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Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested In India
whatajoke writes "Hari Prasad, a security researcher in India who had demonstrated the vulnerability of electronic voting machines used in all elections in India, was arrested by the police on charges of stealing an electronic voting machine. The election commission of India has maintained that EVM are non-hackable. The election commission had previously provided access to the device to the security researchers for a day and asked for a hack in only that time."
According to http://www.indiaevm.org/, the voting machine studied was "provided by an anonymous source". So it may have been stolen, though apparently by someone else. He might be guilty of something, but it would be receiving stolen property, not theft. Or maybe the source had legitimate access to the machine. It is also not clear whether the machine was returned.
Not smoking... Ice cream brain freeze, wrong thread..
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
"The arrest was made on the flimsy charge of 'theft of EVM' used for vulnerability demonstration by Hari Prasad and a team of security researchers that included Alex Halderman, professor of computer science, University of Michigan and Rop Gonggrijp, a security researcher from Netherlands along with a team of their colleagues".
For more info see http://www.youtube.com/user/ropgonggrijp
Hack-tic times.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
No. You can't rape a machine. You can definitely steal one.
</BSGreference>
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
Yeah, or maybe he really stole a voting machine.
The article says it was given to a group of researchers for a day, who found nasty defects
and the politicians did not like that. Nothing suggests the machine was not
returned after a day. Retroactively the grant of the machine is now
considered theft. One suspects the intent is to discredit the research.
The answer to your question lies on page two of your own link.
http://www.indiaevm.org/qa.html
Q: How did you get the EVM you studied?
A: It was provided by a source who has asked to remain anonymous.
My point was that he had been charged with theft for refusing to reveal a source.
If you click the link I provided you'll hear an interview with the scientist in question, by telephone, after his arrest.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I salute your logic dude :)
>> 1) you cannot double-check the vote, thus cheating is easy, even if you have secure machines.
Yes, you can double check. Infact check it thrice, four times, N times...
>> 2) a lot of people in India don't know how to read, and simple tasks like voting with a computer is impossible for them.
People don't read, they do see party symbols, and they press the vote for the symbols. And surprise - surprise, statistically it is the illiterates who vote the most. The middle class and the rich prefer to enjoy the holiday.
>> 3) machines need electricity. In India, there can be an outage at any time of the day.
There is something called a battery. Every machine has that :)
I'm a professor at the University of Michigan, and I coauthored the voting study at issue with Hari Prasad. I've posted part of a phone call with Hari while he was in the police car, along with more details about the arrest.
No, the legal theory of "innocent until proven guilty" stems from ancient (pre-Roman) times, and is in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 11).
If you're interested http://www.talkleft.com/story/2003/01/12/153/23800
ps I'm Dutch ; ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"