Greg Forester, Staff Writer
A Princeton University professor who produced a report for a landmark court case on voting machine security was ordered by a judge to apologize to the court and pay attorney’s fees for breaking the conditions of a protective order.
Computer expert Andrew Appel, who prepared the report for the plaintiffs in the case of Gusciora v. McGreevey, already has submitted a written apology and paid $1,000 to Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., according to company officials.
”To the extent the terms of the protective order were not complied with, Professor Appel sincerely apologizes to the court,” the apology reads.
Although the report eventually was made public, the court found Mr. Appel violated the initial order twice.
The violations, which were cited in a Sequoia court motion, included his sharing of the report’s contents with plaintiffs in a similar case being heard in Louisiana.
Mr. Appel then shared the report with another Princeton University computer professor, Ed Felten, according to a statement from Sequoia.
Those two incidents represented violations of the original September court order, which was put in place by Mercer County Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg.
”I would be very upset if this report was shared with anyone else,” said Judge Feinberg during a November court hearing on Mr. Appel’s alleged violations.
She noted Dr. Felten was not subject to the terms of the agreement, and Mr. Appel, therefore, was prohibited from providing him any information contained in the report.
”Dr. Felten was not somebody who was under any obligation. He had not signed any agreement,” she said.
The protective order was issued partially out of concern for confidential information, including Sequoia computer codes and other proprietary information.
Company officials said such information could be copied or manipulated by competitors and others, compromising Sequoia’s machines.
”If this order gets violated, it can do damage to our company,” said Michelle Shafer, a Sequoia spokeswoman.
The Gusciora v. McGreevey case saw a group of plaintiffs, including Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, D-15, challenge the use of Sequoia voting machines, citing security and tampering vulnerabilities.
Plaintiffs relied on Mr. Appel’s report as evidence of those issues while reports commissioned by the state government and by Sequoia rebutted many of those issues.
They said the testing conditions used to produce Mr. Appel’s reports were unrepresentative of normal voting conditions, and Mr. Appel and his team removed many standard security features before conducting their tests.
The case is scheduled to go to trial in early January in Mercer County Superior Court in Trenton.
