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1.9 Billion Digits: Brazil's Bid For Biometric Voting
MatthewVD writes "Brazil is on a massive fingerprinting spree, with the goal of collecting biometric information from each of its 190 million citizens and identifying all voters by their biological signatures by 2018. The country already has a fully electronic voting system and now officials are trying to end fraud, which was rampant after the military dictatorship ended. Dissenters complain that recounts could be impossible and this opens the door for new kinds of fraud. Imagine this happening in the U.S."
The article refers to digits as in those things at the ends of our hands, not numeric digits. So, the actual amount of data will be far bigger than 1.9 billion numeric digits. Nothing they can't handle, of course.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It is because of that anonimity requirement.
Anonimity makes it impossible to make a secure (in the mathematical sense) election. The best we can do is to make the flaws hard to exploit, what is a completely diferent problem from securing an ATM.
Rethinking email
Several times? What are they?
When you make your National ID card you must give them (all ten fingers), as well as anytime you renew it, for any reason, be it because it was stolen, because you lost them, or because it's time to renew it, which is once every 10 years (although you usually only discover it's time to renew it when you try to open a bank account and someone tells you your ID is void). The same goes for your passport, which is valid for 5 years, although most people don't have one, so this one is optional.
Don't people refuse to give them, or or use fake fingerprint skins to defeat the system?
Nope. Brazil has no recent history of extensive persecution of minorities, so the huge majority of the population doesn't mind.
Brazil has always seemed to me like the next fascist superpower, going beyond China.
Ah, I don't think so. People here mostly don't care about anything political, at all. And the governing parties, all of them, are corrupt in a purely non-ideological way, interested solely in money above anything and everything else. This isn't the kind of scenario that leads to fascism. Besides, when we had a fascist party, way back, it was as odd in its "fascistness" as anything that happens around here. I remember reading once a text by its founder, I don't remember his name, criticizing then Nazi Germany and fascist Italy for persecuting Jews and foreigners. Go figure...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Brother Jeb Bush, and friends ring a bell?
The debacle of the 2000 Florida election was because of paper ballots. If it was illegitimate (I am taking no position on this regard), then it proves that you don't need an electronic system to steal the election if there is systematic corruption already in place. Having an electronic election doesn't help or hurt election fraud in this case, however it does remove a few hundred (thousand?) people involved in counting/reading ballots, each of whom could be corrupt.
Having an electronic election doesn't help or hurt election fraud in this case, however it does remove a few hundred (thousand?) people involved in counting/reading ballots, each of whom could be corrupt.
It removes many who individually could have only a marginal impact on the results while at the same time increasing the size of the "lottery" - such that it is now:
a) Possible for a single invidiual with the right access to corrupt the entire election
b) Do it with much less chance of getting caught because purging an electronic audit trail is a million times easier than covering up physical ballot stuffing at thousands of polling stations
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
A wise man once said: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
The point of that saying is that governments should be easily overthrown (which is actually the entire point of having elected officials. When they start pulling crap like asking citizens to be fingerprinted, you overthrow the government by electing a brand new one. The newly elected officials would then fear introducing similar legislation and then no longer being re-elected. In practice, the people are far too apathetic for the system to work that well, but as Churchill put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.")
Btw, I, as a brazilian, must say that the quote "Imagine this happening in the US" was VERY offensive to me.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can tell you that Brazilians have an unfortunate tendency to be very easily offended for no reason at all. In fact, the fact that I pointed this out probably offended you.
I grew up here in the US, South Carolina to be exact, and all the statement is accurate. You're just missing some cultural background on the American thought process. People here are, in general, very anti-government. All that was meant is that If the federal government suggested fingerprinting everyone here, there would be a huge backlash. In fact, not too long ago there was a federal law passed (the REAL ID Act that would require state identification cards and driver's licenses to pass certain requirements to function as a federal ID card (we don't have a carteira de identidade as in Brazil, there is no federal ID card). The backlash was such that 25 states have passed some type of legislation vowing to not participate in the program. And they don't even require fingerprints, just full name, signature, date of birth, gender, a unique identification number (which was the cause for most of the backlash), address, and a photograph.
There's a lot of things I don't agree with in American culture (like the general lack of interest and trust in science), but I do wish Brazilians would adopt some of the very, very healthy distrust of government.
Oh, and english is not my native language, but come on, the topic is just wrong: "1.9 billion digits" does not make sense.
It's digits as in "digitais". The population of Brazil is approximately190 million, assuming everyone has 10 fingers (or digits), you arrive at that number.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
What it does, whether actual fraud takes place or not, is to open the door to allegation of fraud that cannot be refuted.
I don't know about your country, in mine, every party that participated in the election has the right to call for a recount (at their expense) and send representatives to supervise that recount. Supervising such a recount is trivial. The skills needed by a superviser include being able to identify where a cross has been made on a slip of paper and being able to count paper slips. The average 6 year old should be able to do that with some certainty.
That's not the case with e-voting. It all starts with being unable to tell whether every vote was counted correctly in the first place. Was every vote placed where the voter made his "cross"? With pen-and-paper elections, you have a physical slip of paper that is tossed into the voting bin by the person who votes. The voter goes into the booth, he makes his cross, he comes back out and he dumps a piece of paper himself into the box, under the eyes of representatives of every participating party. The box has been throughly inspected by them all to make sure it's empty before it was sealed, again with them identifying the seal, and they again are there when that seal is broken and the counting starts. There is simply NO way you could possible remove or add any votes illegally.
Not so with electronic booths. Was the "box" empty? And even if, does the box only count every vote once? It's trivial to multiply datasets, how can I know for sure that the code doesn't do that? I can audit it? Let's assume I cannot, like more than 99% of the people out there. Why should I trust you, auditor? Maybe you're in with them and get a ton of money to shut up about their fraud? And how should I recount? I don't even know if the votes you present to me were real because there is no paper slip being tossed into the box, let alone by the voter himself. Did you make dead people vote? Or how do you explain the suspiciously high voter turnout this time?
The problem isn't fraud alone. It's that you cannot simply debunk allegations of fraud easily. Today, you cry foul? Here's the ballots, you can see where the cross was made, you can count, go ahead and check. Your party member has been there all the time and he saw that our box was legit. It's trivial to check either for any person without handicaps. I'd wager about 99% of the voters could easily recount today and be part of the process that ensures that no fraud can happen.
With electronic voting, more than 99% cannot.
And now convince those 99+% that you have been elected legally when the losing parties cry foul and you cannot prove them wrong without reasonable doubt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1) Here in Brazil, mostly everyone trusts the e-voting systems.
It's much much better than the paper ballots which used to end up in rampant fraud in smaller cities, since corruption is widespread. With the e-voting system, the only possible fraud is if the federal government wants to rig the elections (and does a *very* good job at it) neither the government or the opposing parties consider this an issue so, unless they're all colluding with each other (which would make the elections pointless anyway), I think it's reasonably safe. I actually worked for a year and a half in the IT dept. of the Elections Branch in my state and, with that knowledge, I trust the e-voting system.
2) No one here really cares about providing personal data to third-parties. It's common to have to provide your RG (ID card number) and CPF number (something similar to SSN) at a store, when you're making a regular purchase such as shoes or a t-shirt. When designing any sort of IT system to store clients, etc, the CPF number is usually the natural primary key.
Most people here think it's reasonable to collect fingerprints and no one cares when, for instance, the US consulate collects our fingerprints when we're getting our US Visa. Almost all our government documents (we have several: ID Card, CPF, "Voter's Card", Driver's License, Passport) have tons of personal data and fingerprints. This is a non-issue here.
3) People here care about privacy only inside their homes. For instance, everyone (including me) thinks it's a good idea to install more CCTV cameras in some areas to stop crime. In some places, crime is a much more pressing issue than expectation of privacy in a public place. "Big Brother" reality shows are the top 1 programs on public TV, so I would say the next generation might even not care about privacy in their own homes.
The rest of the world is very different from the US - just keep this in mind.