Senate Leader scraps website war poll, blaming hackers
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 07/03/2003 at 22:55 GMT
Senate majority leader Bill Frist has yanked a "Bomb Iraq" poll from
his website.
Frist's office told The Register that "tampering" was to blame for
the removal of the poll, which asked "Should the United States use
force to remove Saddam Hussein from power? Your opinion is
important to Senator Frist."
"Clever computer programmers created a program that generated 8,700
votes in a day," a spokesperson told us. Which is where the mystery
really begins.
The spokesperson couldn't say whether the software was running
inside the firewall, representing a major breach of the Senate IT
security, or was a robot-style vote generator run by netizens.
The curious thing is that Frist's poll page already banned robots -
including the Wayback Machine, archive.org - from the site.
Respondents could vote once and then return to the site later to
change their vote; only the latest response would be counted.
"As you know government computers are constantly being attacked by
hackers," he suggested.
Nor could Frist's office explain why the website administrators
simply didn't exclude the votes they didn't want to count -
Florida-style.
One correspondent has noted the increasing tally of No votes:-
"At 1:35 pm Washington DC time on March 6, the Frist site reported
31,118 responses to the war poll. Anti-war respondents (55%) had
gained a clear majority over pro-war respondents (44.6%). (These
figures do not quite add up to 100%, apparently because of the
rounding method used by Senator Frist's staff.)
"Within the hour, at 2:23 pm, the anti-war fever had risen, with
56.9% anti-war, 42.9% pro-war. By 4:29 pm, according a snapshot of
the Frist site, with 37, 742 total responses, the anti-war vote
registered 59.5%, with the pro-war vote ebbing at 39.8%."
The Senate site has been defaced before. Whether this represents a
new and more serious breach - as Frist's office suggests - we don't
know.
But our enquiries continue.