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To: steve who wrote (19762)	1/27/2001 12:34:25 PM
From: steve	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26039

Say Goodbye to Chad, DoD Tests Internet Voting By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Jan. 25, 2001 -- There’ll be no more chads -- hanging, pregnant or dimpled -- if a test program using the Internet is expanded. The Voting Over the Internet pilot project was conducted during the 2000 election cycle. The Federal Voting Assistance Program sponsored the test in association with state and county governments. In the test, volunteer service members from around the world voted using the World Wide Web. “The effort grew out of our voter survey following the 1996 elections,” said Polli Brunelli, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program. The cycle saw eligible service members being allowed to register and, in some cases, vote by faxing their voting materials to their home counties. The fax program proved very successful, she said. “In the survey, some people asked when they would be able to vote via the Internet,” Brunelli said. “We started researching it immediately.” But "Vote by Internet" is easier to say than to pull off. Ballots must be secret. They must be secure and protected from tampering. There must be a way for them to mirror the requirements of paper ballots -- including signatures. Brunelli's office built on initiatives already afoot within DoD. “At the time we started looking at this project, DoD was developing the Public Key Infrastructure,” she said. PKI allows for secure transmission by use of digital signatures. Voting officials used this to mimic the steps required of the paper ballots. Voting program officials also had to get their state and county partners to buy into the program. “They were most enthusiastic about the idea,” Brunelli said. “(County and state officials) were a part of this from the very beginning.” Counties in South Carolina, Texas, Utah -- and Florida -- participated in the 2000 program. Officials were looking for about 50 eligible voters from each site to participate. “This was a proof-of-concept demonstration,” Brunelli said. “We weren’t set up for mass voting. This was simply to demonstrate that this could work.” Officials set up the system and had third-party testers go through the process. The testers passed the system, and state and county officials accepted the results. Voters came from all five armed services. “This system would be great for our seagoing personnel,” Brunelli said. Participants received directions on how to download the necessary software and how to get their digital signatures via the DoD Public Key Infrastructure. Voters could send in their electronic ballots any time after the ballots were made available. The first vote came from a Marine on Oct. 12, 2000, and went to Weber County, Utah. “I was in Okaloosa County, Fla., on Election Night,” Brunelli said. “The Internet ballots came in and were printed out. It worked flawlessly.” She said a quick after-action review indicates the system worked well. There was no tampering and the ballots remained secret. Comments from the participants showed they were satisfied with the process, with one voter calling it a “snap.” Brunelli said her office would work with state, county and federal officials during the next election cycle if voting by Internet receives the OK. She said some changes would have to be made. “We would have to adapt the program to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and we could modify the program so there would be no need for counties to print out the ballots,” she said. “The ballots could go straight to tabulation.” Brunelli said the Federal Voting Assistance Program will prepare a report about their Voting Over the Internet pilot project and it should be available in March or early April. defenselink.mil steve

To: steve who wrote (19762)	1/31/2001 12:33:56 AM
From: steve	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26039

Nice work on the message boards Stockman, I was thinking that VRSN would have had more of an impact than todays news. Guessed wrong again, lol. Might be the combination of the recent news. I like the trend so far!!! This goes along the lines of post #19762, look to the inside... DEA data theft raises privacy concerns By Robert Lemos Special to CNET News.com January 24, 2001, 5:50 a.m. PT The prosecution of a Drug Enforcement Administration officer in Los Angeles on charges of selling data from a variety of restricted databases has privacy advocates again questioning whether government protections on private data are strict enough. "I think this case points to the necessity that such (database) systems have a foolproof electronic audit trail and sanctions so serious that no officer would dream of stealing the data," said Beth Givens, director of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer information, research and advocacy program. On Monday, Emilio Calatayud, a 34-year-old veteran in the Los Angeles Field Division of the DEA, was arraigned on charges that he allegedly misused his position at the agency to sell information to a private investigations firm. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Central California charged Calatayud with five counts of illegally accessing law-enforcement computer systems, five counts of wire fraud, and one count of bribery. In total, Calatayud is believed to have reaped $22,580 in payments from Los-Angeles-based private investigations firm Triple Check Investigative Services between August 1993 and August 1999. A warrant for Calatayud's arrest had been issued Jan. 11, and the agent turned himself over to law enforcement officials on the following night. U.S. Attorney Alejandro N. Mayorkas slammed Calatayud's alleged misconduct. "The sale of confidential information by a member of a law enforcement agency jeopardizes the viability of criminal investigations, threatens the safety of members of the public and undermines the integrity of our law enforcement community," he said in a statement. Givens thought the case was far from isolated. "I do think this is more common than one might think," she said, adding that the PRC has received several calls complaining about the similar abuse of private data by law officers. Another privacy advocate condemned the alleged actions of the agent, but stressed that other ways of accessing data--allowable by law--are far more worrisome than those that are illegal. "The unauthorized and illegal use of information will become more common as it becomes mined and searched and all those things we can do now," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director for the American Civil Liberties Union. "But we have laws to protect against those things, or at least punish the offenders when we find them." Steinhardt pointed to the recent hack of the University of Washington Medical Center, where a Russian cyberthief made off with almost 5,000 hospital records. Yet, what is often worse is the hospital's use of such data for its own marketing purposes and the low legal barriers for others to access the data. "In the end, we need to be much more concerned with the authorized uses of data than their unauthorized uses," Steinhardt said. "Right now, the law allows a lot of data usage by the government. And there is an awful lot of information that corporations can use as well." news.cnet.com steve