TECHNOIR (28 page)
• In southwestern Ohio, citing a puffed-up terror level given by the Department of Homeland Security, the Warren county Board of Elections abandoned their office and took “exclusive control” of a completely different building to make their 2004 presidential count. Arnebeck says what went on behind closed doors had to be “vote flipping” in some cases, a pasty sticker would be placed over an oval clearly marked for Kerry. “Hundreds of these,” says Arnebeck were discovered during his research. Evidence of vote flipping and ballot switching – and also one heck of a voting anomaly – were discovered in two other southwestern Ohio counties, Butler and Clermont. The voting anomaly, which was discovered coming mostly from southwestern Ohio, which leans to the right, was noticed in the vote for a candidate running for the Ohio Supreme Court. Mrs. C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American, was the Democrat running for a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court; she had been endorsed by pro-choicers and other liberal-focused groups. More significantly, she spent hardly any money on her campaign. Hardly anyone knew who she was, to put it mildly. She didn’t have much of a chance unseating any of the incumbents. Yet incredibly, down-right miraculously, really, she received thousands more votes than John Kerry did! Thousands of voters then, on the same ballot, voted for Bush, an arch-conservative, anti-abortionist, and also voted for an ultra-liberal black woman of modest means who is solidly pro-choice. As Arnebeck puts it, “Butler, Warren and Clairmont: If you take these counties out of the mix, Kerry wins Ohio.”
But these smelly Election Day happenings are way less pungent than what took place with the computers and servers of the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office (run by Blackwell) between 11pm Election Day and dawn of November 3rd, 2004. Remember, the servers and the website hosting and relaying the results of the Ohio vote that day had been outsourced by Blackwell to Connell’s GovTech. Results that everyone, including big media, was using as
thee source
for the correct count. In
Free For All!
Brad Friedman, an independent journalist who writes the BradBlog.com, paints a clear picture of what happened: “The web servers for the election results in Ohio were suddenly moved in the middle of the night...from Ohio to Tennessee,” he said. To Chattanooga, Tennessee, in fact, home of SmarTech, a web-hosting company. Arnebeck says Blackwell had outsourced the website and the Ohio vote count to Connell, who in turn outsourced it to SmarTech. And like Connell’s GovTech, SmarTech’s servers hosted a bevy of Republican sites: gwb43.com, rnc.org, georgeWbush.com, and ohiogop.com, for instance.
“The entire business of reporting these numbers on the web, where media and the rest of America actually take them from, were being run by this far-right, partisan web-hosting company,” said Friedman in
Free For All!
One question lingered, did SmarTech commit all the vote flipping, or were they just one unit in a tightly-knit web? Connell had been subpoenaed to potentially answer what SmarTech had done to the vote. Indeed, he had admitted to other Republican IT operatives it was possible elections hosted by SmarTech could be sabotaged. According to Arnebeck, Connell’s testimony could have led to Karl Rove being subpoenaed, but considering he wasn’t an official member of the Executive Office, he didn’t have Executive Privilege. Which brings us to the most insidious chapter of this story: Before Connell’s death, he and his family had been threatened. By Karl Rove, contends Arnebeck.
In October of 2008, not long after Arnebeck filed for Connell’s deposition, someone working for John McCain’s campaign quietly and anonymously came forward. He or she said Rove was threatening Connell. Arnebeck would tell
Freepress.org
, “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to ‘take the fall’ for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations.” In the
Maxim
article, Connell’s wife, Heather, admitted her husband had directly been warned that he could be in danger. She also told the magazine, she herself had been warned flying wasn’t a good idea for Mike.
Arnebeck alerted the Department of Justice to the alleged threats. They brushed him off. Did this mean Connell’s fate already been sealed for delivery? He would die within two months.
Arnebeck says the Republican plan to rig the 2004 vote was initiated months if not years before Nov. 2nd, 2004. Blackwell, before he took Ohio’s Secretary of State position, was state treasurer for Ohio. At that time, says Arnebeck, he was “bought off with stocks, millions-of-dollars worth” by the Republican party. And just like the Mafioso, the Republicans patiently waited for their payback. When Blackwell became Secretary of State, he quietly outsourced the state’s voting tabulation to Connell. One question that Arnebeck hears is, how was it discovered that Connell, along with SmarTech, were counting Ohio’s ballots? This didn’t occur until the 2006 elections.
The person who uncovered this, “doesn't want to be identified,” said Arnebeck. On election night in 2006, the anonymous source noticed Ohio’s vote count had been switched to a strange server. The information was right before everyone’s eyes on the main page of the Ohio Secretary of State’s vote-counting website – still being run by Connell. One year later, another Republican IT wizard, and someone who was close to Connell, would turn Arnebeck’s case on its side.
The friend is Stephen Spoonamore, and like Connell, he did a lot of IT work for big-time clients, such as American Express and the US Navy. Arnebeck says Spoonamore is an expert on data security and networking. You could also say he’s an expert on election fraud. He came forward months before Election Day 2008, prepared to testify about what he was sure had happened in 2004; vote sabotage in Ohio.
First, Spoonamore and Connell were not only peers, but palled-around together at work. Reports say they traveled the globe together managing elections for the International Republican Institute (ISI); one of their responsibilities was to watch for fraud. Following 2004, Connell’s guilt must have started to nag him. He had hinted to Spoonamore, that yes, it was very possible his computer skills and hardware were being used to steal elections. Arnebeck said Spoonamore specifically asked Connell, “Is it possible your systems could be used to rig elections.” Connell, who Spoonamore says clearly became “uncomfortable” by the question, responded, “It’s possible.”
Second, Arnebeck says Spoonamore set up for the 2004 presidential vote his own “matrix” so to detect any voting fraud patterns; a matrix that identified the C. Ellen Connelly anomaly – Connelly being the African-American women and Democrat who was running for a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court. She was just a tiny blip, if that, on the radar of Ohio voters that day. Yet somehow she received more votes than John Kerry, a lot more. And these odd numbers were mostly coming from southwestern Ohio counties, a region historically strongly-held Republican territory.
“Entirely on his own,” says Arnebeck of Spoonamore’s vigilante-approach towards election fraud, “sort of a hobby, a citizen who believes in Democracy.”
Spoonamore testified that Connell’s network tabulating Ohio’s vote on Nov. 2nd, 2004, had a design flaw that made it child’s play when adding a computer that could perform a “Man-in-the-Middle” attack. “It (MIM attack) is a common problem in the banking settlement space,” he wrote in his affidavit. “A criminal gang will introduce a computer into the outgoing electronic systems of a major retail mall, or smaller branch office of a bank. They will capture the legitimate transactions and then add fraudulent charges to the system for their benefit. Any time all information is directed to a single computer for consolidation, it is possible, and in fact likely, that single computer will exploit the information for some purpose. In the case of Ohio 2004, the purpose I can conceive for sending all county tabulations to a GOP-managed Man-in-the-Middle site in Chattanooga before sending the results onward to the Secretary of State, would be to hack the vote at MIM.”
Still need some more evidence to convince you Bush, Cheney, Rove, Blackwell and, to an unknown extent, Connell, stole the 2004 Presidential Election from John Kerry? Arnebeck says the Ohio Green and Libertarian parties, which he has ties to, decided, after the election in 2004, to pay for a statewide recount of the Ohio vote. Three percent of the actual vote would be examined. But when the two parties asked Triad GSI, the voting- machine manufacturing company that dispatched “technicians” to Ohio county Board of Elections on Election Day 2004, to access their tabulators, they had replaced hard drives and tabulators before the re-count could even be made. One of those counties of course was Hocking County, from which Sherole Eaton was fired.
Arnebeck says the lawsuit should continue to move forward, and that more subpoenas should follow, perhaps filed against SmarTech. As for the FBI, how serious they’re taking the investigation is not known.
Who could forget the first
Terminator
, the story of a resistance fighter from the future sent back in time to protect his unborn leader from an unrelenting cyborg assassin. And who could forget when the unborn leader’s mother, Sarah Connor, first encounters at the dance club this sentient and artificially intelligent killer – what the resistance fighter knows as simply the Terminator. Just before the chilling mayhem in the dance club, creator and director James Cameron, of
Avatar
fame, has the oblivious Connor, played by Linda Hamilton, shout into the club’s pay phone over blaring dance music: “Tech Noir!” she yells to the police, letting them know the name of the club and her location. What the character was also doing, was giving us a hint at Cameron’s hidden message. This was his way of secretly telling the audience what genre of film they were watching – Technoir, a hybrid of science fiction and film noir.
But as she shouts “Tech Noir,” I feel as if Cameron was also trying to portray Connor’s growing desperation as a warning to the rest of us. Because as the human race improves technology at breakneck speed – for example, we already have weapons that can end the human race – Connor represents the weakness and fragility of mankind against technology that it created! Technology that is represented, of course, by an unmerciful mass of metal and microprocessors. “Tech Noir!” she yells over the cacophony, as if her character is a psuedo-Paul Revere.
“Dark Technology! Dark Technology! Wake up everybody!”
Besides nuclear warheads, consider what I have written in the previous pages. Space weapons, for instance. The US has spent over $100 billion on technology that might be missile defense and might be space weapons. What is clear is that this technology is “dual use.” Technology that can defend, but also destroy. Space weapons of the future are something science fiction hasn’t even dreamt up yet. Even what the US is working on now might someday make the weapons in Star Wars look like musket rifles of the 1800s. But this is nothing to joke about. What happens when the US and China deploy numerous constellations of Battlesats into Earth’s lower orbits? Just as the last several generations have lived in fear (and still do) of nuclear holocaust, will our future generations live in fear from invisible lasers and “Rods from Gods” that are continuously circling some 70-miles up? And when you consider how powerful Lockheed Martin and Boeing have become, and how mighty their influence on Capitol Hill is, there’s really nothing stopping them from building these constellations in the name of so-called “freedom.” Just imagine how free everyone will be when these eyes-in-the-sky become armed to the teeth.
As arms-control expert Bruce Gagnon keeps saying, there’s no need for predictions; this is going to happen. American defense contractors have become too powerful. And the US government is going to go along, because for one, Washington is going to want something, anything, in exchange for the $100 billion and counting they’ve spent trying to create missile defense, aka, space weapons. When I think of space weapons I have to recall what the Vatican says about modern warfare: “The development of armaments by modern science has immeasurably magnified the horrors and wickedness of war. Warfare conducted with these weapons can inflict immense and indiscriminate havoc which goes far beyond the bounds of legitimate defense.”
Now, Cameron, of course, doesn’t portray all technology as a potential nightmare. Something of our creation that comes “alive” with an unmerciful conscience and a mission to destroy all humans. That would be too base, for someone of Cameron’s story-telling genius. So don’t forget what finally ended the Terminator – a massive hydraulic press, which crushed him like an aluminum can. Connor, the human, is the force that led the seemingly unstoppable machine to its demise. What do the hydraulic press and the factory it’s in represent? Simply put, they represent “good” technology – a machine that does its job over and over, never with a groan or complaint, let alone a fully-automatic rifle.
And think on this, what machine, what technology, has had the greatest impact on civilization over the last twenty years? Indeed, it has to be the Internet. Connecting the so-called Global Village, making life (allegedly) easier and, of course, the ability to make money easier; heaven knows a lot of people have made a lot of cheese simply by facilitating information. But have we become too dependent on the Internet? Of course we have! The technophiles and corporations have forced it down our throats. You could deny cyberspace, but then where would you be? How would you apply for a job when most companies are only taking applications online? What about learning and buying and selling and directions and communication, and on and on? All of our daily functions, it seems, are becoming dependent on cyberspace. Yes, everyone has benefitted in some way; what’s not to like about making several clicks and, wah-lah, all your bills are paid?