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

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for taking a peek at the code changes too and chiming in.

Ralph Little writes:

> On 2020-11-17 4:24 a.m., Olaf Meeuwissen wrote:
>
>> 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.

Apart from the deskew, there is support for device-side cropping to get
rid of the uninteresting margins, support for manipulation of the red,
green and blue samples (dropout and some kind of what I think is
"enhancement" - based on the EN in the macro name) and something to do
with staple detection.

Cropping will lead to a smaller image, speeding up post-image
processing.  The color sample manipulation can be used to improve the
result of post-image processing.  The staple detection, assuming this is
about a scanned staple, can lead to cropping more of the image by
ignoring the staple when deciding what to crop.

I utterly fail to see how adding support for this kind of functionality
for a general purpose scanner like the Canon DR-X10C and supported by
other scanners already to begin with would make the "SANE Project used
for possible election fraud" any more than any of the Windows and Mac
drivers out there.

Come to think of it, we don't even know if those ballot counting
machines used a (sufficiently recent) SANE "driver" to begin with.

Anyway, all the SANE "drivers" do is tell the scanner how to scan.  The
resulting image data is simply passed on to program using the "driver".

# Admittedly, there are "drivers" that add some image post-processing
# but all that code is out there in our code repository for anyone to
# audit if so inclined.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
 GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13  F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9
 Support Free Software                        https://my.fsf.org/donate
 Join the Free Software Foundation              https://my.fsf.org/join