Frist's "poll"

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Mar 10 15:21:10 PST 2003


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/29654.html

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.



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