174 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition while the canvassing was going on. This is a serious security breach and should not have been allowed. In fact, the Smartmatic intervention is expressly prohibited under our Automated Election System Law (R.A. 9369). Section 35(c) prohibits “gaining or causing access to using, altering, destroying or disclosing any computer data, program, system software, network, or any computer-related devices, facilities, hardware or equipment, whether classied or declassied”. Such acts are prohibited whether or not any election results are affected. Here is the thing: If that Smartmatic technician can change one character, he can change other things as well. Indeed, one can speculate that the so-called “minor change” might have been a deliberate trigger to launch a sleeping worm or Trojan horse already embedded in the system and programmed to make major changes, including the altering of vote counts. Thus, the Smartmatic spokesman could claim with a straight face that the script change he made was “minor”, while neglecting to say that this trivial change was the trigger for another script that would make major outcome-altering changes. Well-known IT expert (and former Comelec technical consultant) Lito Averia pointedly asked, “How come Marlon Garcia (of Smartmatic) had unimpeded access to the transparency server while lesser mortals like representatives of other organizations authorized to connect to the transparency server via a mirror server were not even allowed to take a peek inside the transparency server room? Why were security protocols not strictly enforced? Why had the authorities responsible for the transparency server and its operations allowed the introduction of a program script into the transparency server to happen?” He stressed, “The claimed minor change that Mr. Garcia made cannot be taken lightly. If he can effect a simple change, he also can change something not so simple.” It should be pointed out that all access codes to the computer network were generated by Smartmtaic and known only to Smartmatic and Comelec personnel. This incident was disturbingly similar to incidents in three prior automated elections, one regional and two nationwide: 1) in 2008, in regional elections held in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, a Smartmatic technician in Manila remotely changed the number of voters in a canvassing server in Wao, Lanao del Sur, while canvassing and vote consolidation was in progress; 2) in the 2010 presidential elections, Smartmatic's Marlon Garcia cavalierly accessed the canvassing program to change the number of voters after the tally showed an erroneous 256 million as the total number of registered voters; and 3) in the 2013 mid-term elections, Smartmatic's Marlon Garcia again accessed the canvassing server (through a previously undisclosed intermediary server) to correct a script that produced an astonishing 12-million vote surge barely two hours into the canvassing which, uncorrected, would have produced an aggregate vote far exceeding the total number of registered voters. In all these