A noble sentiment, I admit. And completely understandable if you're anywhere near as human as the rest of us. But I'd like you to consider, just for a moment, that the sentiment might be ill founded.
You may be advocating this reasonable course-of-action out of a genetic predisposition, you know, the one Darwin described as "Survival of the Fittest." In a nutshell, creatures who look out for their own genes first and foremost are more likely to survive than those who don't. It's clearly a clever system which has evolved, and seems to have done a wonderful job of getting us from the primordial soup to walking erect in but a few billion years. Quite an accomplishment, if you ask me, and nothing to be disrespected. It might even turn out to be correct, or perhaps even the only way to ensure life always has a recovery path over the long term. You never can tell when some lunatic might start tossing nukes around.
On the other hand, consider how far that singular species we call Homo Sapient has progressed in the evolutionary instant of but forty thousand years. We appear to have traveled the road of civility from rudimentary compassion to interstellar space flight in less than a tenth of one percent of the roughly 700 million years the dinosaurs had to work with, and they never even got to EDLIN.
I submit this is not the result of mere better genes.
I submit that the thing which sets our species apart from others is that we exhibit a strangely counter-intuitive tendency to, just occasionally, put other people's genes ahead of our own. Compassion. Civility.
I submit as incontrovertible that the benefit to each individual's own genes from an act of selflessness far outweighs cost, averaged long term and species-wide of that selflessness.
And I predict that if we as a civilized species don't start making an effort to identify and marginalize uncivilized individuals, we may soon find those uncivilized individuals marginalizing us, only then to be marginalized themselves into extinction by other species better suited genetically to survival in an uncivilized world.
You and I may worry about terrorists, but all of us including the terrorists need to worry about drug resistant super germs.
After all, uncivilized species have already proven they can survive over the long term, and they have time on their side. We're the ones who only (evolution-wise) just showed up.
Yeah, it sucks to be the one who has to take the bullet, and more so to be the one resigning one's own family to the same fate. But it sure was nice to enjoy air conditioning, and clean water, and penicillin, and tacos hot out of the microwave. And personally I'm just tickeled pink to have been alive the day that particular interstellar traveller was lit.
And when you think about it, it's a small price to pay for a chance to avoid the alternative; resigning humanity back to the world of slavery, untreatable disease, constant famine, and the daily battle for chance just to pass on one's own genes.
I can't knock anyones gut feeling of loyalty toward their own family. We're all only human. But I wish people would consider how many other people have been loyal to their family through the years. People who perhaps don't share their genes, or their religion, or their culture, language, ethnic background, political affiliation, skin color, country of origin, music preference, favorite Nascar driver, etc.
Insurance Company? What a fascinating concept. Funny you should pick that one.
Tell me, what happens to a man's fear when he dies? Does it live forever, or does he get to take it with him?
In the US, citizens have a right to privacy provided by the fourth amendment to the constitution. The government can't just enter our house, open our mail, get a copy of our medical records, or review our tax records. They have to have a reason to do so; a constitutionally valid reason. The only reason the FBI can go through your tax records is in the investigation of a crime.
Whoa! Wait a second there, pardner. I think you're confusing the world that should exist with the one which does. Go re-read the original article.
We agree (I hope) the Fourth says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." and I certainly agree that the government should be restricted in this fashion. But I think you missed the point, anyway. As the saying goes, you can't prove a negative. You cannot provide evidence to support an assertion that "The FBI can't just willy-nilly go requesting tax records from the IRS -- they have to have a warrant to do so." (emphasis added) Substitute shouldn't and we agree, but now we're talking about the world we want, rather than the world we have.
If it ever went to court, there would be a decision and one party would have to take orders from the other.
It wouldn't "go to court". If there's a dispute between a party representing the IRS and a party representing the FBI, it would eventually be escalated to Paulson and Gonzalez, respectively. If they absolutely couldn't work it out among themselves, they are both legally answerable to Bush who (after clearing things through Rove) would lay down the law. No appeal allowed.
...constitution never mentions "separation of powers"...
It also never mentions elephants, so I guess there aren't any of those, either. Or were you using "separation of powers" in the sense that we're protected under the doctrine of "separation of powers" because Buse can't give orders to Paulson at the same time he's giving orders to Gonzalez, so his power is necessarily seperated...
They should be free to request anything be turned over that they wish, just as you or I can.
Say, that's a mighty fine/. account you have there. Mighty fine. Why, I'd just be downright sick if anything bad happened to mine. Not that anything is likely to happen, or anything, mind you. Just that it could, and wouldn't it be a shame, when everyone knows that these kinds of problems can be avoided completely by just slipping a few mod points to an especially insightful post now and then...
The FBI can't just willy-nilly go requesting tax records from the IRS -- they have to have a warrant to do so.
I don't suppose you'd care to offer some evidence to support this negative assertion?
Though people often complain that this is bureaucratic waste and government inefficiency, this actually protects your rights because it is separation of powers.
Unfortunately, no. Both the FBI and the Treasury are Executive branch organizations; there's no Constitutional Separation of Powers involved.
...FBI agents failing to keep track of which agents have which guns and make sure they return them when they leave the agency.
Certainly the abuses coming to light today are in-line with the abuses critics predicted when the program was first announced. But consider; if the critics could predict it, why not the supporters?
You're thinking along the lines of agents were supposed to keep records, but they didn't always. Big deal. Agents we're supposed to never use the info for personal or political gain, and those restrictions were not always adhered to, big deal.
What if we thought along the line of We'll tell agents to keep records, but you know they won't always do so. We'll tell agents to never use the info for personal or political gain, but you know they won't always care, or even know, whether they stand to gain personally or not. Then, once the infrastructure is in place, it becomes trivial to utilize these not supposed to exist back doors to get whatever we need. If word gets out, the perp has plenty of...just following orders, Sir... cover, and we can immediately blame all the problems on the implementation while backpedaling away from the design at full speed.
So perhaps a more apt example might be one like "Yes Sir, I forgot to record that we issued that gun to former agent Bates, and I also forgot to ensure he returned the said weapon when he resigned his position in order to spend more time with his soon to be ex-wife, but I had no way of knowing he was planning to shoot her. By the way, how did you trace that gun back to him? I could have sworn I also wrote down the serial number wrong..."
What the FBI didn't do, that they should have, was properly account for the letters they did use, specifically, properly count the number used, and properly follow up with the recipients of the letters.
If they didn't properly count the numbers, how do we know how many "recipients" they were obligated to "follow up with", let alone whether they followed-up properly? And perhaps you'd explain your theory of how one properly "follows-up" on an illegal release of information? I'm sure the MPAA would be interested in any technology you might have which could "properly follow up" an illegally distributed pre-release movie back into it's proper genie bottle.
Completely hypothetical, of course, but if it turned-out that some of the personal information released related to John Kerry's 2004 election bid; information which could reasonably have made the difference between his election or Bush's, how would you propose to rectify such a situation?
The reason it is not being renewed is because it is not needed anymore.
Riiight!. So let me get this straight....The reason we haven't had any terrorist attacks since 9/11 is because of Bush's illegal spying, which was necessary to keep us all safe. But now that it looks like he might actually be held accountable for those illegal acts, it's suddenly no longer necessary for Bush to conduct illegal spying just to keep us safe.
Either Bush was right, and we're about to see a huge upswing in successful terrorists attacks (or at least unsuccessful ones that manage to see daylight) because Bush can no longer spy on people and foil the plots before anyone even hears about them, or we'll go on seeing about the same level of terrorist activity (what color are we at now?) as we were before and would have been if Bush had been playing by the rules all along.
If they can claim a lack of terrorist attacks then as proof that the program was working, then we can use the same fallacy now to prove it was never necessary in the first place.
...given that the voting machines are not networked...
This statement is unsubstantiated, and should be retracted.
Every system which is capable of being reprogrammed is 'networked'. The network may be sneakernet, but it is networked none the less.
Many electronic voting machines do have modems or other network cards for reporting or maintenance purposes. Those which do not generally receive updates and programming through smart cards, which are as capable of bearing malicious content as any other data transfer medium.
I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work.
You are as welcome as anyone to propose a system, and suggestions of one which might work would be appreciated. But before you make such a suggestion, please assess whether the system you have in mind considers the following:
A voting system, as generally envisioned, is resilient against vote selling, wherein a voter exchanges his vote for benefit. A even an open-voting system must be closed enough to prevent a person from being able to prove his own vote was counted for the correct candidate. Note that this is different than being able to know that one's own vote was counted for the correct candidate.
There is also a difference between having a voter-verified paper trail and actually counting based on it. If the physical ballots are never counted, it doesn't matter whether the electronic count matches. And if one can predict or control which paper ballots will never be counted, the fact they exist matters little. This is why even having an (electronic) count other than the physical ballots makes those ballots practically useless.
So while I'd love to criticize your suggestion for a better voting system, I fear you haven't defined it well enough for me to criticise yet.
If you feel motivated, read through Ron Rivest's (the "R" of the RSA "public key cryptography" team) ThreeVote system, paying special attention to the kinds of threats he admits it would be vulnerable to. He has eliminated problems like making sure the machine is running a trustable binary and is instead worried that someone might be able to rig a dozen or so votes statistically by buying several thousand.
This is one case where the proper implimentation of something like TPM might actually be a GOOD thing.
So if we had such a Trusted Platform Module based system, how would you respond to a successful Karnak attack? Could you respond? Could you even detect one?
Does anybody have a torrent, or at least asn assessment from somebody qualified to be frightened by looking at it?
Let's just suppose, hypothetically like, that I...um....have a friend who has access to the current source stream for all Diebold software, and has no problems with peeking at (or more), and is extremely well qualified to understand it (let's just say, again, hypothetically like, that he was the key architect for the system, and wrote most of the code himself), and is much more interested in seeing his own vote counted correctly than in seeing Diebold or any politically motivated individual rig the election. Let's also assume, hypothetically like, that while completely reliable, he's one of the tin-foil hat crew who is already convinced that someone is trying to rig the election through rigging voting machine software. More to the point, let's assume that preusing Diebold source code is this dude's full-time job, and if he wants to stay late reviewing code, his employer pays him time and a half.
How would you suggest my friend go about making sure that the software running on the box he uses to cast his vote is the same one he just finished building at Diebold? Let's assume he knows what version is current, what patches are appropriate, and what every last function in the source does, and he's verified it's all clean. He knows an unrigged machine will display buildID 8675309, but he also knows how easy it would be to make a rigged machine display that as well.
If you were "my friend", how would you?
If the software running on the box were "open source" by law, it might solve the problem of clueless coders, and it might allow us to catch the unscrupulous ones, but it wouldn't allow us to address the fundamental problem of having to trust the machine count.
In this application, having the source code buys you nothing, whether you're allowed to have it or not.
I never said part of the system wasn't a paper audit trail.
The system either includes a component providing physical evidence of voter intent, or it doesn't.
If it doesn't, my argument above is unaffected.
If it does, but that evidence is not what's actually counted, then having it makes no difference.
If the evidence is only checked when a discrepency (with the digital count) is detected, then the 'how to rig the digital count' problem increases in difficulty. It now becomes a 'how to rig the digital discrepency flag while rigging the digital count' problem. If one has the capability to rig the latter, the ability to rig the former is practically a given.
If the system includes a 'spot check' component, difficulty increases still more. One must then also:
have the ability to predict which portion of the digital count and associated physical evidence component will be selected as a check, and rig with this in mind, or
have the ability to control which portion of the digital count and associated physical evidence component will be selected as a check, and rig with this in mind, or
accept the fact that a risk exists, and plan to blame it on 'cosmic rays' or some other plausible computer failure. Plan to rig the election such that even if the rigged-gain from one compromised machine do not materialize, the election can still be successfully rigged.
If you're going to have a 'paper trail', then all you've accomplished with tamper evident seals, self-destruct ROMs and strong cryptography is to create an complex, expensive, and error-prone electronic pencil. Worse still, any disgruntled voter can exercise a veto (over the digital count) and force a hand recount of the physical evidence by an act as simple as breaking the tamper seal.
If you are trying to increase security, trust is your enemy. Every component you are forced to "trust" is a component through which your security can be compromised. Do we trust the manufacturer to create self-destruct ROM's that really self-destruct? Do we trust the technician to not give-out cryptographic keys? Etc, etc.
A paper and pen system is designed to function independent of trust. You don't need to 'trust' that the paper and ink won't somehow conspire to elect the wrong candidate. You don't need to trust that the ballot box starts empty (check for yourself) or that it won't magically manufacture extra ballots, re-write ones present within it, leak information to an external receiver before the election closes, or fail to give-up selected ballots once the balloting completes. You don't have to trust the ballot counters, you can watch them yourself, or even volunteer to be a ballot counter under the watchful eyes of others.
Better yet, you don't have to be distracted trying to verify source code, you can instead focus on important things, like the issues, for example.
Is requiring a smaller number of volunteers one of the requirements for a "better" voting system? Can you support the assertion that the number of volunteers required for the voting system is inversely proportional to success (in a "better than" sense) of the voting system? Can you even support the assertion that an electronic voting system requires less volunteers?
It provides a simpler framework for issuing directions in multiple languages.
Again, is that a requirement for a "better" voting system? Can you support the assertion? In many places where language barriers make voting problematic, the solution is to have a candidate represented not only by a "letters in a given language" representation, but also by a language agnostic icon (Think an elephant, or a donkey). How is this simpler to implement electronically than through paper?
It prevents voters from selecting multiple options and can warn them if they forget to vote on an issue.
Pre-cast verification (electronic, mechanical, or whatever) can provide this same check, if one is willing to accept the problems such a system introduces in exchange for the service provided. And it is fully compatible with any "pen and paper" voting system. The best you can do here is a "just as good" trade-off.
It makes auditing easier and more likely. Recounts with a pen/paper system require a lot of volunteers to sit in an uncomfortable room for many hours. Voting officials would be more likely to order a random recount if it can be done by a couple of guys feeding a machine for two hours.
We have yet to establish that a recount could be "...done by a couple of guys feeding a machine..." If a compromised machine rigged the original count, the re-count would be rigged as well. How exactly would one "audit" the result of an electronic count without a physical record (paper ballot) as a check. And once we've decided to have the physical ballot as well, why wouldn't one count it?
Long term, it can reduce costs. Grassroots initiatives are currently very expensive and may have to pay their own way to get on a ballot.
Defend (with evidence) the assertion that adding a 'grassroots' candidate to an electronic ballot is less expensive than adding one to a paper-ballot based system. Then, defend the assertion that significantly reducing the cost would result in a 'better' election.
Once a decent electronic voting framework is the norm in the industrialized countries it becomes easier to deploy to in the war-torn regions where a large, reliable, and incorrupt volunteer force is not available.
A paper-and-ink protocol does not depend on a volunteer force which is any of large, reliable, or incorrupt.
Counting all that by hand would be an enormously complex task.
I have yet to hear a single, rational argument supporting the position that hand-counting the ballots from any election of any size and complexity would be more complex than the hand-casting process which produced the ballots to be counted.
If we can cast an arbitrary number of ballots by hand on a given day, there's no reason why they cannot also be counted by hand in the same timeframe.
The entire system design, software and hardware components can be open.
There exists no digital system for which linear behavior is guaranteed.
We can rant all night about the protections we might add to ensure such a system is 'secure', and all we're really doing is making it eaiser for a vote-rigger to convince people the vote wasn't rigged once he's found a way to do it.
When you put it alltogether, the average cost for a voter to vote in person is somewhere between $7-$12/voter. If they did it by mail, that cost goes down to $3/voter.
But if we count the votes by sniffing farts, we could get the cost down to practically nothing.
What the hell does the cost of counting the votes have to do with ensuring continuity of democracy? Are we really willing to toss out our liberties for the cost of a good porn magazine?
Assuming MS is unethical now and forever, because once upon a time several years ago they abused a monopoly, doesn't give the impression that you're thinking critically about this.
Suppose, for example, that at one time I gained a large sum of money through addimittedly immoral means, but now I live a life of perfect morality, existing solely on the interest earned from the ill-gotten funds. Would one consider me to be a moral person?
If so, then one would subscribe to the philosophy that immorality does not exists unless you get caught. The alternative view would require one who profits through immoral action to be tainted until fully repented. This is exactly the view represented in a statement like "MS is unethical now and forever, because once upon a time several years ago they abused a monopoly"
Unless one would be arguing that MS has fully repented for the abusive actions which occured. (Not just the ones for which they were convicted.)
...I'd love to spend the next decade working on moving these issues up the political agenda.
Hopefully, that would give you plenty to be proud-of when you turn 70(ish). As a 40-something, I'd love to join you for the next 30 years, so I'd have something similar to be proud-of.
But let's be serious. I plan to spend the next 30 years continuing to work my butt off to pay for ever-expanding Social Security entitlements (which I'll never see), covering my own skyrocketing healthcare costs, trying to educate my own kids without help from the "metal detectors and cops" public schools and my "No child left behind" personal entitlement of $37.22 per child, and paying off the massive debt Bush & Buddies have run up prosecuting his own personal war, and fixing all the other things you Boomers broke during your fun-loving sex, drugs, and rock&roll youth.
I'd love to help, but I'm just a little bit busy right now. You'll just have to handle this yourself.
But do tell me which of your retirement homes you'll be having your 70th birthday party at, and I'll try to make the party.
"Quit your job" is not what I would call a realistic solution...
Well. okay. That's a fair reply.
There's a lot to be said for someone who is, essentially, looking for a way to keep doing things the non-Windows-way in a Windows-only environment. If the company has a survival path, it will be through people like these who have the vision to see beyond the dogma.
That said, I don't hold out much hope for that company, nor can I offer any relevant Windows solution, not having much experience working under such constraints.
And faced with having no helpful comment to add, I always fall back to a quick snide remark.
A company that mandates the use of a certain solution invariably develops an inability to address that segment of their market which exists outside of the dependency on that solution.
For example, a shipbuilder who mandates all hulls it builds to be sealed with a certain type of caulk will be unable to address the market for hulls built with a different kind of caulk.
In this example, to the extent that your company will be using Windows as its exclusive solution for whatever it is you are required to do, the company will be unable to access solutions outside of the Windows-centric method for doing this. If a better (or more appropriate) non-Windows solution becomes available, that solution will not exists within the 'toolbox' of solutions available to your company, placing it at a competitive disadvantage.
This 'one solution' strategy does have it's place, for example, if the only market for your solutions is among a customer base which exclusively demands those solutions. An example of this might be an electronics manufacturer demanding that all circuit pack manufacturing processes use CFC-free solvents in a market where legal requirements or market conditions specify this.
Such might be the case here if your company is developing a Windows-exclusive product or service for a Windows-exclusive market. However, I'd argue it's inappropriate here due to Microsoft's extensive dominance of their market. Essentially any Windows-exclusive solution eventually becomes a part of Windows itself, unless blocked by legal restraints (think: Quicken in money management) or abnormal market dynamics (think Symantic in anti-virus software). You company would be destined do be bought-out by Microsoft, on Microsoft's terms.
...Yahoo is well within their rights to block anything they want to from going through their IM service...
True. But then again, so is Google.
In response to this, I invite people to visit my Sourceforge RaidIM project, which sends every message through multiple IM systems, and does error correction in messages based on the combination of the resulting messages.
Any other taking of freedom would be done by lawmakers, courts, officers of the law, intelligence agents, and so on, aided by media frenzy and scaremongers. They can threaten your freedom. Terrorists cannot.
Forgive me for being pedantic, but in times like these, clarity is essential.
Substitute liberty for freedom and I'm with you 100%.
Any other taking of liberty would be done by lawmakers, courts, officers of the law, intelligence agents, and so on, aided by media frenzy and scaremongers. They can threaten your liberty. Terrorists cannot.
...this power is derived from Article II of the Constitution...
So, what you're saying is that if we don't like this, it can't just be overruled by one branch of the government, instead it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself?
Funny, I thought we already did that back around Amendment Four?
It sure would make things easier if we could all just pick and choose the laws we wish to be governed by, and ignore the inconvenient ones altogether. But then again, we can't all be President, now can we?
Despite the -1 Troll moderation on the parent, there is a point here many overlook.
But if one is voting one should at least pay some attention to the issues.
What's wrong (in theory, at least) with having a democracy where the voters make awful choices?
Democracy is not a guarantee that the public policy selected will be good, only that it will be what the people asked for. The statement "In America, we get exactly the government we deserve" could be read as a cynical comment, or as proof that a democracy still exists.
No one should believe that democracy is the do-all and end-all of political organization, it's simply state-of-the-art in current technology, and better then anything else invented thus far.
So far it doesn't seem any of the alternatives measure up.
That's a hard standard to beat. However, there's an interesting proposal from Ron Rivest (the 'R' in RSA) called Three Vote [PDF] you might be interested in. It proposes a system whereby each voter gets to keep a copy (receipt) of the vote he cast, but can't use the receipt to prove how he voted and every ballot cast is essentially 'put on a bulletin board' for public verification. An interesting system, which can be implemented using existing voting technology.
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A noble sentiment, I admit. And completely understandable if you're anywhere near as human as the rest of us. But I'd like you to consider, just for a moment, that the sentiment might be ill founded.
You may be advocating this reasonable course-of-action out of a genetic predisposition, you know, the one Darwin described as "Survival of the Fittest." In a nutshell, creatures who look out for their own genes first and foremost are more likely to survive than those who don't. It's clearly a clever system which has evolved, and seems to have done a wonderful job of getting us from the primordial soup to walking erect in but a few billion years. Quite an accomplishment, if you ask me, and nothing to be disrespected. It might even turn out to be correct, or perhaps even the only way to ensure life always has a recovery path over the long term. You never can tell when some lunatic might start tossing nukes around.
On the other hand, consider how far that singular species we call Homo Sapient has progressed in the evolutionary instant of but forty thousand years. We appear to have traveled the road of civility from rudimentary compassion to interstellar space flight in less than a tenth of one percent of the roughly 700 million years the dinosaurs had to work with, and they never even got to EDLIN.
I submit this is not the result of mere better genes. I submit that the thing which sets our species apart from others is that we exhibit a strangely counter-intuitive tendency to, just occasionally, put other people's genes ahead of our own. Compassion. Civility.
I submit as incontrovertible that the benefit to each individual's own genes from an act of selflessness far outweighs cost, averaged long term and species-wide of that selflessness.
And I predict that if we as a civilized species don't start making an effort to identify and marginalize uncivilized individuals, we may soon find those uncivilized individuals marginalizing us, only then to be marginalized themselves into extinction by other species better suited genetically to survival in an uncivilized world.
You and I may worry about terrorists, but all of us including the terrorists need to worry about drug resistant super germs.
After all, uncivilized species have already proven they can survive over the long term, and they have time on their side. We're the ones who only (evolution-wise) just showed up.
Yeah, it sucks to be the one who has to take the bullet, and more so to be the one resigning one's own family to the same fate. But it sure was nice to enjoy air conditioning, and clean water, and penicillin, and tacos hot out of the microwave. And personally I'm just tickeled pink to have been alive the day that particular interstellar traveller was lit.
And when you think about it, it's a small price to pay for a chance to avoid the alternative; resigning humanity back to the world of slavery, untreatable disease, constant famine, and the daily battle for chance just to pass on one's own genes.
I can't knock anyones gut feeling of loyalty toward their own family. We're all only human. But I wish people would consider how many other people have been loyal to their family through the years. People who perhaps don't share their genes, or their religion, or their culture, language, ethnic background, political affiliation, skin color, country of origin, music preference, favorite Nascar driver, etc.
Insurance Company? What a fascinating concept. Funny you should pick that one.
Tell me, what happens to a man's fear when he dies? Does it live forever, or does he get to take it with him?
Whoa! Wait a second there, pardner. I think you're confusing the world that should exist with the one which does. Go re-read the original article.
We agree (I hope) the Fourth says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." and I certainly agree that the government should be restricted in this fashion. But I think you missed the point, anyway. As the saying goes, you can't prove a negative. You cannot provide evidence to support an assertion that "The FBI can't just willy-nilly go requesting tax records from the IRS -- they have to have a warrant to do so." (emphasis added) Substitute shouldn't and we agree, but now we're talking about the world we want, rather than the world we have.
It wouldn't "go to court". If there's a dispute between a party representing the IRS and a party representing the FBI, it would eventually be escalated to Paulson and Gonzalez, respectively. If they absolutely couldn't work it out among themselves, they are both legally answerable to Bush who (after clearing things through Rove) would lay down the law. No appeal allowed.
It also never mentions elephants, so I guess there aren't any of those, either. Or were you using "separation of powers" in the sense that we're protected under the doctrine of "separation of powers" because Buse can't give orders to Paulson at the same time he's giving orders to Gonzalez, so his power is necessarily seperated...
Say, that's a mighty fine /. account you have there. Mighty fine. Why, I'd just be downright sick if anything bad happened to mine. Not that anything is likely to happen, or anything, mind you. Just that it could, and wouldn't it be a shame, when everyone knows that these kinds of problems can be avoided completely by just slipping a few mod points to an especially insightful post now and then...
I don't suppose you'd care to offer some evidence to support this negative assertion?
Unfortunately, no. Both the FBI and the Treasury are Executive branch organizations; there's no Constitutional Separation of Powers involved.
Certainly the abuses coming to light today are in-line with the abuses critics predicted when the program was first announced. But consider; if the critics could predict it, why not the supporters?
You're thinking along the lines of agents were supposed to keep records, but they didn't always. Big deal. Agents we're supposed to never use the info for personal or political gain, and those restrictions were not always adhered to, big deal.
What if we thought along the line of We'll tell agents to keep records, but you know they won't always do so. We'll tell agents to never use the info for personal or political gain, but you know they won't always care, or even know, whether they stand to gain personally or not. Then, once the infrastructure is in place, it becomes trivial to utilize these not supposed to exist back doors to get whatever we need. If word gets out, the perp has plenty of ...just following orders, Sir... cover, and we can immediately blame all the problems on the implementation while backpedaling away from the design at full speed.
So perhaps a more apt example might be one like "Yes Sir, I forgot to record that we issued that gun to former agent Bates, and I also forgot to ensure he returned the said weapon when he resigned his position in order to spend more time with his soon to be ex-wife, but I had no way of knowing he was planning to shoot her. By the way, how did you trace that gun back to him? I could have sworn I also wrote down the serial number wrong..."
If they didn't properly count the numbers, how do we know how many "recipients" they were obligated to "follow up with", let alone whether they followed-up properly? And perhaps you'd explain your theory of how one properly "follows-up" on an illegal release of information? I'm sure the MPAA would be interested in any technology you might have which could "properly follow up" an illegally distributed pre-release movie back into it's proper genie bottle.
Completely hypothetical, of course, but if it turned-out that some of the personal information released related to John Kerry's 2004 election bid; information which could reasonably have made the difference between his election or Bush's, how would you propose to rectify such a situation?
Riiight!. So let me get this straight....The reason we haven't had any terrorist attacks since 9/11 is because of Bush's illegal spying, which was necessary to keep us all safe. But now that it looks like he might actually be held accountable for those illegal acts, it's suddenly no longer necessary for Bush to conduct illegal spying just to keep us safe.
Either Bush was right, and we're about to see a huge upswing in successful terrorists attacks (or at least unsuccessful ones that manage to see daylight) because Bush can no longer spy on people and foil the plots before anyone even hears about them, or we'll go on seeing about the same level of terrorist activity (what color are we at now?) as we were before and would have been if Bush had been playing by the rules all along.
If they can claim a lack of terrorist attacks then as proof that the program was working, then we can use the same fallacy now to prove it was never necessary in the first place.
Ain't payback a bitch?
This statement is unsubstantiated, and should be retracted.
Every system which is capable of being reprogrammed is 'networked'. The network may be sneakernet, but it is networked none the less.
Many electronic voting machines do have modems or other network cards for reporting or maintenance purposes. Those which do not generally receive updates and programming through smart cards, which are as capable of bearing malicious content as any other data transfer medium.
You are as welcome as anyone to propose a system, and suggestions of one which might work would be appreciated. But before you make such a suggestion, please assess whether the system you have in mind considers the following:
So while I'd love to criticize your suggestion for a better voting system, I fear you haven't defined it well enough for me to criticise yet.
If you feel motivated, read through Ron Rivest's (the "R" of the RSA "public key cryptography" team) ThreeVote system, paying special attention to the kinds of threats he admits it would be vulnerable to. He has eliminated problems like making sure the machine is running a trustable binary and is instead worried that someone might be able to rig a dozen or so votes statistically by buying several thousand.
So if we had such a Trusted Platform Module based system, how would you respond to a successful Karnak attack? Could you respond? Could you even detect one?
Let's just suppose, hypothetically like, that I...um....have a friend who has access to the current source stream for all Diebold software, and has no problems with peeking at (or more), and is extremely well qualified to understand it (let's just say, again, hypothetically like, that he was the key architect for the system, and wrote most of the code himself), and is much more interested in seeing his own vote counted correctly than in seeing Diebold or any politically motivated individual rig the election. Let's also assume, hypothetically like, that while completely reliable, he's one of the tin-foil hat crew who is already convinced that someone is trying to rig the election through rigging voting machine software. More to the point, let's assume that preusing Diebold source code is this dude's full-time job, and if he wants to stay late reviewing code, his employer pays him time and a half.
How would you suggest my friend go about making sure that the software running on the box he uses to cast his vote is the same one he just finished building at Diebold? Let's assume he knows what version is current, what patches are appropriate, and what every last function in the source does, and he's verified it's all clean. He knows an unrigged machine will display buildID 8675309, but he also knows how easy it would be to make a rigged machine display that as well.
If you were "my friend", how would you?
If the software running on the box were "open source" by law, it might solve the problem of clueless coders, and it might allow us to catch the unscrupulous ones, but it wouldn't allow us to address the fundamental problem of having to trust the machine count.
In this application, having the source code buys you nothing, whether you're allowed to have it or not.
The system either includes a component providing physical evidence of voter intent, or it doesn't.
If it doesn't, my argument above is unaffected.
If it does, but that evidence is not what's actually counted, then having it makes no difference.
If the evidence is only checked when a discrepency (with the digital count) is detected, then the 'how to rig the digital count' problem increases in difficulty. It now becomes a 'how to rig the digital discrepency flag while rigging the digital count' problem. If one has the capability to rig the latter, the ability to rig the former is practically a given.
If the system includes a 'spot check' component, difficulty increases still more. One must then also:
If you're going to have a 'paper trail', then all you've accomplished with tamper evident seals, self-destruct ROMs and strong cryptography is to create an complex, expensive, and error-prone electronic pencil. Worse still, any disgruntled voter can exercise a veto (over the digital count) and force a hand recount of the physical evidence by an act as simple as breaking the tamper seal.
If you are trying to increase security, trust is your enemy. Every component you are forced to "trust" is a component through which your security can be compromised. Do we trust the manufacturer to create self-destruct ROM's that really self-destruct? Do we trust the technician to not give-out cryptographic keys? Etc, etc.
A paper and pen system is designed to function independent of trust. You don't need to 'trust' that the paper and ink won't somehow conspire to elect the wrong candidate. You don't need to trust that the ballot box starts empty (check for yourself) or that it won't magically manufacture extra ballots, re-write ones present within it, leak information to an external receiver before the election closes, or fail to give-up selected ballots once the balloting completes. You don't have to trust the ballot counters, you can watch them yourself, or even volunteer to be a ballot counter under the watchful eyes of others.
Better yet, you don't have to be distracted trying to verify source code, you can instead focus on important things, like the issues, for example.
Is requiring a smaller number of volunteers one of the requirements for a "better" voting system? Can you support the assertion that the number of volunteers required for the voting system is inversely proportional to success (in a "better than" sense) of the voting system? Can you even support the assertion that an electronic voting system requires less volunteers?
Again, is that a requirement for a "better" voting system? Can you support the assertion? In many places where language barriers make voting problematic, the solution is to have a candidate represented not only by a "letters in a given language" representation, but also by a language agnostic icon (Think an elephant, or a donkey). How is this simpler to implement electronically than through paper?
Pre-cast verification (electronic, mechanical, or whatever) can provide this same check, if one is willing to accept the problems such a system introduces in exchange for the service provided. And it is fully compatible with any "pen and paper" voting system. The best you can do here is a "just as good" trade-off.
We have yet to establish that a recount could be "...done by a couple of guys feeding a machine..." If a compromised machine rigged the original count, the re-count would be rigged as well. How exactly would one "audit" the result of an electronic count without a physical record (paper ballot) as a check. And once we've decided to have the physical ballot as well, why wouldn't one count it?
Defend (with evidence) the assertion that adding a 'grassroots' candidate to an electronic ballot is less expensive than adding one to a paper-ballot based system. Then, defend the assertion that significantly reducing the cost would result in a 'better' election.
A paper-and-ink protocol does not depend on a volunteer force which is any of large, reliable, or incorrupt.
I have yet to hear a single, rational argument supporting the position that hand-counting the ballots from any election of any size and complexity would be more complex than the hand-casting process which produced the ballots to be counted.
If we can cast an arbitrary number of ballots by hand on a given day, there's no reason why they cannot also be counted by hand in the same timeframe.
There exists no digital system for which linear behavior is guaranteed.
We can rant all night about the protections we might add to ensure such a system is 'secure', and all we're really doing is making it eaiser for a vote-rigger to convince people the vote wasn't rigged once he's found a way to do it.
But if we count the votes by sniffing farts, we could get the cost down to practically nothing.
What the hell does the cost of counting the votes have to do with ensuring continuity of democracy? Are we really willing to toss out our liberties for the cost of a good porn magazine?
Have you ever heard the phrase "Fruit of the poisoned tree"?
Suppose, for example, that at one time I gained a large sum of money through addimittedly immoral means, but now I live a life of perfect morality, existing solely on the interest earned from the ill-gotten funds. Would one consider me to be a moral person?
If so, then one would subscribe to the philosophy that immorality does not exists unless you get caught. The alternative view would require one who profits through immoral action to be tainted until fully repented. This is exactly the view represented in a statement like "MS is unethical now and forever, because once upon a time several years ago they abused a monopoly"
Unless one would be arguing that MS has fully repented for the abusive actions which occured. (Not just the ones for which they were convicted.)
Hopefully, that would give you plenty to be proud-of when you turn 70(ish). As a 40-something, I'd love to join you for the next 30 years, so I'd have something similar to be proud-of.
But let's be serious. I plan to spend the next 30 years continuing to work my butt off to pay for ever-expanding Social Security entitlements (which I'll never see), covering my own skyrocketing healthcare costs, trying to educate my own kids without help from the "metal detectors and cops" public schools and my "No child left behind" personal entitlement of $37.22 per child, and paying off the massive debt Bush & Buddies have run up prosecuting his own personal war, and fixing all the other things you Boomers broke during your fun-loving sex, drugs, and rock&roll youth.
I'd love to help, but I'm just a little bit busy right now. You'll just have to handle this yourself.
But do tell me which of your retirement homes you'll be having your 70th birthday party at, and I'll try to make the party.
Yup, call me bitter.
Well. okay. That's a fair reply.
There's a lot to be said for someone who is, essentially, looking for a way to keep doing things the non-Windows-way in a Windows-only environment. If the company has a survival path, it will be through people like these who have the vision to see beyond the dogma.
That said, I don't hold out much hope for that company, nor can I offer any relevant Windows solution, not having much experience working under such constraints.
And faced with having no helpful comment to add, I always fall back to a quick snide remark.
A company that mandates the use of a certain solution invariably develops an inability to address that segment of their market which exists outside of the dependency on that solution.
For example, a shipbuilder who mandates all hulls it builds to be sealed with a certain type of caulk will be unable to address the market for hulls built with a different kind of caulk.
In this example, to the extent that your company will be using Windows as its exclusive solution for whatever it is you are required to do, the company will be unable to access solutions outside of the Windows-centric method for doing this. If a better (or more appropriate) non-Windows solution becomes available, that solution will not exists within the 'toolbox' of solutions available to your company, placing it at a competitive disadvantage.
This 'one solution' strategy does have it's place, for example, if the only market for your solutions is among a customer base which exclusively demands those solutions. An example of this might be an electronics manufacturer demanding that all circuit pack manufacturing processes use CFC-free solvents in a market where legal requirements or market conditions specify this.
Such might be the case here if your company is developing a Windows-exclusive product or service for a Windows-exclusive market. However, I'd argue it's inappropriate here due to Microsoft's extensive dominance of their market. Essentially any Windows-exclusive solution eventually becomes a part of Windows itself, unless blocked by legal restraints (think: Quicken in money management) or abnormal market dynamics (think Symantic in anti-virus software). You company would be destined do be bought-out by Microsoft, on Microsoft's terms.
True. But then again, so is Google.
In response to this, I invite people to visit my Sourceforge RaidIM project, which sends every message through multiple IM systems, and does error correction in messages based on the combination of the resulting messages.
Now in beta...
Forgive me for being pedantic, but in times like these, clarity is essential.
Substitute liberty for freedom and I'm with you 100%.
Any other taking of liberty would be done by lawmakers, courts, officers of the law, intelligence agents, and so on, aided by media frenzy and scaremongers. They can threaten your liberty. Terrorists cannot.
So, what you're saying is that if we don't like this, it can't just be overruled by one branch of the government, instead it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself?
Funny, I thought we already did that back around Amendment Four?
It sure would make things easier if we could all just pick and choose the laws we wish to be governed by, and ignore the inconvenient ones altogether. But then again, we can't all be President, now can we?
What's wrong (in theory, at least) with having a democracy where the voters make awful choices?
Democracy is not a guarantee that the public policy selected will be good, only that it will be what the people asked for. The statement "In America, we get exactly the government we deserve" could be read as a cynical comment, or as proof that a democracy still exists.
No one should believe that democracy is the do-all and end-all of political organization, it's simply state-of-the-art in current technology, and better then anything else invented thus far.
That's a hard standard to beat. However, there's an interesting proposal from Ron Rivest (the 'R' in RSA) called Three Vote [PDF] you might be interested in. It proposes a system whereby each voter gets to keep a copy (receipt) of the vote he cast, but can't use the receipt to prove how he voted and every ballot cast is essentially 'put on a bulletin board' for public verification. An interesting system, which can be implemented using existing voting technology.
Everyone in the world already has an SSN, they just haven't all been notified yet.