Kevin Richard Powell Affidavit

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SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK

COUNTY OF KINGS Part 27 Index No.: 6500-2011---------------------------------------------------------------------x

Christopher-Earl: Strunk, in esse (Hon. Arthur M. Schack J.S.C)

Plaintiff,-against- KEVIN RICHARD POWELL

NEW YORK STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS; et al. AFFIDAVIT

Defendants.

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STATE OF GEORGIA )) ss.

COUNTY OF GWINNETT )

Accordingly, I, Kevin Richard Powell, being duly sworn, depose and say under

penalty of perjury:

1. Affirmant is over 17 years of age and not a party to this case herein;

2. My place for service is located at 2633 Davenham Lane, Duluth, GA 30096

3. My expertise in this matter is: I am currently employed as a TelevisionProducer | Editor with Fulton County Government Television in Atlanta, GA.

Attached is Exhibit A, a copy of my resume highlighting my 25 years of experience in

the Television and Broadcasting industry.

4. I am preparing this affidavit for Plaintiff and am willing to testify accordingly;

5. On September 20th, 2011; I published under the pen name of Pixel Patriot aKevin Richard Powell Affidavit Page 1 of 11


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report in an internet blog on the case before this Court in an effort to educate the

American public about the issue.

6. On Monday, October 3rd, 2011; I was told by the Plaintiff, Christopher-EarlStrunk that someone was filing a FOIA request with the New York State Board of

Elections, which I will further refer to as (NYS BOE); for previous versions of their

website. Mr. Strunk informed me that the part of the BOE website that lists candidate

eligibility previously said the Presidential candidate was required to be a Natural Born

Citizen. I did not know that the website previously stated that. I asked Mr. Strunk if

he had personally seen it before it was changed and he said that he had.

7. While we were still on the phone I went to the website for The Internet Archiveservice called the Wayback Machine and started looking for previous versions of the

Board of Elections website.

8. The Wayback Machine allows users to search through over 150 billionwebpages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

9. I have successfully used the Wayback Machine before with this same method inorder to find the telephone number for the Honorable Sean Jerguson, Georgia state

representative which had been published on a previous version of his district website.

10. The result that I got when I entered the URL for the NYS BOE candidateeligibility webpage:

http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.elections.state.ny.us/RunningOffice.html

Kevin Richard Powell Affidavit Page 2 of 11
http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.elections.state.ny.us/RunningOffice.htmlhttp://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.elections.state.ny.us/RunningOffice.htmlhttp://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.elections.state.ny.us/RunningOffice.html


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into the Wayback Machine on October 3rd was an error message that said:

Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

(I will refer to this as - EXCLUDED MESSAGE 1)

11. I then researched what this error message means and what would generate thiserror message. I learned that The Internet Archive actually has policies governing the

issuance of both EXCLUDED and BLOCKED error messages as a result of search

requests.

12. I discovered that the NYS BOE could embed what is known as robot.txt into thecomputer programming source code for their website, and that this would cause the

Wayback Machine to generate the EXCLUDED error message that I saw on the 3rd of

October.

13. Upon learning that such a tactic could be employed by a government website toprevent the public from seeing previous versions of its website; I immediately went to

the NYS BOE website to view its computer programming source code and found that it

did indeed have the robot.txt code embedded.

14. I continued my research looking for previous versions of the NYS BOE websiteand discovered that not only did they have previous versions of their webpages

EXCLUDED by the robot.txt but that webpages were actually being BLOCKED at the

mirrored site to The Internet Archive in Alexandrina, Egypt.

(I will refer to this as - BLOCKED MESSAGE 2)



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15. According to The Internet Archive exclusion policies, in order for webpages to beBLOCKED; the request had to have been made by the site owner.

16. Furthermore, the Internet Archives exclusion policy stipulates that Archivistswill exercise best-efforts compliance with applicable court orders and Beyond that,

as noted in the Library Bill of Rights, Libraries should challenge censorship in the

fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

17. Upon discovering the NYS BOE websites deceptive practices; I took screencaptures of the EXCLUDED and BLOCKED error messages and downloaded the

corresponding computer programming source code and then wrote a report and

published it online two days later at 7:16 pm on Wednesday October 5th, 2011 here:

http://pixelpatriot.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-york-state-boe-website-cover-up.html

18. I will refer to my online report in this Affidavit as Exhibit B.

19. The day after my report was published online, another website known as theBirtherReport at: www.ObamaReleaseYourRecords.com which I will further refer to

as (ORYR), published my report on Thursday October 6th, 2011.

20. I woke early on Friday October 7th, 2011 and decided to test the html links tomy report as I periodically do. At 3:25 AM ET, I was unable to access the link to the

BLOCKED error. Since my computer browser did not say it could not display the

webpage, I was concerned that it might be a DoS attack on that server in order to

prevent others from seeing the BLOCKED error message.

http://pixelpatriot.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-york-state-boe-website-cover-up.htmlhttp://pixelpatriot.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-york-state-boe-website-cover-up.htmlhttp://www.obamareleaseyourrecords.com/http://www.obamareleaseyourrecords.com/http://pixelpatriot.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-york-state-boe-website-cover-up.html


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21. As defined by the Department of Homeland Security:http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST04-015.html

National Cyber Alert System

Cyber Security Tip ST04-015

What is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack?

In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, an attacker attempts to prevent legitimate users

from accessing information or services. By targeting your computer and its network

connection, or the computers and network of the sites you are trying to use, an

attacker may be able to prevent you from accessing email, websites, online accounts

(banking, etc.), or other services that rely on the affected computer.

The most common and obvious type of DoS attack occurs when an attacker "floods" a

network with information. When you type a URL for a particular website into your

browser, you are sending a request to that site's computer server to view the page. The

server can only process a certain number of requests at once, so if an attacker

overloads the server with requests, it can't process your request. This is a "denial of

service" because you can't access that site.

22. Since this time I was not getting any error messages, I wanted confirmation ofwhat I was experiencing so I called the site owner for ORYR and he said he could not

access it either nor was he getting any kind of error message from his browser. After

about 5 minutes while we were still talking on the phone, the BLOCKED error

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST04-015.htmlhttp://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST04-015.htmlhttp://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST04-015.html


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message suddenly displayed in the browser on my computer screen and when I told

this to ORYR he said the exact same thing happened for him at the exact same time.

He then ran a program called Sitemeter which allows him to see who is accessing his

website and he told me that within 10 minutes after I had tried to access the

BLOCKED site that the U.S. Department of State was looking at my report on his

website ORYR:

23. On Saturday, October 8th I did the same test for the NYS BOE website usingthe Wayback Machine; however this time I got a different error message.

This time the error message said:



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24. Hrm. Wayback Machine doesnt have that page archived.Want to search for all archived pages under http://www.elections.state.ny.us/?

(I will refer to this as - PAGE NOT ARCHIVED MESSAGE 3)

25. Instead of:

26. Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.(EXCLUDED MESSAGE 1)

27. I went back to the NYS BOE website and checked the source code and therobot.txt code was still embedded so I knew that The Internet Archive had to have

changed their own source code. I was very concerned because this appeared to me

to indicate collusion between a 501c3 non-profit organization and the NYS BOE since

their code was changed just 3 days after my report was published.

28. I made screen captures on Saturday October 8th documenting the fact that byputting the URL for the NYS BOE into The Internet Archive Wayback Machine a

different error message was generated.

29. Additionally, I have also recorded the exact same sequence of steps onvideotape, which I will refer to here as Exhibit C; in real-time in order to document as

irrefutable proof that a different error message is generated from what was when I

published my report.

http://www.elections.state.ny.us/http://www.elections.state.ny.us/


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30. After having found that the NYS BOE was engaging in a deceptive manner, Idecided to scrutinize the event that I had just experienced at The Internet Archive

Wayback Machine website so that I could fully understand and document it. I took a

closer look at the URL in my browser for The Internet Archive error message and I

noticed that the URL had an asterisk character * , also known as a wildcard. I know

from my personal experience with computers that this wildcard character is used with

search strings to define varying search parameters. I decided to manually invoke the

same search without the wildcard character so I placed the computer curser using my

mouse in the URL field and backed up two spaces to remove the asterisk and the

preceding forward slash character and hit enter and I instantly got the EXCLUDED

error message that I previously did before Saturday: (EXCLUDED MESSAGE 1).

31. On Sunday, I consulted with a Certified Microsoft Systems Engineer in order toverify my findings:

William Lolli, MCSE

President of Tech Assist, Inc.

A network consulting company

32. He downloaded a static record of The Internet Archive website source code andthen using special software he also did a live trace of both error messages to confirm

that they were both being generated from the same IP address owned by The Internet

Archive. I have included as Exhibit D a printout of his DNS report with the IP trace.

Additionally, here are questions where I was seeking clarification from the DNS report

and his responses:



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33. Question: Would you like to expound on the DNS report or is its mainsignificance that it verifies both domains trace back to the same IP address:

207.241.226.201

34. Lolli: Yes, it simply shows that archive.org traces back to a block of IPaddresses-- which is pretty darn big-- 207.241.224.0 - 207.241.239.255, basically

3825 IP addresses are available to their poole.

35. Then we both simultaneously went through the same sequence of steps usingthe NYS BOE URL with the Wayback Machine and we compared the error message

that was generated. He said that the change in results generated by a search for the

NYS BOE URL using the Wayback Machine would indicate the Internet Archives had

to have changed their own code.

36. Lolli: "Web sites generally have front-end webpages that can send input-requests for response-outputs of data to a backend database. The database, then

responds with either text or an entire webpage as a response to the query. It is safe to

suggest that the archive.org system has more than one database on more than one

physical or virtual host [server]. Depending on the URL string, responses are

generated from any number of databases; and in this case, probably two."

37. Lolli: By removing the */ from the URL, you are re-directed to another server-host (known as liveweb.archive.org), and a new message page is generated and

displayed

http://archive.org/http://archive.org/http://archive.org/http://archive.org/


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38. I also consulted with a professional web developer, Ross Arena; to get a secondopinion. He writes computer programs and internet source code for building websites

and I contacted him through the online referral service called Odesk at

www.odesk.com.

39. I sent him the original source code from last week and gave him a description ofwhat I experienced. Then we reviewed these steps again while discussing it over the

phone at the same time. He told me he had noticed a correlation between the Show

All button and the (PAGE NOT ARCHIVED MESSAGE 3).

40. He said that the Latest button sends a bot to check the website live. I askedhim why would the source code for the Latest button not be a subset of the code for

the Show All button? He said that is just the way that the developers of The Internet

Archive Wayback Machine chose to do it.

41. After Mr. Arena explained to me how the Show All button is invoking the(PAGE NOT ARCHIVED MESSAGE 3), I deduced that the Show All button is only

searching for indexed webpages and he agreed.

42. That being the case, I then suggested testing for a connection between theLatest button and the first error message I saw last week and when we both tested

that, it did generate the first error message: (EXCLUDED MESSAGE 1).

43. Therefore, Mr. Arena confirms that evidenced in The Internet Archives sourcecode on line 221 as can be seen in the screenshot referred to as Exhibit E, the ACTION

http://www.odesk.com/http://www.odesk.com/


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command reverses the result you get when you hit the "Take Me Back" button. It now

invokes the Show All button query which displays a PAGE NOT ARCHIVED

MESSAGE as opposed to the Latest button query which displays the EXCLUDED

MESSAGE.

Exhibit E

44. Therefore, in summary; the New York State Board of Elections website is agovernment website and The Internet Archives Exclusion Policy indicates that their

normal course of action would be to NOT exclude previous versions of the NYS BOE

webpages; however they are. Three days after a report was published exposing this

deceptive practice, The Internet Archives changed their computer source code so that

searches for previous versions of the NYS BOE webpages would generate an error

message telling the user that the page they are looking for is not archived instead of

an error message that would highlight a deceptive practice by the NYS BOE while

simultaneously concealing an exception to their own Exclusion Policy. And even

though the resultant message has changed for the user of the Wayback Machine, the

previous versions of the NYS BOE webpages that listed the requirements for President

to be a Natural Born Citizen are still being excluded.



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Documents

Kevin Richard Powell Affidavit