The Times: Tech column - Electronic voting/Unpoetic domains
By David Rowan
IF THE politicians are to be believed, the age of digital democracy will finally reach Britain tomorrow. For the first time, English local councils from Sheffield to St Albans will offer electronic voting - through the Web or the mobile phone. In Liverpool, that means casting votes through home computers or text messages; in Bolton, it involves voting in electronic kiosks in libraries and polling stations. If these pilots are a success, pressure will grow for nationwide e-voting in a general election some time soon.
The Government - which has provided £3.5 million to fund tomorrow's trials - can barely conceal its delight. Nick Raynsford, the Minister for Local Government, is promising "an e-enabled general election some time after 2006". Robin Cook, the Leader of the House of Commons, goes further. He wants the UK to become the first country in the world to vote over the Internet, possibly at the next election. After all, he says, the Net is "a tool for participation without precedent in democratic history". Steady on, chaps. Yes, the Internet has promised new possibilities for voter involvement since it was first used in Arizona's Democratic primaries in March 2000, but no one, least of all the Government, has yet worked out how to make the process secure and free from abuse. If hackers can keep successfully targeting the world's biggest software firm, imagine how much fun they will be having tomorrow pointing out how easily they can influence e-democracy.
The Electoral Reform Society, for one, worries that the Government is pushing online voting long before it has been shown to work. "We're very dubious about people saying that the next general election should be online," says Alex Folkes at the ERS, which has called - without success - for "a couple of hackers" to be paid to target the councils' e-voting systems to prove that they are unbreakable. "Yes, it's worthwhile trying anything to increase voter turnout. But we don't believe that electronic voting is the big answer. It won't increase turnout by more than 2 or 3 per cent."
The cost, if something goes wrong, may be an immense loss of public confidence. And something will go wrong, sooner or later. "A secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application created so far in the history of computers," according to Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert. "We know that we can't protect Internet computers from viruses and worms, and that all operating systems are vulnerable to attack. What recourse is there if the voting system is hacked into, or gets overloaded and fails?"
Rebecca Mercuri, an American online-voting specialist, warns that no electronic system is safe: "Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the voter can verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated," she says. "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result."
Until security improves, online voting should be limited to the Big Brother evictions. Although that system too has its flaws: remember when hackers boosted Paul Clarke's website vote last summer?
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AS THE Poetry Society found to its cost recently, an unrenewed Internet domain name can quickly fall into the hands of opportunist pornographers. But it has taken Ben Edelman, a student at Harvard, to unravel the scale of the problem. While clicking on a link to the Bicycle Bills website, he was surprised to be taken to Tina's Free Live Webcam. He decided to investigate, and discovered that the site's owners have registered 4,525 different domains that now point to Tina's naked exploits. These are not typically the "XXX" site addresses you would expect, but innocuous business domains that were once registered but allowed to lapse. So don't forget to renew your domain, unless you want your customers to meet an uninhibited 19-year-old New Yorker called Tina.
(The Times, May 1 2002)
IF THE politicians are to be believed, the age of digital democracy will finally reach Britain tomorrow. For the first time, English local councils from Sheffield to St Albans will offer electronic voting - through the Web or the mobile phone. In Liverpool, that means casting votes through home computers or text messages; in Bolton, it involves voting in electronic kiosks in libraries and polling stations. If these pilots are a success, pressure will grow for nationwide e-voting in a general election some time soon.
The Government - which has provided £3.5 million to fund tomorrow's trials - can barely conceal its delight. Nick Raynsford, the Minister for Local Government, is promising "an e-enabled general election some time after 2006". Robin Cook, the Leader of the House of Commons, goes further. He wants the UK to become the first country in the world to vote over the Internet, possibly at the next election. After all, he says, the Net is "a tool for participation without precedent in democratic history". Steady on, chaps. Yes, the Internet has promised new possibilities for voter involvement since it was first used in Arizona's Democratic primaries in March 2000, but no one, least of all the Government, has yet worked out how to make the process secure and free from abuse. If hackers can keep successfully targeting the world's biggest software firm, imagine how much fun they will be having tomorrow pointing out how easily they can influence e-democracy.
The Electoral Reform Society, for one, worries that the Government is pushing online voting long before it has been shown to work. "We're very dubious about people saying that the next general election should be online," says Alex Folkes at the ERS, which has called - without success - for "a couple of hackers" to be paid to target the councils' e-voting systems to prove that they are unbreakable. "Yes, it's worthwhile trying anything to increase voter turnout. But we don't believe that electronic voting is the big answer. It won't increase turnout by more than 2 or 3 per cent."
The cost, if something goes wrong, may be an immense loss of public confidence. And something will go wrong, sooner or later. "A secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application created so far in the history of computers," according to Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert. "We know that we can't protect Internet computers from viruses and worms, and that all operating systems are vulnerable to attack. What recourse is there if the voting system is hacked into, or gets overloaded and fails?"
Rebecca Mercuri, an American online-voting specialist, warns that no electronic system is safe: "Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the voter can verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated," she says. "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result."
Until security improves, online voting should be limited to the Big Brother evictions. Although that system too has its flaws: remember when hackers boosted Paul Clarke's website vote last summer?
++++
AS THE Poetry Society found to its cost recently, an unrenewed Internet domain name can quickly fall into the hands of opportunist pornographers. But it has taken Ben Edelman, a student at Harvard, to unravel the scale of the problem. While clicking on a link to the Bicycle Bills website, he was surprised to be taken to Tina's Free Live Webcam. He decided to investigate, and discovered that the site's owners have registered 4,525 different domains that now point to Tina's naked exploits. These are not typically the "XXX" site addresses you would expect, but innocuous business domains that were once registered but allowed to lapse. So don't forget to renew your domain, unless you want your customers to meet an uninhibited 19-year-old New Yorker called Tina.
(The Times, May 1 2002)
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