Hari Prasad is the managing director of Netindia Ltd., an Indian research and development firm. He and other researchers have long questioned the security of India’s paperless electronic voting machines. Despite repeated reports of election irregularities and concerns about fraud, the Election Commission of India insists that the machines are tamper-proof.

In 2009, the commission publicly challenged Prasad to show that India’s voting machines could be compromised, but refused to give him access to the machines to perform a review. Earlier this year, an anonymous source provided an Indian voting machine to a research team led by Prasad, Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp. The team exposed security flaws that could allow an attacker to change election results and compromise ballot secrecy. They published a paper detailing their findings, which you can read here.

According to Halderman, Prasad was questionedSaturday morning at his home in Hyderabad by authorities who wanted to know the identity of the source who gave the voting machine to the research team. Prasad was ultimately arrested and taken to Mumbai, though reportedly hadn’t been charged with a crime.

This turn of events is deeply troubling. Prasad is a respected researcher who helped to discover a critical flaw in India’s voting system. He and his fellow researchers would never have been able to document the weaknesses in India’s voting machines without the help of their anonymous source. This is precisely why anonymity is important: it allows people to make important contributions to the public dialogue without fear of retribution.

The Election Commission of India should have given researchers access to the voting machines in the first place. Rather than attempting to persecute Prasad and the anonymous source, the government should be focusing its attention and resources on the real problem: electronic voting machines with no mechanism for accountability.

UPDATE: According to the Times of India and Reuters, Prasad has been charged in connection with the alleged theft of the voting machine studied by the research team. He has been remanded to police custody until Thursday, August 26.

Related Issues: Anonymity, Coders’ Rights Project, E-Voting Rights, International

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here is another articles that illustrates problems in e-voting and persecution of civil rights leaders and researches, who disclose this massive fraud to the public

If you look at the results of the primaries you can see the same troubling trends:

1. in spite of only 11% approval rating of the members of Congress, 95% gets re-elected. What is the most reasonable explanation of this dichotomy? Rigged, predetermined elections,using e-voting machines and e ballot counting machines, which are set up to spit out certain result son the election day,  no matter what the actual vote is.

2. you can see, that even when Tea Party candidates are announced as winners and leaders of the movement, those are still puppets, who are allowed to talk only about a couple of issues: lower taxes and spending, that’s it. Even Beck and Palin are not allowed to open their mouth and talk about 3 main issues destroying this Nation:

a. Unbridled free trade and outsourcing of American jobs to the third World Countries with nearly slave labor. Don’t get me wrong. Between an insane liberal Democrat, like Obama, who is spending like a drunken sailor, and a conservative Republican, I will pick a conservative Republican, however even if you have zero spending and zero taxes, you will still lose millions of American jobs and millions will lose their homes and life savings, simply because American workers making $10 an hour cannot compete with Chinese making $1 per hour. Until and unless you bring back the tariffs, that will account for the difference and will protect American jobs, this country and this economy will continue collapsing. None of the gimmicks of Obama administration or previous administration worked or can possibly work. It is simply impossible. We have to place tariffs to protect US economy.

b. stopping amnesty and really closing the borders. Even Palin and Beck supported McCain,  who pushed for Amnesty, which is nothing but a magnet for more illegals and more lost jobs for Americans.

c. removal from offie of the illegitimate Kenyan born communist  usurper  Obama, who is destroying our National Security and economy.

We, as a Nation, are doomed, until we go back to paper ballots and having  new primaries. Otherwise, we are stuck with the same corrupt politicians. If we don’t clean the elections process, this country will end up with a citizen revolt. Unfortunately, by the time it happens, too many US citizens will lose their life savings.