Argentina Not Only Wants To Bring In E-Voting, It Will Make It Illegal To Check The System For Electoral Fraud

from the this-is-fine dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about Australia's refusal to allow researchers to check e-voting software being used in that country. The situation in Argentina seems to be even worse. Access Now provides the background (original in Spanish):

The ruling party in Argentina is driving the adoption of an electronic voting system for national elections. Despite stern warnings from computer security experts about the dangers of the system, the ruling party is persisting with the project and plans to put it to a vote in Congress in the coming weeks.

Techdirt readers hardly need to be reminded about the deeply-flawed nature of e-voting systems, but there's a useful article on Medium (in Spanish) with plenty of links to hispanophone experts from widely-different backgrounds warning against the move.

Imposing an e-voting system may be foolish, but Argentina's plans manage to magnify that folly many times over. A blog post in Spanish by Javier Smaldone explains why:

The proposal provides for imprisonment (1 to 6 years) for conducting activities that are essential in any audit or independent review of the system.

Thus, it is intended to impose the use of computer system in the casting and counting of votes, and as if it were not already extremely difficult for any citizen to be sure how it works (and it is safe), anyone who tries to find out is punished with imprisonment.

It's one thing to bring in an e-voting system that most experts say is a bad idea in theory. But making it effectively illegal to point out flaws that exist in practice is really asking for trouble. Unless this proposed law is changed to allow independent scrutiny of the systems, Argentina will probably find this out the hard way.

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Filed Under: argentina, e-voting, fraud, security, security by obscurity

White House Going With 'Security By Obscurity' As Excuse For Refusing To Release Healthcare.gov Security Details

from the hackers! dept

These days, in the computer security world, it's pretty well known that if you're relying on security by obscurity, you're not being secure. Somehow that message has not reached the techies working on Healthcare.gov. I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise, given what a disaster the rollout of that site was, but everyone was claiming that the whole thing was under control these days, since real techies had been brought in to fix things. In fact, everyone was so happy with Mikey Dickerson's miraculous saving of the program that the White House set up a special US Digital Service for him to lead, allowing him to save other US government projects from near certain disaster.

But when the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how Healthcare.gov was handing its security it got rejected because, according to the White House, it might teach hackers how to break into the system:

In denying access to the documents, including what's known as a site security plan, Medicare told the AP that disclosing them could violate health-privacy laws because it might give hackers enough information to break into the service.

"We concluded that releasing this information would potentially cause an unwarranted risk to consumers' private information," CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said in a statement.

Of course, that suggests that merely revealing the security steps the site has taken will reveal massive vulnerabilities -- and, as most people with even the slightest bit of technological knowledge know, if that's the case, then it's likely the site has already been compromised. If revealing the security setup for the site will leave it open to being hacked, we should probably assume the site was hacked a long, long time ago. If they're deploying security right, merely telling the world what they're doing wouldn't increase the risk. The fact that they're afraid it will suggests that the security plan is dangerously weak.

Filed Under: foia, healthcare.gov, security, security by obscurity
Companies: associated press

DailyDirt: Processors Without Borders...?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Now that everyone is a bit more concerned about software backdoors that the NSA might have installed everywhere, a nationalistic push towards "home-grown" hardware could pick up a little among various countries around the world. Designing custom processors and software from scratch isn't easy or cheap, but it avoids some of the angles of attack for a security break-in (though it doesn't prevent any of the social engineering tactics). Here are just a few links on processor designs that aren't coming from Intel or AMD.

• The Russian government is reportedly going to rely on computer processors made by Russian companies, instead of Intel or AMD. Three Russian companies are creating "Baikal" processors, based on ARM designs, but it's not exactly clear how much more secure the resulting computers will actually be. (ahem, software? ARM licensing?) [url]
• The Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-2, holds the top spot as the most powerful computer, but it runs on Intel chips, not Loongson processors. China's Loongson processors might not replace Intel or AMD chips in the top supercomputers in the near future, but it could happen sooner than expected. [url]
• OpenSPARC is an open source processor design available for anyone to develop, but it's getting a little stale since the last T2 release in 2008. If you're really paranoid about security, using obscure hardware and software might be make things a bit harder for potential attackers... (did you seriously believe that?) [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: arm, backdoors, baikal processors, loongson, opensparc, processors, security by obscurity, supercomputers, tianhe-2, x86
Companies: amd, intel