Beginning in August, Diebold issued cease-and-desist letters to more
than a dozen individuals who posted the documents or links to sites hosting
them on the Internet. The company claimed copyright infringement under the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, a law designed to guard
against the improper use of creative works. Diebold said the documents revealed
proprietary information about the workings of its e-voting system that
would benefit its competitors.