South Korea Breaks Filibuster Record Fighting New Surveillance Bill (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Lawmakers in South Korea's National Assembly have broken the global collective filibuster record in its determination to defeat a new anti-terrorism bill which they believe threatens personal privacy for the country's citizens. 38 liberal members of the National Assembly spoke for a total of 193 hours in a collective effort which began on February 23rd and ended today, with the passing of the bill by 160 parliament members, with one 'no' and apparent abstention from the filibusters.

Comments

tldr

[Noah Haders]

An admirable gesture, but the surveillance bill eventually passed near unanimously, 160-1 (every country has a bernie sanders). Also notably, their NSA was caught "packet tapping" on gmail accounts, and has been accused of manipulating the 2012 election. Another reason to not have electronic voting! (there are so many reasons).

Re:tldr

[Noah Haders]

at least paper voting has an auditable "paper trail." also it probably would be done by CIA, not NSA in that case since it's not related to signals intelligence.

Of course in NZ the NSA or similar body interfered in the election as well. A couple days before voting, an anonymous person "leaked" private emails showing the leading candidate had an affair. I wonder who did that?

Re:tldr

[wardrich86]

This is why Voting needs some sort of ID system to allow you to track your vote. Each year a new hash should be given to each person, which should remain valid until a few weeks after the election. You should be able to log in and see that your vote was correctly registered and counted. I'm pretty sure people will be quick to flock to social media if their hash result doesn't match who they voted for.

Re:tldr

[Grishnakh]

That's a good idea, but it needs a tweak. Forget the logging in bit, all the data needs to be made completely public. With a hash, this can be done anonymously easily.

Give everyone a hash when they register to vote. Using voting machines to record the votes and correlate them with the hashes representing each person. Then after the vote, make available for download the entire data dump, showing (in CSV format perhaps) the voter's hash, and his voting choices. Interested voters just need to download the CSV file and search for their hash and verify the votes match what they chose at the voting booth.

Someone who knows a lot about crypto and math might want to correct me here about how to tweak this so that the government can't (intentionally or inadvertently) keep lists of voters' real IDs and their hashes, since this could be made public and peoples' votes therefore made public. I'm guessing there needs to be another step here.

Re:tldr

[Noah Haders]

why don't you just do paper ballots? at my precinct we use a scan tron system. voters fill out a scan tron sheet ("fill in the bubbles with No 2 pencil"). Machine counts it locally and prints out a summary tape. Precinct sends summary tape and all scantron sheets to the state. State adds up the summary sheets and that's the total. Not only are the summary sheets auditable by hand, but even the scantrons can be auditted. 100% transparency, 100% paper trail.

In what way would an electronic voting system be better?

Re:tldr

[avandesande]

Why even have a hash assigned to them? Just give them a receipt when they vote with a hash that doesn't have any personal information on it linking them. Then post results publicly. People can band together and do their own audits.

Re:tldr

[vux984]

An admirable gesture, but the surveillance bill eventually passed near unanimously, 160-1

The South Korean National Assembly has 300 seats, 7 of which are vacant, so 293 votes available I assume.

It was not "uninamous"; in the sense that it had overwhelming support. It had 54%.

The article appears to state that the 38 members who filibustered abstained. I am not sure why they didn't vote no?? I know next to nothing about south korean's political system.

But that's at LEAST 39 against the bill.

And where were the other hundred votes? Did after the long filibuster they all just left? And the government in power (with 157 seats, just whip the party to sit through until it was passed, along with a few independents? of which there are 6)

By the time the vote came to pass was it just the yes-block left in the room, and the 38 guys abstaining?

In any case, framing it as 160-1 is lying with statistics. :)

Re:tldr

[Plus1Entropy]

Of course in NZ the NSA or similar body interfered in the election as well. A couple days before voting, an anonymous person "leaked" private emails showing the leading candidate had an affair.

That's pretty weak as far as "interfering in an election" goes... Operation Ajax on the other hand...

Huh?

[dargaud]

What's the point of talking 193 hours if you are not even going to vote NO but only abstain ?!?

Re:Huh?

[fnj]

A 160-1 ratio makes me think the political parties forbid them from voting no (vote yes and you're not running under that party's banner in the next election cycle).

Well, I guess we found out what these spineless cowardly fakers were made of, eh? In the crunch, only a single one of these 38 losers bothered to vote no. This is just eerily reminiscent of what we are stuck with in the US Senate.

Secret ballot

[gumpish]

This is why Voting needs some sort of ID system to allow you to track your vote. Each year a new hash should be given to each person, which should remain valid until a few weeks after the election. You should be able to log in and see that your vote was correctly registered and counted. I'm pretty sure people will be quick to flock to social media if their hash result doesn't match who they voted for.

But this would break ballot secrecy. If you can prove how you voted then your vote can be bought or coerced.