The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford University's Cyberlaw Clinic have filed suit in federal court seeking a temporary restraining order against Diebold, maker of electronic voting machinery. The issue is free speech. The suit seeks a cease and desist order against the company to stop it from sending threatening letters to websites and groups that publish company documents obtained by a hacker.

Voting activists who have received the cease-and-desist orders, including students from at least 20 universities, claim the documents raise serious security concerns about Diebold Inc., which has more than 50,000 touchscreen voting terminals nationwide.

....A hacker broke into Diebold's servers in March using an employee's ID, and copied thousands of company announcements and internal e-mails. [company spokesman] Jacobsen said the documents might have been altered afterward. The hacker e-mailed the data to voting activists, some of whom published stories on their Web logs. A freelance journalist at Wired News also received data and wrote about it in an online story.