American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [82]
Spoonamore also happened to live in Ohio, and on election night 2004, was doing some monitoring when he began noticing trends in a number of Ohio counties where Kerry started out ahead but then radically different totals ended up favoring Bush. Spoonamore started thinking about the possibility of a “kingpin attack,” where a computer inserted into the communications flow has the ability to change information at both ends of an IT system. It’s Greek to me, but for you geeks out there, it’s also known as the “man in the middle” plan. Based on the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registering, Spoonamore figured out that the same server form was used by the GOP for most of their hosting, and that tracked back to a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called SMARTech.
Here’s an excerpt from the Chattanooga daily paper, from March 2004: “Along the information superhighway, the road to another term in the White House for George Bush begins in Chattanooga. From a second story suite in the Pioneer Bank Building on Broad Street, millions of Internet connections and e-mail blasts by the president’s reelection campaign are regularly broadcast by SMARTech Inc.” The company was run by Jeff Averbeck, an “Internet entrepreneur who first began working as a consultant for the Republican National Committee in 2000.”23
Lawyers made a Freedom of Information Act request that confirms what Spoonamore uncovered. In November 2003, Blackwell’s office had enlisted a company called GovTech Solutions, owned by Mike Connell, to establish a duplicate control center for election day ’04. The results would be sent directly to subcontractor SMARTech and its backup server out in Tennessee. The contract specified that there would be “a hardware VPN device [that] will allow access to a private network connecting the servers for database replication services as well as remote admin[istration].” Meaning, I’m told, that anybody could get into the network and make whatever adjustments they wanted. The election results could be observed and changed, using remote access through high-speed Internet from any location.24 The primary control was SMARTech headquarters. “We have no idea what was set up in Chattanooga,” Spoonamore says. “There could have been 20 Republican operatives, and from that point they could have made a direct hop to the White House. They could have been running this from the War Room!”25
Early on Election Day, George W. Bush and Karl Rove flew into Columbus, Ohio, to meet with Blackwell.26 Connell managed the setup that enabled Blackwell to study maps of the precincts and voter turnout in order to figure out how many votes they needed.27 A third company that Connell brought into the scheme was Triad, a major donor to Bush’s campaign. They were run by some far-right Christians, the Rapp family. Triad supplied the network computers that stored all the voter registration information, and hosted the county board of elections results on its Web server.28
Connell admitted making Govtech, SMARTech, and Triad look like a single unit for the Ohio election returns.29 Congressman Conyers had written to Triad in December 2004, asking about their ability to access the vote-counting computers remotely.30 Triad, it seems, had changed the hard drive in the tabulator computer before the recount. The only reason to do that, Spoonamore says, would be to erase and destroy evidence of a software manipulation of that tabulator.
Out of the blue, Connell called Spoonamore late in 2005. They’d never met before, but Connell had heard of the systems Spoonamore developed to protect democracy advocates from being hacked in hostile overseas environments. In one such location, Connell was helping out some Christian advocacy groups. Unbeknownst to Connell, Spoonamore already knew a fair bit about him from his research into election activities and the voting machines. Connell had created Web sites