Make Privacy a 2016 Election Issue
EPIC has just launched “Data Protection 2016” to try to make privacy an issue in this year’s elections.
You can buy swag.
Entries Tagged "voting"
Page 9 of 18
Voter Surveillance
There hasn’t been that much written about surveillance and big data being used to manipulate voters. In Data and Goliath, I wrote:
Unique harms can arise from the use of surveillance data in politics. Election politics is very much a type of marketing, and politicians are starting to use personalized marketing’s capability to discriminate as a way to track voting patterns and better “sell” a candidate or policy position. Candidates and advocacy groups can create ads and fund-raising appeals targeted to particular categories: people who earn more than $100,000 a year, gun owners, people who have read news articles on one side of a particular issue, unemployed veterans…anything you can think of. They can target outraged ads to one group of people, and thoughtful policy-based ads to another. They can also fine-tune their get-out-the-vote campaigns on Election Day, and more efficiently gerrymander districts between elections. Such use of data will likely have fundamental effects on democracy and voting.
A new research paper looks at the trends:
Abstract: This paper surveys the various voter surveillance practices recently observed in the United States, assesses the extent to which they have been adopted in other democratic countries, and discusses the broad implications for privacy and democracy. Four broad trends are discussed: the move from voter management databases to integrated voter management platforms; the shift from mass-messaging to micro-targeting employing personal data from commercial data brokerage firms; the analysis of social media and the social graph; and the decentralization of data to local campaigns through mobile applications. The de-alignment of the electorate in most Western societies has placed pressures on parties to target voters outside their traditional bases, and to find new, cheaper, and potentially more intrusive, ways to influence their political behavior. This paper builds on previous research to consider the theoretical tensions between concerns for excessive surveillance, and the broad democratic responsibility of parties to mobilize voters and increase political engagement. These issues have been insufficiently studied in the surveillance literature. They are not just confined to the privacy of the individual voter, but relate to broader dynamics in democratic politics.
Eighth Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner
On April 1, I announced the Eighth Movie-Plot Threat Contest:
I want a movie-plot threat that shows the evils of encryption. (For those who don’t know, a movie-plot threat is a scary-threat story that would make a great movie, but is much too specific to build security policies around. Contest history here.) We’ve long heard about the evils of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse—terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. (Or maybe they’re terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers; I can never remember.) Try to be more original than that. And nothing too science fictional; today’s technology or presumed technology only.
On May 14, I announced the five semifinalists. The votes are in, and the winner is TonyK:
November 6 2020, the morning of the presidential election. This will be the first election where votes can be cast from smart phones and laptops. A record turnout is expected.
There is much excitement as live results are being displayed all over the place. Twitter, television, apps and websites are all displaying the vote counts. It is a close race between the leading candidates until about 9 am when a third candidate starts to rapidly close the gap. He was an unknown independent that had suspected ties to multiple terrorist organizations. There was outrage when he got on to the ballot, but it had quickly died down when he put forth no campaign effort.
By 11 am the independent was predicted to win, and the software called it for him at 3:22 pm.
At 4 the CEO of the software maker was being interviewed on CNN. There were accusations of everything from bribery to bugs to hackers being responsible for the results. Demands were made for audits and recounts. Some were even asking for the data to be made publicly available. The CEO calmly explained that there could be no audit or recount. The system was encrypted end to end and all the votes were cryptographically anonymized.
The interviewer was stunned and sat there in silence. When he eventually spoke, he said “We just elected a terrorist as the President of the United States.”
For the record, Nick P was a close runner-up.
Congratulations, TonyK. Contact me by e-mail, and I’ll send you your fabulous prizes.
EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Slashdot thread.
Eighth Movie-Plot Threat Contest Semifinalists
On April 1, I announced the Eighth Movie Plot Threat Contest: demonstrate the evils of encryption.
Not a whole lot of good submissions this year. Possibly this contest has run its course, and there’s not a whole lot of interest left. On the other hand, it’s heartening to know that there aren’t a lot of encryption movie-plot threats out there.
Anyway, here are the semifinalists.
Cast your vote by number here; voting closes at the end of the month.
An Incredibly Insecure Voting Machine
Wow:
The weak passwords—which are hard-coded and can’t be changed—were only one item on a long list of critical defects uncovered by the review. The Wi-Fi network the machines use is encrypted with wired equivalent privacy, an algorithm so weak that it takes as little as 10 minutes for attackers to break a network’s encryption key. The shortcomings of WEP have been so well-known that it was banished in 2004 by the IEEE, the world’s largest association of technical professionals. What’s more, the WINVote runs a version of Windows XP Embedded that hasn’t received a security patch since 2004, making it vulnerable to scores of known exploits that completely hijack the underlying machine. Making matters worse, the machine uses no firewall and exposes several important Internet ports.
It’s the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE). The Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) investigated the machine, and found that you could hack this machine from across the street with a smart phone:
So how would someone use these vulnerabilities to change an election?
- Take your laptop to a polling place, and sit outside in the parking lot.
- Use a free sniffer to capture the traffic, and use that to figure out the WEP password (which VITA did for us).
- Connect to the voting machine over WiFi.
- If asked for a password, the administrator password is “admin” (VITA provided that).
- Download the Microsoft Access database using Windows Explorer.
- Use a free tool to extract the hardwired key (“shoup”), which VITA also did for us.
- Use Microsoft Access to add, delete, or change any of the votes in the database.
- Upload the modified copy of the Microsoft Access database back to the voting machine.
- Wait for the election results to be published.
Note that none of the above steps, with the possible exception of figuring out the WEP password, require any technical expertise. In fact, they’re pretty much things that the average office worker does on a daily basis.
More.
Attacking Researchers Who Expose Voting Vulnerabilities
Researchers found voting-system flaws in New South Wales, and were attacked by voting officials and the company that made the machines.
Hacking Internet Voting from Wireless Routers
Good paper, and layman’s explanation.
Internet voting scares me. It gives hackers the potential to seriously disrupt our democratic processes.
EDITED TO ADD (11/14): Another article.
Unusual Electronic Voting Machine Threat Model
Rats have destroyed dozens of electronic voting machines by eating the cables. It would have been a better story if the rats had zeroed out the machines after the votes had been cast but before they were counted, but it seems that they just ate the machines while they were in storage.
The EVMs had been stored in a pre-designated strong room that was located near a wholesale wheat market, where the rats had apparently made their home.
There’s a general thread running through security where high-tech replacements for low-tech systems have new and unexpected failures.
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): This article says it was only a potential threat, and one being addressed.
New Low in Election Fraud
Azerbaijan achieves a new low in electoral fraud: the government accidentally publishes the results of the election before the polls open.
The mistake came when an electoral commission accidentally published results showing a victory for Ilham Aliyev, the country’s long-standing President, a day before voting. Meydan TV, an online channel critical of the government, released a screenshot from a mobile app for the Azerbaijan Central Election Commission which showed that Mr Aliyev had received 72.76 per cent of the vote compared with 7.4 per cent for the opposition candidate, Jamil Hasanli. The screenshot also indicates that the app displayed information about how many people voted at various times during the day. Polls opened at 8am.
Here’s another article.
But luckily, former US legislators are monitoring everything:
But observers from other delegations, including a group of former members of the United States House of Representatives, said the voting on Wednesday was clean and efficient. Mr. Aliyev, thanking voters in a televised statement, called the elections “free and transparent.”
Former Representative Michael E. McMahon, a Democrat from Staten Island, called the vote “honest, fair and really efficient.”
“There were much shorter lines than in America, and no hanging chads“—a reference to the disputed ballots in the United States presidential race in 2000.
Long lines? Hanging chads? These people have no idea how the big boys steal elections.
The Security Risks of Unregulated Google Search
Someday I need to write an essay on the security risks of secret algorithms that become part of our infrastructure. This paper gives one example of that. Could Google tip an election by manipulating what comes up from search results on the candidates?
The study’s participants, selected to resemble the US voting population, viewed the results for two candidates on a mock search engine called Kadoodle. By front-loading Kadoodle’s results with articles favoring one of the candidates, Epstein shifted enough of his participants’ voter preferences toward the favored candidate to simulate the swing of a close election. But here’s the kicker: in one round of the study, Epstein configured Kadoodle so that it hid the manipulation from 100 percent of the participants.
Turns out that it could. And, it wouldn’t even be illegal for Google to do it.
The author thinks that government regulation is the only reasonable solution.
Epstein believes that the mere existence of the power to fix election outcomes, wielded or not, is a threat to democracy, and he asserts that search engines should be regulated accordingly. But regulatory analogies for a many-armed, ever-shifting company like Google are tough to pin down. For those who see search results as a mere passive relaying of information, like a library index or a phone book, there is precedent for regulation. In the past, phone books—with a monopoly on the flow of certain information to the public—were prevented from not listing businesses even when paid to do so. In the 1990s, similar reasoning led to the “must carry” rule, which required cable companies to carry certain channels to communities where they were the only providers of those channels.
As I said, I need to write an essay on the broader issue.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.