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Florida County Asks Students To Crack Elections
imAck writes: "After the election fiasco last year in Florida, many have discussed the possibilities of using a computerized voting system to replace the old punch-card ballot system. Florida's Broward county is considering buying a $20 million dollar computerized touchscreen system to handle future elections. What makes the story interesting is how they are planning to test the system for security holes.
The county plans on holding mock elections in high schools and at senior citizen communities. They are actually asking the students to try and hack into the system during the mock elections to learn of possible security issues." I wonder if Broward County would look into spending their money on hardware and supporting development of the GNU Project's existing electronic voting software.
"This man hacked into our systems and he's well able to cause serious damage over computer networks. Just look at this: he cracked Florida's new ballot system!"
Don't help officals or suits, it gets you screwed big time. If you can code or hack or crack, keep it under the lid in the public and don't brag about it. It doesn't do any good to you.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
The cracking challenge is absolute propaganda and bullshit. The real danger is elections rigged and stolen by criminals like Freida Harris and her hirelings, who will have physical access to the insides of those black boxes. The real intent of the challenge, is to increase confidence that no one will be able to crack these boxes and demonstrate that their software counts votes erroneously. On purpose.
The machines approved for use in Florida produce no paper output. All votes cast are electronic fictions subject to no kind of verification, ever, under any circumstance: A crooked election official's wettest dream come true. At least in Florida, the democratic proces is over, dead and buried, as of now. And BTW the software is proprietary closed source, made by contractors hired by the dominant political party.
99 buckets of bits on the wall...
take one down and pass it around, 99 buckets of bits on the wall
Having worked for the Secretary of State here in Florida (and working on the first couple of election results systems for the Florida Dept. of State, Division of Elections), I feel confident saying that the problems in Florida are mostly due to sheer incompetence. The few people who actually know anything aren't compensated enough to stay on, and the rest rely on Peter Principle to stay in their positions. Problem is, this incompetence allows those who are truly evil to have free reign over the elections. It's not some big, carefully orchestrated plot, it's pure opportunism - wait around for a big enough screw up, and have your fun during the resulting confusion.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Since the $20 million is being paid to a corporate contractor, I wonder what the DMCA or, some area of copyright law is going to do to that concept.
That...
l
1. the responsible parties in FL think that this is a remotely good idea, and
2. the responsible parties in FL think that "electronic" voting is feasible.
Don't these people consult experts that know about such things, and have informed opinions? Or do they just listen to brain-dead consultants.
Check out a Crypto-Gram article for a better explanation than I can provide:
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0012.htm
The GNU system will more than likely never be used in the United states. Being a US citizen the powers that be take great pride in making money for their pockets. How do you think we got some of these crappy and downright bizzare voting systems? Corruption. I have yet to see one voting system that is open so that the citizens can inspect it as we are allowed to do under the constitution. The big monster mechanical voting machines of the 50,60,70,80's were easily subverted and even if you didn't subvert the hardware you only needed to subvert the human operators (or overseers). The biggest problem with the GNU voting system is that it is open, is not in control of the government, and therefore not easily subverted as the election can be watched. by watching to see if the same IP address keeps submitting voting requests, and that IP address is not a voting station. Or other traffic modeling to catch ballot stuffing... but you cant stop the fact that a perl script running on the server could nicely stuff ballots... same as the ballot takers can stuff more in.
You're dealing with a very powerful part of america... and the polotical parties will not allow their power to be diluted or changed.
Who needs hackers if the electronic systems already suck?
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
They did that with some test Windows 2000 box, which nobody broke into as I recall. (Golly, Windows 2000 must be secure!) However, Windows 2000 started getting cracked once Microsoft started shipping the negligent bloatware (yup, still have not fixed that virus-bearing document format). This is due to crackers getting to sit a Windows 2000 box down, rip it apart, and otherwise get their hands on it, rather than poking sticks at an ivory tower somewhere.
Plus, with the recent SMDI thingy, I think some folks would be wary to take up a corporations offer "hack this, please, we won't beat you up with the DMCA. honest."