Pacific Spirit Marine Institute

Eballot For World: More Ewaste and Bycatch, Texted Your Vote In!

Sunday, July 15, 2007

This story falls under the heading of news you can use.

Don’t ever forget: it doesn’t matter for whom you vote, what really matters is who counts your vote!

Actions for bringing you internet voting are going on across the globe. Canada, the USA, France. The UE has launced the Cyber Vote Project trials have already been used in Sweden, France and Germany.

Why leave the club when the party is just getting hot? Text in your vote while in a drunken stupper via your cell phone. How about casting your vote for the next American Idol and then voting for your next Prime Minister or President. Careful now don’t get the two mixed up.

In spite of the US Department of Security warnings in 2004 listing its top 5 reasons to not use internet voting Evoting is rolled forward:

Our conclusions are summarized as follows:

DRE (direct recording electronic) voting systems have been widely criticized elsewhere for various deficiencies and security vulnerabilities: that their software is totally closed and proprietary; that the software undergoes insufficient scrutiny during qualification and certification; that they are especially vulnerable to various forms of insider (programmer) attacks; and that DREs have no voter-verified audit trails (paper or otherwise) that could largely circumvent these problems and improve voter confidence. All of these criticisms, which we endorse, apply directly to SERVE as well.

But in addition, because SERVE is an Internet- and PC-based system, it has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks (insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, viral attacks on voter PCs, etc.), any one of which could be catastrophic.

Such attacks could occur on a large scale, and could be launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of U.S. law. These attacks could result in large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement, and/or privacy violation, and/or vote buying and selling, and/or vote switching even to the extent of reversing the outcome of many elections at once, including the presidential election. With care in the design, some of the attacks could succeed and yet go completely undetected. Even if detected and neutralized, such attacks could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections.

It is impossible to estimate the probability of a successful cyber-attack (or multiple successful attacks) on any one election. But we show that the attacks we are most concerned about are quite easy to perpetrate. In some cases there are kits readily available on the Internet that could be modified or used directly for attacking an election. And we must consider the obvious fact that a U.S. general election offers one of the most tempting targets for cyber-attack in the history of the Internet, whether the attacker’s motive is overtly political or simply self-aggrandizement.

New Report:

The US Department of Defense has continued analyzing Online Voting and concluded in a new report that reads in part May 2007:

“There really is no good way to build such a voting system without a radical change in overall architecture of the Internet and the PC, or some unforeseen security breakthrough.” Online voting security is “an essentially impossible task.”

…”Most of the security problems with Internet voting are generic to any PC and Internet application, and fundamentally have no effective solutions. This is why the majority of all email transmitted ove the Internet is spam, and an estimated 50% of all Internet-connected PCs in the world are infected with malicious software, despite more than a decad of effor and immense investment by the world’s high technology companies in trying to fix these problems.” …”The real problem is that no fundamental solution is possible using the current Internet protocols and the current PC hardware and software platforms.”

Demand that your vote be counted as cast. Demand paper ballots that can be verified. Your most fundamental of rights are in peril regardless in what nation you live.

THE TIME HAS COME FOR YOU TO STAND UP FOR YOURSELF, don’t ever forget, it isn’t them against us. They are us, we have sent them into our goverments to represent us, now demand that they proctect our right to cast an unempeachable ballot. We need to stop letting the tail wag the dog.

Labels: Ewaste, Toxic Ewaste, bycatch, eballot, electronic voting