A Preview of New Congress's Tech Policy Agenda

Here is what Cameron Wilson, the USACM Public Policy Director says about what the new Democratic-led Congress will be doing with respect to technology policy. He focuses on six big areas that have been in focus by recent administrations: innovation, offshoring, privacy, copyright, e-voting, and Internet regulation.

Here's what's not on that list. First, biometrics and national IDs. Even with conservatives in the minority, this probably won't go away. It's scary because those things don't actually give us greater security although we might think they will. But my guess is this will continue to be something that's discussed in the name of security. As to Homeland security, I think Democrats will step it up a notch as they're able. (I think a Democratic president or Guiliani or McCain would also do this after '08 though.) I also think that the Dems will put a stop to all of this wiretapping and over-the-top surveillance that's borderline unconstitutional.

As to the six main categories, I can only hope the VVPAT bill goes national so we can make sure that when (not if) e-voting machines fail we have some way of verifying the votes cast. In the globalization arena, yes - we must deal with these visa issues. All of the talk about immigration problems is always about illegals but what about the workers who are skilled who come to this country to take jobs and then can't get them because of visa problems on our end? That's just silly. And yes, education's a factor here - we need to be training more skilled tech workers here, but that's another issue. As to IP, I can only hope the DMCA is reduced to rubble but that may be a pipe dream since so many Hollywood are tied to the Democratic party.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.

A Review of 2006 Online Campaigns

I'm almost done with the political blogging for the week, but I had to examine how candidates online this year. Here are some examples of tight races where I took a look at their online campaigns and projected winners based on their online campaigns (web, blog, & email when relevant). In most cases, the candidate with the better site won but not all.

CA Governor:
Better online campaign - neither (both were bad)
Winner - Arnold Schwarzenegger, http://www.schwarzenegger.com/
(opposing candidate - Phil Angelides, http://www.angelides.com/)

CA Lieutenant Governor:
Better online campaign - John Garamendi, http://www.garamendi.org/
Winner - John Garamendi, http://www.garamendi.org/
(opposing candidate - Tom McClintock, http://www.tommcclintock.net/)

CA Secretary of State:
Better online campaign - Bruce McPherson, http://www.mcpherson2006.com/
Winner - Debra Bowen, http://www.debrabowen.com/

MI Governor:
Better online campaign - TIE (both were good) between Dick DeVos, http://www.devosforgovernor.com/ & Jennifer Granholm, http://www.granholmforgov.com/
Winner - Jennifer Granholm, http://www.granholmforgov.com/

MO Senator:
Better online campaign - Claire McCaskill, http://www.claireonline.com/
Winner - Claire McCaskill, http://www.claireonline.com/
(opposing candidate - Jim Talent, http://www.talentforsenate.com/)

CT Senator:
Better online campaign - Ned Lamont, http://www.nedlamont.com/
Winner - Joe Lieberman, http://www.joe2006.com/

RI Senator:
Better online campaign - Sheldon Whitehouse, http://www.whitehouseforsenate.com/ (by a hair)
Winner - Sheldon Whitehouse, http://www.whitehouseforsenate.com/
(opposing candidate - Lincoln Chafee, http://www.chafeeforsenate.com/)

Overall comments --
One thing I noticed was that in general, more Democrats' sites had blogs. Of course, most of them hadn't been updated in a few days, but at least they had them. I was amazed at how the Michigan governor's race had two sites that looked incredibly similar - but I was impressed that Granholm's site included a Farsi (I'm assuming) translation for the huge Middle Eastern population in the Detroit area, along with Spanish. And I was a bit shocked that a couple of the Republican candidates' sites were so sparse they could've been local city council web sites.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.

Election Results Online

I'm guessing I'm not the only person who's looking online for results, so I found some good ones from political friends... here's where to look (some are election pages within their sites):

National:
CNN
CNN Blog Party
Washington Post
Think Progress

California:
California Secretary of State
Sacramento Bee

Bay Area:
San Francisco Chronicle
San Jose Mercury News
San Mateo County Elections
Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters
Palo Alto Weekly
The Almanac

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Originally posted at the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

Angelides Site Gone - Error Messages Look Fishy

Hmm. Goto angelides.com. See what you find.

As I type this, it's not there. (Although it may be back up again by the time most people read this post.) Went bye-bye at least 2 hours ago when I checked it last.

Three reasons it could go poof:
1) They ran out of money and the ISP pulled the plug (doubtful)
2) They got hacked (possible)
3) The site crashed because of more traffic than expected (most likely)

What's really strange is that the page gives an error with a misspelling, so it's an error that was individually crafted for use on the site, not a generic server error. It says: "Sorry, the requested page was not found. Please try again. Original URI: /" It's not written like a typical error message and they misspelled URL. I don't get it.

I'm not an expert in web programming, but I have to say it looks like from the HTML that this page was deliberately put there and I have to say based on that, I'm leaning toward thinking it was hacked (DOS - Denial Of Service - attack). It just doesn't feel to me like an authentic error page unless someone in the campaign mocked it up on a different machine when the site crashed as a temporary measure.

A few months back, the same thing happened to Lieberman's site and I didn't witness it, but I know he threatened legal action thinking it was a hacker although I assumed at the time it was more likely the server couldn't handle the load. (I also didn't see the site during the outage). In this case, I'm not so sure.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.

E-Voting Dilemma? We Have Two Options Left

It's election time again and electronic voting machines are back on top in the news.  "Hacking Democracy" aired on HBO this week, articles are still surfacing about Maryland's problems with electronic voting machines in their primary, and already a plethora of problem reports from machine pre-tests are rolling in.  If you voted absentee already, you can sigh in relief that you're done.  For everybody else, read on.

In order to make sure this post is taken seriously, here's why I'm qualified to write about this topic:  I've worked in computer and network security for several years, I've written about a wide range of security topics for reputed publications, I have edited three books on computer security, and I'm a member of the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery Public Policy Committee.  I have also worked in the past with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, both of whom have worked closely with the Verified Voting Foundation.

The organizations noted above have worked extremely hard to guarantee a voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) in all future elections.  They succeeded in California but not every state has been so lucky.  And, I might add, here in California the machines we're using are not entirely without bugs, errors, or security concerns.  For example, San Mateo County is using eSlate (by Hart InterCivic) handheld devices not unlike PDAs.  In Calloway County, Kentucky, votes have been switched on straight tickets from all Democrats to all Republicans when the results were sent to the review screen.  This is happening across the country with machines made by all four major e-voting machine companies, flipping both ways.

The way I see it, we only have two options left as voters.

Option 1: If you have a machine that provides the option to verify your vote with a paper audit trail, you can do so at the end of the voting process.  This is the voter's responsibility, not the volunteers at the polls.  And it is still possible that the vote recorded is not the same as the vote printed.  Aside from that, most states do not have adequate processes in place for reporting errors.  Do this at your own risk, but if you decide to use an e-voting machine, please participate in Verified Voting's Election Transparency Project.

Option 2: If you have an electronic voting machine that does not request a paper ballot.  These are real ballots, not provisional ballots.  They will be counted on election day and verified.  It's old tech and it won't work for some people with disabilities, but it's safe and it's proven.  For those of you who are not lucky enough to have real paper ballots available but instead are granted provisional paper ballots only, file a complaint.

I don't think anyone needs to be reminded that our democracy is at stake here.  To see up-to-date results on errors being reported around the country, goto VotersUnite.org.  For more information about the importance of VVPATs or to participate in the Election Transparency Project, check out VerifiedVoting.org.  HBO's documentary, "Hacking Democracy", will be aired again Tuesday morning.

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Originally posted at the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

Blogging 101 for Politicians: Tiptoeing Through the Minefield

Politicians don't do blogs.  Or at least that was what they said in the old days, before the 2004 election cycle.  The reasoning was that blogging was just another way to catch foot-in-mouth disease and find oneself subject to more ridicule.  Still, in 2005, when I participated in a political training program, one of the core messages was "don't write much - especially online".

It took me a while to decide to start blogging for that reason, but eventually I decided that it is more important to me to have free speech and use it to write than to run for office and win.  So if I ever decide to run and I lose because of something dumb I wrote ten years before that gets exploited in the wrong way (like this post, perhaps), that's just too bad.  I think it's sad that candidates feel compelled to hide their opinions for fear of offending voters.  They do it because they don't want their words misused or their ideas misconstrued, but that can also cost them elections.

But let's take a step back and reiterate what Elizabeth Edwards said: "the Internet is the last real democratic institution."  Her point is that the Internet can be like the New Hampshire living room or the local town hall meeting.  It's a place where true constituent communication is achieved one-on-one.  This is why politicians started turning around and saying, "hey, wait a minute - I want a piece of this."  (Okay, so I don't know any who actually used those words, but you get the idea.)

Here's today's history lesson.  Everybody remembers that Howard Dean came along and raised a zillion dollars online for his campaign, but what many don't remember is that just as he was becoming the flavor of the month for the Democrats, Gary Hart snuck in under their radar and launched what Wired News and 'political analysts' called the "first true weblog to be put up by a politician," meaning that he wrote his own posts and the comments were left open.  By doing that, he broke new ground.

Senator Hart was considering an official run but had a small, mostly online grassroots "testing the waters" campaign going and I ended-up running the Internet part of the organization.  That's a story in itself, but the truth is that selling the idea of a blog to him wasn't actually that difficult.  He's the kind of person who thrives on communicating with the people and does it through a variety of vehicles even now, including blogging for the Huffington Post.  He's highly intelligent, he understands the "technology revolution" and tends to take more risks than most other politicians due to his experience.  Two other people who were helping me with the campaign thought that a blog would be a good idea, so I gathered all our arguments in favor and pitched it to the would-be candidate.

Running a presidential candidate's blog was a lot of fun.  I heard through the grapevine that it was one of the most popular blogs in the world for a while, so that gives you an idea of how many people were visiting.  There are numerous political sites now that I'm sure get more hits a day than we were back then, but the norm of political sites is still that they are written by political writers, not the candidates.

One of the things that makes blogging difficult for politicians is that it is just another thing for them to do in a day packed with events .  In our case, our candidate found ways to write up posts rapidly while riding in the car or on his computer at night.  We only asked for one every week or two, so we could maintain interest on the site but not overwhelm him.  Being a prolific writer, it was easy.

Other campaigns caught-on and began launching their own blogs, but theirs had other people posting on them beyond just the candidate.  We stayed behind the scenes.  That was the way the people at the top of the organization wanted it.  Had it become a full-blown campaign with an official announcement and the whole works, we would've expanded the blog to more contributors - we already had draft posts in the works at the time.  As the 2004 campaign continued, the candidates kept posting, but less often as election day approached.  Now it's something seen more in smaller campaigns than at the national level.  Look at any Congressional candidate's web site for the 2006 election and you'll see there's not much being written by the candidates themselves.

The thing about tiptoeing around blogging as a politician is that it can be like a mine field: if you step in the wrong place, your whole leg might get blown off.  This isn't really any different than saying something inane to Letterman, but it travels faster.  Most politician-candidates feel that this is not worth the risk, so they leave all of the blogging, commenting, heckling and trashing to those who are pretty much full-time political bloggers.  There are other issues to consider when blogging as a politician, of course, but that's for another day.

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Originally posted at the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

Errors Reported in E-Voting Machines Across the Country

It's started. The reports are coming in - errors in many kinds of electronic voting machines around the country are occurring and they're major. VotersUnite.org has a great Election Problem Log page where they report any problem noted in the media.

Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, California, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Washington, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Nevada have all reported errors so far.

Do what you can - request a paper ballot.

And check out HBO's documentary, "Hacking Democracy" airing Tuesday.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.

No More Rocking The Vote, Just FIX It!

Gene Spafford, computer security expert and co-chair of the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery Public Policy Committee forwarded this article to USACM members (of which I'm one). It pinpoints a company, FixAVote.com, that supposedly offers "election outcome solutions". If you look closely at the site, it is really tough to tell if it's serious or a joke. Take a look - you'll see what I mean.

Avi Rubin and Ed Felten, two other USACM members known for their research on the security of electronic voting machines (see my post, Fixing E-Voting, from a few weeks ago) were interviewed for the Computer World article. Zogby recapped TechDirt's post on the site as well. For those knowledgeable about the issue and the security behind it, it was fairly clear it was a hoax, but it was done so deadpan that a little doubt was left.

Bruce Schneier, another computer security (crypto, for those of you who don't know) expert, a few days ago, confirmed on his site that it is a hoax but everyone I've seen writing about it agrees that it was very well done. It's one of those sites with boring corporate model photo clips (people just a little bit too beautiful, so that tipped me off that the site wasn't for real) and generic consultantspeak that makes you really confused about what they can actually do for you, but the best part is where they name the specific electronic voting machine makers, like Diebold, who they supposedly work with. Great joke.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.