US District Judge Jeremy Fogel could issue a ruling this week on whether or not an injunction should be issued stopping e-voting company Diebold Inc from sending cease-and-desist letters to people publishing links to documents discussing alleged Diebold security flaws.

Diebold has threatened ISPs who host websites that publish or link to an archive that includes data from Diebold staff confirming blunders in Diebold voting machines, and difficulties certifying the systems for actual elections, says the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

It's representing the ISP OPG and Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, together with the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School.

Computer programmers, ISPs and students at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received C&D notices and, "Many removed links to Diebold documents, but some - including San Francisco-based ISP Online Policy Group - refused, and sued Diebold," says an Associated Press report here.

"They say the leaked documents raise serious security questions about Diebold, which controls 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide,'" it goes on. "They argue they have a right to publish the data under the 'fair use' exception of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"OPG, which hosts at least 1,000 Web sites of nonprofit groups and individuals on 120 computer servers, also argues that the volunteer organization cannot be responsible for every link of every client.

"Robert A. Mittelstaedt, who represents Diebold, said the company didn't intend to stymie free speech or place onerous burdens on ISPs. says the report. He emphasized that North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold strongly objected to the voting activists and student groups' 'wholesale reproduction' of 13,000 pages of internal documents."