- BAGHDAD (AFP) -- Iraq's Central
Bank unveiled the country's new currency, which will go into use October
15 and which will push banknotes bearing Saddam Hussein's smiling face
into the dustbin of history.
-
- Ahmad Salman Mohammed, a deputy governor of the central
bank, declined to say how many banknotes were printed but said there were
sufficient new dinars to replace the old ones and "keep reserves for
two years"
-
- Six new denominations -- 50, 250, 1,000, 5,000 and 25,000
dinars -- will replace the former five and the period to exchange the old
ones will last until January 15, Mohammed said.
-
- "It will be a united currency for united Iraq,"
he told a news conference at the heavily guarded Central Bank of Iraq.
-
- Mohammed did not reveal where the new bank notes were
printed but said they contained the most up-to-date anti-counterfeit features
to ensure that they could never be counterfeited.
-
- Top US civil administrator Paul Bremer announced in July
that the new bank notes would replace the New Iraqi Dinar in use since
1991, when UN sanctions imposed on Iraq for invading Kuwait the previous
year forced Baghdad to rely on domestic firms to print money.
-
- The so-called Swiss Dinar, which was printed in Britain,
remained in circulation in northern Kurdish regions that slipped out of
Saddam's control following the 1991 Gulf War.
-
- Copyright © 2003 Agence France Presse. All rights
reserved.
- http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/50726/1/.html
-
-
-
- British Company De La Rue Was Awarded Contract To Print
New Iraqi Currency
-
- DE LA RUE PLC
-
- News Release 19 September 2003
-
- PRE CLOSED PERIOD TRADING UPDATE FOR THE PERIOD TO 27
SEPTEMBER 2003
- De La Rue issues the following trading update prior to
entering its closed period, ahead of the publication of its interim results
on 25 November 2003.
-
- Underlying trading during the first half year has been
in line with expectations.
-
- Production of the Iraq bank note order, announced on
7 July 2003, is progressing well. Deliveries have now commenced and further
significant deliveries are expected to be made in the first half.
-
- The Group's cost reduction programme continues to be
implemented to schedule.
-
- Accordingly, as a result of the earlier than anticipated
deliveries of the Iraq bank note order, the Group expects to report interim
results significantly ahead of expectations previously indicated at the
time of the AGM in July 2003.
-
- http://www.delarue.com/DLR_Content/CDA/Pages/News/articles/235/0,3396,,00.html
-
-
-
- De La Rue Owns Sequoia Voting Systems
-
- About Sequoia
-
- Sequoia Voting Systems is not only the nation's most
experienced provider of touch screen voting systems. It is the only company
in the United States with an uninterrupted track record of successful countywide
installations.
-
- Sequoia, in fact, is largely responsible for the nation's
current interest in touch screen voting, having pioneered the first major
countywide installation in Riverside County, California during the November
2000 presidential election, before election reform became a national priority.
-
- Our tamperproof products, including the AVC Edge®
and the AVC Advantage®, are sought after from coast to coast for their
accuracy and reliability. And our installation team is second to none,
having managed thousands of electronic elections for 14 years in 16 states.
-
- So while the national media focuses on problems involving
companies that have only recently entered the touch screen arena, Sequoia's
customers from Palm Beach County, Florida to the suburban Seattle county
of Snohomish, Washington continue to enjoy the accolades that result from
having carefree, accurate, electronic elections in partnership with our
seasoned team of dedicated technicians and former election administrators.
-
- But Sequoia's success with touch screen voting ultimately
reflects much more than having a superior product or a more experienced
installation team. It reflects the fact that we've been managing and supplying
equipment for U.S. elections for more than 100 years, longer than any other
company in the election business. It reflects the extraordinarily high
level of teamwork and mutual trust that we develop with each of our government
clients. We know there is no one-size-fits-all approach for every jurisdiction,
so we listen to our customers and try to understand their specific needs
and concerns so that we can build customized solutions.
-
- Our success with touch screen voting also reflects the
intense focus on product accuracy and security that we share with our parent
company, UK-based De La Rue. De La Rue is the world's leading provider
of tamperproof products and automated systems designed to ensure the highest
levels of accuracy and security in our everyday transactions with businesses
and government agencies, from ATM and electronic voting transactions to
the production of national currencies, travelers checks and government
identification cards.
-
- In addition to printing 125 national currencies as well
as the omnipresent American Express travelers checks, De La Rue invented
the highly accurate and secure cash-counting mechanisms used in automated
teller machines. More than 1,200 financial institutions in 60 counties
currently use De La Rue's cash-counting mechanisms to secure their customers'
transactions, much like Sequoia's touch screen voting machines accurately
and securely count people's votes.
-
- De La Rue is also the world's largest provider of tamperproof
national identity cards, passports and driver's licenses. Its passport
and national identification programs are used by more than 50 countries,
including Mexico and Chile, which have the largest national identification
card programs in Latin America. De La Rue's contract to produce tamperproof
driver's licenses for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles is
also one of the largest in North America and is considered by Office of
Homeland Security officials to be among the most secure identification
card programs in the world, providing a much needed template for other
states that are seeking to enhance their driver's license document security.
-
- Working in collaboration with the world's premier law
enforcement agencies, including Interpol, Scotland Yard and the FBI, De
La Rue has also developed highly sophisticated security systems designed
to foil identity theft and fraud. De La Rue is also working with Sequoia
to develop a new generation of high security products that use smart card
technology and signature verification biometrics. And while we can't yet
share the specifics of the new products we have under development, we can
assure you that De La Rue and Sequoia will continue to set the highest
industry standards for accuracy and security in every application we introduce
to government agencies, businesses and consumers around the world.
-
-
- Sequoia Voting Systems, AVC Edge and AVC Advantage are
registered trademarks of Sequoia Voting Systems.
- All Content is property of Sequoia Voting Systems 2002.
The materials on this site are provided by Sequoia Voting Systems as a
service to our customers and may be used for informational purposes only.
-
- http://www.sequoiavote.com/aboutsequoia.php
-
-
-
- And, Last But Not Least...
-
- "Sequoia Voting Systems is one of the three 'major
players' in the U.S. electronic voting-machine
- industry (along with Diebold and Election Systems and
Software (ES&S)). Sequoia operates 40,000 direct recording electronic
voting machines in the United States. According to a lawsuit filed against
California over electronic voting, "touch-screen voting systems made
by Sequoia Voting Systems... do not provide a paper record [and] are more
vulnerable to fraud than traditional voting methods."
-
- Concerns Over 'Serious Flaws' in Electronic Voting Prompt
New Examination by Members of Congress
-
- A recently published study documenting a host of security
flaws in a leading touch-screen voting system has caused elections officials
across the United States to question the use of electronic voting machines.
-
- "The Caltech/ MIT report found that as many as six
million ballots were not counted in 2000. Of 800 lever machines tested,
200 had broken meters that stopped counting once they hit 999, but touch-screen
machines were even worse."
-
- Exclusive to American Free Press
- By Christopher Bollyn
- 10-4-3
-
- A published report from a team of computer experts exposing
a wide range of security flaws in a leading touch screen voting system
has sent "shock waves across the country" and caused elections
officials to question the use of electronic voting machines.
-
- "The story is only beginning," Douglas W. Jones,
associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, told
American Free Press. Jones is key to understanding the security flaws a
team of computer experts from Johns Hopkins and Rice University found when
they examined the "source code," the software that runs the Diebold
AccuVote-TS voting system.
-
- Aviel D. Rubin, associate professor of computer science
and technical director of the Information Security Institute (ISI) at Johns
Hopkins, led the study. The group's 24-page report, Analysis of an Electronic
Voting System, was published July 23.
-
- Diebold voting machines are used in 37 states. Nearly
one in five Americans votes on touch-screen voting machines.
-
- Although voting machines were not on the agenda for the
National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), the release of the
Hopkins report prior to their late July conference in Portland, Me., forced
a change. The conference discussed whether the National Institute of Standards
and Technology should be asked to establish new standards for computerized
voting machines.
-
- "There is a sense that in the past [critics of computer
voting machines] were part of the black box crowd and conspiracy theorists,"
Kay Albowicz, a representative for NASS said. "No one is saying that
now."
-
- Albowicz could only have been referring to the numerous
stories about computer voting fraud carried in The Spotlight, a newspaper
shut down by the federal government in 2001.
-
- "The Johns Hopkins study is the first piece of evidence
that current touch-screen technology could be seriously flawed," the
Internet-based Wired News (WN) reported.
-
- "As the computer scientists at Johns Hopkins recently
reported, these new machines are vulnerable to massive fraud," Rep.
Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said. "Unless Congress acts to pass legislation
that would make sure that all computer voting machines have a paper record
that voters can verify when they cast their ballots, voters and election
officials will have no way of knowing whether the computers are counting
votes properly."
-
- Holt has introduced a bill, H.R. 2239, which would require
computerized voting machines to provide voter-verified audit trails, something
first advocated by The Spotlight.
-
- Computer scientists have said for years that voting machines
should provide a voter-verifiable paper trail to prevent vote fraud. "In
the absence of any significant audit trails, you have no knowledge whatsoever
as to what goes on inside the systems," Peter Neumann of Stanford
Research Institute said in 2002.
-
- The ISI researchers examined code from Diebold Elections
Systems Inc. voting machines and found serious flaws. Thousands of computer
files, including program files, were discovered on an unprotected company
file transfer protocol (ftp) site on the Internet. Diebold "field
representatives used the site to fix the company's voting machines,"
WN reported.
-
- "They claim they keep everything secure, but this
shows the lax nature of their [Diebold] procedures," said Rebecca
Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College. "This
just blatantly flies in the face of good security."
-
- Diebold spokesman John Kristoff said it was "an
oversight" that source code had been available to the public over
the Internet.
-
- Computer experts say the ftp files indicate that security
flaws exist also in Diebold's optical scan machines.
-
- Experts discovered an oddly named folder on the ftp site
named "rob-georgia." This folder contained program "patch"
files, which instruct the computerized voting system to replace the existing
program with another. Georgia, which experienced a historic Republican
upset, was the first state to exclusively use Diebold touch-screen machines
in November 2002.
-
- Rubin had published an earlier paper speculating on different
ways an electronic voting machine could be compromised. "Looking at
the actual code," he said, "it appears a lot worse than I predicted."
Among the "stunning flaws" found in the Diebold voting system
was that it left ballot choices and election results open to tampering,
even from a remote location.
-
- States have taken the attitude that assumes electronic
voting systems are secure until proven otherwise, Rubin said. "People
will use it unless someone can show it's insecure," he said. "I
don't know if that's the right model we should be taking for elections."
-
- "Within the first half-hour of analysis, we found
some immediate red flags," Yoshi Kohno, one of the ISI researchers,
said. "The more we examined it, the more we concluded this thing [AccuVote-TS]
should not be used in elections."
-
- "You can't take something that's that broken and
turn it into something secure," Rubin said. "I am against electronic
voting because I think voting is too important and computers are too difficult
to secure.
-
- "I don't think anybody has the capability to develop
a whole new system from scratch in a year," Rubin said, "and
I don't think Diebold had any incentive to do so, because none of this
news broke until recently.
-
- "We looked at the software, and it was poorly written,"
he said. "[For example,] all machines had the same password hardwired
into the code. Computer Security 101 would tell you that's the first thing
not to do.
-
- "We have claimed that, in the Diebold code we examined,
'cryptography, when used at all, is used incorrectly,' " said Rubin.
-
- Diebold has some 50,000 machines counting votes in California,
Georgia, Kansas and some in Maryland counties, including Prince Georges
and Montgomery. Maryland purchased more than 5,000 Diebold touch-screen
machines for $17 million in March 2002.
-
- Howard A. Denis, a Montgomery County council member,
was "so shaken by the Hopkins report that he is considering asking
for a waiver to stop using electronic machines," The Washington Post
reported. " 'The more I look into this, the more serious I think it
is,' " said Denis.
-
- "I don't want to have this thing whitewashed and
have a lot of happy talk, and have people trying to mollify us and blow
off these charges," Denis told the Post. "The integrity of our
democracy is really at stake here.
-
- "The electronic machines were forced down our throats
by the state," he said. "We were used as guinea pigs for this,
and on top of it we had to pay for it."
-
- The critical Hopkins report has caused a number of states
to back away from purchasing any kind of electronic voting machine system.
"The rush to buy equipment this year or next year just doesn't make
sense to us anymore," said Cory Fong, North Dakota's deputy secretary
of state.
-
- HELP STEAL AMERICANS' VOTES
-
- The Help America Vote Act, passed in November 2002, provided
$3.9 billion to replace older voting machines with what have now been shown
to be insecure electronic voting systems. The federal act created "a
gold rush" for the companies that make and operate electronic voting
machines because it requires all states and the District of Columbia to
replace antiquated voting equipment by 2006.
-
- "Of the $1.5 billion appropriated so far to replace
old machines . . . about half has been released," the Post reported.
"And that has all gone toward buying electronic machines, which cost
as much as $4,000 apiece."
-
- Jones, as an Iowa state elections official, examined
the flawed computer code five years earlier and pointed out the security
problems to the system's developers and to government officials. "They
promised it would be fixed," he said. "The Hopkins group found
clear evidence that it wasn't. Yet for five years, I had been under the
impression that it was fixed."
-
- Jones said he was shocked to discover the flaws had not
been corrected.
-
- "There are more shenanigans. The hole had not been
patched," Jones told AFP. "They can use the excuse of incompetence,
but there are hints of deliberation . . . The Diebold machine should be
decertified. Incompetence alone should be justification for de-certification.
They were told and they didn't fix it."
-
- Jones told AFP that he first examined the Global Election
Management System, or "GEMS" software in November 1997. Global
was acquired by Diebold in 2001.
-
- A three-man panel from the Virginia State Board of Elections
was asked to certify an upgrade to the state's Diebold voting machines.
-
- "An outside consultant," who remained unnamed
in The Washington Post, "assured the three-member panel recently that
the [Hopkins] report was nonsense."
-
- 'A LEAP OF FAITH'
-
- "I hope you're right," Chairman Michael G.
Brown said, taking "a leap of faith" and approving the upgrade.
"Because when they get ready to hang the three of us in effigy, you
won't be here."
-
- "Unfortunately, he's wrong. The report is generally
valid," said David L. Dill, computer scientist at Stanford University
and member of the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task
Force. "It's been obvious that [electronic voting machines] can be
hacked, and Aviel [Rubin] shows that they can be hacked. They've blown
up all the arguments that the present machines are OK.
-
- "If the Virginia State Board of elections were really
worried about being burned in effigy, it would have been prudent to seek
a broader range of advice," he said.
-
- Dill identified the unnamed consultant as Brit Williams,
the Georgia-based voting machine technologist at Kennesaw State University,
who was instrumental in bringing the Diebold touch-screen voting to Georgia.
Williams was a consultant to the Federal Election Commission during the
development of the FEC Voting System Standards in 1990 and 2002. He also
chairs the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) Voting
Systems Board Technical Committee and consults for several states, including
Virginia.
-
- Iowa professor Jones told AFP that Williams is "heavily
invested in the process" of introducing touch-screen voting systems
across the United States. Williams was "installed" in a key position
at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc., which has
been "setting standards for many years," from which he advised
the FEC on electronic voting systems, Jones said.
-
- "Williams believes that he can detect malicious
code in voting machines by testing them," Dill said. "I think
he's on the defensive because he was so involved in the deployment of Diebold's
machines in Georgia."
-
- Georgia is perhaps "hardest hit by the growing Diebold
scandal," said Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering
in the 21st Century. On election night 2002, 67 memory cards with thousands
of votes went missing in Fulton County, Harris reports. The loss of memory
cards is comparable to lost ballot boxes.
-
- Right before the election in Georgia, an unexamined program
"patch" was hastily installed on the 22,000 Diebold voting machines
across the state. A patch inserts a "program fix" into the existing
code.
-
- One of the folders found on the Diebold ftp site was
one named "rob-georgia." This folder contained patch files that
instructed the computer to replace the existing GEMS program with another.
AFP has confirmed that the Diebold code used in Georgia was not inspected
prior to the 2002 election.
-
- "Putting patches on 22,000 voting machines without
looking at the underlying code has put the Georgia election results in
doubt," Harris wrote. "Source code files clearly show that Windows
source code was modified."
-
- "Georgia law requires that any time software is
updated, it must be re-certified, but the patches were never examined by
testing labs," Harris said. In Georgia, "no one bothered to see
what the patch did."
-
- Harris asked Williams about the lack of security in applying
the unexamined code patch just before the election in Georgia. "That's
a real good question," Williams said. "Like I say, we were in
the heat of the election. Some of the things we did, we probably compromised
security a little bit."
-
- Williams did not examinee the Diebold code or the patch:
"We don't look at the source code, that's the federal certification
labs that do that," he told Harris.
-
- Harris said the flawed code examined by Rubin's team
was used during the November 2002 election in Georgia, Maryland, California
and Kansas. The insecure software may have been used in "as many as
13 states and 197 counties," she said.
-
- "If a programmer employed by an election machine
manufacturer introduces malicious code into the system that can change
votes, even the most competent local election officials will not be able
to stop it or detect it," Dill said.
-
- Most computer crimes are "committed by insiders-not
because insiders are more dishonest, but because it is easier for them
to commit the crimes and, sometimes, escape detection," Dill said.
-
- Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) has asked Science
Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego, which has an existing
$2.6 million contract with the state to analyze software, to review the
security of the Diebold system. If security flaws are found, then Maryland's
$55.6 million contract with Ohio-based Diebold for 11,000 machines may
be canceled. The SAIC evaluation should be ready in early September.
-
- "I think SAIC has competent people," Rubin
said. "But if SAIC passes the software, then I'll be very suspicious,"
he said. "I obviously don't think this thing is going to pass the
tests."
-
- SAIC is working with Diversified Dynamics of Glen Allen,
Va., in the development of a voting system known as the System 5 DVRS.
-
- The Post article identified the three "major players"
in the U.S. electronic voting-machine industry: Diebold, Election Systems
and Software (ES&S) and Sequoia Voting Systems, which it incorrectly
described as "Oakland, Calif.-based."
-
- "It is a British-owned company," Sequoia Vice
President Kathryn Ferguson told AFP. Sequoia operates 40,000 direct recording
electronic voting machines in the United States, Ferguson said.
-
- Dill leads a coalition that has declared computerized
voting machines to be "inherently subject to programming error, equipment
malfunction and malicious tampering." More than 900 computer professionals
signed the coalition's on-line resolution, posted at verifiedvoting.org.
The coalition calls for touch-screen machines to print a voter verified
paper ballot that can be checked in case of problems.
-
- Illinois has drafted a law requiring a voter verifiable
paper trail, but there remains a catch. The law would require that a "permanent
paper record shall either be self-contained within the voting device or
shall be deposited by the voter into a secure ballot box." This record
"shall be available as an official record for any recount, redundant
count, or verification."
-
- There is, however, a significant difference between these
two options. The first option of ballots "self-contained within the
voting device" does not allow the voter to inspect and verify the
accuracy of his ballot; the second does.
-
- The legal threshold in Illinois for obtaining a "recount"
is far beyond the reach of third party and challenging candidates, making
any "recount" unlikely.
-
- A Palm Desert, Calif., woman, Susan Marie Weber, is suing
the state over the use of unverifiable voting machines. "They're not
allowing us to verify our votes," Weber said in WN.
-
- Weber's suit charges Bill Jones, California's former
secretary of state, and election officials in Riverside County of depriving
citizens of their constitutional rights by deploying touch-screen voting
systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems that do not provide a paper record.
Weber says the Sequoia machines are more vulnerable to fraud than traditional
voting methods.
-
- HAND-COUNTED VOTING BEST
-
- Hand-counted paper ballots were found to be the best
and most accurate way of voting, according to the Voting Technology Project
conducted by political scientists at Caltech and Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT).
-
- The Voting Technology Project compared the reliability
of voting systems used nationwide from 1988 to 2000 and came to a remarkable
conclusion: "The most stunning thing in our work was that hand-counted
paper ballots were better than anything else," project director Stephen
Ansolabehere said.
-
- This happens to be the exact conclusion reached four
years ago by The Spotlight newspaper after its seminal investigation.
-
- The Caltech/ MIT report found that as many as six million
ballots were not counted in 2000. Of 800 lever machines tested, 200 had
broken meters that stopped counting once they hit 999, but touch-screen
machines were even worse.
-
- The evaluation of voting systems found that touch-screen
voting systems performed worse than the mechanical lever machines, optically
scanned paper ballots and hand-counted paper ballots during the 2000 election.
Only punch-card machines performed worse than touch-screen systems, which
raises the obvious question: Do we need expensive electronic voting machines
at all?
-
-
- http://americanfreepress.net/08_25_03/Concerns_Over/concerns_over.html
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