Category: Privacy & Security
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California Study: Voting Machines Vulnerable; Worse to Come?
A major study of three e-voting systems, commissioned by the California Secretary of State’s office, reported Friday that all three had multiple serious vulnerabilities. The study examined systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia; each system included a touch-screen machine, an optical-scan machine, and the associated backend control and tabulation machine. Each system was studied…
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Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search warrant or similar process to access it. The Court’s decision was swayed by amicus briefs submitted by EFF and a group of law professors. When…
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How Computers Can Make Voting More Secure
By now there is overwhelming evidence that today’s paperless computer-based voting technologies have such serious security and reliability problems that we should not be using them. Computers can’t do the job by themselves; but what role should they play in voting? It’s tempting to eliminate computers entirely, returning to old-fashioned paper voting, but I think…
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Sarasota Voting Machines Insecure
The technical team commissioned by the State of Florida to study the technology used in the ill-fated Sarasota election has released its report. (Background: on the Sarasota election problems; on the study.) One revelation from the study is that the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines are terribly insecure. The machines are apparently susceptible to viruses, and…
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Diebold Shows How to Make Your Own Voting Machine Key
By now it should be clear that Diebold’s AccuVote-TS electronic voting machines have lousy security. Our study last fall showed that malicious software running on the machines can invisibly alter votes, and that this software can be installed in under a minute by inserting a new memory card into the side of the machine. The…
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Voting, Secrecy, and Phonecams
Yesterday I wrote about the recent erosion of the secret ballot. One cause is the change in voting technology, especially voting by mail. But even if we don’t change our voting technology at all, changes in other technologies are still eroding the secret ballot. Phonecams are a good example. You probably carry into the voting…
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Net Neutrality: Strike While the Iron Is Hot?
Bill Herman at the Public Knowledge blog has an interesting response to my net neutrality paper. As he notes, my paper was mostly about the technical details surrounding neutrality, with a short policy recommendation at the end. Here’s the last paragraph of my paper: There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing…
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New Net Neutrality Paper
I just released a new paper on net neutrality, called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It’s based on several of my earlier blog posts, with some new material.
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"Censorship" Bill Lifts Ban on Speech
The House has now joined the Senate in passing the Family Movie Act; the Act is almost sure to be signed into law soon by the President. (The Act is bundled with some unrelated provisions into a multi-part bill called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Here I’ll focus only on Section 201, called the…
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One More on Biometrics
Simson Garfinkel offers a practical perspective on biometrics, at CSO Magazine.