The Times: Tech column - E-voting risks/Microsoft's iLoo
By David Rowan
DID you mouse-click your vote last Thursday? Or perhaps you sent a text message or used your TV remote-control unit to choose your local councillor? From Sheffield to South Somerset, 1.5 million of us could vote electronically last week in pilots that the Government heralds as democracy's future. So impressed are ministers by the "resounding success" of e-voting that next year they want to involve ten million of us as a preface to a fully electronic general election a few years later. That is a very worrying prospect indeed.
As Downing Street rushes breathlessly towards the "total e-enabled general election", experts on computer security are ringing warning bells. The worst that happened last week was a "technical hitch" that caused touch-sensitive screens to fail in St Albans, and another that delayed PC-based voting in Sheffield. But in the US, more extensive trials have revealed serious security breaches, the "disappearance" of large numbers of votes, and even votes for one party being credited to another.
The security technologist Bruce Schneider says: "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."
The Foundation for Information Policy Research, a British think-tank, says that e-voting could cause "major problems" and damage public confidence in the electoral process severely. It argues that electronic votes must also be recorded on paper, to protect against problems such as the 103,000 ballots "missed" in Congressional elections in Broward County, Florida, last November. Ian Brown, the foundation's director, says that anything other than a paper trail that can be audited "is an invitation to fraud for hackers and virus-writers around the world".
Rebecca Mercuri, a Philadelphia academic who has pioneered research into e voting, visited Britain last autumn to warn ministers that the remote-voting systems favoured in the UK would be relatively easy to subvert. Ministers do not appear to be listening.
++++
DON'T LAUGH, but Microsoft's big product launch for the summer is... an internet-enabled toilet, the iLoo, to be unveiled at Glastonbury. It comes with a plasma screen and wireless keyboard, so that festival-goers will be able to surf while relieving themselves. There is even talk of toilet paper printed with website addresses.
(The Times, May 6 2003)
DID you mouse-click your vote last Thursday? Or perhaps you sent a text message or used your TV remote-control unit to choose your local councillor? From Sheffield to South Somerset, 1.5 million of us could vote electronically last week in pilots that the Government heralds as democracy's future. So impressed are ministers by the "resounding success" of e-voting that next year they want to involve ten million of us as a preface to a fully electronic general election a few years later. That is a very worrying prospect indeed.
As Downing Street rushes breathlessly towards the "total e-enabled general election", experts on computer security are ringing warning bells. The worst that happened last week was a "technical hitch" that caused touch-sensitive screens to fail in St Albans, and another that delayed PC-based voting in Sheffield. But in the US, more extensive trials have revealed serious security breaches, the "disappearance" of large numbers of votes, and even votes for one party being credited to another.
The security technologist Bruce Schneider says: "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."
The Foundation for Information Policy Research, a British think-tank, says that e-voting could cause "major problems" and damage public confidence in the electoral process severely. It argues that electronic votes must also be recorded on paper, to protect against problems such as the 103,000 ballots "missed" in Congressional elections in Broward County, Florida, last November. Ian Brown, the foundation's director, says that anything other than a paper trail that can be audited "is an invitation to fraud for hackers and virus-writers around the world".
Rebecca Mercuri, a Philadelphia academic who has pioneered research into e voting, visited Britain last autumn to warn ministers that the remote-voting systems favoured in the UK would be relatively easy to subvert. Ministers do not appear to be listening.
++++
DON'T LAUGH, but Microsoft's big product launch for the summer is... an internet-enabled toilet, the iLoo, to be unveiled at Glastonbury. It comes with a plasma screen and wireless keyboard, so that festival-goers will be able to surf while relieving themselves. There is even talk of toilet paper printed with website addresses.
(The Times, May 6 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, May 06, 2003
<< Home