Thats pretty much it, if things were done right, but unless a person was involved with it, cannot say for sure. People make mistakes, and if a non-technical person was involved in the decision making, there may be things they neglect due to lack of knowledge.

My comments were what I would do, but I do programming. I would also guess that there must be some sort of guidelines on how these machines are supposed to work. I personally believe that very little facts are out there and a lot of people make stuff up and it gets passed around. But I would HOPE that there are safeguards in place. Nothing in uncrackable, but on what scale?

The one thing you mentioned that I didn't was the fact that it would probably take more than one person to do the coding, and probably more in on the secret. If something like this happened, how many people could keep a secret for 6 years?

A few years ago a programmer was hired to write a progam to steal PIN numbers from a fake ATM machine. He wasn't in on it but figured out the crime and rolled over. And this was 1 guy with 1 machine. How would some stranger know what political affiliation the programmer had and how/what was he willing to do for his party? It didn't sound like he was going to get any big money. Greed explains a lot, but not in this case.

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