E-democracy and other forms of corporatism

[Arjen Kamphuis <arjen(at)kmphs.com>]

Dear DD-activists/enthousiasts,

Altough I normally don't read (let alone respond to) the WDDM list I
noticed a CC to me and since I can't sleep I'd like to make two
points on the subject of E-voting and democracy (direct or otherwise).

On E-voting:

There exist no electronic system today that allow truly democratic
elections (transparent process combined with secret ballot for the
voter). The Irish (the people not their government) were wise to drop
the Dutch voting-computers since their internal workings are a trade-
secret of the company who makes them. Having an election on these
kind of systems (which is what the Netherlands will do on 22nd of
nov.) means handing over the control of your election to a handful of
engineers and managers at a commercial company. This negates the very
point of having a democracy; de-concentration of power. As the Dutch
hacker-group showed is is trivially easy to replace the software in
these machines by other software that can create any election outcome
desired by said small group of engineers and managers. If we allow
ten people such power we may as well let them choose a cabinet and
save everyone a lot of time.

It is principally impossible to detect fraud on the current
generation of voting-computers (both the Dutch types and the American
machines). This means that even of foul play is suspected (say a
sudden win for Bush in Ohio in '04) there is no stack of paper
ballots or any other evidence that may be examined by concerned
citizens. This means that whatever the computer says is true is true
by definition. And the computer of course will say whatever it is
programmed to say by the humans programming it.

In almost any other use of a computer there is some way of detecting
structural failure. If a system designing a plane is faulty the
planes will crash an we'll notice. If you bank's computer is faulty
you will notice the money that goes missing eventually. Not so with
voting. There is no 'reality-check' since reality is defined by the
output-data of the computer itself (instead of calculated or
predicted rightly or wrongly). The possibilities for fraud using
voting computers with undocumented inner workings are so great (and
easy) that they make such systems principally unsuitable for truly
democratic elections. Meaning an election were the process is a much
under control of the people as the outcome is. The Netherlands will
have UN election monitors on the ground this month to observe the
process, a treat usually reserved for places like Iraq or Kazakhstan
were democracy is still in its infancy.

E-democracy (voting over the Internet or by other electronic means
such as text-message) is even more troublesome because now we're not
talking about one voting computer but a series of computers that have
to work together. Some of these computers will be owned by the
government (who may or may not actually understand the inner working)
other will be owned by telecom corporations and the end-user computer
(PC or phone) may be owned by the citizen but will at best be only
partially under their control. For the average human a computer is a
near magical device and even beginning to understand them requires
years of intense study and a near-autistic ability to focus on some
obscure technical detail (I speak from experience ;-).

Paper ballot and a pencil on the other hand are reliable, cheap (cost
is half of e-voting in the Netherlands) and understandable by any
citizen old enough to vote without requiring an academic degree in
electronics and software engineering. The only disadvantage of paper
ballots are that they take a little more time and effort to count so
we'll have the election results 24-48 hours later. A price well worth
paying to guarantee the integrity of the process. The point is not
that they cannot be tampered with. They can and the have been. The
point is that large-scale tampering is impossible to hide (we saw
this in Florida in 2000 and more recently in Mexico). Electronic
polling is fine for Idols or other reality TV shows but no way to run
a serious democracy.

Smarter people than me have written much more about this:
www.blackboxvoting.org, if you read Dutch:
www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl


On democracy (I speak about the Netherlands and US, your milage may
vary):

Point is; we don't have any. We have a mediacracy. Through selective
informing of the general public by TV, print media and the
educational system a 'political reality' has been created that has no
relation with observable facts. The voting computers are a case in
point. When our group hacked them the interior minister responded by
removing 10% of them, instantly creating a monopoly for the remaining
company producing the majority of the machines. He further announced
that the elections would be secure because the AIVD (Dutch secret
service - our FBI) would be monitoring the process.

Let me repeat that; The integrity of the Dutch parliamentary election
will be guaranteed by having the secret service monitor the process.
The service reports to a confidential committee of selected MEP's
whose members may not publicly discuss what goes on in their
meetings. There I was naively thinking we had actually won the cold
war. Boy was I wrong!

But here comes the really scary part: not a single member of our
parliament or our media felt it was necessary to ask the minister a
question about this.

The US, UK and Dutch governments are currently run by the same people
who started a military invasion of a sovereign country without UN
mandate and without this country being a threat to them. These people
knowingly and blatantly lied about the reasons and justifications of
this attack (see: www.downingstreetmemo.org). The unprovoked invasion
of Iraq is a war-crime according to the Nuremberg standards. The
400.000-800.000 civilians who have died since march 2003 are victims
of this war-crime. The documents proving all of this have been
publicly available for over 18 month now and yet these war-criminals
are still in power and no serious effort has been made to hold them
responsible in any way. In fact, one of the first things Nancy Pelosi
promised Bush that she would not give any support to impeach him for
starting the Iraq war, lying about WMD's, torturing in secret prisons
or illegally using the security services against US citizens. The US
currently has effectively no civil liberties. The president has the
right to arrest anyone, anywhere, without proof, without formally
accusing this person and imprisoning them indefinitely without access
to legal representation or even the protections of the Geneva
convention. Anywhere in this context means anywhere on the planet, so
yes, that means you. And all of this is probably just the tip of the
iceberg. In Denmark a courageous journalist who published on this may
face time in prison (http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/13/europe/
EU_GEN_Denmark_Iraq_Intelligence.php).

Most of the citizens of the Netherlands have never heard of the
Downingstreet memo's because their media has not told them (clearly)
and because many of them are just no longer 'interested in politics'.
So this month in the Netherlands we will probably re-elect a war-
criminal who actively (militarily) supported a war that has already
killed more people than WW-II did in the Netherlands. And there is no
public debate about this because the media refuse to give it serious
attention and political parties talk only about things that get them
on prime-time (which means they mostly talk about each other).

Forget DD for now. Fight for a government that upholds the basic rule-
of-law. Fight for fact-based policy-making instead of illegal
occupation of other countries. Fight for basic civil liberties such
as the right to demonstrate (you can't in the Netherlands without a
permission that may be refused for any reason). Fight for the right
to study the inner workings of a voting-computer and publish those
studies (already illegal in the US, Eu law on the way). Fight for the
right to not be extradited to the US (a country that admits to
torturing in secret prisons) without proof of wrongdoing.

Because without these rights democracy (Direct or otherwise) is
meaningless.

Personally I'm seriously doubting if it's even realistic to expect
some chance of winning this. Most people in the Netherlands (or UK/
US) simply don't know, don't want to know or don't care that their
government consists of war-criminals. Maybe we need some tanks
running over students, that tends to wake people up. But only if it
is shown on TV of course.

Switzerland has a brand-new constitution that looks very nice. I'm
considering moving. Permanently. This pains me because it is, in way,
giving up and giving in. But sometimes this is the smart thing to do.
In 1933 you could still get out. In 1939 it was too late. What year
is it?

With kind regards,

Arjen Kamphuis,
former IBM Global IT-architect,
Certified Information Systems Auditor & Info Sec Manager


ps: I don't read the list so send reply's off-list.

ps-II: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/ is a good source if
you want a fact-based perspective on reality.




On Nov 12, 2006, at 9:43 AM, Filia den Hollander wrote:
> Hi Pras and Mirek,
>
> I’d like to add something to the e-democracy discussion.
>
> Electronic voting is a technical device, not a political system.
> Here in The Netherlands it recently came to the surface that our
> voting computers are open to fraud, and they have been removed (in
> the big cities) or replaced (in the small cities).
> It is also worthwhile to note that Ireland had refused a couple of
> years ago to buy the electronic voting system manufactured by the
> Dutch. It wasn’t transparent enough how the hardware was composed
> and the Dutch refused to give that transparency.
>
> This last information I have from Arjen Kamphuis (cc), who is up-to-
> date in IT matters. The first was recently in the news broadcasts.
>
> Kind regards,
> Filia den Hollander
>
>
> op 11-11-2006 23:53 schreef M. Kolar:
>
> > Pras Anand wrote:
> > > marketplace operations which are aimed at creating a DD. The
> industry
> > > buzzword is e-democracy and if (for example) you search google for
> > > e-government and european commission I'm sure you'd find many well
> > > placed ideas. These ideas have now flourished into examples all
> over the
> >      I am afraid that a very large majority of efforts (initiated
> by industry
> > and governments) that you will find on the internet under the
> keyword of
> > e-government (and even e-democracy) are actually top-down
> measures to make the
> > functioning of the current representative governments better,
> it's about how
> > to
> > get the central decision made faster available to the citizens,
> and citizens
> > can comply with them online (various online filing systems).
> > But I agree, you can find also find some truly DD efforts there,
> and many of
> > the technical solutions from the above top-down approach can pave
> way for true
> > DD.
> >
> >
> > > In the sense that people don't even know what to think often and
> just
> > > say what they read, heard or saw on the television. Why would
> replacing
> > > existing governments with people from the general public
> actually be a
> > > good thing?
> > Experience with Citizen Juries, Wisdom Councils, etc. shows that
> even
> > such initially ignorant general public can make very good
> decisions if you
> > provide them with good information sources. They will educate
> themselves fast
> > if they know that they can change something, that their voice
> will be heard.
> > Mirek




--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Applied physicists are from Venus, | Arjen Kamphuis
theoretical pysicists wonder why   | arjen(at)kmphs.com
it rotates the wrong way.