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Archives for 2008

Interesting Email from Sequoia

March 17, 2008 by

A copy of an email I received has been passed around on various mailing lists. Several people, including reporters, have asked me to confirm its authenticity. Since everyone seems to have read it already, I might as well publish it here. Yes, it is genuine.

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Sender: Smith, Ed [address redacted]@sequoiavote.com
To: ,
Subject: Sequoia Advantage voting machines from New Jersey
Date: Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 6:16 PM

Dear Professors Felten and Appel:

As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.

Very truly yours,
Edwin Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems

[contact information and boilerplate redacted]

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

Privacy: Beating the Commitment Problem

March 12, 2008 by

I wrote yesterday about a market failure relating to privacy, in which a startup company can’t convincingly commit to honoring its customers’ privacy later, after the company is successful. If companies can’t commit to honoring privacy, then customers won’t be willing to pay for privacy promises – and the market will undersupply privacy.

Today I want to consider how to attack this problem. What can be done to enable stronger privacy commitments?

I was skeptical of legal commitments because, even though a company might make a contractual promise to honor some privacy rules, customers won’t have the time or training to verify that the promise is enforceable and free of loopholes.

One way to attack this problem is to use standardized contracts. A trusted public organization might design a privacy contract that companies could sign. Then if a customer knew that a company had signed the standard contract, and if the customer trusted the organization that wrote the contract, the customer could be confident that the contract was strong.

But even if the contract is legally bulletproof, the company might still violate it. This risk is especially acute with a cash-strapped startup, and even more so if the startup might be located offshore. Many startups will have shallow pockets and little presence in the user’s locality, so they won’t be deterred much by potential breach-of-contract lawsuits. If the startup succeeds, it will eventually have enough at stake that it will have to keep the promises that its early self made. But if it fails or is on the ropes, it will be strongly tempted to try cheating.

How can we keep a startup from cheating? One approach is to raise the stakes by asking the startup to escrow money against the possibility of a violation – this requirement could be build into the contract.

Another approach is to have the actual data held by a third party with deeper pockets – the startup would provide the code that implements its service, but the code would run on equipment managed by the third party. Outsourcing of technical infrastructure is increasingly common already, so the only difference from existing practice would be to build a stronger wall between the data stored on the server and the company providing the code that implements the service.

From a technical standpoint, this wall might be very difficult to build, depending on what exactly the service is supposed to do. For some services the wall might turn out to be impossible to build – there are some gnarly technical issues here.

There’s no easy way out of the privacy commitment problem. But we can probably do more to attack it than we do today. Many people seem to have given up on privacy online, which is a real shame.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Privacy and the Commitment Problem

March 11, 2008 by

One of the challenges in understanding privacy is how to square what people say about privacy with what they actually do. People say they care deeply about privacy and resent unexpected commercial use of information about them; but they happily give that same information to companies likely to use and sell it. If people value their privacy so highly, why do they sell it for next to nothing?

To put it another way, people say they want more privacy than the market is producing. Why is this? One explanation is that actions speak louder than words, people don’t really want privacy very much (despite what they say), and the market is producing an efficient level of privacy. But there’s another possibility: perhaps a market failure is causing underproduction of privacy.

Why might this be? A recent Slate essay by Reihan Salam gives a clue. Salam talks about the quandry faced by companies like the financial-management site Wesabe. A new company building up its business wants to reassure customers that their information will be treated with the utmost case. But later, when the company is big, it will want to monetize the same customer information. Salam argues that these forces are in tension and few if any companies will be able to stick with their early promises to not be evil.

What customers want, of course, is not good intentions but a solid commitment from a company that it will stay privacy-friendly as it grows. The problem is that there’s no good way for a company to make such a commitment. In principle, a company could make an ironclad legal commitment, written into a contract with customers. But in practice customers will have a hard time deciphering such a contract and figuring out how much it actually protects them. Is the contract enforceable? Are there loopholes? The average customer won’t have a clue. He’ll do what he usually does with a long website contract: glance briefly at it, then shrug and click “Accept”.

An alternative to contracts is signaling. A company will say, repeatedly, that its intentions are pure. It will appoint the right people to its advisory board and send its executives to say the right things at the right conferences. It will take conspicuous, almost extravagant steps to be privacy-friendly. This is all fine as far as it goes, but these signals are a poor substitute for a real commitment. They aren’t too difficult to fake. And even if the signals are backed by the best of intentions, everything could change in an instant if the company is acquired – a new management team might not share the original team’s commitment to privacy. Indeed, if management’s passion for privacy is holding down revenue, such an acquisition will be especially likely.

There’s an obvious market failure here. If we postulate that at least some customers want to use web services that come with strong privacy commitments (and are willing to pay the appropriate premium for them), it’s hard to see how the market can provide what they want. Companies can signal a commitment to privacy, but those signals will be unreliable so customers won’t be willing to pay much for them – which will leave the companies with little incentive to actually protect privacy. The market will underproduce privacy.

How big a problem is this? It depends on how many customers would be willing to pay a premium for privacy – a premium big enough to replace the revenue from monetizing customer information. How many customers would be willing to pay this much? I don’t know. But I do know that people might care a lot about privacy, even if they’re not paying for privacy today.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

InfoTech and Public Policy Course Blog

March 6, 2008 by

Postings here have been a bit sparse lately, which I hope to remedy soon. In the meantime, you can get a hearty dose of tech policy blog goodness over at my course blog, where students in my course in Information Technology and Public Policy post their thoughts on the topic.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

pesky details with getting a voting system correct

February 29, 2008 by

Today was the last day of early voting in Texas’s primary election. Historically, I have never voted in a primary election. I’ve never felt I identified enough with a particular political party to want to have a say in selecting their candidates. Once I started working on voting security, I discovered that this also allowed me to make a legitimate claim to being “non-partisan.” (While some election officials, political scientists, and others who you might perhaps prefer to be non-partisan do have explicit partisan views, many more make a point of similarly obscuring their partisan preferences like I do.)

In Texas, you are not required to register with a party in order to vote in their primary. Instead, you just show up and ask for their primary ballot. In the big city of Houston, any registered voter can go to any of 35 early voting locations over the two weeks of early voting. Alternately, they may vote in their home, local precinct (there are almost a thousand of these) on the day of the election. There have been stories of long lines over the past two weeks. My wife wanted to vote, but procrastinating, we went on the final night to a gigantic supermarket near campus. Arriving at 5:50pm or so, she didn’t reach the head of the queue until 8pm. Meanwhile, I took care of our daughter and tried to figure out the causes of the queue.

There were maybe twenty electronic voting machines, consistently operating at between 50-70% utilization (i.e., as many as half of the voting machines were unused at any given time). Yet the queue was huge. How could this be? Turns out there were four people at the desk in front dealing with the sign-in procedure. In a traditional, local precinct, this is nothing fancier than flipping open a paper printout to the page with your name. You sign next to it, and then you go vote. Simple as can be. Early voting is a different can of worms. They can’t feasibly keep a printout with over a million names of it in each of 35 early voting centers. That means they need computers. Our county’s computers had some kind of web interface that they could use to verify the voter’s registration. They then print a sticker with your name on it, you sign it, and it goes into a book. If a voter happens to present their voter registration card (my wife happened to have hers with her), the process is over in a hurry. Otherwise, things slow down, particularly if, say, your driver’s license doesn’t match up with the computer. “What was your previous address?” Unsurprisingly, the voter registration / sign-in table was the bottleneck. I’ve seen similar effects beforehand when voting early.

How could you solve this problem? You could have an explicit “fast path” for voters who match quickly versus a “slow path” with a secondary queue for more complicated voters. You can have more registration terminals. You could have roving helpers with PDAs and battery-powered printers that try to get further back into the queue and help voters reconcile themselves with their “true” identity. There’s no lack of creativity that’s been applied to solving this class of problems outside of the domain of election management.

Now, these voter registration systems are not subject to any of the verification and testing procedures that apply to the electronic voting machines themselves. Any vendor can sell pretty much anything and the state government doesn’t have much to say about it. That’s both good and bad. It’s clearly bad because any vetting process might have tried to consider these queueing issues and would have issued requirements on how to address the problem. On the flip side, one of the benefits of the lack of regulation is that the vendor(s) could ostensibly fix their software. Quickly.

To the extent there’s a moral to this story, it’s that the whole system matters. For the most part, we computer security folks have largely ignored voter registration as being somebody else’s problem. Maybe there’s a market for some crack programmer to crank out a superior solution in the time it took to read this blog post and get us out of the queue and into the voting booth.

(Sidebar: Turns out, the Texas Democratic Party has both a primary election and a caucus. Any voter who casts a vote in the primary is elgible to caucus with the party. The caucus locations are the same as the local polling places, with caucusing starting 15 minutes after the close of the polls. Expect stories about crowding, confusion, and chaos, particularly given the crowded, small precinct rooms and relatively few people with experience in the caucusing process. Wikipedia has some details about the complex process by which the state’s delegates are ultimately selected. There may or may not be lawsuits over the process as well.)

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