By Alvin Capino | Posted on Dec. 10, 2012 at 12:01am
Their obstinacy in claiming that there was a grand
conspiracy to rig the 2010 national elections through the AES and the PCOS
machines must already be jarring the nerves of some people in Malacañang who
realize that the bashing in effect is also questioning the legitimacy of the
2010 win of Pres. Benigno Aquino III.
It’s no wonder therefore that one of the leaders
of the AES/PCOS bashers, former acting Comelec Commissioner Gus Lagman, was not
reappointed by Malacañang after he was bypassed by the Commission on
Appointments.
The dilemma of Malacañang about Lagman is
understandable. How can the Aquino administration support Lagman when he has
not stopped raising issues against AES/PCOS, which in turn reanimates the
lingering doubts on the victory of President Aquino in the 2010 automated
elections?
The problem of the AES/PCOS bashers is that
people have realized that they are not only misinforming the public on
AES/PCOS; they are also engaged in disinformation.
Wikipedia is helpful in making the distinction
between misinformation and disinformation. The free online encyclopedia says
“misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread
unintentionally.” On the other hand “disinformation, in contrast, is intended
to mislead.”
If you look at all the efforts the critics of
the AES/PCOS it would look like they are not only committing misinformation
they are actually engaged in disinformation.
Undeterred by the Supreme Court’s June 2012
decision declaring Comelec’s purchase of the PCOS machines from Smartmatic/TIM
valid (this decision was affirmed by the high court last October), the AES/PCOS
bashers continue to make media rounds and hold press conferences to warn people
about the looming disaster in the 2013 elections.
Their warning, however, sounds like the
end-of-the-world Mayan prediction which is more imagined than real.
The present mantra of the AES/PCOS bashers is
“source code”.
The “source code”, in IT parlance, is the set of
instructions that allows a program to run on a computer or a computing machine.
Citing the business dispute in the United States
between Smartmatic and its licensing company, Dominion Voting Systems
International, AES/PCOS bashers are now claiming that no source code for the
2010 election was ever deposited by Smartmatic with the Bangko Sentral ng
Pilipinas as required by law.
In response to the source code issue, Comelec
spokesman Director James Jimenez wrote in his Nov. 28 column in a business
daily that the licensing agreement between Smartmatic and Dominion included a
provision that obligates Dominion to place all its source codes in escrow.
Jimenez said that there is a safety clause in
the contract that allows Smartmatic to take the codes out of escrow and use
them to fix any problems arising from Dominion’s violation of their licensing
agreement, if any. This provision is the center of the legal feud between
Smartmatic and Dominion.
Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes has repeatedly
assured the public that the business dispute between Smartmatic and Dominion
does not affect in any way the technological aspect of the Comelec contract
with Smartmatic. He has also made clear that the dispute would have no
effect on the use of the PCOS for the 2013 elections.
Brillantes, one of the country’s leading
election lawyers before his appointment to chair the Comelec and who is also a
certified public accountant, said that what contributes to the confusion on the
Smartmatic and Dominion legal tussle is when non-lawyers interpret complicated
legal issues and when the comments are based not on source documents but on
third party accounts.
Jimenez also explained that the
Dominion-Smartmatic legal feud does not in any way imply that Smartmatic never
got the source code for the 2010 elections. In fact he said that the source
code was submitted by Smartmatic and Comelec for a third-party review. After
the review was completed, the source code was used to create a final version of
the software that was used in the 2010 elections.
It is strange that former acting Comelec
Commissioner Lagman now raises the issue of whether there is a source code when
he has lashed out against Comelec before against the poll body’s bias
against local IT experts when it awarded a P70-million contract to SysTest Labs
to perform he mandatory review instead of making the source code available for
review by Filipino IT professionals.
Jimenez said that Comelec even invited the very
same groups now claiming the non-existence of the source code to examine it in
the presence of representatives from Smartmatic and Dominion. “Unfortunately,
the review process was boycotted by the very same people who now claim that the
code never actually existed.”
Published in Manila Standard Today
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