Time Nigh on Whether Security of 2008 Election is Faulty

OhioNewsBureau - Opinion/Editorial

Columbus, Ohio:  Attorneys representing Mike Connell, trusted cyber adviser for the Bush family and various Republican causes, have every reason to delay their client's testimony until after the November election.

Meeting Notes Touch on Security of White House Email

With 36 days left before Election Day 2008, attorneys representing Mike Connell, a so-called guru of GOP information technology who has been a trusted cyber adviser for the Bush family and various Republican causes, have every reason to delay until after the November election their client standing to testify in what effectively is a modern day, voting version twist to "The 39 Steps," Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 mystery.

The difference this year compared to a time when computers didn't exist, is that instead of the theft relying upon remembering machine parts, its about rerouting and re-tabulating public ballots through an architectural system that allowed partisan operatives to refashion them in a way that favors the Republican candidate, Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008. The question of whether our system of voting, now dependent upon black-box electronics and privately made voting machines that studies and experts say can never really be verified as secure, is secure is critical. Backtracking over a trail of cyber clues only another cyber expert could follow is needed if any of this far-flung theory about manipulating voting data is true

Unlike Mr. Memory, the memory expert in Hitchcock's movie who upon a predetermined cue proceeds to repeat the sequence of 39 steps needed to engineer a new engine, Connell's attorneys want to delay until after the election the need for their client to comply with a subpoena compelling him to answer questions related to the 2004 election in Ohio, that involved his work in setting up the state architecture for then-Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. Under the direction of James L. Ervin, J. Allen Jones, III and Jeremy Gilman, the troika of attorneys from the prestigious and powerful law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan and Aronoff, LLP, the motion was filed with Federal District Court Judge Algernon Marbley to quash a subpoena commanding Connell to sit for a deposition given by Clifford O. Arnebeck and the Office of Ohio Attorney General (OAG), who represents the Office of Ohio Secretary of State (OSOS) Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat elected in 2006.

Mr. Connell is one human key to unlocking answers to whether the basic integrity of our system of democracy and the election architecture that runs it all is sound, according to Arnebeck, the lead plaintiff attorney in the 2006 lawsuit alleging that various events of election fraud and voter suppression from the last election constituted violations of the Civil Rights Act and other constitutional amendments. For voters to know their vote will count and not just be a prop in a cyber play where the outcome is predetermined, Marbley's court must press Connell's attorneys to produce him soon. Otherwise, the reasons Ervin and team are using to keep his client under cover until the election is over, including it being a burden on their client and the need to keep trade secrets confidential, resided in the argument that he [Connell] is too busy with election matters to provide testimony that could shed light on the security and vulnerability of Ohio's voting system. To those who want to see discovery go forward, like Arnebeck and his plaintiff attorney Bob Fitrakis, a political science professor at Columbus State Community College, that reasoning would seem as preposterous as arguing that a bank robber can't talk about the last bank robbed because he's too busy preparing to rob the next bank.

"The broad nature of the subpoena, lack of definition or scope, and the purpose of the relief from stay (to prove "that this is not just 'conspiracy theory'"), clearly creates an irreversible harm toward Mr. Connell should the trade secrets be disclosed. Furthermore, and as discussed above, without some narrowing and limitation in the scope of the documents to be produced, Mr. Connell is in a precarious position to even make known what specific trade secrets, proprietary information, and confidential information he would have to seek to Court's protection on. Thus, the subpoena seeks to have Mr. Connell expose trade secrets, and livelihood without any protection. Therefore, the subpoena issues by Party-Plaintiffs should be quashed as a matter of law." [Connell Motion to Quash]

But if secrecy is a must, a judge can order testimony to be held in camera (kept secret and not made public) in cases where proprietary information or issues of national security are involved. 

On the same day the Ohio Supreme Court and a federal judge in Cleveland issued two similar decisions overruling the lawsuits filed by the Ohio Republican Party to try to change a law that Republicans wrote and a Republican governor passed in 2005, communication misfires took place between Arnebeck, the OAG and Ervin, representing the powerhouse law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan and Aronoff. Arnebeck told the OhioNewsBureau that he will file a motion to "enforce the subpoena by compulsion of legal process" forcing Connell to testify. Connell's attorney said they don't expect to produce him before the General Election on November 4th. Arnebeck said he will provide more information, if that's what's needed to better circumscribe what documents he would like Connell to produce. "We're doing our part to be reasonable and work in good faith and try to do what's fair for everybody," he said in a telephone interview.

The news that Ohio's "One-Stop Early Voting" period, during which a new voter can register and vote at the same time from September 30 to October 6, can proceed, only makes the climb for Republicans higher this year, as those who are likely to take advantage of "One-Stop Early Voting" will be blocks predisposed to Democrats and Sen. Obama, like students, African Americans and Hispanics. The magic of the matric is that it works only when margins are thin, thin enough that between the point of an automatic recount and a point within the margin of error, close elections can be won or lost. 

Arnebeck has yet to make a public records request of the OSOS for information related to network architecture maps he believes might shed light on a strategy his cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore, describes as one simple method to attack a computer system by inserting a secret computer between two other points in the system. Such a scenario, described as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), can interlope on information flowing to and from computer points. If those computer points are a county vote tabulator and the state system server, the ability for a cyber sleuth with Connell's expertise and talent to change turnout could be great.

If Connell could be brought in from the cold to tell what he knows about what happened in Ohio or in Florida, where he ran Jeb Bush's gubernatorial campaign website, Jeb.org, and then built IT projects at four points on the State of Florida's network while administering 'special projects' on georgewbush.com for Jeb's older brother, George, during the Presidential campaign of 2000. The illumination from Connell's testimony could assist plaintiff attorneys, working in concert with the OAG and their client OSOS, to focus forces and resources on the discovery process. As the nation awakens slowly to the realization that elections can be electronically commandeered from beneath the waves of cyberspace, despite the furry generated from the world of bi-partisanship, which exists due to federal and state laws, promulgated rules, officeholder directives or memos that conspire to convince us all that everything is good, safe and secure. The argument of bi-partisanship argues one party will be a check on the other. Architecture of the design and style built by Connell and collaborators move independent of the sound and fury generated from the world of bipartisanship. Bipartisanship has always been the go-to rationale for why election conspiracies are impossible to pull off, for the obvious reason that one party would have to be in league with the other; otherwise conspiracy isn't possible. This false assumption has prevented the kind of cyber sleuthing that could confirm or debunk the allegation that elections are rigged.

If indeed the conspiracy theorists are correct, and there is an Election Day Doomsday Machine out there, idling in anticipation of the flow of information that will happen on Election Day, when Arnebeck and others who believe such a system would tip the table in a close presidential election to a Republican candidate McCain, for whose campaign Connell works. The far-flung conspiracy theories advocated by a small but unusually well informed group of people, who say the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 were effectively stolen from beneath the waves of cyberspace, could either be confirmed or debunked as partisan paranoia if only more discovery is allowed to proceed. 

"If this election has the same dynamic as 2006, the landslide [of voters] will over come electronic rigging, as it did two years ago," said Arnebeck, referring to the sea change in Ohio when voters tossed out many Republicans from office.

In Connell's rebuttal motion filed last Thursday, issues cited to delay his deposition were the lack of reasonable time to prepare for the event, plus the need to protect proprietary trade secrets from Arnebeck's expert witness on data cyber security, Stephen Spoonamore, a professional college, who knows how to backtrack through cyber space and reveal where system interlopers may have entered into the ebb and flow of information. Unless Judge Marbley can cause the intersection of Arnebeck and Connell to occur within time to act to deactivate the cyber system that Arnebeck and others argue was designed to toss close elections to a Republican, like the presidential ticket of Arizona Sen. John McCain and Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, all may be lost. Marbley must act quickly; otherwise we may never know whether the system Connell helped build and deploy was responsible for President Bush's narrow victory in Ohio four years ago, when he won by fewer than 119,000 votes. If Connell can hunker down for another 36 days, the vote will be cast and any opportunity to hunt down, neutralize and disarm any systemic vulnerability before the election will have been lost.

The battle of the legal teams is just beginning. Doing their jobs, defense attorneys are claiming tight schedules prevent it from occuring before the election. Plaintiff attorneys will push Marbley and his Magistrate Judge Terrance Kemp, to broker a timely deposition date. Because Connell has been the man on the inside, behind firewalls, Connell could tell us much about his matrix of politically active clients, ranging from government to private sector to activist-front groups associated with a range of industry groups advocating for or against a particular issue. He has been the inside man on the web-related-infrastructures of many operations. Connell was inside man while White House officials were politicizing the USA's hiring and firing practices. To leave no doubt, The Washington Post reported Monday that US Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has appointed a special prosecutor to probe the role Alberto Gonzales, his predecessor at Justice, played in misleading Congress after the firings came to light last year. The report showed that top Justice Department officials "abdicated their responsibility" by failing to supervise subordinates who carried out the botched plan, according to a long-awaited report released today and covered by WaPo.

Headlines like these reveal that the US Dept. of Justice was engaged in political firings of US Attorneys for not towing the Bush White House agenda, they were very often using Republican National Committee (RNC) Internet addresses to do it. Rep. Henry Waxman's Government Oversight Committee focused much attention to the missing White House and RNC emails.  Connell, who lives in Ohio with his wife and family, works with the top levels of the RNC, the White House, Congress, and including the House Judiciary Committee, the Department of Justice, and party operatives involved in the Bush/Cheney politicization effort. All the cyber work that's taken place at the federal level and in key states like Ohio or Florida would accrue to John McCain, should he be elected president, and serve as ample incentive to keep under the radar of public scrutiny in the hopes that a McCain administration, the beneficiary of its powers, would continue to use the powers of the presidency to forever protect it from review by any court or administrative agency. Connell currently works for the McCain Campaign, as do other members of the Bush political machine, who have requested to change ships from the Bush Navy to McCain's Navy.

Plaintiff attorneys say Rove's first objective in his master plan to achieve a permanent majority for Republicans is to capture the judiciary through politicization of its ranks by hiring party loyalists to make charges against Democrats and those sympathetic to their agenda and turn a blind eye to the transgressions of members of their party. Cases like the firing of US Attorneys and the incarceration of Don Siegleman, a duly elected Governor of Alabama, are two cases that connect the dots between commanding a political structure and the prosecution of its enemies.

Disclosed here for the first time are notes of a conversation held on October 11, 2006 between Stephen Spoonamore and Connell and others from firms he was associated with, on various topics, one of which should be of great interest to election and democracy watchers. Those topics, as recorded by Spoonamore at the offices of Cybrinth, a company he formerly owned and operated, touch on overseas IT incidents that affected their mutual clients, data destruction to protect communications from latency intercepts and GovTech's needs to upgrade email and communication system security with several clients of Connell's. One of those clients, Spoonamore reports, was the Bush White House.

Understanding that Rove's objective was to politicize the federal government and that Connell was a cyber field hand in that process, it begs the question of how Connell, a top-level RNC technology strategist, was ever permitted to ply his trade inside the wide array of government networks he then and currently operates.  The easy answer is Rove, who is implicated at the top of a strategy to make the machine of government function in as politically beneficial a way as possible.  Since early 2007, investigating the use of RNC email accounts for activities such as politically profiling US Attorneys for hiring and firing decisions has been confounded by obstructive efforts of RNC and White House officials. 

By now, it's believed that most of the relevant White House and RNC system emails have been destroyed. But that's where Mike Connell's operation comes into focus, since it's come to light that when he met with then Cybrinth CEO, Stephen Spoonamore, on October 11, 2006  for consultation on data destruction technology (Spoonamore's expertise to protect electronic transactions), Connell and GovTech President Randy Cole, running for election to the Ohio House of Representatives this year, hoped to use that information on White House systems.  Spoonamore's refusal to cooperate in such an endeavour that would be illegal ended the conversation, but the anecdote is significant because the meeting occurred only five days before Connell's client, Congresswoman Heather Wilson of New Mexico, personally called US Attorney David Iglesias to ask about criminal investigations into Democrats.  Wilson has been Connell's congressional client since 1999 but only in June 2006 was recorded the first in a series of a six-month disbursement to GovTech Solutions from her Member Account for "Email and Web Related Services" (Voucher P1 06NM0100414). 

GovTech Solutions was first engaged for web service provision to the House Judiciary Committee at the end of 2005 which is significant because of its responsibility to oversee the Department of Justice.  The shift to new email services required by Rep. Wilson in the latter half of 2006 was shortly followed by the January 2007 hearings into politically-motivated employment decisions made at DOJ.

Now, back to the White House from whose employment as Internet and E-Communications Director David Almacy departed in March 2007 after two years. Before entering government employment, Almacy had worked for TechCentralStation.com and GovTech Solutions (of which both had ownership interests held by DCI Group CEO Tom Synhorst).  Just before leaving, in a March 1^st "Ask the White House" online chat session, Almacy described recently having completed "the largest redesign of a White House website in our nation's history" while keeping the same functionality for visitors.  This makeover occurred during the time frame in which his former boss, Mike Connell was actively seeking consultation with Spoonamore on destructive techniques for White House email that has since been declared "missing in action". Coincidentally, that same period is when Congressman Heather Wilson became embroiled in the US Attorneys firing affair.

So, as with a decade of elections, in one way or another, Connell's footprints show up in the scenes of another long-term priority project of Karl Rove.  GovTech Solutions is the 'non-partisan' spinoff of Connell's flagship company, NewMedia Communications, which seems to be Rove's way of politicizing an inherently neutral tool, the very network of Federal government, itself.

With few days remaining before the election, and with lawsuits flying fast and furious in Ohio over who can and who cannot vote, information from Connell about what lies ahead, if anything, seems even more important to know about.

For other work by ePluribus members on related topics, refer to these links.

For more current information, check these links out:
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/electionstrikeforce/2008/09/stay_in_kinglincoln_v_blackwel.html
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Republican_IT_consultant_subpoenaed_in_case_0929.html
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6445#more-6445

John Michael Spinelli is a former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He now serves as the OhioNews Bureau Chief for ePluribus Media Journal. Find ONB archives here.
Luaptifer is a researcher, who holds a PhD in a scientific field and is interested in restoring democracy to America. He is member of the ePluribus Media Advisory board.
Photo credits: (c) 2008 AnHarris, istockphoto

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