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First there was Enron, a company of greedy, selfish, lying, scheming good ol' boys, closely linked to the Bush administrations in Texas and Washington (sort of like the bin Ladin family, as shown in Michael Moore's soon-to-be-released film Fahrenheit 9/11). Read about how they talked obscenely about the obscene profits they were generating by ruthlessly and criminally manipulating the power market in California.

Then there was Enron's accountant, Arthur Andersen, LLP, which helped Enron cook its dishonest books to a fare-thee-well and, when the authorities, in the form of the SEC came looking, engaged in a massive shredding exercise to destroy records of Andersen's and Enron's criminal wrongdoing. Read the indictment against Andersen.

In June, 2002, Andersen was convicted on charges of obstructing justice. Read the BBC report on Andersen's conviction. Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

Arthur Andersen LLP, based in Chicago, Illinois, used to be one of the Big Five accounting firms and performed auditing, tax services, and consulting until 2000. In 2002 the firm lost auditing license in the U.S. as a result of involvement in the Enron collapse. Andersen has sold its assets outside the U.S. to other firms such as Ernst & Young.

Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting were both business units of Andersen Worldwide before their split in 2000. As a result of that split, Andersen Consulting was forced to change its name, which it did on Jan 1, 2001. The new company, free now of Arthur Andersen, named itself Accenture.

Visit the Accenture web site.

Read some comments about Accenture's work in Canada in the late 90s.

In July, 2003, Accenture was given a contract with the Pentagon to build SERVE, the so-called "Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment."

On October 1, 2003, Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich denounced the awarding of this deal to Accenture, saying that "awarding a contract for a new system for electronic voting for military personnel living overseas to the firm that [is] at the heart of the Enron accounting scandal [is] inherently flawed and unacceptable."

Between November 7, 2003, and April 22, 2004, the Latest Voting News published more than 70 articles and interviews about the SERVE project, which had been appropriated $22 million to build a secure remote Internet voting system for use by the overseas voters, including military personnel.

On January 18, 2004, the Latest Voting News called for the abandonment of the SERVE project, among other reasons, because there still was no legitimate mechanism for certifying it for use in any elections.

On January 21, 2004, four members of the Security Peer Review Group, a group of respected computer scientists hired by the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program to analyze SERVE, announced their conclusion that SERVE was not secure and could never be made secure, given the nature of the Internet as it now existed.

At the end of January, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz decided that SERVE would not be used in the November, 2004 elections.

Shortly thereafter, this reporter asked the Pentagon what it would be doing with the money it wouldn't be spending between February and November, 2004, to complete the development and deployment of SERVE and to use it in the November elections.

The Pentagon said there wasn't any money left.

The Latest Voting News then filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all the Pentagon's data concerning the Accenture contract that had used up all its money just as it was being cancelled nine months before it was supposed to be used.

Action on this request is still pending, as of June 2, 2004.

Before filing the FOIA request with the Pentagon, Latest Voting News contacted Accenture and asked about the anomalous disappearance of the $22 million by the time the program was shut down, nine months before SERVE was supposed to be used. Its spokesman had the same response as the Pentagon's had, prior to the filing of the FOIA. The Accenture spokesperson's comment? ""Unfortunately, I can't comment."

Now, today, it's been announced that the same Accenture whose lineage stretches back to Enron's crooked accountants, who spent $22 million in pubic funds on a project it had to know was doomed from the start, has been awarded a contract potentially worth $10 billion to build a "virtual border" around the U.S.

Interestingly, solving the problem of identifying, checking on, and admitting millions of visitors to the U.S. is somewhat similar to the problem of identifying, checking on, and allowing hundreds of thousands of overseas Americans to vote over the Internet. But should it take $10 billion dollars to solve it, especially after so much of the work has presumably already been done under the earlier, smaller contract that never paid off?

Will the company that was unable to solve the Internet voting problem be able to solve the "virtual border" problem? And will even $10 billion, 500 times the size of the SERVE contract, be enough for them?