[sane-devel] Fwd: SANE project used for possible election fraud

[Ralph Little]

Hi,

On 2020-11-17 4:24 a.m., Olaf Meeuwissen wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I got this in the mail this evening.  Sigh.
> Not sure how to best respond.
>
> Tyler Sharpe writes:
>
>> Employees from smartmatic contributed code to add support for a scanner
>> used by dominion to count ballots. I'm not that familiar with SANE but it
>> looks like it would be a perfect tool to rig an election. the code changes
>> are here but I'm not sure what they do:
>> https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/merge_requests/12#note_139722740
>>
>> Let me know what you think.
There is a certain kind of madness going around in the US at the moment
(I assume that is where this came from).
It's inevitable that projects like this will get dragged into it from
time to time. Heck, free software *is* a political movement.
That someone would think it weird that a company that uses scanners
would contribute code to a driver for said scanners speaks volumes.

> To the best of my knowledge, those changes allow one to make a few
> changes that affect how the scanner *hardware* processes the image
> data before that data arrives at the SANE scanner "driver".
> Whether any of that functionality is actually used is not something
> that the SANE scanner "driver" controls.  This is controlled by the
> software that uses the SANE scanner "driver".
>
Looks like hardware deskew among other things.
Seems pretty reasonable that Smartmatic would be interested in that
functionality considering what they do.

Hopefully, this kind of thing will go away in a couple of months.

Cheers,
Ralph