Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Cites & Insights, Volume 4, Number 5: April 2004 (PDF format, 272K).

• ÒThe Broadcast Flag proposed rulemaking is an
  end-run around CongressÕ apparent unwillingness
  to enact something as horrendous as
  CBDTPA.
• ÒWhile ineffective at solving any known problem,
  the Broadcast Flag would provide an opening
  for Big Media to insist on other
  ÒenforcementÓ measures that would cripple
  computers and many other electronic devices.
• ÒThe case for the Broadcast Flag appears internally
  inconsistent and at odds with technological
  reality. But then, the MPAA is behind thisÑ
  and Jack Valenti doesnÕt seem to have progressed
  from his two-decade-old assertions that
  VCRs would destroy the movie industry.

Red Rock Eater Digest - pointers, March 24, 2004

Phil Agre is associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ten years ago, he started an email list called Red Rock Eater Digest Each mailing was a concise listing of links to article, reports, academic writings, and web sites concerned with the social and political aspects of computing and networking. In August of 2003, Phil stopped sending out the list because, as he says in the first new issue of RRE in seven months, “because a bunch of issues all got stale at once.” Now, he writes:

So what matters now? We’ll have to figure that out.
As a first guess, here are some links that are mostly intelligent
academic discussions at the intersection of information technology
and more permanent things.

Among other listings in the newest issue of RRE on topics
of social aspects of computing, technology, and conferences are these:

• Government Policy toward Open Source Software
  Robert W. Hahn (Editor), James Bessen, David S. Evans, Lawrence Lessig, Bradford L. Smith. Books and Monographs. Dec 2002, which includes a chapter
  “Open Source Baselines: Compared to What?” by Lawrence Lessig
• Agre’s sylabus on the semantic web
• The Digital Technology Boomerang:
  New Intellectual Property Rights Threaten Global ÒOpen ScienceÓ
  By
  Paul A. David

RRE home page:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html

XML feed: http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/index.xml

archive: http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/

BlackBoxVoting.org

At this site you will find the complete text of the book Black Box Voting:
Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century
By Bev Harris with David Allen in PDF format, and an order form for the paper version. You’ll also find a large collection of articles about e-voting. These are newspaper articles, FEC reports, transcripts, articles by Harris, and more. Harris has pretty much single-handedly discovered and covered this story. As the article in the current
Vanity Fair (”Hack the Vote” by Michael Shnayerson, April 2004, p.158-180) notes, Harris is “a journalist without training or experience, stumbling onto a national story ignored by every big-city newspaper in the land and working it deeper and deeper with scoops that would have made her career at The New York Times or The Washington Post…”

Election Reform and Electronic
Voting Systems (DREs):
Analysis of Security Issues
November 4, 2003, Congressional Research Service RL32139
Eric A. Fischer,
Senior Specialist in Science and Technology,
Domestic Social Policy Division.

CRS weighs in with this 40 page study of “direct recording electronic”
(DRE) touchscreen voting machines. Their use is expected to increase
substantially under provisions of The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA, P.L.
107-252). The purpose of this report has been to explain the controversy about the security
of DREs and to lay out the issues raised and options for addressing them. The report
does not attempt to resolve the controversy.

The report discusses seven proposals for addressing the security issues raised
about DREs. They include using current procedures and security mechanisms, with
improvements as necessary; improving standards for the development and
certification of voting systems; using open-source software for voting systems; and
severalmethods to improve the transparency and verifiability of elections, including
voter-verified paper ballots and an electronic version of that approach, use of
modular electronic voting architecture that physically separates the voter interface
from the casting and counting functions; and a system that uses cryptographic
protocols to permit voters to verify that their ballots were cast as intended and that
no votes were improperly changed, omitted, or added.

OMB Watch — The Watcher March 22, 2004 Vol. 5, No. 6

The Bush administration is classifying documents at nearly twice the rate of the Clinton administration, according to statistics compiled by the
Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives and Records Administration.

The Risks Digest Volume 23: Issue 27
“California voters turned away”
Peter G. Neumann
Mon, 15 Mar 2004.

The Risks Digest continues to be an excellent source of authoritative information
on the problems of e-voting.

…in the 17 counties in which Diebold
systems were used, none of the versions of those systems actually used was
the version that had been certified.

…There were numerous reports in the past weeks of malfunctions and
irregularities elsewhere as well. I would have to spend more time than I
have to catalogue them all in RISKS. But I think you get the idea from what
we have included here that there are vastly too many problems that could
influence the results of close elections, often with no recourse to find out
what was really intended.

For Most Africans, Internet Access Is Little More Than a Pipe Dream
Chris Alden
Posted: 2004-03-12
USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review

More from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

isen.blog
David S. Isenberg notes that Vanity Fair issue of April 2004, p.158 includes an article called “Hack the Vote” by Michael Shnayerson about electronic voting.
Vanity Fair describes the article on its web site:

After FloridaÕs paper-ballot debacle in 2000, electronic voting machines were marketed as a foolproof solution. But with unexpected results cropping up in machine-counted elections across the country, Michael Shnayerson reports on a dangerous mixÑof primitive technologies, political agendas, and big moneyÑthat could lead to undetectable fraud this November. Photographs by Tom Schierlitz and Robbie McClaran

More at Unintended Consequences, Doug Simpson’s weblog of research on the collision of law, networks and disruptive technologies.

The Free Lane on the Information Highway
By Dalton Conley, OP-ED, Published: March 19, 2004
New York Times.

Here is a wonderful idea for the next FCC (when it stops kowtowing to Big Broadcasting and starts remembering that the airwaves belong to the people) and an excellent parallel drawn between public libraries and public airwaves. This could be more than a metaphor; it could be a whole new approach to information .

With the technology known as wireless fidelity, laptop users can get onto the Internet and download e-mail, photos and other electronic files from places once well off the information superhighway Ñ parks, truck stops and cafes, to name a few.

That’s a wonderful thing, but what’s better is that WiFi holds the promise of bridging America’s much discussed digital divide Ñ if we make it ubiquitous and free to use, like the public library system.

E-Epistemology and Misinformation by Peter G. Neumann, “Inside Risks” 155, Communications of the ACM 46, (5, May 2003).
final, published, pdf version available to ACM subscribers.

This article is worth re-reading. It touches on
so many issues that are relevant to how people find, evaluate, and use information. Privacy, urban myths, Copyright restrictions and proprietary information, the hidden web, and more.

The propagation of misinformation has long been a problem in conventional print and broadcast media, but represents another problem that is exacerbated by the speed and bandwidth of the Internet. In general, widely held beliefs in supposedly valid information tend to take on lives of their own as urban myths; they tend to be trusted far beyond what is reasonable, even in the presence of well-based demonstrations of their invalidity.