The death of my online presence #DEBill #GE2010

It is likely my days are numbered, I will not be with you for much longer, my only hope is you will miss me when I am gone.
My online self is about to die, cut off from the data supply which is as vital to it existing as oxygen is to my real world self.
Firstly all the pubs, cafes and other places I like to frequent will have to stop providing usable WiFi as it will be too much of a business risk.
Then my home connection will be turned off, time will see exploits against even the highest grades of wireless encryption currently in use; so it won't be long before people can download files willy nilly using it and have me cut off when I am accused of "illegal file sharing". This may even become a method of attack against people to deny them service. Even if I then switch to a wired internal network it will be too late.
Finally as far as personal access go I have my dongle. Since sim card cloning has been around for years and over the air attacks on mobile data traffic have been shown in the theoretical space that won't be safe from "technical measures" for long.
To begin with while all this is going on I will have my work internet connection, but how much longer for? Given that the Digital Economy Bill is going to kill off the digital economy in a fruitless attempt to shore up the bad business models of BPI members etc, the company I work for could fail and die and I doubt that I'll have much time on the internet when I try and make a go of being a cook.

What do the outsiders see?

Is it a truism that every organisation needs to examine itself thoroughly from an external point of view from time to time? To not only look for validation of what it is doing (and how and why) but to ensure that the image it is portraying to the general public is the right one.
I am a member of the Open Rights Group and subscribed to their main discussion list. From inside the tent things look good but then I saw something that a friend wrote:

I don't so much mind Andrew Orlowski being a bitter and twisted polemicist, but he could at least get his facts straight.
'The British ORG [Open Rights Group] originally grew out of a campaign against copyright, and a contempt for creators and peformers is what binds it together.'

Erm...no it didn't. This is the original pledge, which mentions nothing about copyright. And, while it's clear the ORG is by no means perfect, I'd certainly not say it had contempt for creators and performers - there are frequent, balanced debates between a bloke who runs his own music company and the rest of the list. Shame, really, as the ORG *does* have a tendency to be a little smug about it's own (eg, the people who post most) and some decent opposition could help keep it on the straight and narrow. What a wasted opportunity. - Catherine

I will admit that last bit struck a chord, I don't know what is being done in ORG's inner circle, but I hope that there is work going on to keep the campaign grounded, relevant and coming across appropriately to the general public. The sort of things I am talking about is sessions working with external perspectives; opposition position work/devils advocate arguments; reviews of media coverage from a neutral point of view and the like.

I would say the same about the other campaigning group I am a member of, CAMRA but that tends to have the opposite problem, there are plenty of differing points of view, so the list of motions at the AGM will always have at least one pair that contradict each other. On the other hand we do manage to run a pretty fine beer festival.

Access to Information

Both the topics I had planned for when I got home tonight were about information

1. What I could and couldn't blog about my time at the moment
2. the Open Rights Group's two year birthday

strangely a third added itself to the list. They are however all are intertwined.
The first is jury duty which is currently breading a post on the inefficiencies of government run organisations.
The second is about an organisation which is trying to bring digital rights and safeguards to the forefront of everyone's mind, especially the governments.
The last is of course the loss of the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25m people.
WORDS FAIL ME
This government tells us we can trust it with all our medical records on a central database, the ID Card and electronic voting. Right now I wouldn't trust them to take a breath out after they have breathed in.

Voting is not the place for blind faith

The title of this post was almost "Elections are not the place for blind faith" but of course they are, the faith that this time your party will overcome the odds to win, or the faith that this time the politicians will be caring, listening people.

What shouldn't be left to faith is the collection and counting of votes and the security around this that ensures that the person voting is entitled to do so, their vote is counted but only once and they can as far as possible avoid being coerced into voting in a manner against their will or for money.

During the electronic voting pilots at the last local elections, I was one of a number of people that formed an independent observation team that then provided our feedback in turn to the Electoral Commission who produced their report in August. The government has just produced it's response to this and the Gould Report on the Scottish election fiasco debacle chaos no sorry, can't come up with a suitable word. The response, in essence says that they appreciate the work everyone has put in but as the government "believes" something different they are going to carry on as they were. This is supported by such flimsy 'self supporting arguments' as "we suggested it was a good idea in another discussion document" in this case The Governance of Britain

The Green Paper supports investigating the modernisation of voting methods, as well as explicitly supporting the continued investigation into the benefits of electronic voting including remote electronic voting.

Never mind the fact that a green paper is the starting point for a consultation, not a set of binding conclusions, "we agree with what we said" is not the most compelling use of logic I have ever seen.

Another article of faith in the response is:

All the pilots supported successful elections. The Government is not aware of any instances of alleged fraud during the elections and does not believe that the pilots increased the risk of electoral fraud.

Again with the belief, the government does not and cannot know but in this case it seems, to believe is good enough. So from now on:

• I believe that my fellow humans are all sufficiently morally decent to never attempt to infiltrate an electronic voting company and make changes inside the black box software that could influence an election.
• I believe that large software companies are sufficiently interested in the public good as opposed to the value of the public contract to have every possible safeguard against rogue employees.
• I believe that there is no-one in the world who would want to pay large amounts of money to anyone who could provide them with an electoral back door

Given my beliefs we are all safe with black box electronic voting.

Further reading on electronic voting security.

Becky Hogge interviewed for Groklaw

Groklaw, which started as really just another blog before it's author, PJ, made it the commentary site for legal issues in the free software world and has for a while now seen it expanding the topics coverage to a wider range of digital rights topics.
Today they publish an interview between Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and Sean Daly about the BBC iPlayer. It has turned out to be a very fair and balanced discussion about the issues involved. Given that it was a transatlantic conversation there are one or two culture translation gems, this being my favourite:

Becky Hogge: ... flagship programs, like Top Gear -- do you know Top Gear?
Sean Daly: Yes, I saw a guy who like drove his car across a lake one time.

Do it right or don't bother

The Electoral Commission's report into the various internet/telephone/advanced voting and electronic counting pilots in the English local government elections has been published and they have concluded that it isn't currently worth the effort.

"we do not see any merit in continuing with small-scale, piecemeal piloting where similar innovations are explored each year without sufficient planning and implementation time, and in the absence of any clear direction, or likelihood of new insights." — Peter Wardle, Electoral Commission chief executive

So the official body for keeping an eye on all things electoral in this country agrees that this set of pilots were rushed, lacked for sound planning and didn't really teach us anything new, especially given that they were the sixth set in seven years.
There were one or two key worries highlighted about security and perception of the possibility for fraud. In Sheffield (the election I was an observer for) the risk management and accreditation document set (RMADS) had no evidence of having been reviewed or approved by the Security Accreditor or indeed having made it beyond the draft stage. There were also concerns that the risk assessment was a standard one for generic web based services and not specifically for an e-voting system.
The lack of observers at the electronic voting count, the sealed envelope nature of the electronic voting, the perceived slight of hand of the electronic votes being added into the totals and the lack of a recount facility were all causes for concern by those involved in the political process and observers alike. It is important to addresses these perceptions even I they are built on a shaky understanding, the concept of a recount for example, given that any system which could give different answers at the end would have to be binned immediately.

"there was insufficient time available to implement and plan the pilots, and the quality assurance and testing was undertaken too late and lacked sufficient depth. The level of implementation and security risk involved was significant and unacceptable." — The Electoral Commission Key issues and conclusions

Other assessments by the Commission are on a very generous basis, the bullet points on encouraging voting and facilitating counting are based on benefits to a very small number of people or by a tiny margin. The really important conclusion that needs to be remembered for when the government are doing their best to ignore this report to go ahead with what they and not the electorate want is this: The pilot scheme had a negligible impact on turnout. There was some controversy in the run up to this set of pilots about how successful previous pilots had been in increasing turnout, so we need to be sure when, in the future, the subject comes up we can point strait at this and tell them they are wrong.
The bottom line of course is that for once a government technology project came in on time, but at a cost. Telephone voting in Sheffield cost £425 for each person and this was after a discount of a third of a million pounds. While this cost would be reduced in a more widespread scheme than this pilot, it does seam an awful lot of money to try out technology that isn't ready yet, doesn't have the support of a good chunk of key stakeholders and reduces the transparency and security of the voting system while making fraud and vote selling easier.
For more information on the electronic voting pilots read the Open Rights Group briefing paper.

Part of a bigger thing

During this years local elections I acted as an observer on behalf of the Open Rights Group. As part of the process of producing the report I have kept my observations under my hat up until now. Well the report has been published and is available to download. As Jason the co-ordinator for our efforts has already conceded, I will happily admit we went into the process with a view. That view was that given all the problems both theoretical and practically demonstrated in other countries, with the safety and security of electronic voting now was not the time to try it out on the British electorate.
The report shows that as foreseen the inadequate planning and preparation lead to many situations where a system designed to prevent human error and provide efficiency gains, in the most part had the opposite effect.
Please, download the report, please, please read it. If you have an opinion on what it says, write your own blog entry, write and article for the magazine or newspaper you contribute to (if it is at all relevant), pen a letter to your MP, MSP or Councillor (the omission of AM is due to as far as I know the Welsh avoiding having to deal with this problem, this time round). What I really don't want is for you to do nothing, if the right to vote, have your vote counted, have your vote kept confidential and the principle that election fixing is a bad thing are all important to you than please keep the word alive that the trials just conducted in e-voting and e-counting were not a success by any measure.
Edit While I have been writing this it has been pointed out that El Reg, The Mail, Press Association, The Grauniad, Channel 4 all have the story, in these days of citizen journalism don't let the old school media keep the lead ;-)