Interview with Scoop's Alastair Thompson By Joan Brunwasser
<http://www.opednews.com/articles/Interview-with-Scoop-s-Ala-by-Joan-Brunwasser-090707-183.html>http://www.opednews.com/articles/Interview-with-Scoop-s-Ala-by-Joan-Brunwasser-090707-183.html Welcome to OpEdNews, Alastair. You're an unknown quantity to many of our American readers. Yet your creation, <http://Scoop.co.nz>Scoop.co.nz, been around for over ten years. Can you describe what Scoop is and what you do? Joan, it's a pleasure to be answering questions about Scoop here on OpEdNews. We have watched this site grow over several years to occupy a similar place to that which Scoop started to stake out when we launched in 1999. Scoop has two aspects to what it does. We publish raw news (disintermediated press releases and speeches) in our home market of New Zealand [NZ]. We do this in a spirit of empowering the public by giving them access to the full undigested stream of information which goes into creating the media that they see in their newspapers and on the radio and TV. And, (and this will be the bit that your readers are most interested in) we also publish free and frank commentary and some press releases from around the world. In this area of publication, we concentrate on stories which are either being ignored in the mainstream or which are receiveing insufficient attention. Our US coverage for example has concentrated on subjects like: the lies that started the Iraq war, corporate malfeasance and criminality, impeachment, unanswered questions in the official 911 narrative, and the weaknesses in the US election system - particularly in relation to electronic voting machine vulnerablities. You have garnered some pretty impressive awards since 1999. Can you take a moment and talk about that? The success of the idea as a web media concept was not quite so quickly followed with financial success, unfortunately. But the lack of funds encouraged creativity and freedom on the editorial side and is largely responsible for making Scoop what it has become. We won lots of awards in the early days - cleaning up in the inaugural NZ public internet awards in 2001, and then performing well in 2002, 2003 and 2004. After 2004, the NZ award organizers changed the methodology, making it a sheer numbers race and we haven't really tried that hard since. Awards are nice to win but it gets difficult competing as an independent with the huge online news teams put together by the newspapers and TV networks. Most recently, we did rather well in the first properly judged <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0705/S00372.htm>online journalism awards in 2007. One of the satisfying things has always been how we have managed to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. We were the first website to publish top rating story lists, the first to start publishing images, and we definitely publish the biggest images online in NZ. We were also the first news producers to start podcasting and running video. That's a lot of firsts, especially for a small operation. You've proven yourselves adept at turning obstacles into challenges and then rising to them. The alternative press in America could learn a lot from you. How did you become interested in examining the underbelly of American elections? Through 2002, we had been following the drumbeats to war and publishing dissident views on the subject. Perhaps because of our coverage of that and issues like <http://www.scoop.co.nz/features/UnansweredQuestions.html>Unanswered Questions we were added to the press release distribution list of Talion.com, a PR agency being run by [<http://BlackBoxVoting.org>BlackBoxVoting.org founder and director] Bev Harris. In October 2002, we published a press release "<http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0210/S00044.htm>Republicans Make the US Elections Voting Machines" from Talion.com. On the eve of the 2002 midterm elections, ES&S demanded removal of the article "<http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0211/S00005.htm>Voting Machine Company Demands Removal Of Articles". We did not comply and instead published <http://search.scoop.co.nz/search?q=talion&b=Talion.com&sort_by=date>several more releases from Talion. On 12 November a week after the midterms, I personally decided to look a bit deeper into the record and published "<http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0211/S00078.htm>American Coup: Mid-Term Election Polls vs Actuals" a report which found a pattern of inconsistencies around the critical senate and gubernatorial races which occurred in that election round. That article, and several of the Talion ones, were picked up by several big US websites - notably by Mark Karlin at <http://Buzzflash.com>Buzzflash.com and achieved very high levels of traffic. Little did we realize what was to come next. Don't stop there, Alastair. Well, the first thing that happened is that the story was hard to get traction around. Not only was it hard to get anyone to report anything about the subject, but criticism for us daring to attack the credibility of election results came thick and fast. But there was also considerable support. It was a fun time. <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0211/S00080.htm>William Rivers Pitt was one of the first off the blocks to touch on the subject and <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0211/S00081.htm>Faun Otter had already written on it. Scoop started following the story closely and publishing anything we could find. Then, in February 2003, we had a <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00036.htm>breakthrough - Bev Harris found an open FTP site with <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00052.htm>all the source code to the Diebold voting machines. These reports were closely followed by a <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00101.htm>report in the Guardian Newspaper and this <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00156.htm>fantastic report out of Baltimore. <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0302/S00157.htm>Salon's Farhad Manjoo joined the beat a few days later. Scoop was rapidly becoming a clearing house for information on this new and fascinating area of inquiry. Bev Harris was telling me she was onto some really big material, (she rang to tell me) but then went a bit quiet. In March, <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0303/S00325.htm>elements of the Democratic Party finally woke up to what was going on. But the big break was still ahead - it was to do with the breakthrough in February and the cache of Diebold source files. Interview with Scoop's Alastair Thompson, Part 2 By Joan Brunwasser At the end of <http://www.opednews.com/articles/Interview-with-Scoop-s-Ala-by-Joan-Brunwasser-090707-183.html>part one of our interview, you left off with Bev Harris's breakthrough discovery about Diebold. Please don't leave us hanging, Alastair! In June 2003, (after the war started) Bev contacted me by phone. She had been trying valiantly to get computer scientists to look at the source code she had uncovered with no success. She was also becoming a little concerned for her own safety. Her own inquiries into the source code had confirmed that the machines and tabulators were foolishly hackable but getting someone official on the record to say so was proving impossible. Most scientists were afraid that if they broke the easily cracked zip passwords on some of the files they would be opening themselves up to felony prosecution under the DMCA [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act]. We decided to proceed to publish Bev's findings as they stood. On July 8 2003 we did so in a one-two punch. First up was my commentary on Bev's findings <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00064.htm>"Bigger Than Watergate" and then, seven minutes later, Bev's expose report <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm>"Inside a US Election Vote Counting Program" which explained in detail just how easy it is to hack a US election without being detected, if you have access to the tabulation computer. In the first story, a link was also published to a copy of the cache of Diebold source files data. Over the next few days, the story went ballistic. It was linked off of Slashdot.org and copies of both stories were posted on hundreds of websites across the US and the world - including Buzzflash.com and Whatreallyhappened.org. It was even <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00102.htm>translated into German and Robert Cringely of PBS picked it up. Meanwhile, the cache of data files was downloaded hundreds of times - often by military computers - but most importantly by a group of scientists at Johns Hopkins University. And on July 25, they published their report, <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00196.htm>"Analysis of an Electronic Voting System." The source of the files they used is acknowledged in the footnotes. The academic paper which examined the vulnerabilities of Diebold's touchscreen software was reported in the New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html>"Computer Voting is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say" and suddenly it was game on . [You can see just how widely the NYT story was picked up <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00219.htm>here.] I then introduced myself to the election reform crew at the <http://www.democraticunderground.com/>Democratic Underground which was then the clubhouse for the team researching this stuff, and we prepared to do battle to get something done about this mess. Well, having worked the election integrity beat since 2005, I'm not so confident that we've actually made much progress over the years. Media exposure is an important first step. But we're still working toward getting widespread recognition of the dangers of computerized voting to democratic values. What progress can you point to? Precisely. Actually, knowledge is only a small part of the solution, and, since 2002, we have seen three sets of compromised elections. And probably most sad of all - nothing concrete is being done even now - and given the track record of the election fraudsters, I would fully expect the 2010 midterms to be compromised. And when you realise that the corrupt election system is also being used to run primary races, you may quickly figure out why even with control of the House and the Senate, Obama is finding it tough going getting his agenda in place. In the aftermath of the original revelations of 2003, I expected there to be significant and rapid moves to fix the problems. But precisely the opposite happened - election officials dug in and defended their machines - they called the election integrity movement names and attempted to sideline us. Meanwhile, the media were little better, and even after the 2004 election, they were poking the borax - though at least then they did in fact report the idea of stolen elections on the front pages. Unfortunately, politicians and naysayers have persistently maintained the view that unless there is a smoking gun they will not believe what they want not to believe. The tragedy is that there is a smoking gun - one that emerged in the aftermath of the events described above. After the source code leak, two more sets of leaks followed in the summer of 2003. First, the Diebold memos (made famous by the Swarthmore College civil disobedience action). These memos contained some interesting additional information about the Volusia County incident in the 2000 election. In October 2003, I published my version of this story <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm>"Diebold Memos Disclose Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud" based on information provided by Bev Harris. Bev's version of the same story can be found in her <http://www.amazon.com/Black-Box-Voting-Tampering-Century/dp/1890916900>book on the subject. This story proves election fraud has happened. The timing, scale and nature of the discrepancy is such that it unquestionably played a part in the premature award of the 2000 election to George Bush by network news anchors on election night. It cannot be explained by any other credible explanation except computer hacking. It is the smoking gun. Thank you, Alastair. We'll pause here with the smoking gun. When we come back, we'll talk about the 2004 presidential election, online independents, Scoop's mission statement, and the stable of Americans that write for Scoop. I hope you'll join us. **** Correction to part one (already amended online), as pointed out by Bev Harris: "Each instance of Talion.com in part one should be replaced with Bev Harris - I owned Talion.com, but it was a publicity site that had nothing to do with the voting issue." Thank you, Be Author's Bio: Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of <http://ihcenter.org/Groups/CitizensForElectionReform.html>Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles. CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. 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