Whether it's an "insider" who works for your agency or an outside contractor, it doesn't matter: either way you have to trust somebody.
The only solution that makes sense is an audit trail that records file transfers and can't itself be modified - which is a real bitchkitty to implement. Does anybody know of any decent products that cover both servers and workstations?
...because we already know Sony is evil as hell and we don't buy their laptops.
And anybody who went and forgot that lesson deserves whatever abuse Sony heaps on 'em.
My daily carry piece (with CCW permit) lives in a fanny pack held closed with the magnets out of a couple of old 17gig Maxtor 3.5" drives. I ditched the zipper in favor of that setup, and it's a lot faster
...or to put it another way, four excuses used:
1) "We have to let the blind and disabled vote privately". This is huge. See, even before Diebold got into voting, they were giving big money to the National Federation of the Blind, who would sue banks that didn't use "accessible" ATM (cash) machines, and then as part of the settlement the bank was supposed to buy "accessible" ATMs made by, you guessed it, Diebold.
Once Diebold got into voting in 2002 they pulled the same scam. The same National Federation of the Blind crew came in and flooded state-level voting system evaluation boards with tear-jerk stories of being able to vote privately for the first time with electronic voting (and an audio track telling them what to push for which votes).
2) A lot of the fiasco in the Florida 2000 race got blamed (mostly unfairly) on bad/old equipment. So the US Fed Gov't poured $3.5bil into voting system improvements in the form of grants to states and counties in 2002. Diebold got into voting in 2002 when the ink was barely dry on this bill (the "Help America Vote Act")...basically, it was blood in the water that attracted sharks. ES&S seriously ramped up production at that point.
3) There are claims that paper can be hacked too, and that's actually correct. What they didn't understand was that in order to do paper fraud you need a lot of people - it's "retail fraud" where each fraudster only affects a small number of votes. You damn well CAN do that but it takes a big corrupt political machine like Chicago in the '60s/'70s, Tamany Hall in NYC prior to 1913, etc. Electronic voting introduces "wholesale fraud" where one guy or a small team hacks a bunch of votes at once.
4) Costs of election processing. See, in the US we don't just have "Democracy", we have gobs of it. We vote for lots of races that would just be appointees elsewhere: "town clerk", judges, a ton of other minor officials. In most states we also vote on issues, bond measures, whether to buy parkland, whether to have gay marriage or not, stuff like that. So we end up with these huge ballots to a point where hand-counting starts to look ugly.
Right now, one fast solution might be to do paper ballots that get scanned, NOT touchscreens, and then once the ballots are fed through the "official count" scanners make by head cases like Diebold, ES&S and the like, we then run them through standard scanners saving graphic images to a hard disk and then to DVDs. Those would get handed out to political parties and activists on election night plus copied up to the web.
That way, anybody who wants to can do a hand-count of any one race or all races, by getting enough people together to count the graphic images. We basically have the existing "black boxes" (because all this Federal testing insanity is now enshrined in law and all these counties have bought junk systems already) and run them through a "white box" consisting of basically Ubuntu, an old P4, a decent hard disk, DVD burner and the biggest scanner SANE supports.
We can get that running in most places by 2010 because this "afterscanner white box" isn't a tabulator. In fact we do NOT want it to have OCR at all or know what's on the ballots, that way it can't be programmed to cheat. So since it's not a tabulator, it doesn't need certification, so it can be set up fast and cheap with off-the-shelf hardware and FOSS software with at most a simple front and and maybe an Ubuntu re-spin customized for this purposes.
Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org/
And California:
Some have even been booted out of the process for poor performance, most recently when NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) started looking at them. Systest was just kicked out, see this story and links from there for details:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/79428.html
Cyber was so bad, you could jam a cheap pocket calculator halfway into a banana, pay 'em enough money and they'd have declared it "an acceptable election technology" or somedamnthing.
We can do whole-disk encryption and If asked for the password, plead the 5th. So far courts are going along with that.
So I run whole-disk encryption and don't try for encryption secrecy...
But I also don't take a lappy outside the US.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
