MSNBC: Luciano Pavarotti, whose vibrant high C’s and ebullient showmanship made him one of the world’s most beloved tenors, has died, his manager told The Associated Press. He was 71.
His manager, Terri Robson, told the AP in an e-mail statement that Pavarotti died at his home in Modena, Italy, at 5 a.m. local time. Pavarotti had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and underwent further treatment in August.
“The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer, which eventually took his life. In fitting with the approach that characterized his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness,” the statement said.
Stories
"The Rotting of the Big Apple" September 1990
Stories
The Decline Of New York
If, as Lewis Mumford wrote, cities were created as “a means of bringing heaven down to earth” and “a symbol of the possible,” New York is the epitome of those dreams. No other city’s skyline thrusts so aggressively toward the heavens, pulling down the clouds like a monarch shrugging into a cloak. No other city’s history so embodies the idea of innovation and achievement in such a dazzling range of human endeavors. “There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride and exultancy,” novelist Thomas Wolfe rhapsodized in 1935. “It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.”
That is why New York was for more than two centuries — and still is — a beacon for the best, brightest and bravest people from all over the U.S. and all around the world. They come to test themselves against the toughest competition, to make a buck, to reinvent lives that seem stale in any other setting. As the song that has become the city’s unofficial anthem puts it, “If I can make it there, I’d make it anywhere.”
In virtually every category, New York has the best, the biggest, the most — except for civility, of which it has the least. With a flood of new arrivals from Europe, the Soviet Union and the Third World, New York’s population has rebounded from its 1980 low of 7 million to an estimated 8 million, more than twice as many as runner-up Los Angeles. Washington may be the home of Congress and the President, but New York is the financial capital of the world. Even with the rise of Japan and Germany, the New York Stock Exchange remains the world’s most prestigious financial market, on which stocks worth trillions of dollars are traded.
In culture too, New York remains a pacesetter. Other cities would be proud to have one world-class performing troupe. New York has dozens, including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the American Ballet Theater, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Manhattan Theater Club. As a showcase for theater, Broadway has few rivals — unless they are the city’s own off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions. Its collection of museums is a gallery in itself.
But just as the sheer size of New York’s population makes possible a dazzling smorgasbord of urban delights, it also magnifies a myriad of social ills. Only about 1 of every 100 New Yorkers is homeless, but that adds up to 90,000 people huddling in shelters or eking out a life of not-so-quiet desperation on the street. A mere 1 in 300 New Yorkers may be a victim of AIDS, but that totals 27,000 people, a staggering 19% of all confirmed cases in the U.S. Says Paul Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a nonprofit housing-development organization: “New York is the same as every place — only more so.”
Until recently, the negative aspects of New York living were more than compensated by the exhilaration of simply being there. As architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable says, “When it is good, New York is very, very good. Which is why New Yorkers put up with so much that is bad.” Over the decades, Gothamites have evolved a hard-boiled, calculating approach to life that enables them to enjoy the city’s manifold pleasures while minimizing its most egregious hassles. Says Brigette Moore, 19, a college student from Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay section: “I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up in any other city. I think people in other parts of the country are more limited. In New York you have the privilege to be anything you want.”
But that balance has now begun to shift. Reason: a surge of drugs and violent crime that government officials seem utterly unable to combat. Eight other major cities have higher homicide rates, but New York’s carnage dwarfs theirs in absolute terms. Last year 1,905 people were murdered in New York, more than twice as many as in Los Angeles. In the first five months of this year, 888 homicides were committed, setting a pace that will result in a new record if it goes unchecked.
The victims have been of all races, all classes, all ages. This summer, in one eight-day period, four children were killed by stray gunshots as they played on the sidewalks, toddled in their grandmother’s kitchens or slept soundly in their own beds. Six others have been wounded since late June. So many have died that a new slang term has been coined to describe them: “mushrooms,” as vulnerable as tiny plants that spring up underfoot.
The city was still absorbing those horrors two weeks ago when Sean Healy, a prosecutor in the Bronx district attorney’s office, was cut down by a hail of gunfire as he selected a package of doughnuts from the shelf of a neighborhood grocery. That same day Vander Beatty, a former political power in Brooklyn attempting a comeback by running for district leader, was shot to death in his campaign headquarters. The prime suspect, according to police, was a longtime friend who was allegedly angry over the manner in which a lawyer who had been recommended by Beatty had handled his alimony case.
Then last week came the murder of 22-year-old Brian Watkins, an avid tennis buff from Provo, Utah, on a subway platform in midtown Manhattan. Over the years, his family frequently made a pilgrimage to watch the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens. En route to dinner at Tavern on the Green, a popular tourist attraction, the family was attacked by a group of eight black and Hispanic youths. After one of the gang cut open his father’s pocket to get at his money and punched his mother in the face, Brian jumped to his parents’ defense. He was stabbed with a four-inch butterfly knife and died 40 minutes later at St. Vincent’s Hospital.
The shock of Watkins’ death was intensified by the venality of its alleged motive. According to police, the suspects are members of F.T.S. (an abbreviated obscenity), a Queens youth gang that requires its members to commit a mugging as an initiation rite. They were reportedly trying to raise cash to finance an evening of frolicking at Roseland, a nearby dance hall, where six suspects were arrested. Two others were rounded up later.
Like the brutal rape of the Central Park jogger and the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last year, Watkins’ death quickly assumed a larger symbolic meaning. Outside the city it confirmed what most Americans already believed: New York is an exciting but dangerous place. Among New Yorkers it reinforced the spreading conviction that the city has spun out of control. A growing sense of vulnerability has been deepened by the belief that deadly violence, once mostly confined to crime-ridden ghetto neighborhoods that the police wrote off as free-fire zones, is now lashing out randomly at anyone, anytime, even in areas once considered relatively safe.
New Yorkers were quick to notice that the Watkins family were attacked even though they were traveling in a group of five, including three men. But such a precaution did not prevent them — or thousands of city residents — from being victimized. “Crime is tearing at the vitals of this city and has completely altered ordinary life,” says Thomas Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a private watchdog group. “Worst of all, it is destroying the morale of our citizens.”
The looming question in many minds was what, if anything, people could do to protect themselves when children were no longer safe in their beds. “New Yorkers can put up with dirty streets, poor schools and broken subways,” warns Mitchell Moss, director of the urban research center at New York University. “But New Yorkers cannot take uncertainty — risks, yes, but not uncertainty.”
At times the city has seemed so consumed with crime that it was incapable of thinking about anything else. Nursery-school teachers in some of the city’s tougher neighborhoods train children barely old enough to talk to hit the floor at the sound of gunshots. They call them “firecrackers” and reward the swift with a lollipop.
What has most dismayed many New Yorkers is the tepid response of the city’s leaders to the surge of mayhem. Like everyone else in New York, Mayor David Dinkins and his handpicked police commissioner, Lee Brown, seem at a loss for remedies to the worst crime wave to hit the city in a decade. “New York is in desperate need of leadership,” says Moss, “and it simply isn’t there.” A TIME/CNN poll of New Yorkers taken during this summer’s rash of killings showed that only 47% approved of Dinkins’ performance, and an equal number believed he is no different or worse than his abrasive predecessor, Edward I. Koch.
New York’s plunge into chaos cannot be blamed on Dinkins, who has been in office for only nine months. In fact, he has inherited the whirlwind sown by decades of benign neglect, misplaced priorities and outright incompetence at every level of government. If during the city’s close brush with bankruptcy during the 1970s Gerald Ford was willing to let New York drop dead, the Reagan Administration seemed eager to bury it. Since 1980, cutbacks in federal aid have cost New York billions, with funds for subsidized housing alone dropping $16 billion. Despite a series of state and local levies that now place New Yorkers among the most heavily taxed citizens in the nation, the city has never recovered from those setbacks.
Most brutally hit have been basic social services. Even with the addition of 1,058 new police officers in October, the force will still be 14% smaller than its 1975 level of 31,683. Meanwhile crime, fueled by the drug epidemic, has jumped 25%. Since 1987, the number of street sweepers has been slashed from 1,400 to 300, trash collections in midtown Manhattan have been reduced by a third, and what used to be daily rounds in the outer boroughs have been reduced to twice a week. Epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis and syphilis have pushed the health-care system to the breaking point. As many New Yorkers are waiting for public housing as there are existing units, leading occupants to double or triple up in a frantic bid for shelter. “The chickens have come home to roost,” says Madeline Lee, executive director of the New York Foundation, which supports community projects for the disadvantaged, “and New York doesn’t let anyone escape from the reality of that.”
That reality includes an infrastructure so dilapidated that the very streets seem to be rising up in rebellion. A year ago, a series of exploding steam pipes spewed carcinogenic asbestos into apartment houses in Manhattan. When some residents moved back into their homes after a protracted cleanup, objects of value had been stolen.
During the roaring 1980s, it appeared that New York might slip by. High finance and a booming real estate market transported New York to a paroxysm of unbridled capitalism, with all its attendant glitz and excess. At the height of the bull market, 60,000 new jobs were being created annually, luring droves of hyperambitious baby boomers to the canyons of Wall Street and midtown Manhattan. Nicknamed “the Erector set,” a stable of real estate developers transformed the cityscape, throwing up 50 million sq. ft. of glistening office monoliths within Manhattan alone. New fortunes upended the city’s social lineage, shoving Rockefeller and Astor aside for Trump, Steinberg and Kravis. The new barons redefined wealth beyond Jay Gatsby’s wildest dreams, ensconcing themselves in palatial aeries groaning with old masters and nouveau exorbitance.
But behind the blinding glitter of the new multimillionaires, the city was failing the bulk of its citizens. Even the basic rudiments of civil behavior seemed to evaporate along with the glitter of the boom times. Every day 155,000 subway riders jump the turnstiles, denying the cash-strapped mass transit system at least $65 million annually. The streets have become public rest rooms for both people and animals, even though failure to clean up after a pet dog carries fines of up to $100. What was once the bustle of a hyperkinetic city has become a demented frenzy.
Skyrocketing real estate prices (a one-room apartment that rents for $800 a month is considered a bargain) have driven middle-class families out of Manhattan and are threatening the creative enterprises that make the island a cultural oasis. Twenty years ago, about 50 or 60 new productions opened on Broadway each year. Today soaring costs have driven the price of an orchestra seat to $60, and a healthy season yields no more than 35 new shows, only 12 of which are deemed successes. In dance alone, New York lost 55 world-class studios in the past four years. Others, including Martha Graham Dance, are considering following the example of the Joffrey Ballet by establishing second and third homes in other cities. That means a shorter season in New York. “This is the most expensive, difficult and competitive city for arts organizations,” says David Resnicow, president of the Arts and Communications Counselors, which arranges sponsorships for corporations and cultural institutions. “You don’t have to be in New York to make it. ”
The daily litany of problems seems all the starker now because of the feverish boosterism that characterized Koch’s three terms as mayor. The 65- year-old Democrat lived and breathed New York, taking the pulse of the city through his own. “How’m I doin’?” was his constant question as he flitted from fire to shooting to gala to press conference. For much of his 12-year tenure, the answer was “O.K.” But rampant corruption within his administration and the widening economic and racial fissures in the city ultimately soured New Yorkers on their tireless but tiresome mayor.
Last November New Yorkers turned to Dinkins in the hope that the cautious and gentle veteran clubhouse politician would heal the rifts among them and offer a modicum of racial peace. “A Gorgeous Mosaic” became the 63-year-old grandfather’s metaphor for his divided city, and he pulled together an ethnically diverse electorate to become New York’s first black mayor by a narrow margin. Dinkins has named more minorities to top-level staff positions than any mayor before him and has drawn on a national pool of talent to fill posts in his administration. With little fanfare, the silver-haired insider fashioned a slash-and-tax $28 billion budget that met with grudging approval from unions and business leaders alike.
But the battle for survival is being fought on the sidewalks of New York, not in the ledger books. And so far, Dinkins’ lackluster performance has strengthened the unsettling sense that he is simply not up to his job. In the war against crime, Dinkins’ initiatives have been piecemeal and halting, ranging from a stillborn gun-amnesty program (only 35 illegal firearms have been turned in) to the hiring of less than a fourth of the additional 5,000 officers that police commissioner Brown contends are needed to win back the streets.
Part of the mayor’s problem is style. Unlike the prickly Koch, Dinkins rarely raises his voice and disdains the finger-in-your-chest aggressiveness that has characterized New York politicians since the days of Tammany Hall. He is far more comfortable in quiet back-room negotiations than in public confrontations with unhappy constituents. His finest hour may have been the lavish hero’s welcome the city provided in June for South African leader Nelson Mandela, for whom New York’s warring ethnic groups seemed to put aside their differences during a three-day celebration of racial harmony.
A more serious drawback is Dinkins’ reluctance to attack problems in a direct and forceful way. Since January, for example, the Flatbush section of Brooklyn has been roiled by a black boycott of two Korean grocery stores that began after a Haitian woman accused the Koreans of assaulting her in an argument over a dollar’s worth of fruit. The shopowners obtained a civil court injunction ordering the protesters to remain at least 50 ft. away from the shops’ entrances, but Dinkins has not ordered the police to enforce it. Instead, he appointed a commission to review his handling of the affair. Not surprisingly, the report it issued two weeks ago praised the mayor’s conduct and lambasted Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes for not vigorously pushing the investigation and prosecution of the Haitian woman’s original complaint.
Despite the mounting unease about his leadership, Dinkins remains unfazed. His response last week to demands that he publicly condemn the Watkins murder was characteristically orotund. Quoth the mayor: “I say that if two nations are in dispute and one diplomat says to the representative of another government, ‘Her Majesty’s government is exceedingly distressed,’ everybody knows that means we’re mad as hell. Now, however, I’m prepared to say I’m mad as hell, not simply ‘We’re exceedingly distressed.’ ”
Even so, Dinkins’ remark was a significant shift from his earlier pronouncements. At times the mayor has attempted to downplay the crime wave as a public relations problem: “This administration is doing all it can to win back our streets. Some of it has been to address the image of the city. People need to feel secure, and ((a bad image)) adversely impacts business and tourism.” He has also portrayed the outbreak as a local manifestation of a national crisis beyond his control: “If the problems of drugs and crime were only in New York, then you could ask, What is it that you folks are doing wrong? But all of our urban centers are afflicted similarly. The fact that it’s happening somewhere else doesn’t mean that I don’t have a problem to address. But the fact that the problem is regional or nationwide does say that the Federal Government should assist in addressing it.” Says Dinkins: “You have to have credibility. People have to have faith in you.”
These days faith is in short supply. So is money. Megadeveloper Lew Rudin, who heads a corporate cheerleading organization, Association for a Better New York, estimates it would take $5 trillion to bring his city back up to par. Although its annual budget is larger than that of all but two states, New York City is in a financial straitjacket, and the nation’s economic downturn, more harshly reflected in the Northeast than elsewhere, offers little hope for future relief. Says financier Felix Rohatyn, who devised the plan that saved New York from bankruptcy 15 years ago: “I just don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, we cannot turn our back on the city now.” Facing a $1.8 billion shortfall, the Dinkins administration has been forced to raise taxes $800 million and cut city services more than $200 million.
Such cutbacks mean that for average New Yorkers the struggle to attain what other Americans take for granted will become even more grueling. The challenge is especially tough for families with children. New York public schools are burdened with educating 940,000 students, representing 150 countries and speaking more than 100 languages. Less than half read at or above grade level, 1 out of 3 drop out before their senior year, and those who do stay in school often take five to seven years to graduate from high school. The system itself is rife with troubles. Almost a third of the city’s 32 local school boards are under investigation for corruption, building maintenance has chalked up a $500 million backlog, and a basic in-school service like nursing care has been slashed 86%. An impossible caseload of 1,000 high school students for every guidance counselor makes a mockery of the profession.
Other New Yorkers are waging private wars for safe and affordable housing. Willie Olmo, an electronics technician who supports his wife Mabel and five daughters on a salary of $30,000, had nowhere to go last year when the landlord abandoned the apartment building in which the family lived. When police declined to drive away crack users who had set up a drug den in the building’s basement, Olmo picked up a baseball bat and chased them out himself. He then bought walkie-talkies with his own money and started a tenants’ patrol, which has since expanded into a neighborhood watch committee. Next he persuaded his neighbors to lease the building from the city and manage it themselves. “We’ve tried to improve the neighborhood so we could live here,” says Mabel. “Rents everywhere else are too high.”
For those who can afford it, the increasingly attractive choice is to leave New York behind. According to the Household Goods Carriers’ Bureau, which tracks the business of the city’s six largest moving companies, 12,000 more customers moved out over the past two years than moved in. For the first time in this century, fear of crime is the main catalyst for this burgeoning exodus. “People may want to be here,” says Richard Anderson, head of New York’s Regional Plan Association, “but the things that drive them away are bubbling to the surface.” Says Laura Ziman, a native New Yorker who recently fled to upstate New York with her husband and their two toddlers: “I love the city, but it’s just becoming unlivable.”
So far the exodus from New York is no more than a trickle. But it could become a flood if the fear of crime begins to overshadow the city’s unique combination of pizazz and opportunity. Unchecked violence has already dulled the luster of the Big Apple. The daunting task before its leaders is to prevent it from rotting to the core.
CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,009 New York City residents for TIME/CNN on Aug. 2 to 5 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling is plus or minus 3%.
Drunken elephants go on rampage after "getting into" the rice beer
StoriesAt least 6 in India killed after elephants get into rice beer
Dec 17, 2002 – At least six persons were crushed to death by wild elephants that went amok after getting drunk on rice beer near Guwahati, India. A forest official said the herd went on the rampage Monday in Tinsukia district.
“They smashed huts and plundered granaries and broke open casks to drink rice beer. The herd then went berserk killing six persons,” according to a Reuters report.
Wild elephants have been targeting areas where people brew large volumes of rice beer. “We have come across devastating drunken bouts by herds that have developed a liking for country liquor,” Kushal Sharma, a noted elephant expert, said.
In the last two years, elephants have killed at least 150 people. Villagers, in turn, have killed up to 200 of the animals.
KUCINICH WINS POLL ON EDWARDS WEBSITE
Stories
Edie Brickell Keyboardist Shot Dead In Dallas
Stories
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Musician Is Killed for Banging on a Door
DALLAS, Sept. 4 — A Texas rock musician was shot to death here early Monday by a neighbor who fired through a closed door, thinking he was scaring off a burglar.
The incident occurred just three days after a new law took effect strengthening the right of Texans to use deadly force to protect themselves and their property.
The musician, Jeffrey Carter Albrecht, 34, a keyboardist with Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians and the Dallas rock band Sorta, was shot in the head after he startled a man and his wife about 4 a.m. by pounding and kicking at their back door, the police said. Mr. Albrecht had just assaulted his girlfriend, who lives next door and had locked him out of her house, the police said.
The neighbor, who has not been identified by the police, was awakened by his wife’s screams that someone was breaking into their home, according to the police report. The man yelled for the person to go away, but when the pounding continued, he fired through the top of the door.
Mr. Albrecht, who was about 6-foot-5, was struck in the head.
The police said the case would be referred to a grand jury for review. Mr. Albrecht’s mother, Judith Albrecht, would not say whether she thought the neighbor should be charged with a crime.
“I think he was frightened, and I do think he could have made another choice,” Ms. Albrecht said. “I understand there are a lot of bad people, but Carter was not one of them.”
Mr. Albrecht’s girlfriend, Ryann Rathbone, said she believed he was having a bad reaction to the combination of alcohol and an antismoking drug they both had taken for a week. The drug had given them hallucinatory dreams, Ms. Rathbone said.
“This was not a drunken rage,” she said.
“Carter would never have hurt me, ever,’’ Ms. Rathbone said.
Texas has protected the right to “stand your ground” and use deadly force to protect oneself at home without first trying to retreat since 1995. And a law that took effect on Saturday expanded that so-called “castle doctrine” to apply to public spaces.
The law also expanded civil immunity and could make it more difficult for the Albrecht family or relatives of those killed in similar incidents in Texas to win a wrongful-death suit, said James Dark, executive director of the Texas State Rifle Association, which lobbied for the new law.
“These duty-to-retreat laws provide legal protection for those who are out committing criminal acts,” Mr. Dark said. Under the new Texas law, “the protection of the law falls on those who obey the law not those who violate the law.”
Texas is one of 19 states with a castle doctrine self-defense law, according to the National Rifle Association.
Marsha McCartney, president of the North Texas chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, called Mr. Albrecht’s death “one more gun tragedy.”
“I’m sure the man who did the shooting feels terrible about it,” Ms. McCartney said, “but legally in Texas he can do exactly what he did because he feels frightened.”
Borris Miles, a Democratic state representative from Houston and a former schools police officer, opposed the legislation, which was signed into law in March.
In July, Mr. Miles confronted a robber at his home construction site and shot him in the leg. No charges were filed, but he said he still opposed the new law.
“We have a right to defend ourselves in our home. I support that and I always will,” Mr. Miles said. But the law went too far, he said, by expanding the right to use deadly force in the workplace and one’s automobile.
Canadian Ryan Coniam hired as race engineer for Jacques Villeneuve in 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup
Stories
Burlington racer to be Villeneuve’s NASCAR engineer
September 04, 2007
Norris McDonald
Motorsport Reporter
Burlington’s Ryan Coniam has been hired as race engineer for Jacques Villeneuve in the 2008 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series.
Villeneuve, who was world driving champion in 1997, will start his NASCAR career at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sept. 22 when he will partner Bill Davis Racing teammate Mike Skinner in a Craftsman Truck Series race.
Villeneuve is expected to drive as many as seven truck races and possibly one Nextel Cup race in ’07 before going into the Cup series full-time in 2008.
The 27-year-old Coniam, former World of Outlaws sprint car star and son of Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame inductee Warren Coniam, has been living in Mooresville, N.C., where he was employed in research and development for Dale Earnhardt Inc. He was head-hunted by BDR and travelled to Bristol, Tenn., for an interview the weekend of Aug. 25. He was notified last Friday that he has the job and told wheels.ca today that he is absolutely thrilled.
Coniam, who started racing karts when he was seven, has carefully worked his way up the racing ladder. He had seasons in modifieds and limited supermodifieds on pavement and then went sprint-car racing on dirt, spending seasons with the Southern Ontario Sprint Car series and the New York-based Empire Super Sprints.
A move to the highly competitive U.S.-based All Star Circuit of Champions series followed and he won rookie-of-the-year honours and finished top five in points in his first year. He then raced on and off with the World of Outlaws before starting to concentrate on car preparation and team management.
Villeneuve will drive truck No. 27, renumbered in recent days by BDR to honour Villeneuve’s late father, Gilles Villeneuve, who drove Ferrari No. 27.
Jacques Villeneuve also drove with that number on his car when he raced in the CART series in the mid-1990s, winning both the Indianapolis 500 and the CART championship in 1995.
CARLOS AMEZCUELA ROCKS FAT FOX CONTRACT; BAILS ON HAL FISHMAN JOB AT KTLA
Stories
September 5, 2007
Carlos Amezcua, the longtime KTLA-TV Channel 5 morning news anchor who was viewed as a potential replacement for the late Hal Fishman on the station’s 10 p.m. newscast, has decided to move to rival KTTV-TV Channel 11, station officials said Tuesday.
Amezcua, who has been with KTLA for more than 16 years, had been working as the interim evening news anchor after Fishman died this summer.
“We had hoped that he would be in that position, but obviously things take turns. We’ve got to move forward,” said Rich Goldner, interim KTLA news director.
Variety reported that Amezcua will anchor KTTV’s 10 p.m. newscast beginning this fall, replacing veteran anchor John Beard.
VOTING MACHINES "FATALLY FLAWED"
Stories“………..the software mechanisms that are intended to secure the systems can be defeated very, very easily……….”
“………I frankly was surprised that the systems we looked at had passed certification. …..”
“…………I think they’re fatally flawed, and that puts us in a real bind……….”
Voice of the Voters: Transcript of Matt Blaze Interview
By Mary Ann Gould
TIME TO BAN DREs?????
THE PROBLEMS WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING, ESPECIALLY DRES – A VIEW FROM THE CA TOP TO BOTTOM STUDY
Transcript of Matt Blaze, and Mary Ann Gould on Voice of the Voters!
Dr. Matt Blaze of the University of Pennsylvania and leader of the Sequoia source code review team for California’s Top to Bottom Electronic Voting Investigation
August 8, 2007MAG: Good evening, Dr. Blaze. We’re glad to have you here, especially with all the notoriety that is going around the country about the top-to-bottom study in California.
MB: Glad to be here.
MAG: I noticed on your blog, which is excellent, www.crypto.com, you noted that you found significant, deeply rooted weaknesses in all three of the vendors’ software. Then you went on to talk about the red team and their finding significant problems because of built-in security mechanisms that they were up against—that they simply don’t work properly.
MB: That’s right. I should start by telling you a little bit about what we did, and what my role in it was. So, the California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, this Spring, put together a study of the electronic voting technology that’s used in her state, that’s primarily four systems made by Diebold, Sequoia, Hart, and ES&S. What she did is went to the University of California to two professors, one at UC Berkley, David Wagner, and another at UC Davis, Matt Bishop, and asked them to put together teams to review each of these systems in various ways. And in particular, one of the teams was to review the source code of the systems—the programs that run on the voting computers, and on the vote tallying computers back at the county election’s headquarters. And another team was to attempt to use any vulnerabilities that were found to see if these could be exploited to interfere with the proper tallying of votes or interfere in the election, in some way. Now, my role in this was to lead the team that looked at the source code for one of the systems, the Sequoia system, and our reports, the red team reports, and the source code review reports were submitted to the state a few weeks ago, and they’re up on the Secretary of State’s website. So, my role was to basically look at the Sequoia system’s source code and see if there were any security problems in it—to do a security review of the software. Now, after we finished, all the reports found particular problems that were particular to the various systems. There was an overall similarity among them, which is that all three of the reviewed systems (one of the systems wasn’t reviewed; they didn’t submit their source code in time, that was the ES&S system), of the three systems that were reviewed, Diebold, Sequoia and Hart, all of the teams that looked at them just found that the software mechanisms that are intended to secure the systems can be defeated very, very easily. They just don’t work very well, at all. Because of that, the red teams that were to try to penetrate these systems and tamper with election results in a simulated environment had a relatively easy time of it. They were able to succeed at almost everything they tried.
MAG: Now, you indicated that what you found, even in the code alone, was far more pervasive and much more easily exploitable than you had ever imagined it would be. What did you mean by that?
MB: That’s right. It would be unfair to expect any large system to be completely perfect, and really nobody expects that any large software project is going to be completely free of mistakes or bugs or even little security problems. And in fact, election systems are designed with procedures that are intended to tolerate a certain amount of weakness. So we expected that we would find some things that would be wrong. What really surprised me, and I think surprised all of us, was just how deeply rooted the problems were. It wasn’t simply that there were some mechanisms that could be beefed up or that weren’t as good as they could have been, but that every single mechanism that was intended to stop somebody from doing something just didn’t work or could be defeated very, very easily.
Now, two of the three systems, Hart and Sequoia, haven’t really been studied that widely in the public literature, in the academic literature; not much had been known about them before. But the Diebold system, various versions of that have been studied by academics, by researchers, who had found that there were problems. But even there, the problems that were found by the Diebold team included some things that hadn’t been found before.
MAG: Well, Harri Hursti, on our program, had said two things: one, that there was an overall weakness in the architecture and that basically, the equipment that he had looked at has not been built for quality.
MB: I’d say there really are two problems. This is really another way of putting that. The first, as you said: there’s a problem with the architecture, and by the architecture, what I mean is the design of the system. Even if it were built absolutely perfectly, the way it was designed puts security at a bit of a disadvantage. That is, the way these systems are designed, if you compromise one component, one voting machine somewhere, it becomes easier than it should be to interfere with the election results. The architectures of the systems aren’t designed with enough built-in checks and balances and built-in—essentially—mistrust of the possibility of mistakes to tolerate the kinds of problems that come up in any system run by people. So you can look at the overall design of these systems and tell right off the bat that this design was not as good for security as it could be. But, compounding that problem, when we actually went and looked inside these systems and looked at the source code that runs them, not only is the design weak, but the implementation itself is weak. The code has bugs in it, there are some fundamental security weaknesses that could have been avoided by better programming. So that makes that weak architecture that much worse, because the weaknesses that you might be able to exploit are just all over the place.
MAG: How did these machines get certified?
MB: There’s a federal certification process in which the design is submitted and the source code is submitted to what’s called an independent testing authority, and they look at the code and make sure, and they’re supposed to make sure, that the code is written according to certain standards. They look at the actual machines and they test them. I frankly was surprised that the systems we looked at had passed certification.
MAG: Then that’s my question. How did they get past that certification?
MB: I think you’d have to ask the testing authorities. It frankly baffles me.
MAG: Okay. Then we get to the bottom line, I guess. Are the problems fixable, or do we have systems that might be fatally flawed?
MB: I think they’re fatally flawed, and that puts us in a real bind. We can’t just postpone our elections until the technology is ready. So we really have two problems: one, which in a lot of ways is the easier of the two problems, is what do we do in the long term? How would we design a good, secure election system for use in three to five years from now? And I think there are a number of ways we might do that, and we can talk about them. But we’re still left with the problem of what will we do in November and what will we do in the primaries, and what do we do in the presidential election in 2008?
MAG: And those are very serious situations. First, I’d like to ask on DREs, direct recording electronics, or many people call them touch-screen machines: Even if we had a printer put on them, would that solve the problem?
MB: So there’s a concept with these touch-screen DRE voting machines, a concept called a voter-verified paper trail. The idea here is that votes are recorded electronically, but before you finalize casting your vote, there’s a little printer, similar to a cash register receipt printer, next to the machine, usually behind glass, that prints out the votes that the machine is recording, all the different candidates in each race it thinks you voted for. What you’re supposed to do is, before pressing the “Yes, I want to cast my vote” on the touch-screen display, you should look at that voter-verified paper trail print-out and confirm that it actually reflects your vote, and at that point, it should print out on that display “Vote confirmed, scroll forward,” and then the display on the screen will go blank and let the next person vote. So this is intended to improve the reliability and the security of these machines, because it means that there is now a paper record of what’s been voted for, so if the electronic record is tampered with, or is lost, or is challenged later on, you can go to these print-outs and count up the votes that the machines printed out. Now, this does, in fact, prevent a number of ways of attacking these machines, a number of types of vote tampering pretty well, but they’re not perfect; they don’t solve the problem as well as we’d need them to, and probably not well enough to use with the kinds of machines that we’ve seen here. The first problem is that the paper trail produced by these printers only gets counted if there’s an actual recount. It’s a very labor-intensive process to go through all the voting machines and count up each of the tallies in each of the races.
MAG: So on election night, what we get as a result has nothing to do with these paper print-outs.
MB: That’s right. These are just secondary records that are used only if there’s a recount of particular machines, so if there is no recount, then these paper trails are never looked at. So somebody would have to suspect there was a problem, or challenge the results of the election for these paper trail records to even be taken into consideration. So that’s one weakness. Another weakness is that we really don’t know that much about how voters behave with these print-outs. We don’t know if people actually look at them carefully, so if the machine is running software or firmware that’s trying to cheat, it may be able to print out invalid choices right on the printer.
MAG: And I believe that has been found.
MB: So, the behavior of voters— because you know, the voter’s looking at the screen to cast their ballot and there’s this little receipt printer, or this little cash register–type printer on the side, we don’t really know if people look at it carefully enough to tell if their choices are accurately recorded. The other problem is that in these voting machines, the printer itself—many of the characteristics of the printer—are under the control of the software running on the voting machine and so the corrupted voting machine that has bad software loaded into it by someone might be able to print out the paper trail in a very misleading way that might look acceptable to the voter but in fact actually reflects a vote for someone else. For example, it could print out the correct candidates, but then print “cancelled” below them, and then print the candidates that the machine wants to vote for.
MAG: Hmm. Now, we also have the other option with the opscan. Now that too is vulnerable. How would you compare the two?
MB: So, the optical scanning voting systems are a little different. There, rather than voting on a touch-screen, you vote by filling out a piece of paper, one of these optically scanned forms where you usually cross out with a pen or pencil something next to the candidate you want to vote for, so you actually use a paper ballot, and it’s at the voting booth. It’s just a booth; there’s no actual voting machinery where you fill out the form, it’s just a little booth you get privacy to fill out your ballot in. Then you take this ballot and feed this into a scanning device that sits on top of a ballot box and basically the scanning device reads the marks you put on the ballot and figures out who you voted for, records a tally for those candidates in those races, and deposits your ballot in the ballot box. Then, at the end of the election, the electronic results from the optical scanner and the paper ballots are sent back to the election headquarters. Now, what we found in looking again at all these systems is that it’s possible to tamper with the electronic records of optically scanned ballots that are returned from the polling place back to headquarters and change what results are recorded. So these systems, as they’re implemented, are still vulnerable to tampering, but they at least have the benefit that you still have the paper ballots that the voters voted on. And, as long as the ballot boxes are adequately secured, and somebody is watching them and they’re properly sealed, if you suspect there might have been that kind of tampering, you can go back and count the paper ballots in a secure place and find out who the voters intended to vote for.
MAG: Okay. Now, some people say that we can also solve the problem by doing a one to three percent audit. Would that work? Are there some problems that you’ve found?
MB: We didn’t look at auditing procedures in our study in any particular detail, except the procedures as used in California, as they might interact with some of the vulnerabilities that we found. So, I can tell you what they do in California is automatically recount one percent of the precinct results as a kind of safeguard, so one percent of the voting machines will have their paper ballots (if they’re an optical scan system, or if there are voter-verified paper trails) counted and matched against the electronic results that were recorded in those machines. And, if there’s a mismatch, then they know that there was some tampering with those particular machines. Now, this is actually helpful for catching deep problems that affect all of the machines. If, for example, the manufacturer of a voting machine included bad software in every machine that was sent everywhere, the one percent recount procedure would be likely to catch that because the fraud would be uniformly distributed among all of the voting machines. But what this is not as good at catching is targeted fraud where somebody goes to a particular precinct and knows that there will be, for example, a lot of votes for the candidate they don’t want to win, and arranges for those particular machines to run tampered software, which as we showed could be very easily loaded in. The safeguards to prevent that in software don’t work nearly as well as they’re intended to. Now, the one percent recount will only catch that if, by sheer luck, a chance of one in a hundred, the machines that were tampered with get selected for the audit.
MAG: So we have a serious situation. We’ve got a system that you’ve indicated is fatally flawed, the two systems available both have problems; one from your point of view has the advantage, at least, of the voter completing the ballot with their own hand, which could be counted. What, then, can we do for 2008?
MB: Again, we’re in a real bind. I don’t envy the election officials who are going to have to make some very hard decisions, coming up. Now, one thing I should emphasize: we looked only at the software and the systems themselves. We looked at the software. The red teams looked at the hardware as delivered, and tried to tamper with it, using some of the problems that we discovered with the software systems. And what we found was that the software and the hardware don’t prevent tampering. So that’s not the only set of security mechanisms in place in an election. The elections are also protected by procedures and by physical security of the machines themselves. So what our results tell you is that the security system depends entirely on those procedures. Any security that we were relying on the machines to have or the software to have, we shouldn’t assume it’s there; it’s fatally flawed. So what we’re saying is all of the security in an election depends on the security procedures and the protocols and the physical seals and the two-person control by poll workers and election officials and people watching what’s going on—that’s where all of the security comes in. Now, the problem that we have is that those procedures were designed on the assumption that the machines were offering a certain level of security to start with, but in fact they’re not. So those procedures have to be thought out from the beginning very carefully, and whether or not a practical set of procedures can be designed that actually adds security, I’m not sure.
MAG: So you’re really saying that you could have the best security procedures in the world, but if what they’re checking out has problems, it may help a little bit, but you’re still left defenseless.
MB: You have the problem that an election is a logistically very complex event. You may have a thousand polling places in a county, and thousands of poll workers who get a few hours of training and have been basically hired to work just on Election Day, and you may have half a dozen of them in any polling place, carrying out procedures that they do maybe once a year after a few hours of training. The equipment has to be distributed to these polling places; some of them are in lobbies of apartment buildings, in school gyms, sometimes even in private homes. That equipment might be delivered the night before. In some cases, it’s sent home with the poll workers, who bring it to the polling place on the morning of Election Day and basically had it in their homes overnight and had access to it completely without restriction. So building a physical security system that prevents anybody from tampering with equipment in such a complicated event and with so many people involved, this is going to be very hard.
MAG: Well, I understand the Secretary of State of California is going to institute some changes, which may include in some places a hundred percent count. Do you think we may have to do that for 2008?
MB: One of the things that the Secretary of State required was that in many cases the DRE machines all have to have their paper trails recounted—one hundred percent of them, not just one percent. That will certainly prevent certain attacks that would otherwise not be detected with just a one percent recount. They’ve limited the number of DREs for the Diebold and the Sequoia system to just one per polling place in order to accommodate voters with disabilities who can’t use the optical scan ballots without needing assistance, but who might be able to use the DRE machines, and that is intended
to reduce the scale and the number of people who’d have access to the machine throughout the day, to limit what would need to be protected and to make it easier to do that hundred percent recount. These seem like, to me, frankly, very sensible ways of mitigating this. What I’d be less confident in saying is that this is going to give you a secure election, but these seem like steps in the right direction. It’s certainly more secure than not doing these things.MAG: Now I’ll put you on the spot: Congress is apparently finally waking up and is supposedly considering banning DREs and giving states money to replace [them] with optical scan. Would you support that?
MB: That seems, from what we’ve seen, my opinion, and I’m speaking only for myself, is that that would make me feel a lot more comfortable with the security of these elections.
MAG: But you would still like to see a fair number of procedural changes, as well.
MB: That’s right. We still need procedural changes, we still need to look at the security of the optical scan ballots, but I think the most serious problems we found, and most importantly, the ones that are hardest to correct, once they’ve happened, are the problems with the DREs.
MAG: That even raises the question, because you mentioned checks and balances, and that’s pretty important; I’m wondering if you could ever design and have a DRE system that would meet that, because a DRE system, even with a printer, would never be a separate and independent system.
MB: The disadvantage of a DRE is that the voters’ intentions—are touching a screen, this ephemeral process, that, at the end of it, you’re left with only the record produced by the machine, you’re not left with something that the voter has produced themselves, so you don’t know if it’s an accurate reflection of what they actually intended. So, DREs start from a security disadvantage right there. Now, it’s important not to confuse DREs with touch-screens.
MAG: Understood.
MB: This, I think, has been a source of considerable confusion on the issue because people often equate the nice user interface of a touch-screen, which many voters, particularly disabled voters, like quite a bit because you can, for example, have assistive devices hooked up to it that will speak in different languages, you can have sip and puff interfaces for mobility-impaired voters, and so on. These are all very important considerations, but they don’t actually require a DRE machine in order to accommodate these voters.
MAG: Do you think that we’re going to be faced in 2008 with doing a lot more hand counting to give us any security?
MB: Well, I think if we want secure elections, with the equipment at least that we looked at, we’re going to have no alternative.
MAG: Is there any reason for you to think that, and here again, this is strictly your opinion, that the equipment you didn’t examine, although it covers a large majority, that it would be that much different?
MB: Well, all we can do is speculate. We looked at three. Of the three we looked at, all of them were very deeply and pervasively flawed. Are the others any better? I suppose it’s possible that they are, but unfortunately, they haven’t been looked at with the same kind of scrutiny.
MAG: So, how do you feel as a Pennsylvanian and living in Philadelphia, where you have a Danaher machine which actually doesn’t even have a print-out, and you will be going, unless there is a change, up to that machine, entering your vote and not knowing where it went? How secure will you feel in 2008 if we have no change?
MB: Well, I hope that the procedures that are put in place in Philadelphia to prevent tampering are really sound.
MAG: But we still have that problem without any proof.
MB: That’s right.
MAG: Okay. Is there anything else that our audience should know, and is there anything Congress should be aware of?
MB: Well, I think one of the things we need to recognize is that these voting machines, the DREs, and the systems that count the votes, and the optical scan systems, these are all computers. They don’t look like personal computers, they don’t have the same keyboard and the same display, but on the inside, they’re computers that run software, and they’re running very complex software that performs a specialized task that only gets tested out a few times a year, and may not be stress-tested in a hostile environment very often in its life at all. Now, writing software that’s correct and that’s secure is a very, very difficult problem. It’s really the fundamental problem that computer science has been grappling with and has not succeeded in solving for its whole history. So, building a secure voting system out of software is already a very difficult problem, because designing software itself is a hard problem. So scrutiny and skepticism are really the only safeguards we have here.
MAG: And what about for Congress? Do you think it is time they re-look at this?
MB: It’s a shame, and again, I’m speaking only for myself here.
MAG: Understood.
MB: It’s a shame that after the 2000 election, with the butterfly ballot and so on, there was a real national consensus that it was important to make voting more reliable. I think everyone agreed with this very important goal that we should modernize elections and make them as reliable as possible. Unfortunately, we really rushed into buying equipment everywhere in the country that really wasn’t ready, and I think the only way we are going to solve this problem is by recognizing that we’ve got to do a careful design. We’re going to be left with whatever equipment we buy, whatever systems are put in place, we’re going to have them for a while, and this is something our democracy vitally depends on, so this is worth doing right.
MAG: Well, I would invite all our listeners, in addition, to play a game. I found that your Vendor Excuse Bingo is absolutely ingenious and fantastic. Where could they find it?
MB: There’s a link to it on my blog. I should say, I don’t want to make light of this, because this is very, very serious; but an unfortunate property of vendors of software, whether it’s voting machines or web servers, who have had their software exposed to scrutiny and discovered that it’s not as secure as it should be is to deny and threaten and so on. So I’ve put together a little bingo game with some of the common vendor responses to these kinds of things that I think we’re likely to hear in the voting machine case, but we often hear in computing in general.
MAG: And that website is?
MB: The website is www.crypto.com/blog.
MAG: Well, I want to thank you.
MB: And I should also say, if I can just interrupt very quickly. Go to the source: the Secretary of State’s website in California has all of our reports. We tried to make them as readable as possible.
MAG: And you did an excellent job and I think you did a tremendous service for this country and thank you very much.
MB: Thank you.
Authors Bio: Mary Ann Gould is a founding member of the Pennsylvania-based Coalition for Voting Integrity.
WHAT A PICTURE!
Stories
B-52 Carrying 5 Nuclear Warheads Mistakenly Flew Across United States
StoriesBREAKING:FROM CROOKS AND LIARS
By: Logan Murphy
From Americablog:
CNN’s Barbara Starr has been breathlessly reporting the news that a B-52, loaded with nuclear warheads, flew across the country last week — without anyone’s knowledge. It has caused quite a stir in the military. Starr reports that Bush had to be informed about the mistake. Here’s an NBC report:
An Air Force squadron commander has been relieved of his command after five nuclear weapons were mistakenly loaded aboard a B-52 and flown cross-country from North Dakota to Louisiana last week, NBC News reported.
Five 150-kiloton warheads were attached to cruise missiles that were flown from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to be dismantled, but they should have been removed, according to officials.
Military officials insist the warheads remained “under control” at all times and did not pose a danger.
That’s comforting.
More information as it becomes available.
The New York Herald Sun 