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Archives for March 2011

Seals on NJ voting machines, as of 2011

March 21, 2011 by

Part of a multipart series starting here.

During the NJ voting-machines trial, plaintiffs’ expert witness Roger Johnston testified that the State’s attempt to secure its AVC Advantage voting machines was completely ineffective: the seals were ill-chosen, the all-important seal use protocol was entirely missing, and anyway the physical design of this voting machine makes it practically impossible to secure using seals.

Of course, the plaintiffs’ case covered many things other than security seals. And even if the seals could work perfectly, how could citizens know that fraudulent vote-miscounting software hadn’t been perfectly sealed into the voting machine?

Still, it was evident from Judge Linda Feinberg’s ruling, in her Opinion of February 2010, that she took very seriously Dr. Johnston’s testimony about the importance of a seal use protocol. She ordered,


4. SEALS AND SEAL-USE PROTOCOLS (REQUIRED)

For a system of tamper-evident seals to provide effective protection seals must be consistently installed, they must be truly tamper-evident, and they must be consistently inspected. While the new seals proposed by the State will provide enhanced security and protection against intruders, it is critical for the State to develop a seal protocol, in writing, and to provide appropriate training for individuals charged with seal inspection. Without a seal-use protocol, use of tamper-evident seals significantly reduces their effectiveness.

The court directs the State to develop a seal-use protocol. This shall include a training curriculum and standardized procedures for the recording of serial numbers and maintenance of appropriate serial number records.

(With regard to other issues, she ordered improvements to the security of computers used to prepare ballot definitions and aggregate vote totals; criminal background checks for workers who maintain and transport voting machines; better security for voting machines when they are stored at polling places before elections; that election computers not be connected to the Internet; and better training for election workers in “protocols for the chain of custody and maintenance of election records.”)

Judge Feinberg gave the State until July 2010 to come up with a seal use protocol. The State missed this deadline, but upon being reminded of the deadline, they submitted to the Court some woefully inadequate sketches for such a protocol. The Court rejected these sketches, and told them to come up with a real protocol. In September 2010 they tried again with a lengthier document that was still short on specifics, and the Court again found this inadequate. In October 2010 they tried again, asking for another 12-month extension, which the judge granted. In addition they proposed some new seal protocols, but asked the Court not to show them to Plaintiffs’ experts–which is most unusual in the tradition of Anglo-American law, where the Court is supposed to hear from both sides before a finding of fact. By March 2011, Judge Feinberg has not yet decided whether the State has a seal use protocol in compliance with her Order.

I’ve been observing the New Jersey Division of Elections quite closely over the past few years, as this litigation has dragged on. In some things they do a pretty good job: they are competent at voter registration, and they do maintain enough polling places so that the lines don’t get long—and these are basics of election administration that we should not take for granted. But with regard to the security of their voting machines, they just don’t get it. These direct-recording electronic voting machines are inherently insecure, and in the period 2008-2010 they have applied no fewer than six different ad-hoc “patches” to try to secure these machines: four different seal regimes, followed by three different documents claiming to be seal use protocols.

Is the New Jersey Division of Elections deliberately stalling, preserving insecure elections by dragging this case out, always proposing too little, too late and always requesting another extension? Or do they just not care, so through their lack of attention they always propose too little, too late and always request another extension? Even if the Division of Elections could come up with a seal use protocol that the Court would accept, how could we believe that these Keystone Kops could have the follow-through, the “security culture”, to execute such a protocol in the decades to come?

These voting machines are inherently insecure. The State claims they could be made secure with good seals. That’s not true: even with perfect seals and a perfectly executed seal-use protocol, there is the danger of locking fraudulent software securely into the voting machine! But even on its own flawed terms–trying to solve the problem with seals insead of with an inherently auditable technology–the State is failing to execute.

Filed Under: Other Topics

Internet Voting in Union Elections?

March 16, 2011 by

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently asked for public comment on a fascinating issue: what kind of guidelines should they give unions that want to use “electronic voting” to elect their officers? (Curiously, they defined electronic voting broadly to include computerized (DRE) voting systems, vote-by-phone systems and internet voting systems.)

As a technology policy researcher with the NSF ACCURATE e-voting center, I figured we should have good advice for DOL.

(If you need a quick primer on security issues in e-voting, GMU’s Jerry Brito has just posted an episode of his Surprisingly Free podcast where he and I work through a number of basic issues in e-voting and security. I’d suggest you check out Jerry’s podcast regularly as he gets great guests (like a podcast with CITP’s own Tim Lee) and really digs deep into the issues while keeping it at an understandable level.)

The DOL issued a Request for Information (PDF) that asked a series of questions, beginning with the very basic, “Should we issue e-voting guidelines at all?” The questions go on to ask about the necessity of voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs), observability, meaningful recounts, ballot secrecy, preventing flawed and/or malicious software, logging, insider threats, voter intimidation, phishing, spoofing, denial-of-service and recovering from malfunctions.

Whew. The DOL clearly wanted a “brain dump” from computer security and the voting technology communities!

It turns out that labor elections and government elections aren’t as different as I originally thought. The controlling statute for union elections (the LMRDA) and caselaw* that has developed over the years require strict ballot secrecy–such that any technology that could link a voter and their ballot is not allowed–both during voting and in any post-election process. The one major difference is that there isn’t a body of election law and regulation on top of which unions and the DOL can run their elections; for example, election laws frequently disallow campaigning or photography within a certain distance of an official polling place while that would be hard to prohibit in union elections.

After a considerable amount of wrangling and writing, ACCURATE submitted a comment, find it here in PDF. The essential points we make are pretty straightforward: 1) don’t allow internet voting from unsupervised, uncontrolled computing devices for any election that requires high integrity; and, 2) only elections that use voter-verified paper records (VVPRs) subject to an audit process that uses those records to audit the reported election outcome can avoid the various types of threats that DOL is concerned with. The idea is simple: VVPRs are independent of the software and hardware of the voting system, so it doesn’t matter how bad those aspects are as long as there is a robust parallel process that can check the result. Of course, VVPRs are no panacea: they must be carefully stored, secured and transported and ACCURATE’s HCI researchers have shown that it’s very hard to get voters to consistently check them for accuracy. However, those problems are much more tractable than, say, removing all the malware and spyware from hundreds of thousands of voter PCs and mobile devices.

I must say I was a bit surprised to see the other sets of comments submitted, mostly by voting system vendors and union organizations, but also the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). ACCURATE and EPIC seem to be lone voices in this process “porting” what we’ve learned about the difficulties of running secure civic elections to the labor sphere. Many of the unions talked about how they must have forms of electronic, phone and internet voting as their constituencies are spread far and wide, can’t make it to polling places and are concerned with environmental impacts of paper and more traditional voting methods. Of course, we would counter that accommodations can be made for most of these concerns and still not fundamentally undermine the integrity of union elections.

Both unions and vendors used an unfortunate rhetorical tactic when talking about security properties of these systems: “We’ve run x hundreds of elections using this kind of technology and have never had a problem/no one has ever complained about fraud.” Unfortunately, that’s not how security works. Akin to adversarial processes like financial audits, security isn’t something that you can base predictions of future performance on past results. That is, the SEC doesn’t say to companies that their past 10 years of financials have been in order, so take a few years off. No, security requires careful design, affirmative effort and active auditing to assure that a system doe not violate the properties it claims.

There’s a lot more in our comment, and I’d be more than happy to respond to comments if you have questions.

* Check out the “Court Cases” section of the Federal Register notice linked to above.

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A Legacy at Risk: How the new Ministry of Culture in Brazil reversed its digital agenda

March 14, 2011 by

Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has become a prominent figure in the political world. When he completed his second and last term last December, 87% of Brazilians approved his government, an unprecedented high rate. So it is not surprising that his successor Dilma Roussef, the first woman elected president in Brazil, took office with his strong support and the promise of continuity.

However, disappointment about that promise is growing, at least in regard to one of Lula’s landmark policies: his support to the so-called “digital culture” policies. “Digital Culture” is the expression Brazilians use to refer to a broad agenda. It derives from the principle that technology is a crucial tool for cultural policies, especially because it allows the democratization of access, and the production and dissemination of cultural artifacts. It includes also the reform of copyright, especially because the Brazilian copyright has become notoriously restrictive, preventing consumers from uploading their CD´s into an iPod, a library from digitizing an old book for preservation, or a professor from using excerpts of a film in classroom. Finally, the digital culture agenda also includes the support to open licensing models, such as free software or Creative Commons.

These policies were successfully deployed by Gilberto Gil, a popular musician appointed Minister of Culture in 2003. He was profiled as early as 2004 by Wired Magazine as a champion of free culture and free software. Mr. Gil became such a popular politician in the country that some started calling him “the Lula of Lula”, in reference to his high popularity and progressive policies, within an already popular and progressive government.

Mr. Gil’s policies were continued by his successor (and former chief of staff) Juca Ferreira, who was appointed Minister of Culture in 2008 after Gil resigned to devote more time to his music career. One of the most successful policies implemented by Gil/Juca was the creation of the so-called “cultural hotspots”. The program provides resources to grassroots cultural initiatives and organizations to acquire multimedia production equipment and broadband Internet. More than 4,000 hotspots were created, spread over more than 1,000 cities in the country. Many of them in poor areas, rural communities, or favelas (shanty towns).

Mr. Gil described the idea of the hotspots as an “anthropological tao-in”, in reference to the Chinese therapeutic massage that when applied to the right spots of the body, awakens its internal energy. According to his view, with the right incentives, it was possible to energize and foster cultural practices in places often neglected. His view was that every citizen should be considered a producer, and not only a consumer of culture. The hotspots should provide the tools necessary for access, production, and dissemination of local culture, especially for those coming from poor or peripheral areas.

Information technology and the hacker ethic was an integral part of that vision, including incentives for the adoption of free software and Creative Commons, what eventually led to a national discussion about the impact of copyright over cultural production, spurring the the ongoing copyright reform process.

As Mr. Gil put it in his own words in 2005, at a speech he delivered at NYU:

I, Gilberto Gil, Brazilian citizen and citizen of the World, Minister of Culture of Brazil, work with music, at the Ministry, and in all dimensions of my life under the inspiration of the hacker ethic – and concerned with the issues of my world and my time present me, such as the issue of digital inclusion, the issue of free software and the issue of regulation and development of the production and dissemination of audiovisual content by any means, for any purpose.
…
I want indeed for the Ministry of Culture of Brazil to be a laboratory for new ideas, capable of inventing new procedures for the world’s creative industries, and capable of proposing suggestions aimed at overcoming the present dead ends – I did indeed think that my country should dare and not wait for solutions to come from outside, from societies that would tell us Brazilians which path should be followed for our development, as if our future could only be our becoming a nation such as the ones that exist here or in Europe.

Gil´s speech seems now almost lost in a distant time. The reason is that the newly appointed Ministry of Culture, Mrs. Ana de Hollanda, has taken advantage of her first weeks in office to reverse much of what was built in the past 8 years. By way of example, one of her first actions was to remove the Creative Commons license from the Ministry’s website, without any prior note. The license had been used for the past 6 years, and the Ministry of Culture was actually the pioneer in its adoption at the government level. It is worth noting that the CC licenses continue to be used at other government branches, including the official weblog of president Dilma Roussef. Ironically, at the same day the licenses were taken down by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Planning issued a normative instruction fostering the adoption of open licenses, and expressly mentioning Creative Commons.

This contradiction led prominent politicians in Brazil, including Congress member Paulo Teixeira, to claim that the Ministry of Culture has engaged in policies that conflict with the overall direction of the Federal Government. Mr. Teixeira reminds that during the presidential campaign, president Dilma Roussef met with Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, during an important campaign act. She also publicly committed to go ahead with the copyright reform and the digital culture agenda. Before that, in 2009, both president Lula and Dilma (then his Secretary of State) attended together the International Free Software Forum (FISL 10), one of the largest free software global events, which takes place in the city of Porto Alegre. There, Lula’s speech focused on his support to digital culture, Internet freedom and free software.

Other source of criticism is the proximity of the new Minister of Culture with the copyright collecting societies. By way of example, in her first weeks in office, the Minister agreed to meet with Hildebrando Pontes, a lawyer that works for the collecting societies who has become notorious for arguing that copyright should last forever. At the same time, the Ministry declined to meet with representatives of civil society, including those from the “cultural hotspots” program. She then fired the chief copyright officer who led the reform process for the past 6 years, and appointed Mrs. Marcia Regina Barbosa, a lawyer who worked with Hildebrando Pontes.

Collecting societies are a controversial institution in Brazil. They face strong discontentment from rights holders, who claim they are not paid properly. They also face discontentment from their paying “customers”, who claim their criteria for setting royalty prices are simply obscure. They have also been declared by congress inquiry committees as lacking transparency and clear accounting. One of the goals of the copyright reform initiated by Mr. Gilberto Gil was precisely to implement a minimum set of regulation over the collecting societies. By law they have the monopoly over their business, but unlike other countries, no regulation applies to their activities, which remain excused from any sort of independent assessment. Regulation is also supported by many prominent Brazilian musicians, who have recently become vocal about the issue.

The Ministry of Culture change of policy has drawn the attention of both national and international organizations. Even before the Minister´s inauguration, an open letter subscribed by more that 1,500 representatives of civil society organizations in Brazil was posted online expressing concern with the possible change of direction. Folha de São Paulo, the largest newspaper in the country, wrote a piece about the letter. The Minister, however, declined to provide any comments to the journalist. To this date, the letter has not been replied or even acknowledged by the Minister or her staff.

The Minister´s actions, together with the absence of clear statements justifying her decisions, have generated considerable uproar. A public campaign called Sou MinCC (“I am MinCC”) emerged (MinC is the acronym for Ministry of Culture – MinCC is the result of MinC + CC, in reference to the Creative Commons licenses). Besides that, the Commons Strategies Group, an international NGO, prepared an open letter (led by Silke Helfrich at the World Social Forum in Dakar) to President Dilma, also expressing concern about the new policies. The letter was released on February, 21st, and gathered the support of organizations such as Creative Commons, the Free Knowledge Institute (Netherlands), La Quadrature du Net (France), among others.

This is an important moment for the history of cultural policies in Brazil. There is a shared feeling that much of what was built in the past 8 years is at risk. A heated debate took over the Brazilian public sphere, with articles being published by all the major newspapers. The collecting societies and their members have taken the stand to argue in favor of the Minister, claiming that the decisions taken so far are a “sovereign act”, and that the collecting societies should indeed be exempt of any external supervision, and the copyright reform should be halted for good.

But the place where the debate is really developing on a daily basis is the Internet. Bloggers, twittterers and social network members have engaged fiercely in the discussion of the current situation. Many of them were too young to even acknowledge the appointment of Gilberto when he took office. It is a new generation that has risen for the first time to debate the future of culture and technology policies in Brazil. Inadvertently, the new Minister Ana de Hollanda is contributing to the emergence of new generation of voices online. One now can only hope that she will eventually listen to them.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Seals on NJ voting machines, March 2009

March 7, 2011 by

During the NJ voting-machines trial, both Roger Johnston and I showed different ways of removing all the seals from voting machines and putting them back without evidence of tampering. The significance of this is that one can then install fraudulent vote-stealing software in the computer.

The State responded by switching seals yet again, right in the middle of the trial! They replaced the white vinyl adhesive-tape seal with a red tape seal that has an extremely soft and sticky adhesive. In addition, they proposed something really wacky: they would squirt superglue into the blue padlock seal and into the security screw cap.

Nothing better illustrates the State’s “band-aid approach, where serious security vulnerabilities can be covered over with ad hoc fixes” (as Roger characterizes it) than this. The superglue will interfere with the ability for election workers to (legitimately) remove the seal to maintain the machine. The superglue will make it more difficult to detect tampering, because it goes on in such a variable way that the inspector doesn’t know what’s supposed to be “normal.” And the extremely soft adhesive on the tape seal is extremely difficult to clean up, when the election worker (legitimately) removes it to maintain the machine. Of course, one must clean up all the old adhesive before resealing the voting machine.

Furthermore, Roger demonstrated for the Court that all these seals can still be defeated, with or without the superglue. Here’s the judge’s summary of his testimony about all these seals:


New Jersey is proposing to add six different kinds of seals in nine different locations to the voting machines. Johnston testified he has never witnessed this many seals applied to a system. At most, Johnston has seen three seals applied to high-level security applications such as nuclear safeguards. According to Johnston, there is recognition among security professionals that the effective use of a seal requires an extensive use protocol. Thus, it becomes impractical to have a large number of seals installed and inspected. He testified that the use of a large number of seals substantially decreases security, because attention cannot be focused for a very long time on any one of the seals, and it requires a great deal more complexity for these seal-use protocols and for training.

For more details and pictures of these seals, see “Seal Regime #4” in this paper.

Filed Under: Other Topics, Privacy & Security Tagged With: ,

Do corporations have a "personal privacy" right?

March 1, 2011 by

Today, the Supreme Court released its unanimous opinion in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., No. 09-1279 (U.S. Mar. 1, 2011)

At issue was the question, “Does a corporation have a “personal privacy” right under the Freedom of Information Act?” In this decision, the United States Supreme Court said “no.” The decision was 8-0 with Associate Justice Kagan not participating in the decision.

What was the case about? A trade association sought disclosure of documents that AT&T had submitted to the FCC during an investigation. AT&T argued that the documents were exempt under FOIA Exemption 7(C), which prohibited disclosure of law enforcement records if the disclosure “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit accepted AT&T’s argument, and held that a corporation could have a “personal privacy” right because a corporation was a “person” under FOIA.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Looking at the express text of FOIA as well as the common meaning of words, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, held that, absent an express definition of “personal” in FOIA, that word refers to individuals and not corporate entities.

It should be noted that corporations are, for various purposes, considered “persons” under constitutional and common law. However, at issue was a question of statutory interpretation.

The Court even got in a good zinger at the end, noting that, “We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”

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