See your link here
Protecting themselves, not voters
8 comments- IT TOPICS:Government & Regulation, Hardware, Security
You got to hand it to the Florida election officials, they know how to protect themselves and their corporate sponsors from embarrassment. They've proposed a new law which would mandate that only people with one of three little known certifications would be allowed to test e-voting machines, and even then only under very limited circumstances. No one else would be allowed to look at the boxes. So rather than fix any problems with the e-voting machines, they've transferred the risk from one of embarrassment for themselves to one of possible voter fraud for the state of Florida. Good job of looking out for yourconstituency folks.
None of the three certifications specified by Florida legislation, the American Software Testing Qualifications Board, the American Society for Quality or the EC (E-Commerce) Council, actually qualify an individual to do a security assessment on an e-voting system. And in my opinion, there's no way such a certification could be created without compromising the reviewer; the certification would have to be vetted by the very industry creating the e-voting machines and would invalidate the concept of a unbiased third-party review. It is only by having independent review of the code can we guarantee that there is no chicanery going on behind the scenes and that the systems are safe from attack during the election. Trusting the manufacturers of the e-voting machines to guarantee their machines without oversight is like asking the fox to watch the hen house. They're the people who have the most to gain by hiding any vulnerability and the people with the most access to surreptitiously make changes to the code and, more importantly, the results.
I recently talked to Dan Kuykendall of the Mighty Seek podcast , someone who makes his living trying to break software, and we agreed that e-voting machines are absolutely necessary to the future of democracy, or at least that they're coming one way or another. But we have to be absolutely certain that the results these machines return are beyond reproach. In many elections it would only take a swing of two or three percent to completely change the outcome. Think about the changes that might have made in recent Presidential elections. Diebold and the Florida election officials may be perfectly honest and upstanding; but I'm not willing to bet the future of the country on that assumption. I want as many eyes as possible looking at the code and the process around e-voting as possible. After all, there most definitely are "evil and nefarious voting officials" out there. There have been in every election since the founding of our country.
Print
Email this
Digg this
