Benlog

Category: policy

  • Bullet-Proofing the Front Door and Leaving the Back Door Open

    Vote By Mail in California While we’re struggling to secure voting machines, a number of States are deploying “Vote By Mail Permanently!” Here’s a picture on a bus in the San Francisco Bay Area. What a nightmare. I suspect that, for some election officials, the appeal of vote-by-mail is a bit like a magnified version…

  • The State of Badware

    I’m an advisor to Harvard Law’s Berkman Center, where I work specifically with StopBadware, a group of talented folks who are helping to identify and report on software that does bad stuff to your computer. Malware, spyware, adware, badware, whatever you want to call it, the issue is control and notice: do you control your…

  • Security Theater and Transparency

    [With apologies to my grandmothers, some of the most insightful people I’ve known.] When you want to build a publicly accountable secure system, must you build to the lowest common denominator? The key example is, of course, voting. It’s clear that you have to build the user interface to the lowest common denominator: given minimal…

  • Support Creative Commons

    Creative Commons is an organization that helps individuals share and remix their songs, videos, writings, etc. under appropriate licenses. Need a picture for a blog posting? Search Flickr, Google, Yahoo, all of which now have Creative Commons search options. With a CC license, you know ahead of time which rights you have. Don’t forget to…

  • Protecting Data by Being More Open

    In the last few weeks, friends of mine — savvy friends of mine — have been hit by sites that ask for your gmail, yahoo, or hotmail password just so they can “check to see if your friends are using the site!” Quechup, the so-called “social network that’s sweeping the globe” is accomplishing that grand…

  • Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

    The “surge” is working. That is, if you count the number of deaths in the “right” way: a body found with a gunshot to the front of the head is classified as an ordinary crime, while a body with a gunshot to the back of the head is attributed to sectarian violence. Bill Maher mentioned…

  • Windows Genuine Advantage: Guilty until Proven Innocent

    In cryptographic protocols, we talk about “the adversary”, this entity that’s trying to screw up the security goals of your protocol. Applied security folks also talk about adversaries, though they talk more often about “threats” and “threat models.” In any case, there’s some dark, shadowy, evil figure fighting against you. In a well architectured system,…

  • Crime and Useful Punishment

    My wife and I were discussing Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons Quarterback who is admitting he set up dog fights and killed some dogs by drowning and hanging. The people defending Vick are a bit out of line, in my opinion, especially those claiming that “dogfighting is just a sport.” Uhuh, right. The guy committed…

  • Are you Kidding Me?

    Republicans in California are trying to split the electoral votes proportionally in time for the 2008 elections. They say it’s “more fair.” Are you kidding me? Seriously? Is this the level of lying that we’re dealing with now? Obviously, it’s only fair if all states do this. If only “blue states” do this, or if…

  • Way to Go, Secretary Bowen.

    In 2004, I appeared on a panel at Harvard alongside Debra Bowen, who was then a California State Senator. I found her to be extremely sharp, and particularly insightful about voting issues at a time when most of the public debate was thoroughly confused (it’s gotten a little bit better since). Ms. Bowen has since…

  • The Three Laws of Computer Ethics

    Julie Amero is a substitute teacher who faces the possibility of jail time because the classroom computer displayed pornographic popups to teenage kids. Though she tried to stop it, she was somehow blamed by an incompetent and overreaching school administration. Thankfully, she recently obtained a new trial. I hope this one is a bit less…

  • The Apple Effect

    On June 29th, the day the iPhone launched, I posted the following to a private mailing list: I suspect there’ll also be an ipod/DRM effect. Once the ipod got super hot, you had folks demanding that Apple “make it compatible with other music stores.” What a riot it was to see even the ex-head of…

  • Advertising = Democracy?

    A few days ago, the Google Healthcare blog carried an entry that criticized Michael Moore’s latest film, Sicko, for not providing a balanced view of the health care world. The reaction in the blogosphere was clearly negative, with folks wondering if Google was shilling for pharmaceutical companies. I haven’t seen the movie, so I won’t…

  • Know your Supreme Court Justices

    The Supreme Court recently ruled that high-school students’ free speech rights do not extend to allowing them to post drug-related banners. I’m all for free speech, but I guess I don’t have too much of an issue with this decision, because you have to give school administrators some power to control the classroom learning environment.…

  • Voting à la Française

    Nicolas Sarkozy just won the French Presidential Elections by a sizeable margin. In case my fellow US liberals are worried about a “Conservative” victory in Europe, it’s important to note that the US Republican Party and the French UMP are by no means the same. Sarkozy used his first speaking opportunity to declare France “a…

  • It’s True “for Me”

    Richard Dawkins spoke with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News last night. I thought it would be more explosive, but it remained extremely quiet and civilized. That said, the crux of the issue was addressed: O’Reilly: well, it’s true for me, you see I believe… Dawkins: you mean “true for you” is different from “true for…

  • Why Boston ran out of Ballots in the Last Election

    Last Friday, Professor David King presented the results of his review of the Boston Election Department at a meeting of the MIT Voting Technology Project. His work has been mentioned in the press, but this is the first time that David has been able to publicly comment on his recommendations. There are number of interesting…

  • The Coercion Issues of Vote By Mail

    There isn’t much hard data on the coercion issues of vote by mail, though with states adopting new absentee voting policies, that may change, and we may start to see some interesting things. In the meantime, there’s a very interesting collection of vote-by-mail fraud incidents reported regularly on the No Vote By Mail blog. I…

  • Google & Privacy

    (Thanks to Joe for the pointer.) Google just announced a notable improvement in their privacy practices, which reinforces the opinion I expressed in a post a few days ago. Could it be that Google is starting to feel consumer demand for privacy? I think it’s happening, and the most promising aspect of Google’s move is…

  • Microsoft’s Competitive Advantage: Privacy

    Today, I attended a lunch at the Berkman Center with Microsoft’s Ira Rubinstein. Ira talked about privacy and how it is built into the Microsoft development model. He mentioned Microsoft’s new layered approach to privacy policies, where a simple front page gives you the highlights, and you can drill down on any point. A bit…

  • Privacy and Social Networks

    I worry a lot about privacy. The first half of this short video about the privacy policy of Facebook.com is great (the second half is a bit too much of a six-degrees-of-separation game to associate Facebook.com with the CIA). What’s particularly interesting is that, when Facebook.com is discussed in the press, there is rarely any…

  • On Voting, Banking, and Bad Analogies

    Estonia is running online elections, where anyone with a national ID card and Internet Explorer can vote online. As usual, the article forgets to mention the single biggest issue with remote voting, whether online or by mail: voter coercion. The point of supervised voting—i.e. voting in a controlled location, inside a private voting booth—is to…

  • Property Rehab

    Too many people in the US are property addicts. They see “property” as the natural state of a free society, where things must be owned if they are going to be economically viable. Houses, cars, TVs, pots and pans, etc… All of these must clearly be owned by someone. This also extends to music, movies,…

  • Election Season is Over… It’s time to design the next Voting System

    You can’t design a voting system in the few months that precede an election. That’s why the year in between elections should be the most productive in designing new voting technology: no one from the press is paying attention, no one is rushing to merely patch their existing system, and opportunity abounds! And so, if…

  • Setting Expectations

    Even if you take political preference aside for a second, and ignore the craziness of George Bush’s speech last night, if you just take it at face value, something is really really wrong. The President admitted that he made mistakes, that there’s tons of violence, that we’re not “winning.” Then he said that winning the…

  • Scheduling Poll Workers

    Thad Hall wonders if Poll Workers could be scheduled like Walmart employees. Thad’s ideas are generally fantastic, and I find his out-of-the-box yet highly-informed viewpoint to be refreshing in this field. In this case, though, I don’t think this suggestion would work. It’s all about training and complexity. Consider what a well-oiled machine Walmart is,…

  • Felten on Voting

    Ed Felten, who’s done some fantastic work on DRM and steganography, is writing more and more about voting systems. It’s great to see the community growing, but it’s also important to keep the academic debate alive. In that spirit, here goes some (hopefully constructive) criticism of Felten’s posts. In Paper Trail Standard Advances, Felten writes:…

  • Because we cannot let this become routine

    Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, was sent to Syria by the US government, where he was tortured for months. He was never allowed to speak to a lawyer. He was never charged with any crime. Thankfully, his single phone call enabled his wife to discover what had happened to him and start…

  • I spoke too quickly?

    As one astute commenter notes in my previous blog post on the TGDC meeting, a second resolution presented again by Ron Rivest today was accepted, thanks to revisions that grandfathered in existing machines. This is not quite as good as yesterday’s resolution, but it’s still quite good. So I must at the very least take…

  • A Real Shame

    Yesterday, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee narrowly rejected Ron Rivest’s proposal that voting systems become software-independent. This is a real shame, and it should lead us to seriously question the qualifications and biases of those who voted against it. The software-independence guideline means that a voting system can’t depend on software for its correctness. In…