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The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency
The book chronicles the final week before security expert Professor Chad Davis is to testify before Congress on the security of a commercial e-voting software product made by a fictitious company, Advice Software, Inc.
Davis' testimony will ultimately determine if the software will be implemented for use during the United States' 2004 presidential election, and therefore create a huge windfall for the company. The company will do anything and everything it can to ensure that Davis provides positive testimony. Advice will stop at nothing to complete their mission; that means they'll engage in multiple murders, kidnapping and a slew of other nefarious activities. All of this is addition to simultaneously attempting to corner the video chip market, and create video drivers that send subliminal messages about which candidate to vote for.
As Albert Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." The plot could have been made much simpler to mimic reality and the current state of insecure e-voting systems. As in real life, the e-voting companies are getting away with providing insecure e-voting systems; under the nose of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and an unsuspecting and apathetic voting public. The idea that an e-voting software company would resort to murder is where the book demonstrates it is a novel.
The reason e-voting companies and their insecure software can run roughshod through the FEC is that voting-system flaws do not have the same immediate tragic consequences that other product failures can. Plane crashes and adverse drug effects spur the FAA and FDA to take drastic actions and often overreact to an event; poorly written and insecure voting software is clearly not as newsworthy as a burning jet.
Combine this with a public that is utterly apathetic to voting in general and the situation is ripe for the situation where e-voting can have a near hypnotic effect on most people involved. Because voter turnout for U.S. presidential elections is quite low (60% of eligible voters cast their ballots in the November 2000 presidential election), and most people are completely unaware of the dangers of insecure voting applications, an under-funded federal agency can be manipulated by the e-voting vendors to roll out insecure voting software.
The international intrigue of the novel takes the reader to the RSA security conference in Amsterdam, where Davis is given a cryptic CD-ROM by Baff Lexicon, a notorious international hacker. Lexicon suggests there is serious problems with the software and will brief Davis at midnight that night at the Amsterdam Hard Rock Cafe on the details. Unfortunately, Lexicon is being trailed by undercover agents from Advice, and is murdered a few hours later by a Yugoslavian hit man that the company seems to have on retainer.
Davis now has the difficult job of unlocking the cryptic information on the CD-ROM on his own. That same CD-ROM is included with the book, and the reader is invited to join Davis in attempting to decrypt the contents of the CD and the conspiracy that Advice Software is attempting to perpetrate; namely the outcome of the 2004 election.
(If you are not interested in buying the book, anyone can download the software without having to buy the book. The software is actually part of a contest and the winner will receive a free pass to the BlackHat 2005 conference.)
A good section of the novel then details how Davis attempts to decipher the secrets that Baff Lexicon was attempting to convey to him. The two authors of The Mezonic Agenda have, respectively, a PhD in applied mathematics and a Master's in chemical engineering, and write in a someone choppy style representative of their technical backgrounds. Occasional errors in grammar and spelling are excused, save for the egregious misspelling of Learjet on page 154.
The story concludes with a moral dilemma that Davis faces: with his wife and daughter kidnapped by the Advice Software hit man, does he provide favorable, yet dishonest testimony about the software and watch his family set free; or tell the truth and watch them die?
The novel itself takes up 240 of the books 370 pages, with the last five parts dedicated to a history of voting, reverse engineering, cryptography, buffer overflows and steganography.
As a standalone novel, the book (while entertaining and enjoyably readable) is somewhat overpriced at $34.95, especially since the enclosed CD-ROM is freely downloadable and the plot is somewhat thin. The non-fiction final section, though, is quite informative and effectively complements the novel.
This novel does a good job of explaining how software can be cracked, and provides the reader with a good overview of security concepts such as buffer overflows, reverse engineering, cryptography, and more. It is hoped that the book will find itself in the hands of members of Congress and the FEC, who truly need to be educated in such fundamental security topics.
As a novel, The Mezonic Agenda will not compete with books from Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum. But because insecure e-voting is one of the greatest threats to democracy today, it is a much needed title.
You can purchase The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
In other words, "choose-your-own-adventure". It doesn't sound so impressive without the big words, does it?
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Anyone think this was about Diebold?
include $sig;
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That being the case, novels are written, to briefly take such men, out of that quiet desperation, even for a short while.
From the looks of things, a lot of these novels could be shortened to novellas if all of those extra commas were eliminated.
Sounds just like Slashdot....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
At one time I was a programmer working for the real life equivalant and I was horrified by the apathy the senior managment had for the software's security. All they cared about was having the software ready to sell by the time of the election, not having a fair election.
I spoke up and after rocking the boat to no avail (I even recieved not-so-subtle hints of losing my job). So I wrote a letter to the chairman of the FEC and my state senator and I was granted a hearing by the FEC where I was to be given the chance to present my case.
That was when they had a hitman show up at my house. Appearing like a trenchcoat wearing deamon he calmy walked up to my front stoop and kicked the door in. My doberman pincher tried to fight off the intruder but poor Billy got his head blown off by the Spas-12 shotgun the assasin carried. I was upstairs posting on Slashdot when I heard the noise and ran to the top of my stairs only to see Death empty three rounds of double odd buck into my belly.
I was dead before I hit the floor.
They took my body and dumped it out in Cheasapeake bay with old fashiond cement shoes and there I remain till this day.
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I have no idea what you're talking about. Mezonic is a perfectly cromulent word!
I did notice:
Mezonic
Diebold
Same length, same number of vowels, etc. I wonder if there is some message hidden here (probably just a coincidence).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
it's a story about a flawed voting system and the lead character's named 'chad' ...
This is where participants in international intrigue are meeting these days to exchange secrets: exotic locales like the Hard Rock Cafe?
I miss the Cold War...
Read my blog.