Swarthmore Shuts Down Web Sites of Students Publicizing Company's Voting-Machine Memos

Swarthmore College last week temporarily shut down the network connections of two students who used the Internet to publicize internal company memos that the students say reveal insecurities in a commercial electronic-voting system.

Calling their exploits an act of civil disobedience, the two have inspired students at four other institutions to help disseminate the documents.

At issue are memos and other materials from Diebold Inc., a producer of electronic-voting machines that is based in North Canton, Ohio. According to the Swarthmore students, and the writer who first obtained the company memos, they reveal that people can tamper with Diebold's vote-counting database and change votes.

But Joseph Richardson, a spokesman for Diebold, said the materials that the students have been distributing were stolen from Diebold, and contain company software and employee correspondence. The company considers the posting of the materials online to be copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, he said.

The Swarthmore students who first distributed the memos online are Micah White, a senior, and Andrew Main, a junior. They are affiliated with a liberal student-activist group on the campus called Why War. The students say that distributing the documents is an act of free speech that could lead to fairer elections.

Earlier this month, the Why War Web site, hosted by a commercial Internet service provider, contained links to the Diebold documents. After Diebold told the provider that it was breaking the law by hosting the Web site, Why War moved its site to Swarthmore's server.

Swarthmore then received a letter from Diebold demanding that the college take down the site. The students moved the Why War site to another provider, and also publicized the Diebold documents on their personal Web pages, which are hosted by Swarthmore.

That action is what prompted Swarthmore administrators to sever the students' Internet connections on Thursday. The students then removed the references from their Web sites and their Internet connections were restored the same day, said Mr. White.

He said he was disappointed that the college thwarted Why War's efforts to distribute the documents, particularly since the college was founded by Quakers and encourages students to stand up for their political beliefs.

"There's tremendous support on this campus for Swarthmore taking a stronger stance on this issue," he said. "By them saying, 'It's a copyright violation,' they're weaseling out of their responsibility as a major institution of higher learning that happens to be founded on Quaker principles of truth and civil disobedience."

A spokesman for Swarthmore said the college is proud that the students are acting on their beliefs, but that it cannot support them because that would require the college to support every student political movement on campus. "There are students here pursuing all sorts of political initiatives," said Tom Krattenmaker, a spokesman for Swarthmore. "All of them want the college to commit their resources to their causes."

Apart from Swarthmore, dozens of other Internet service providers that are unaffiliated with colleges have hosted the Diebold documents, including the Online Policy Group, a nonprofit policy-research group. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that promotes civil liberties online, is now representing the Online Policy Group in its fight to keep the documents on its computer server.

Mr. Richardson said Diebold will continue to send copyright-infringement notices to Internet service providers that host the company documents, including the four other institutions — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas–Pan American. The materials were first obtained by Bev Harris, who is writing a book about modern-day ballot-tampering. According to published accounts, she found the materials on an unprotected Web site while doing a Google search.