The Battle of the Pollsters

msnbc.com

Zogby Vs. Mitofsky

Keith Olbermann

NEW YORK - It was a spectacular irony - a Republican senator using the word “fraud” about the presidential election. More spectacular still, he was visiting his condemnation of apparent election manipulation on the incumbent party. And beyond all that, he and others based their conclusions largely on the incredible disparity between the last exit polls and the vote count itself. Of course, Indiana’s Richard Lugar was talking about the presidential election in the Ukraine. But in so doing, he underscored that once again, the exit polls appear to have fulfilled the time-honored international tradition of the canary in the mine shaft. If only we could have used them in that way here.

“I don't think that exit polls can be used as a barometer for the accuracy of an election itself,” noted pollster John Zogby explained to me on last night’s Countdown, in what we think was his first full-scale television interview since the election. “At least until we find out if there's something broken with this round of election polls… I think that the gentlemen who are responsible for the exit polls should be fully transparent, release their data, discuss their methodology. Let us see what exactly it is that happened, and why it happened.”

It turns out one of those gentlemen doesn’t think anything happened.

In an unsolicited e-mail to Countdown, Warren Mitofsky wrote that he was “struck by the misinformation” in our program. He heads Mitofsky International, which along with Edison Media Research, conducted the election night exit polling for the television networks and the Associated Press. I referred to the variance among the early and late exit polls, and the voting. Insisting “there were no early exit polls” released by his company or Edison, Mr. Mitofsky wrote “the early release came from unauthorized leaks to bloggers who posted misinformation.”

Mitofsky compared those leaks to “the score at half time at a football game” and said the “leakers were reading complex displays intended for trained statisticians. The leakers did not understand what they were reading and the bloggers did not know they were getting misinformation.”

His defense of his work grew more strident. “The presidential exit polls released at poll closing time when they were completed had an average error of 1.9 percentage points. There were no mistaken projections by Edison/Mitofsky or any of the NEP members.” One more thrust: “All the professionals correctly interpreted the numbers.”

While Zogby spoke of a “blue ribbon panel” to investigate both the voting irregularities and the exit polling, Mitofsky asked rhetorically, “Did anyone really think that 51% in an exit poll two hours before voting was finished in the western states gave Kerry a lock on the presidency?”

John Zogby, meanwhile, was more concerned about the short end of another poll this week -- one that indicated that about four in five Americans thought President Bush had been legitimately elected three weeks ago. “But, Keith, 20 percent don’t think the president is legitimate. And worse yet, if you take the other half, those that didn’t vote for him, about half of the other side doesn’t think the president is legitimate. That just hasn’t existed for a long, long time in our system. We need to restore, I think, some semblance of legitimacy and honor to the system.”

Warren Mitofsky seemed to disagree. “The exit polls have been better in the past. They were far from perfect, but nowhere near as bad as your broadcast made them sound.” He never mentioned Zogby in his e-mail, but he did blast others. “Only the unauthorized leakers and bloggers were misled - a fate they richly deserved.”

Mitofsky’s pride in his efforts is understandable. But the so-called ‘early waves’ of exit polling information were disseminated in generalized form to all the networks as darkness fell in the east on November 2nd. They were intended as background, as material that could be used to anticipate patterns and results. Those who characterized them loaded them heavily with caveats and disclaimers, and kept numbers virtually out of their characterizations. But the effect was impossible to misinterpret. Merely in their intended spheres, they helped shape coverage and tone, on-air and off.

And they, along with the voting irregularities so thoroughly chronicled on the net (and still just seeping into the mainstream media), created an atmosphere that Zogby thinks requires broad remedy: “I think it's in the interests of the nation that we study what happened in this election and widen that, let's study what happened with the exit polls, and let's come out with a definitive conclusions by a blue ribbon panel to restore the legitimacy of this election.”

Zogby thinks he knows the steps to take to do that. The first is for those who are raising questions, to keep doing so. “I can reassure them they’re not crazy for asking. It’s not just those who are far out, it is indeed many respectable, responsible people.” The pollster says he’s heard from thousands of them, asking him to get involved in their various causes and investigations, so many he can’t answer them all.

But he used Countdown as his mass e-mail reply. “I’ll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it’s in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls.” Zogby called for the proverbial blue-ribbon commission into the voting irregularities, and the full release of the exit polling data.

And he encouraged the recounts, even when, as they have in the first three of the nine precincts in New Hampshire, they have varied by just fifteen votes from the original count. The second tally in Ohio, Zogby says, “certainly is useful, but I don't think its enough…I called this election for months the Armageddon election, and in that context, one of the things that we discovered throughout our polling was the fact that there were going to be significant numbers, on both sides who were not going to accept the legitimacy of the other guy winning, especially if it was close election.”

Do they have reason? With three weeks’ reflection, he’s not convinced there was an altered vote - accidental or otherwise - at least not on “a grand scale.” But Zogby says the “system is not geared for a close election like this” and if “many millions of people… don’t think that their vote was counted accurately,” the results are almost as bad as if an election was rigged, or decided by static charges in a thousand computers.

Zogby says he’s at peace with his own Election Night forecast - made not with the Mitofsky or Edison exit polling, but with his own polls. He saw Florida and Ohio both “trending” towards Kerry, and producing a triple-digit victory for the Democrat. Within the pollster’s margin of error, he made no mistakes. But he may not be as thoroughly sanguine as he suggests. Off-air, in the preparatory interview standard for all guests, his November 2 forecast was mentioned.

“Thanks,” he said, “for reminding me.”

Which reminds me that it was mildly encouraging to see some focus given to this entire topic Tuesday night by my old CNN cohort Aaron Brown. A carefully-worded segment included a laundry list of the problems we’ve been reporting on Countdown for the last three weeks, and compared them to “the kind of dumb mistake that ruined the Hubbell telescope.” Brown referenced the UC Berkeley study on the prospect of 130,000 phantom votes in Florida (though he didn’t mention its conclusion that all of them went to President Bush), and even had about fifteen seconds of Blackbox’s Bev Harris and her slog through the computer printout records in Florida.

Such as they are.

Thoughts? Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Originally published November 24, 2004

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The Real Environmental Mandate

The New York Times
November 26, 2004

The Real Environmental Mandate

Michael Leavitt, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency, declared recently that the voters on Election Day had delivered a clear mandate for President Bush's environmental policies, a "validation of our philosophy and agenda."

We're still trying to puzzle out which voters he had in mind. For one thing, environmental issues - as well as related energy issues - rarely broke the surface of the campaign. That was a shame, since these are important matters and the candidates' views differed just as sharply as they did on other issues. But the electorate can hardly be said to have delivered a mandate on something they weren't even asked to think about.

To the extent that voters registered an opinion on environmental issues, they did it in local settings, and they consistently asked for more environmental protection than Mr. Bush has been offering them. With rare exceptions, the administration's operating mode has been to remove or roll back legal safeguards without putting much in their place, including the free-market solutions advertised as a substitute for regulations. This was true whether the issue was clean air, clean water or protecting the public lands from logging, destructive mining practices, overgrazing, and oil and gas drilling.

The voters sent a different message. In Colorado, a healthy majority approved a ballot initiative requiring electric utilities to generate 10 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2015, a more aggressive approach than any so far offered on the federal level. In Montana, despite heavy industry lobbying, an even greater majority upheld a prohibition on mining practices that pollute rivers and streams with toxic wastes - a brave vote in a poor state that needs jobs.

Nationwide, voters in red states as well as blue approved $2.53 billion worth of new bond issues to preserve open space - a clear rebuke to a Congress that has dramatically cut financing for land acquisition and to an administration that insists on opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.

Though Mr. Leavitt's comments suggest that we can expect more of the same - more rollbacks dressed up as "sound science," more "market-based solutions" that are merely cover for needless delay - the administration has not really unveiled its plans. It is possible therefore that we could be pleasantly surprised. We could see a clean air program with teeth, we could see real money for the conservation programs in the farm bill, we could see energy legislation targeted more toward new technologies and conservation and less to the old extractive industries, we could see a public lands policy that spares our last wild places. That would be a fitting response to what the public really said on Nov. 2.

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Still Worlds Apart on Iraq

The New York Times
November 26, 2004

Still Worlds Apart on Iraq

Foreign ministers from all the right countries were present. The timing - two months before the scheduled date of Iraq's all-important elections - was promising. The Mideast location was symbolically apt. Too bad, then, that this week's big international conference on Iraq in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el Sheik, bringing together all of Baghdad's neighbors and every permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, did so little to change the dismal overall equation.

The ministers came, they dined and they endorsed the familiar uncontroversial list of desirable goals. They encouraged free elections. They condemned terrorism. They endorsed Iraq's territorial integrity. They reiterated the importance of humanitarian assistance. Then, still fundamentally disagreeing about how to achieve these goals, they flew off again, without committing themselves to anything likely to make any real difference.

International conferences like these can be quite useful when the participants start out with some basic agreement about the nature of the problem and the outlines of some possible solutions. On Iraq, there is still no such agreement. More than 20 months after the United States unilaterally assumed responsibility for Iraq's future by invading without the support of the Security Council or most neighboring countries, it still finds itself largely on its own, with much of the rest of the world watching skeptically from the sidelines.

This is not a healthy situation - for Iraq, for the United States, for the Middle East or for the international community. How things go in Iraq over the next few months will probably have widespread and lasting consequences for all. And they are unlikely to go very well unless all, or at least most, of the governments represented at Sharm el Sheik begin actively working together.

But don't expect that to happen any time soon. The newly re-elected Bush administration seems more determined than ever to rely on military force to crush the Sunni insurgency, even if that means going ahead with elections next January that are not broadly inclusive. Most of the rest of the world, doubting that this strategy can bring security, legitimacy or real sovereignty, seems equally determined to remain largely aloof.

The preferred strategy seems to be to hope for the best and offer such low-risk gestures as forgiving bad Iraqi debt that would surely never be repaid anyway. But even debt relief, which Western and Japanese government creditors agreed to last weekend, is further than Iraq's major Arab creditors, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, are now prepared to go. That makes it far more difficult for the new Iraqi government to obtain the credit it will need to revive and rebuild a devastated country. And so far only Romania and tiny Fiji have offered soldiers for the protective force needed to send more election workers to Iraq.

That leaves America still going it almost alone. Apart from the British, most remaining multinational troops are more symbolic than militarily significant. Washington's other main partner is Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who has not done enough to reach out to the estranged Sunni minority and now may be in danger of losing Shiite support to the new anti-American alliance of the former rebel leader Moktada al-Sadr and the former Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi.

The newly trained Iraqi security forces the administration likes to talk about still do not exist in large enough numbers to safeguard polling places in January, nor has their reliability under fire yet been convincingly demonstrated. The more than 135,000 United States troops now on long-term occupation duty cannot remain there indefinitely without seriously eroding America's worldwide readiness and credibility.

To begin changing this bleak picture, the Bush administration will have to work much harder at international bridge building than it did in its first term. Simply soliciting support for current American policies will not be enough. Washington must also be willing to consider changing some of those policies as part of a renewed process of international consultation. That might lead to more productive international conferences in the future.

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More Resignations at the CIA

The New York Times
November 25, 2004

2 Top Officials Are Reported to Quit C.I.A.
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - Two more senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine service are stepping down, intelligence officials said Wednesday, in the latest sign of upheaval in the agency under its new chief, Porter J. Goss.

As the chiefs of the Europe and Far East divisions, the two officials have headed spying operations in some of the most important regions of the world and were among a group known as the barons in the highest level of clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations.

The directorate has been the main target of an overhaul effort by Mr. Goss and his staff. Its chief, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy resigned this month after a dispute with the new management team.

An intelligence official said that the two division chiefs were retiring from the agency and that there would be no public announcement. Neither could be named, the official said, because they are working under cover.

A former intelligence official described the two as "very senior guys" who were stepping down because they did not feel comfortable with new management.

In a memorandum to agency employees last week, Mr. Goss warned that more personnel changes were coming as part of what he described as an effort to rebuild the ability of the agency to perform its core mission of stealing secrets.

Last week, President Bush directed Mr. Goss to draw up detailed plans in 90 days for a major overhaul of the agency, to address shortcomings that have become evident with intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and prewar assessments of Iraq.

The directive included a call for 50 percent increases in crucial operations and analytical personnel, a goal that the agency had already set in a five-year strategic plan drafted in December under George J. Tenet, the previous director of central intelligence. Many of the agency's top officials, including John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director, and A. B. Krongard, the No. 3 official, have stepped down or announced plans to do so since Mr. Goss took office in September. The upheaval has been most extensive in the operations directorate, made up of spies and spymasters who have made careers out of stealing secrets.

The clandestine service is a proud closed fraternity and one that sees itself as fiercely loyal and not risk-averse. It is also a group that has recoiled in recent weeks at the criticisms leveled at the agency, including comments this month from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who accused the agency of acting "almost as a rogue" institution.

Mr. Goss is a former spy and a member of the clandestine service who worked in Latin America in the 60's. More recently, he was a Republican congressman and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he has made plain his view that the current crop of case officers is not bold enough.

What is playing out in the agency headquarters is no less than a clash of cultures on a scale not seen there. since the Carter administration, when Stansfield Turner, a retired admiral, took a half-dozen Navy officers with him to the agency in 1977.

Under Mr. Goss, it is a cadre of former House Republican aides, not Navy officers, who dominate the new management team. This month, they have toppled Mr. Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, in a way that former intelligence officials say has shown little regard for the tradition-bound clandestine service which has always prized rank, experience and lines of authority.

"The C.I.A. is a line organization like the military," said Christopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee. "When staff guys insert themselves, that causes confusion and discontent."

Under Mr. Goss, the extent of the rebellion in the ranks is not clear. Much of the anger has been focused on a former Congressional aide, Patrick Murray, the chief of staff, who is said to have raised the hackles of some station chiefs around the world. The atmosphere has so deteriorated in the agency that some career officers have begun using derogatory nicknames for Mr. Murray and his colleagues, former intelligence officials said.

A backdrop to the tensions have been accusations from some Republicans that the agency sought over the summer to undermine Mr. Bush's re-election. Mr. McCain, in suggesting that the agency had been disloyal, has singled out the disclosure of intelligence reports about Iraq whose conclusions were at odds with administration assertions about the war.

In a rare public rebuttal, John E. McLaughlin, a career C.I.A. official who is stepping down as the agency's No. 2 official after less than two months as Mr. Goss's deputy, wrote in an op-ed article on Tuesday in The Washington Post that the accusation was unjustified.

"C.I.A. officers are career professionals who work for the president," Mr. McLaughlin wrote. "They see this as a solemn duty, regardless of which party holds the White House. Has everyone ruled out the possibility that the intelligence community during this period was simply doing its job - calling things as it saw them - and that people with a wide array of motives found it advantageous to put out this material when the C.I.A.'s views seemed at odds with the administration's?"

Still, the memorandum that Mr. Goss issued last week advised his employees that the agency's job was to "support the administration and its policies" and to do nothing to associate themselves with opposition to the administration.

People close to Mr. Goss and Mr. Murray, 40, say the two believe that major shakeups are needed.

"What's going on at the agency now is very clearly a group of deskbound bureaucrats who don't want the system to change," said Gardiner Peckham, a longtime friend of Mr. Murray and, like him, a former Republican Congressional official. "Basically, they're looking at a president, a director and his chief of staff who are change agents. There are some who would like to stand in the way and prevent that change from taking place, and they shouldn't win."

Mr. Turner, as intelligence chief under President Jimmy Carter, had an agenda that was the opposite in many ways from Mr. Goss's. He sought to shrink the clandestine service and rein it in, in reaction to the abuses of the 60's and 70's. Mr. Goss wants to make it bigger and bolder, in response to failures in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks and in prewar intelligence on Iraq.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Turner said he recognized the challenge that Mr. Goss was facing.

"Criticize the D.O., and you're in trouble," Mr. Turner said, using an abbreviation for the operations directorate. "Try to modify the way that operation works, and if you're an outsider, you're in trouble."

Mr. Goss and his team, including Mr. Murray, have never made a secret of their view that the clandestine service was in need of major change. A report by the House Intelligence Committee issued in June, when Mr. Goss was its chairman and Mr. Murray its staff director, portrayed the operations directorate in scathing terms, disparaging what it called "a continued political aversion to operations risk" and calling for "immediate and far-reaching changes."

"The nimble, flexible, core-mission oriented enterprise the D.O. once was, is becoming just a fleeting memory," the report said. "With each passing day, it becomes harder to resurrect."

The report so infuriated the agency that Mr. Tenet, who was still director of central intelligence, shot off an angry letter to Mr. Goss.

To replace Mr. Kappes, Mr. Goss has appointed a career covert officer whose name has not been announced because he is undercover but who has been most recently director of the Counterterrorism Center at the agency.

An agency spokesman declined to comment on the internal dispute.

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New Kids on the Bloc

Please read all the way through, including my comment at the end.

The New York Times
November 26, 2004

New Kids on the Bloc
By VERONICA KHOKHLOVA

Kiev, Ukraine

A family friend who has a 17-year-old son told me this last week: "Young people today are so different from what we used to be, or even from what your generation is. They don't have our fear - they don't know it. But they know their rights, and they know how to defend them. They aren't scared to."

With Ukraine now gripped in a political crisis stemming from the disputed results of Sunday's presidential election, I can see what that friend meant.

For example, I have a 20-year-old friend, Tanya. When I was 16 and the Soviet Union collapsed, she was 6. Monday night, Tanya returned to Kiev, where she is a history student in college, from her hometown, Zhytomyr, where she had been observing the election.

On Tuesday morning, she, along with half a million other people, was at Kiev's Independence Square, protesting the declaration by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich that he was the winner. From there, together with thousands of other students, she marched to Shevchenko University, whose leadership had refused to allow its students to join a growing nationwide strike.

They weren't letting anyone out of the university, Tanya told me when I ran into her that evening at a huge rally outside the Ukrainian Parliament building. The students were locked inside, she explained, but they opened all the windows, and the protesters were passing them orange flags - the symbol of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, whom most everyone feels was cheated out of victory. One guy climbed the drainpipe to the second floor to deliver the flags, Tanya said, and the students pulled him in through the window. Soon after, the administration relented, the students were liberated, their classes canceled.

By the time of the rally that night, Tanya had been up and running for 10 hours in the freezing cold dressed only in a thin green coat, an orange scarf around her neck and orange ribbons tied into her braids. She didn't look tired or cold; as we set out in search of a quick cup of coffee, she made us stop by a loudspeaker and listen to Mr. Yushchenko addressing Parliament inside the building.

Then, as we moved again, she and her friend started singing the Ukrainian national anthem. They didn't sound phony; they were singing for themselves, not loudly, and in beautiful voices (both are members of a Ukrainian choir), and it moved me to tears.

An hour later, around 7 p.m., we were at Independence Square again, at another huge rally, listening to Mr. Yushchenko on the loudspeakers again. Tanya, along with everyone else, was shouting "Yushchenko! Yushchenko!" and I, standing next to her, found myself shouting too, with confidence and inspiration I hadn't felt before.

And over and over one hears the chant, "My razom, nas bagato, i nas ne podolaty!" ("We're together, and there are many of us, and we can't be defeated!") Three weeks ago, I would have probably said that this was what students shouted at their rallies, but now everyone does, and so many people mean it.

When opposition party leaders asked the crowd to stay in the square through the night, taking turns in order not to get too cold, Tanya started making plans for the next day. She intended to return at 6 a.m.; she must have been very tired and cold by then, but it still wasn't showing.

The past four days have taught me something valuable: when I'm watching the situation unfold on television, I grow tense, fearful that it's not going to end well. But when I return to the crowd, I feel elated, thanks to people like Tanya, tens of thousands of them, and to everyone else who's out there, people of all ages, hundreds of thousands of them, fearless.

And our international support has heartened us as well. Almost every international observer - including experts from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and from NATO - has accused the ruling party of widespread voting fraud. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the United States "cannot accept this result as legitimate." The only foreign leader who has sided with Mr. Yanukovich has been President Vladimir Putin of Russia, which, needless to say, hasn't done much for the prime minister's credibility.

Which brings up a joke I've heard a few times recently: a Ukrainian man shows up at work, all his clothes rumpled. When his colleagues ask what happened, he replies: "I turn on the TV this morning, and there's Putin praising Yanukovich. I switch to another channel, and there's Putin again, praising Yanukovich. So I switch the channels again, and there's again Putin praising Yanukovich. I turn on the radio, and Putin is there, too, praising Yanukovich. So I figured there was no use turning on the iron."

I'm not sure if it's a remake of an old Soviet joke. It may be. But it fits November 2004 in Ukraine beautifully: there's little use watching TV, what's happening now is available to everyone firsthand, out there in the streets of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. And if the students have no fear in defending their rights, why should the rest of us?

Veronica Khokhlova, a Ukrainian journalist, writes Neeka's Backlog, a Weblog.

Comment: Ironically, kids and others in the Ukraine get it, and act on it, just as some did here in the USA in the sixties. Sadly, there is no such movement today here in the USA concering the recent elections. Perhaps some 18 - 20 something folks here in the USA will get their act together and inspire the rest of the USA to wake up again.

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Corporate PAC's Backed Republicans 10 to 1

The New York Times
November 26, 2004

Corporate PAC's Backed Republicans 10 to 1
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 (AP) - The top-giving corporate political action committees did not hedge their bets in the fall elections despite the narrow division between Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

They favored Republican candidates 10 to 1.

Of 268 corporate PAC's that donated $100,000 or more to presidential and Congressional candidates from January 2003 through the middle of last month, 245 gave the majority of their contributions to Republicans, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Political Money Line, a nonpartisan campaign finance tracking service.

Twenty-three corporate PAC's made more than half their donations to Democrats, according to the study, based on the most recent campaign finance reports available.

Corporate PAC's are financed with limited donations from company employees, who can each give up to $5,000 a year. In turn, the PAC's can donate up to $5,000 for a primary and another $5,000 for the general election to each federal candidate they support.

No money from the corporation itself can go to Congressional or presidential candidates.

These were the five most-Republican-leaning corporate PAC's:

Cooper Industries PAC: All $208,000 to Republicans. Cooper Industries, based in Houston, makes hardware and electrical and automotive products.

Flowers Industries PAC: All $131,500 to Republican candidates. Flowers Industries, a bakery company, is based in Thomasville, Ga.

The PAC of Phillips International: All $113,500 to Republicans. Phillips is a publishing company in Potomac, Md.

Harris Corporation Federal PAC: $168,500 to Republicans; $4,000 to Democrats. Harris, based in Melbourne, Fla., is an international communications equipment company.

Illinois Tool Works for Better Government Committee: $139,500 to Republicans; $5,000 to Democrats.

These were the five most-Democratic-leaning PAC's:

Cablevision Systems Corporation PAC: $88,000 to Democrats; $24,500 to Republicans.

The PAC of MWH Americas: $69,334 to Democrats; $48,000 to Republicans. MWH Americas is a construction and engineering company based in Broomfield, Colo.

The PAC of the LaSalle Bank Corporation of Chicago and its Standard Federal Bank subsidiary: $65,250 to Democrats; $47,500 to Republican candidates.

New York Mercantile Exchange PAC: $200,500 to Democrats; $148,000 to Republicans.

Harrah's Entertainment casino company PAC: $75,767 to Democrats; $57,793 to Republicans.

Republicans increased their majorities in both houses of Congress.

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New High-Tech Passports Raise Snooping Concerns

The New York Times
November 26, 2004

New High-Tech Passports Raise Snooping Concerns
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - The State Department will soon begin issuing passports that carry information about the traveler in a computer chip embedded in the cardboard cover as well as on its printed pages.

Privacy advocates say the new format - developed in response to security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks - will be vulnerable to electronic snooping by anyone within several feet, a practice called skimming. Internal State Department documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, show that Canada, Germany and Britain have raised the same concern.

"This is like putting an invisible bull's-eye on Americans that can be seen only by the terrorists," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the A.C.L.U. Technology and Liberty Program. "If there's any nation in the world at the moment that could do without such a device, it is the United States."

The organization wants the State Department to take security precautions like encrypting the data, so that even if it is downloaded by unauthorized people, it cannot be understood.

In a telephone interview, Frank E. Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, said the skimming problem "can be dealt with."

"We are certainly still working hard on the question of whether additional security measures should be taken," he said.

The technology is familiar to the public in applications like highway toll-collection systems and "smart cards" for entering buildings or subway turnstiles. In passports, the technology would be more sophisticated, with a computer having the ability to query the chip selectively for particular information. The chip, expected to cost about $8, would hold 64 kilobytes of data, the same as early personal computers.

Last month the Government Printing Office awarded $373,000 in contracts to four manufacturers to design the passports, which would contain chips that stored all the printed data on the passport, as well as digitized data on the traveler's face.

At an airport immigration checkpoint, an antenna could read a passport waved a few inches away. A digital camera could look at the traveler's face and compare it with the data from the passport chip.

The problem, though, is that the passport might be read by others, too. According to one document obtained by the A.C.L.U., a State Department memo from September detailing negotiations on the subject, the American position is that the data "should be able to be read by anyone who chooses to invest in the infrastructure to do so."

Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. described a test in which a chip was read from 30 feet away, but Mr. Moss of the State Department said that was in a laboratory and would be hard to duplicate in the field.

Government officials from the United States, Canada and western European countries, and chip manufacturing experts, have been discussing standards for chips in passports for more than two years under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which is affiliated with the United Nations and promulgates a variety of standards for aviation. Mr. Steinhardt complained that the organization had ignored the civil liberties group's request to participate in sessions when standards were discussed.

The State Department, which issues about seven million passports a year, hopes to begin issuing a limited number with chips early next year, initially to government employees.

To combat passport fraud and theft, the government will soon require all visitors who do not need visas to enter the United States - those who are deemed low security risks because of the countries they come from - to carry passports that are machine-readable and contain "biometric" information like fingerprints or facial measurements.

Australia is already issuing passports with chips, and others will follow soon, Mr. Moss said. And since passport requirements are usually reciprocal, the United States anticipates that those countries will demand similar features on American passports.

Neville G. Pattinson, the director of business development, technology and government affairs at Axalto, one of the vendors, said the problem with encryption was that the chip had to be readable by governments all over the world. But, he said, "there is a considerable concern over skimming."

The chips raise the possibility of someone "brushing against you with the equipment, in a briefcase or another disguise, and hoping they can read it out of your pocket or purse," Mr. Pattinson said. Another possibility is someone embedding a reader in a doorway, he said.

But he said low-cost fixes were available. One would incorporate a layer of metal foil into the cover of the passport so it could be read only when opened.

Another would put a password into the printed information in the passport. A reader would optically scan for the password, which would be visible only when the passport was open, and then use it to obtain data from the chip.

Another possibility would be to keep the passport in a foil pouch, like those issued with highway toll-collection devices so they can be carried through a toll booth without being read. In multilateral discussions, though, some experts said they feared that terrorists would use the pouches to smuggle weapons.

The A.C.L.U. is seeking to portray the new passports as part of a continuing loss of privacy.

In March, the A.C.L.U. and 12 other organizations from North America, Europe and Asia signed a letter to the aviation organization saying they were "increasingly concerned that the biometric travel document initiative is part and parcel of a larger surveillance infrastructure monitoring the movement of individuals globally."

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Election Fraud and the Press

The press has been all over the election fraud story for several days now -- no, not the election fraud in the USA -- that apparently is a topic the press seems unwilling to investigate and report on. It's only a story, apparently, when it happens in other countries -- like the Ukraine. Clearly, the press believes that the citizens of the USA should be much more concerned with election fraud and corruption in the Ukraine and should not care that there is election fraud and corruption right here in the USA. This is a very sad state of affairs.

Please contact the press -- print, tv, radio, and tell them that you are much more concerned about the election fraud and corruption story regarding the 2004 election in the USA than you are about the election in the Ukraine. Ask everyone you know to do the same.

Thank you.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing all our readers a Happy Thanksgiving.

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Pardon

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The War President

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Intelligence

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Red Ink

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Gulliver

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Mysterious ‘George W. Bush: Our leader’ Clear Channel political public service billboard graces Orlando freeway

Mysterious ‘George W. Bush: Our leader’ Clear Channel political public service billboard graces Orlando freeway



By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

A billboard recently put up in Orlando bearing a smiling photograph of President Bush with the words “Our Leader” is raising eyebrows among progressives who feel the poster is akin to that of propaganda used by tyrannical regimes.

Full article at:
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=442

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EFF, VerifiedVoting.org Push for Post-Election Tests on E-Voting Machines

For Immediate Release: November 23rd, 2004

EFF, VerifiedVoting.org Push for Post-Election Tests on E-Voting Machines

Independent Tests by Counties May Answer Lingering Questions About Accuracy, Machine Failures


San Francisco - On November 2, voting machines in many states -- both "red" and "blue" -- had problems that led thousands of citizens to call a national voter protection hotline. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the VerifiedVoting.org (VVO) were at the other end of the line, and the two organizations are very concerned about they heard. In several states, voters who chose one presidential candidate were presented with confirmation screens that listed another candidate's name. In others, machines crashed and were rebooted repeatedly, but nobody knows whether votes were lost.

EFF and VVO have responded by sending letters to voting officials in the eight counties that experienced the worst technical problems, urging the officials to allow independent testing of the machines. Such tests could reveal what went wrong and whether anyone tampered with the devices. Prominent technical experts including Rice University computer science professor Dan Wallach and security guru Bruce Schneier have agreed to help conduct these tests.

In addition to petitioning the county officials directly, EFF and VVO are calling on the public to let voting officials know that they would like to see truly independent testing of the machines used in this election.

The counties in question are Broward and Palm Beach in Florida, Mahoning and Franklin in Ohio, Mercer and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Harris in Texas, and Bernalillo in New Mexico. Concerned citizens who live in these counties can contact their local voting officials or add their signatures to the EFF/VVO electronic petition. When 10,000 people have signed the petition, the groups will deliver a copy to the officials in the target counties.

"The election is over, but voters can still make a difference for our democracy," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Asking that these machines be tested
independently is a crucial first step."

VVO Executive Director Will Doherty added, "We now have a chance for qualified voting technology experts to help remedy the problems we documented with paperless e-voting machines in the 2004 election."

For this release:
http://verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5344

Sign the petition:
http://www.eff.org/e-vote/petition/


About EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/


About VerifiedVoting.org

VerifiedVoting.org is a nonprofit organization championing reliable and publicly verifiable elections. Founded by Stanford University Computer Science Professor David Dill, the organization supports a requirement for voter-verified paper ballots on electronic voting machines allowing voters to inspect individual permanent records of their ballots and election officials to conduct meaningful recounts as needed. The organization's website is at http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

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Which one's the turkey?

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Lowering Ethical Standards: It's Job One!

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US GAO to investigate US election complaints

cnn.com

GAO to investigate election complaints

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Government Accountability Office plans to investigate complaints of several systemic problems with this month's elections, a group of Democratic lawmakers said Tuesday.

The investigation comes in response to two letters written by lawmakers to the GAO which address numerous media reports of irregularities in the 2004 vote and call for those to be reviewed.

The GAO said it will not investigate every charge listed by the Democrats, but will examine "the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines and counting of provisional ballots."

A spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers requesting an investigation, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said the goal is not to overturn the election results, but rather to improve the mechanics of the voting process.

"We are hopeful that GAO's nonpartisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election," said a statement released by Conyers and five other members of Congress.

As part of the inquiry, the group said it will provide copies of specific incident reports received in their offices regarding the election, including more than 57,000 complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.

Those reports include allegations of computer and voting machine problems that added votes to totals, as well as malfunctions that resulted in votes being thrown out.

"We are literally receiving additional reports every minute," said a November 5 letter from lawmakers to the GAO. "The essence of democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures.

"In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004."

Requesting lawmakers in addition to Conyers were Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Louise Slaughter and Gregory Meeks of New York; Robert Wexler of Florida; Robert Scott of Virginia; Melvin Watt of North Carolina; Rush Holt of New Jersey; John Olver of Massachusetts; Bob Filner, George Miller and Barbara Lee of California; and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

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A Moral Indictment

The New York Times
November 23, 2004

A Moral Indictment
By RONNIE EARLE

Austin, Tex. — It is a rare day when members of the United States Congress try to read the minds of the members of a grand jury in Travis County, Tex. Apparently Tom DeLay's colleagues expect him to be indicted.

Last week Congressional Republicans voted to change their rule that required an indicted leader to relinquish his post. They were responding to an investigation by the Travis County grand jury into political contributions by corporations that has already resulted in the indictments of three associates of Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader.

Yet no member of Congress has been indicted in the investigation, and none is a target unless he or she has committed a crime. The grand jury will continue its work, abiding by the rule of law. That law requires a grand jury of citizens, not the prosecutor, to determine whether probable cause exists to hold an accused person to answer for the accusation against him or her.

Politicians in Congress are responsible for the leaders they choose. Their choices reflect their moral values.

Every law enforcement officer depends on the moral values and integrity of society for backup; they are like body armor. The cynical destruction of moral values at the top makes it hard for law enforcement to do its job.

In terms of moral values, this is where the rubber meets the road. The rules you apply to yourself are the true test of your moral values.

The thinly veiled personal attacks on me by Mr. DeLay's supporters in this case are no different from those in the cases of any of the 15 elected officials this office has prosecuted in my 27-year tenure. Most of these officials - 12 Democrats and three Republicans - have accused me of having political motives. What else are they going to say?

For most of my tenure the Democrats held the power in state government. Now Republicans do. Most crimes by elected officials involve the abuse of power; you have to have power before you can abuse it.

There is no limit to what you can do if you have the power to change the rules. Congress may make its own rules, but the public makes the rule of law, and depends for its peace on the enforcement of the law. Hypocrisy at the highest levels of government is toxic to the moral fiber that holds our communities together.

The open contempt for moral values by our elected officials has a corrosive effect. It is a sad day for law enforcement when Congress offers such poor leadership on moral values and ethical behavior. We are a moral people, and the first lesson of democracy is not to hold the public in contempt.

Ronnie Earle is the district attorney for Travis County, Tex.

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