More on EVM… (please copy and paste the whole msg if you like to share) youtube/watch?v=mCg3KUtkypo The speaker in this video is J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. He was one of the team members of Hari Prasad, the whistle blower, who exposed the indian EVM machine and the ECI, after 2009 elections. This very important video gives the following information. • The Election Commission of India claims that indian EVM machines are perfect, tamperproof, infallible and beyond the need of technical improvement. Alex Halderman says that there is no technology in the world which cannot be improved. More importantly, he points out that the ECI actually has no knowledge of the machines. The code of this software is not with the ECI. This code, which is burnt in the chip and is deliberately designed not to be read, is NOT MADE IN INDIA. (We know from other sources that the chip is made in America). So the ECI has put the integrity of our election system in the hands of foreign agencies. Perhaps there is a provision in the code to manipulate the machines by someone sitting in America. We have no way of knowing…. • In 2009, Hari Prasad and his team said that they could prove publically that the machines were not tamperproof. They were asked to prove their statement. After 10 miunutes of work on the machine, when Hari Prasad was about to hack the system, the ECI got nervous and stopped him. They told him to hack the machine without studying the machine. How was that possible? So the project was cancelled. • In 2010, Hari Prasad invited Alex Halderman so that they could study and expose the weaknesses of a machine which was provided by an anonymous person who had legitimate access to the machines. What Alex, Hari and Rop (from Netherland) discovered was indeed shocking. • The team found that it was possible to make copies of all parts of the machine. In fact, the whole machine could be duplicated. However, there were easier, faster and cheaper ways to cheat. • Under the display board, a duplicate micro-processor could be fitted with a blue-tooth radio. Votes have to be stolen cleverly; not too many and not too less. During the voting or during the counting, a moblie phone could be used, from a distance, to send a signal to the blue-tooth radio, to tell the micro-processor how many votes to steal from where. • They found that the ballot is actually NOT SECRET. The votes are stored in the machine in the order in which they are cast. The voters also sign a register. It is easy to find out WHO VOTED FOR WHOM. • They discovered that there is absolutely no cryptographic security in the way the votes get stored in the machine. No special feature attached to the vote of each candidate. Each vote is just one byte. Download the memory contents. Change the bytes array and you change the number of votes that a candidate gets. • They even found a still easier way to cheat; to use a CLIPPY, a miniaturised vote stealing device which clips directly to the memory chips and rewrites them. Clippy takes only one second to do its job. Clippy provides the electronic form of booth capture that used to be done earlier with paper ballots. • The indian EVMs are thus NEITHER TRANSPARENT NOR VERIFIABLE. Why should we trust these machines? • Machines are stored in warehouses. In one warehouse of one parliamentary area there are more than a thousand machines. That means breaking into warehouses of hotly contested parliamentary seats would give access to all the machines which need to be manipulated. • In 2011 Alex came to India to give tutorials to Indian computer specialists on how to improve the machines. He was not allowed to enter India. Then finally, after spending a night at the airport, he was allowed to enter Mumbai but he could not organise the tutorials. He says he does not want to say anything about the fraudulant elections because he does not want to be killed. • Pakistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, Namibia, South Africa; all are considering e-voting. Alex is scared that this is to support governments win the election which they do not deserve to win. • As solutions Alex offers : paper ballot, precinct count optical scan, paper trails with crypto-graphic voting. However, given the situation of law and order in India, I personally feel we cannot trust any machine and any agency. Therefore paper ballot is the best solution. OLD IS GOLD. youtube/watch?v=mCg3KUtkypo
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:21:44 +0000
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