I just read the transcript on MSNBC.com and that question and answer are not in the transcript. The first question ameriblog has on their website is in the MSNBC.com transcript, but the follow-up question that specifically mentions Amanpour is not there.

Strangely, this was some time after the "last updated" date on the transcript page, since the Aravosis posting was the day after the "last updated" date. Either Aravosis made the whole quote up (and a bunch of postings on his site about the quote), or somebody removed the question without marking the transcript as edited.

I don't like to lend credence to weird conspiracy theories, but that is pretty damn suspicious.

I just read the linked article yet I saw no mention of Christiane Amanpour whatsoever on the transcript posted at MSNBC.com. Is this bad info, or did that bit end up going down the memory hole?

Tricky Dickie's gumshoe stumblebums broke into the Democrats' Watergate hotel rooms to illegally spy on them to gain political advantage. From the vast illegal spy net that the Bush Administration casts over millions of innocent Americans, the most valuable "side-catch" is private and confidential information about their Democratic opponents. Acting on information received in this fashion, it is possible to rule in perpetuity, by pre-emptively and surgically striking defectors from the Party Line using accurately primed MSN shills.

In case you missed it, our Democracy died at the hands of SCOTUS in the aftermath of Florida 2000.

Perhaps someone in the media should see if James Risen has anything to say about this.

That would cetainly explain the deafening silence of Bush's critics and the supplication of the media at large after 9/11. I may be grasping for some reason to stick with the Dems in 2006/8, but it makes a lot what I saw make sense.

In the face of whatever the NSA has dug up from your phone, email, EZ-Pass, credit card and ultimately perhaps even DNA, who in their right mind would publish, broadcast, or otherwise rail against Bush's siezure of the Republic? For that matter, who would dare to contest Bush's "wins" in Ohio and Florida in 2004?

I'm just sayin'...

This reeks. Something seems very wrong. We need an explanation from MSNBC. We need some explanation from Andrea Mitchell as to why the question was asked. Is there anyone out there left to investigate? Does anyone ask questions anymore? Do our newspeople just accept "news" as bellringing? Holy Cow! The bell just rang. People are joyous. The country is saved. Everyone survived!

Er...wait a minute...this just in...

It sure would be great in this climate if there were copies of web pages with remarkable information, such the question and answer about monitoring reporters' phone lines. (Acrobat is pretty good for this; it makes a page image that shows the ads and sidebars in context.)

When I was a little kid (before the 1967 war) my dad worked as a US consul in an outback town in a middle eastern country. The local police audibly monitored my family's household phone -- sometimes we had to yell to wake them up before they'd put our calls through. This made my mom so mad that she and a friend used to call each other and read each other recipes for hours, switching back and forth between English and Spanish.

After about a week of this, they stopped the monitoring. When my Dad's departure date came, there was a big community going-away party. The chief of police actually asked my mom what she and her friend had been talking about on the phone that week -- I guess they overwhelmed the translation capacity of the local cops.

Just another story from the gentler cold-war-era.

Imagine this: A Trojan Horse unleashes thousands of illegitimate votes and disappears without a trace, election commissioners bypass laws, uninvestigated computer glitches and easily picked locks in voting systems, no federal oversight holding e-voting vendors accountable—yes folks, elections can be stolen.

Since the 2000 Presidential election, problems stemming from the use of electronic voting machines have called into question the foundation of American democracy—the US voting system. At the forefront of concerns are security issues surrounding the use of Direct Recording Electronics [DREs], better known as touch screen computer voting machines, and their lack of a paper trail in the form of an auditable paper ballot. Widely reported irregularities from voting districts around the US have alarmed many and opened claims of stolen elections. Some even doubt the legitimacy of the outcome of recent US elections. A team of top computer scientists has been working diligently to resolve the many underlying design problems in the e-voting system that leave it open to cheating. Stalled by the federal government, and with doubts about e-voting continuing to spread, these scientists have instead turned to state governments and the National Science Foundation for help.

"Maryland, where I live, uses Diebold DREs, which are an ideal opportunity for cheating," said Dr. Avi Rubin, Technical Director, Information Security Institute, Johns Hopkins University. "In fact, you couldn't come up with a better opportunity for cheating. There's no ability to audit or recount, and the entire process takes place inside the computer, which is not transparent."

In May 2004, Rubin co-authored an analysis of electronic voting systems, raising concerns about lack of security, for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional organization for technical standards. He also served in 2004 as a poll worker and election judge in Baltimore County, Maryland, where he lives. These and other experiences have only served to raise his concerns about the possibility for cheating via the use of electronic voting machines.

Efforts to Secure E-voting Stalled

Apprehension about the lack of security in Diebold's DREs and other touch screen computer voting machines spurred David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor, to establish the Verified Voting Foundation in November 2004. According to Dill, when federal legislators tried to create a law that would address e-voting security problems, it was "blocked by a committee chairman, so we focused on state legislation."

Since then, the group has been advising states on e-voting security problems and the need, at a bare minimum, for a verified voting paper audit trail.

Earlier this year, Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) submitted a bill, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005 (HR 550), to the House Administration Committee. The bill requires a paper audit trail at the federal level. But Holt has not been able to get the chairman of the committee, Congressman Robert Ney (R-OH), to schedule a hearing on it all year long.

"Congressman Ney will not schedule a hearing on the bill, so it remains in limbo," confirmed Pat Eddington, Holt's press secretary.

Even the bi-partisan federal Carter-Baker Commission Report could not nudge Ney. Set up to review the entire electoral process and co-chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, the report strongly endorses the need for a paper audit trail. (Congressman Ney's office did not return repeated calls.)

In lieu of the refusal of some at the federal level of government to address the issues surrounding the legitimacy of electronic voting procedures and work toward safeguarding American elections, Verified Voting turned to state governments. Since its founding, Verified Voting has helped 26 states establish state legislation that requires a paper audit trail in e-voting machines, and 14 states have requirements pending, according to verifiedvoting.org.

However, paper receipts only begin to address the complexity of electronic voting problems. The most serious concern among computer scientists studying the problems is the "Trojan Horse," a computer code that can be programmed to hide inside voting software, emerge in less than one second to change an election, then destroy itself immediately afterwards, going undetected.

"Anyone who has access to the software—an insider—could easily insert a Trojan Horse into the software," said Barbara Simons, a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a retired IBM researcher who is co-authoring a book on the risks of computerized voting. The problem is that the Trojan Horse cannot be detected unless the software is inspected continuously—as in every second—for its presence.

No Oversight of E-voting Legitimacy

Three-voting vendors—Diebold, Election Systems and Software (ESS), and Sequoia—dominate the market. Since e-voting is unprecedented in the history of elections and law tends to lag behind technology development, there is no federal oversight body holding these companies accountable for the security and reliability of their electronic voting systems. Their machines are supposedly tested by independent testing authorities. "But it turns out that the vendors pay the independent testing authorities and the vendors keep the results confidential," said Simons. "So you have a huge conflict of interest right there."

In addition, said Simons, "There is no requirement to make any problems public or even to reveal them to election officials because this information is proprietary for the vendors. Also, the testers are only required to test for things on a list and aren't required to test for things that aren't on the list. If you are going to subvert software, you are not going to do something that will be found by a checklist. So it's easy to insert a Trojan Horse into the software because the testing won't find it. And even if they did find it, there are no requirements to report it." Vendors are the ones who decide what goes on the list and what doesn't.