Author: Andrew Appel
-
Election Machinery blog
Students will be studying election technology and election administration in freshman seminar courses taught by at Princeton (by me) and at Stanford (by David Dill). The students will be writing short articles on the Election Machinery blog. I invite you all to read that blog over the next three months, to see what a small…
-
Bizarre Undervote on iVotronic in France
In France, most municipalities use paper ballots in elections, but a few places have begun using DRE (direct-recording electronic) machines. Pierre Muller, a French computer scientist, has recently sent me a report of a malfunction by an ES&S iVotronic machine in a recent municipal election. In this spring’s elections (and he believes this also happened…
-
Eavesdropping as a Telecom Profit Center
In 1980 AT&T was a powerful institution with a lucrative monopoly on transporting long-distance voice communications, but forbidden by law from permitting the government to eavesdrop without a warrant. Then in 1981 Judge Greene took its voice monopoly away, and in the 1980s and 90s the Internet ate the rest of its lunch. By 1996,…
-
AT&T Explains Guilt by Association
According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse. What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very…