Archive for 'evoting'
Holy Orders
So, yesterday marked the day that the new Blasphemy law came into force in Ireland. It also marked the day when Atheist Ireland published 25 “blasphemous” quotes, in a supposed act of defiance.
Atheist Ireland have gone about it in a very strange way; the url in their blog post is not a hyperlink, and the quotes aren’t simply in their post or on their front page. That’s their prerogative, of course, but I do wonder if it’s a sign of overt caution. Either way, the circus seems to have worked, and CNN and the BBC have both picked it up, among many more.
As a press-stunt, it’s genius. Getting the attention of the international media like that is not easy, and through careful choice of celebrities to quote, and the right tone, Atheist Ireland have pulled off a well-executed PR coup.
But as an act of online advocacy, and of affecting political change, frankly it’s stupid. And I think that Atheist Ireland will have approximately zero success. Such is the magnitude of their “not getting it” that they are probably forever doomed to an existence of committeeism and tokenism in near-equal measure.
Firstly, the action itself is ineffective, it does not – in my opinion – constitute any kind of an offence. Let’s go to the source, the 2009 Defamation Act;
(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if—
(a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and
(b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.
Clearly there is political, scientific and academic value in Atheist Ireland’s statements. If they really wanted to engage in civil disobedience, it would take something akin to cartoons of the prophet, getting it on in a threesome with Buddha and Jesus while being bitten by some vampire Jehova’s Witnesses. That’s what the law was designed to impede. To be clear, I don’t agree with that law, I think freedom of speech is more important than a bizarre right not to be offended, but the law simply isn’t of the nature that Atheist Ireland and others imply.
I’m not sure if it’s willful misrepresentation, but by conveying the impression that the new law is designed to outlaw such trivial, and relatively innocuous, statements of the sort that Atheist Ireland quotes it is only serving to undermine Atheist Ireland’s own credibility. In light of the actual facts, it’s hard to take them seriously on the issue. Sacrificing integrity and accuracy for punchy-PR is never a great idea, long term.
To be fair to Atheist Ireland, they don’t actually claim that their statements are prosecutable, and are making the broader (but again, tokenistic) point that the law is simply silly and unworkable. Great, that’s an important point – but what use is making so much noise about it? This actually entrenches politicians and makes them less and less likely to respond favourably. It’s ironic that this the kind of reactionary “we must be listened to” tokenism that led to the law in the first place.
PR-led advocacy groups, which are really pressure groups almost never work in Ireland. There simply isn’t any political incentive to respond to pressure on these kind of issues. Across all of Ireland there are maybe 200 swing votes on the Blasphemy issue, thinly spread across the constituencies. Elected politicians, rightly, place it very low on the agenda. Going to 2 funerals, fixing some lamps, and changing a speed limit or two will get you as many votes – and in one parish.
Real, successful, advocacy groups don’t look like this. Instead there are small, targeted and strategic efforts. It’s lots of small meetings, tactically-directed briefs and letters and relationship building. The effective groups work somewhat within the system, more quietly, and get a lot more done. Groups like Barnardos get more mileage from lobbying the Department of Finance behind the scenes than they do out of a hundred press releases.
When we were running our campaigns against E-voting, I’m convinced we made ten times as much progress by working quietly behind the scenes than we ever did through PR-based activity. In order to run a successful effort, I think it’s important to keep some basics in mind;
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Think in terms of the people you are trying to influence, and how they perceive it. How do you make your cause be in their interest? What can you do for them?
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If it’s a political change you need, how do you frame the issue in terms of jobs, money or core political ideology (ideally patriotism)? If you need to influence a small number of politicians, how do you make the issue about their legacy?
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If you plan to take your case to the courts, how do you influence the context in which judges rule? How do you develop and frame legal theory, how do you make it such that “your side” seems like the obviously equitable one, to judges and their peer-group. An article in a legal journal espousing your side will go a long way.
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When you do make a press-release or PR effort, consider very carefully the question “How will this actually progress our cause? what are we aiming to achieve here”. Inciting rage, generating “pressure” and elevating one’s personal profile should be non-goals, they aren’t effective. A lot of progress can me made by suppressing your ego and not taking credit; ghost-writing political speeches and news editorials is incredibly common, for example. Have those been considered first?
An effective goals would be “increasing awareness, and converting this into membership and resources”. A clueful organisation ends their campaign with a notice to donate money, rather than to sign a petition. It’s an important dictinction, the money can help make real change, most petitions are ignored.
Bottom line; always judge an advocacy group by the amount of actual progress they make on their issues, not column inches. And if you are an advocacy group, ask at every stage – for every action – “what is the sequence of events I hope to trigger that will actually cause the change I desire?”.
Now, to be more constructive. What would I do? Firstly, I think the priority should be to convert all of the PR into money, and to use that money to fund legal research. Small, but targeted academic briefs – aiming for 3 or more papers a year establishing the jurisprudence of the blasphemy law. The aim would be to establish a credible context in which it showed that the law is out of place, that it doesn’t fit with many of our international treaty commitments and is comparatively regressive.
Next priority would be to start to frame the issue as anti-republican. Ireland is at a very important cross-roads, in the wake of the Ryan and Murphy reports there are calls for more church-state separation. The way to capitalise on this is to make the case for a newly invigorated Republicanism, one of the great Irish political ideals. Republics are supposed to be by and for the people, relatively free of church interference. Our proclamation says;
The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
It’s not that hard to frame the blasphemy law as anti-republican.
With a few short years of that kind of hard work, it would be possible to create a context in which an Irish politician could see it as in their interest, and in the betterment of their legacy, that they bravely spear-head a new Republican ideal.
Backed by research and briefs which will help them not look stupid to their peer-group, or in the face of opposition questions, we can give them the confidence to propose it in the first place. This is what achieving real change looks like; careful groundwork. The system simply isn’t going to respond whining from a marginalised minority group.
The good news is that it’s doable. It took us a long time to get it finished, but a relatively small group of e-voting campaigners finally managed to get a key government policy 100% reversed. And this was in spite of far more political (and real economic) capital having been invested than in the new blasphemy law. There were many many small meetings, letters, briefing documents, ghost-written speeches and editorials, researched papers, legal strategies and only about 2 press releases per year on average – with a cluster around 2004 during the run up to the elections.
To me, based on experience with ICTE and other lobby groups, that’s a lot more like what this kind of successful advocacy looks like. I do hope Atheist Ireland, or another secular-interest group, can find the time and experience to develop these issues properly, but for now it doesn’t seem promising.
Update: Throwing caution to the wind, Atheist Ireland have now made the url I mentioned a hyperlink and published the quotes on their front page. Also, there’s some lively discussion in the comments to this post.
Damovo fail to understand e-voting basics
Unfortunately another IT company has decided to push the e-voting issue again. Damovo have commissioned a survey and are creating the impression that electronic voting would somehow increase turnout. With two features in the Independent and SiliconRepublic.
The articles are simply staggering. By means of a survey, it’s revealed that 44% of the non-voting respondents could not make it to their polling station on polling day. E-voting, it is headlined, is the solution! Well, unfortunately trial after trial has failed to increase voter-turnout consistently. Even in Ireland, when trialled, turnout did not rise with any significance. What about moving the polling day? What about re-examining the postal voting system? What about allowing multiple polling days? The premise that e-voting is the only, or even most effective, solution is flawed.
There are some worrying statements from John McCabe – MD of Damovo Ireland – who says:
“If you can do your tax returns online, why can’t you vote online?”
The simple reason, is that online voting cannot be implemented both anonymously and secure from tampering, they are mutually exclusive requirements. But it doesn’t stop there:
Reminded of the over-the-top controversy around e-voting booths five years ago, McCabe said there are secure technologies available today that would eradicate concerns. “For purpose of identification people could use their biometric passports or use one-off polling cards.”
I’ve read and categorized every single submission to the Commission on Electronic Voting. As far as I’m aware identity fraud was not raised a concern with the e-voting system. It is an unrelated concern. The problem was, is, and will always be the vulnerability to undetectable vote tampering and failures.
Worse still, if we make identity a chief concern, then surely we must rule out all remote voting? The implications of McCabe’s statements are self-contradictory. If McCabe’s statements are a reflection of Damovo’s general competency, I worry for their future.
E-voting round-up
Just in time for Halloween (maybe we should start producing E-voting machine costumes) there are some more significant developments on the Electronic Voting front.
E-voting abandoned – in part – in the Netherlands
Firstly, in the Netherlands and mirroring what happened in Ireland 2 years ago, E-voting has been abandoned in 35 districts (including Amsterdam) just 3 weeks before the general election administrators are now looking for ballot boxes.
The machines in question this time are SDU machines which are generally considered more modern than the Nedap machines, and are used in about 10% of the Netherlands. Although the Dutch anti e-voting group have still not managed to get their hands on an SDU machine their concerns triggered some additional testing which revealed that the SDU machines are vulnerable to same electronic eavesdropping problems they demonstrated with the Nedap machines.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Nedap machines will be used in 3 weeks time, but already there are negative soundings from the ministry concerned and the Dutch group had previously demonstrated that the Nedap machines can be eavesdropped. I share Rop’s belief that it is only a matter of time.
Joe McCarthy wins FoI appeals, but new concerns raised
A few weeks ago I met Joe on Grafton St. and he relayed the great news that after over 3 years, he has finally suceeded in getting access to some more of the material he requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Previously the Department of the Environment have appealed these requests on the basis that it is commercially sensitive; in order words that it would harm the business of the vendors.
Having seemingly prevailed against that spurious challenge, it now emerges that a new argument is being made; that the release of the material would facilitate the commissioning of an offence. Hacking e-voting machines is an offence in Ireland, and now that the Dutch group have demonstrated that it is possible, the Information Commissioner may take the view that further releases of information could further facilitate offence.
You can read Joe’s mail and the ensuing discussion. One excerpt from the investigators letter which I thought was particularly interesting is;
You may argue that the recent hacking of the voting machines in Holland means that the competitive position of Nedap cannot be further prejudiced through the release of the above records. However, it seems to me that the release of the records would involve the disclosure of information not already in the public domain, which could indeed further prejudice Nedap’s competitive position.
That would seem to be an astonishing revelation; what information could possibly make Nedap’s competitive position even worse?
Joe has also set-up the excellently well-named Fiasco.ie which serves as a source of information Joe has collated in relation to the E-voting and the Poolbeg Incinerator projects. As if all this wasn’t enough, Joe also appeared on Radio 1 yesterday, the stream is here and the relevant discussion is 1 hour in.
Some clarifications
Talking to various journalists over the last week has revealed two common sources of confusion which I thought I would try and lay to rest. Firstly, the exact type of attack which is causing such concern in the Netherlands right now – electronic eavesdropping – does not require physical access to the machines, but is in fact a passive form of attack. The situation is analogous to a glass ballot box which lets you see from a far how someone has voted.
The Irish machines are prone to this exact attack and it is particularly relevant to a Constitutional challenge in Ireland. There are strong precedents for challenges to ballot secrecy in Ireland and the courts have previously found measures which impacted voting-secrecy unconstitutional. Despite the Taoiseach’s rhetoric, no physical access to the voting machine is required for this attack, all that’s needed is a radio receiver, even a short-wave radio will probably do. An aerial is needed, but not a big one, there is no reason all of this could not fit in your pocket.
Although this presents a risk of voter intimidation, that someone might stand in the room and monitor how you vote, that has it’s own risks (the victim may go to the police). There are much more likely and clever forms of attack. During the last general election, I was a spoiled-ballot adjudicator in the Dublin South Central constituency. As we deliberated over various spoiled ballots, it became clear that a disproportionate number of unstamped ballot papers had Sinn Féin as a first preference. Each vote was clearly individually marked, making ballot stuffing an unlikely cause but instead the returning officer suspected that a polling officer had failed to stamp the ballots of likely Sinn Féin voters as they went to vote. An investigation was promised, but I’m not certain if much came of it.
With the Nedap system, a polling officer could similarly monitor the actual preferences of voters, and before the voter had a chance to press the cast vote button the officer could intervene or remove the power from the machine as it is pressed (in which case a vote will not be recorded).
The only realistic way to fix this problem with the Nedap machines would be retrofit a faraday cage (metallic shielding) around all of the components which emit the detectable signals. Not only is this costly, but the the actual buttons that a voter presses may be in this list of components, making it impossible. This is just one of the many reasons it is beyond ludicrous to suggest that these machines will ever be used.
The second item of confusion is surrounding the recommendations of the commission and the costs involved. Following Simon’s post several journalists got in contact with me about these particular things.
The actual recommendations concerning direct hardware modifications are R5, R6, R7, R9 and R10 which are all to be found in part 8 of the Commission on Electronic Voting’s second report. Additionally, part 5.2 (in C10) of that same report asserts that the Nedap system …
is not subject to any meaningful independent audit of its vote recording function. Thus the paper system is superior in this respect.
… which as far as we’re concerned is game over, and implies a change of hardware.
The Register screws the issue, again.
Last week, another bizarre and mis-informed article emerged on E-voting from Thomas C. Greene over at the Register. In that article Thomas linked to his previous articles on the issue but failed to link to one other in that series; Fergal Daly’s rebuttal of nearly every point he made, and Fergal wrote that over 2 years ago. You can read a series of other replies, including mine, in the ICTE thread.
Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis
And lastly, at the end of this week we’ll have the Fianna Fáil party. Between now and the end of the Árd Fheis, a further €16,000 will have been wasted. That the Taoiseach and Minister Roche are behaving irresponsibly on the issue is now clear. As Noel Whelan pointed out in his opinion piece in the Irish Times last Saturday;
Surely if the Taoiseach and his colleagues have learned anything in recent weeks, it is that the public realise that to err is human. The Government should have the decency to admit their error of judgment on electronic voting, apologise for it and trust the voters to be proportionate in their response.
The Árd Fheis is the perfect opportunity for the grass-roots of the party to hold the Taoiseach to account, but I’m betting there won’t be so much as a peep on the issue. As I said to one member of Fianna Fáil;
If the party of which you are member has no mechanism by why which such stark realities can be brought home to policy changes with the minimum of waste, then it’s simply never going to be worth respecting. If a change can’t be effected when you have objective reality on your side, it’s just a no-hoper.
I certainly won’t be holding my breath. I can’t but agree with Noel Whelan’s assessment;
Even though the Cabinet subcommittee has just begun its work, Minister for the Environment Dick Roche was confident on TV3 last weekend that the machines would be used in elections due to be held in 2009. Most voters will see this latest charade for what it is – an attempt to long-ball the ultimate decision to scrap this e-voting proposal well out past the next election in the hope that the current Government won’t be blamed for wasting the money. It won’t work and the Government should cut its political and financial losses now.
The battle against e-voting in Ireland has been won, what this is is about now is finally putting a stop to the senseless waste and beginning to lay some foundations for truly productive electoral reform. What we have right now is stomach-churning politics at its very worst.
E-voting at De Balie and the current Irish situation
This past Wednesday, Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet organised a discussion on E-voting at De Balie in Amsterdam. De Balie is an interesting mix between a nice bar and several rooms and chambers designed for debates and discussions, a cinema and a gallery. They have excellent infrastructure for it, live recordings and streaming, simple projection systems, a good layout. Dublin could definitely do with something like this!
Rop gave a talk on the work that has been done to hack the system in the Netherlands and followed that up with a great demonstration of the hacked machine in action, showing how a vote can be mis-recorded. As if that wasn’t enough, we were also treated to great demonstration of the RF snooping in action, and we able to clearly see the signals associated with certain buttons, it was accurate and clear on telling us how Rop had voted. That’s pretty scary!
After that, I spoke for a little over 20 minutes on E-voting and ICTE in Ireland, my presentation notes are online, and the photoset is here. This was followed by a good and lively panel discussion with a heavy amount of audience participation.
With the very recent news that the Taoiseach and Minister Roche are getting behind E-voting and saying it will be used in 2009, I was asked to give my own analysis of that and what’s going on. My best guess is that not only is this complete and utter nonsense, but that the Taoiseach and Minister know that too. The idea that fixing the system would only cost €500,000 (that estimate is based on the original cost of the software which didn’t work) is just laughable.
Nedap, the machines manufacturers, themselves pointed out that it will be costly to retrofit the e-voting units with the neccessary changes pointed out by the commission (the Government seem to be in complete denial that major hardware changes were recommended, while simultaneously having committed to implementing all of the recommendations of the Commission on Electronic Voting) would cost a lot of money. These changes don’t even cover the central issue – a voter verified audit trail, an issue which the government did not allow the Commission to examine – or defend against the RF snooping attack I saw demonstrated just 2 days ago.
Not only that but the Commission recommended that there be procedural, administrative, training and security changes, all of which will cost money and remain unaccounted for. And even then, we still suspect that the e-voting system is more costly to run on a per-election basis anyway, it requires more staff and all of those storage costs. To actually implement the system would cost tens of millions of euro, and would still not be deserving on any confidence. The Minister and Taoiseach just do not inhabit the real world if they think that’s feasible. Although there is some evidence that some in Fianna Fáil get it.
Rather, what this looks much more like is that Fianna Fáil are just too stubborn to accept their own incompetence on this issue, that they did utterly waste over 50 million euro of taxpayers money, even after having been told the machines were unsuitable , and are desperately trying to neutralise a potential election issue for next year.
Were it not so cynical, this would just be plain laughable. More than anything, I think this shows that now is the time for an Independent Electoral Commission. It just is not appropriate that a single party should play politics so shoddily with such an important issue for democracy. For our part, nearly two years ago I told the Minister that if he tried to bring in E-voting without a VVAT, we will sue the Government. Has that cost been accounted for? With the latest attacks on voting secrecy with the system, our constitutional case only strengthens and other precedents become even more clearly involved.
Right now, the best estimates are that it is costing just under €2,000 a day to store the machines. That’s how much taxpayers money the Minister and Taoiseach are willing to waste purely to remain ignorant of the issues. Were it not so cynical, this would just be plain laughable.
Mirror image
Colin and Noirin have both now got wordpress up and running, so I’ve effectively been shamed into finally updating this with some content. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been finishing my presentation and handouts for ApacheCon EU 2005 and working some more on the Evoting campaign.
The 2-month gap between the deadline for papers and making the actual presentation at ApacheCon is working out rather annoyingly though. Since I wrote the paper, I’ve gone ahead and planned and purchased an entire new ftp.heanet.ie (details soon), so I’ll just have to fill that in when I make the presentation. Suffice it to say that we’re getting some pretty good deals, and the new spec will be fairly impressive.