"...it now takes programming prowess to steal elections when all it used to take was the ability to stuff ballot boxes."

ABC News is getting to be a real blogging force. Last week the Foley story, which has apparently been an open secret in Washington for years, was put into the national spotlight by this big-time MSM player, and the rest is...you know...

So what's next?

The electronic voting machine vulnerability may be the next big non-story to get pushed on the big-time MSM stage. Putting together snips and clips from here and there that bloggers have had access to for, what...weeks? months? this big outfit comes lumbering along with appropriate gravitas to sell some more non-news.

In a paper last month, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,"... Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman discussed a common Diebold machine. They showed that anyone who gets access to the machine and its memory card for literally a minute or two could easily install the group's invisible vote-stealing software on the machine. (Poll workers and others have unsupervised access for much longer periods.) Changing all logs, counters, and associated records to reflect the bogus vote count that it generates, the software installed by the infected memory card (similar to a floppy disk) would be undetectable. In fact, the software would delete itself at the end of Election Day.

Wo0-hoo!
Somebody at ABC must be reading BoingBoing. But hey, they got to it in less than a month. Not what you's call "breaking news" but better than two or three years, I guess.
Thanks, Pop.
It's a long way from corporate welfare, but I know -- you got advertisers to keep happy.
H/T 3Quarks. (Sorry, Abbas, I couldn't resist.)