SAN JOSE, Calif. — Attorneys specializing in free speech on the Internet filed suit Tuesday against Diebold Inc., demanding the voting equipment company stop sending legal threats to organizations that publish its leaked documents.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford University's Cyberlaw Clinic filed for a temporary restraining order in federal court. Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose is expected to issue a decision this week.
Computer programmers, Internet service providers and students from at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have received the cease-and-desist orders from Diebold.
Many groups are refusing to remove from their Web sites internal Diebold documents that they claim raise serious security questions and threaten the U.S. elections process.
Diebold executives could not be reached Tuesday, but spokesman Mike Jacobsen said in late October that the cease-and-desist orders do not mean the documents are authentic — nor do they give credence to advocates who claim lax Diebold security could allow hackers to rig machines. Jacobsen warned that some of the 13,000 pages of stolen documents may have been altered after they were stolen from the company's central server.
In March, a hacker broke into Diebold's servers using an employee's ID number, and copied company announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails dating back to January 1999, Jacobsen said.
The vast majority of the 1.8 gigabits of data contain little more than banal employee e-mails, routine software manuals and old voter record files. But several items seem to raise security concerns.
In one series of e-mails, a senior engineer dismisses concern from a lower-level programmer who questions why the company lacked certification for a customized operating system used in touch-screen voting machines. The Federal Election Commission requires voting software to be certified by an independent research lab.
In another e-mail, a Diebold executive scolded programmers for leaving software files on an Internet site without password protection.
"This potentially gives the software away to whomever wants it," the manager wrote in the e-mail.
In August, the hacker e-mailed the data to voting activists, some of whom published stories on their Web logs. A freelance journalist at Wired News also received data and wrote about it in an online story.
The data was further distributed in digital form online, and it can still be found at dozens of sites — including some in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Italy. It's unclear how many sites link to the data.
EFF staff attorney Wendy Seltzer said activists are trying to publicize alleged security breaches at Diebold, which has more than 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide. Publishing stolen documents from one of the nation's largest election equipment vendors, she says, is more important than honoring copyrights.
"People are using these documents to talk about how the votes are counted," Seltzer said. "The First Amendment protects them."
San Francisco-based EFF represents Online Policy Group, a nonprofit ISP that hosts the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center.
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