On data retention, electronic voting and slippery slopes.
Published: 2006-05-21
Category: Life and stuff
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Language: [English]
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There are some things that are going on with IT, that could have very negative impact on the quality of life for a lot of people, if left unchecked. Some of the systems currently being implemented for the benefit of the comunity are are, really, really dangerous if they somehow fall under control of a government or other organization that doesn't have the best intrests of the population as a whole in mind.

for startes there are the electronic voting machines. Sure, it's all nice and handy. And if the standards are uphold it can be a really accurate way of voting. But, if the people in power want to change the election results badly enough, they can, and nobody will be able to prove otherwise.

I'm sure that almost every government that is implementing the machines has the best intrests of the people in mind. And im sure that they can be trusted. But can you be sure that you can all future governments as well.

When you vote the old paper way, there's always the papers that you can count and re-count basicly as often as you want to. For cheating in a paper election you need to have a way to:

• Get pre-fabricated ballots into the boxes
• Get ballods not of your liking out of the boxes
• Fix the books that note who voted and how many ballots where cast.

In short.. it's a complete and utter mess. Now with electronic voting, the machine can SAY that it registed your vote correctly, but I could have just as easily counted your vote for the other candidate, and you will never know.

Ofcourse there's all kinds of organizational savegards, but in the end it's the basis of the sistem that is much more vunerable then the paper vote.

And speed is not an exuse either. A well organized traditional vote can have the results within a few hours of the polls closing. Here in chile, within 90 minutos of the polls closing it was known who was the new president. Okay, with e-voting you can have the results in 5 minutes.. but where's the drama and thrills in that.

E-voting is not future-proof... and it could cost us very dearly.

An other and very well documented example of the way things can come back to bite a (part of) society badly are databases. There is for example the way records were kept in the Netherlands (more espificly Amsterdam) before the second world war. They had all kinds of civil information, registing what kind of family lived, in what house, what the source of income was, the general standard of living etc. All very ordered and efficent.

Little did the people that make the complete register realize, that only a few years later, that same information would be used for rounding-up nearly 95% of the jewish population of the City. All it took was a few civil servants with Nazi simpathies to turn a harmless coleccion of civil data into a means map of genocide.

With this in mind, at present databases are everywhere. You get classified into groups and subgroups at every turn. That's just a matter of life.

However now, the european union comission, in its endless wisdom has decided to oblige all ISPs in the zone to keep records of all network traffic for for atleast 6 months (max 2years). They don't collect the content, only a record of the connections. And not just the connections of known suspects, nop, all the conections to everywhere.

This ofcourse, is a mayor engeneering task and will be costly (to say the least) for the service providers to implement. There are no provisions for sharing of the costs. So the law will raise the costs of Internet for the end consumer. But that's almost besides the point.

They will, ofcourse, use it only for the most nobel of causes. Finding would-be terrorists and kiddy-porn producers. However once the infrastructure is there, it's cheap to use. So why not use it for finding other illigal activities as well? Say, trading stolen Creditcards. But then, you could also use it for finding movie and mp3 traders.

And so, once in-place, it's really hard to say "NO" to this. It's just too tempting. Now imagine that, by some figment of the imagination, not only european but also other governments and organizations get access to this database.

Well, even before it has been presented to the national parlements of the member states the US is already asking, ney, demanding access to this database.

The best is to remember the wise words of Benjamin Franklin:

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

• http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/02/HNeudataretention_1.html
• http://ue.eu.int/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/jha/88467.pdf
• http://tweakers.net/nieuws/41276/EU-richtlijn-bewaarplicht-aangenomen.html
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/25/data_retention/
• http://www.theregister.com/2006/05/14/diebold_e-voting_flaw/