Slashdot Log In
Dutch Blackbox Voting Pwned
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Oct 05, 2006 08:55 AM
from the playing-chess-at-the-polls dept.
from the playing-chess-at-the-polls dept.
An anonymous reader writes, "In a just-published report (PDF, in English, cached here), the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation (Dutch and English) details how it converted a Nedap voting machine, of a type used in Holland and France, to steal a pre-determined percentage of votes and reassign them to another party. The paper describes in great detail how 'anyone, when given brief access to the devices at any time before the election, can gain complete and virtually undetectable control over the election results.' As a funny bonus, responding to an earlier challenge by the manufacturer, the researchers reflashed a voting machine to play chess. The news was on national television (Dutch) last night and is growing into a major scandal. 90% of the votes in the Netherlands are cast on these machines and national elections will be held in a month." Please create mirrors for the 8.1-MB PDF and post their URLs. You might also try John Graham-Cumming's l8r.org service to tell you when the slashdot effect subsides from any of the mirrors.
Related Stories
[+]
Politics: Dutch Securing E-voting After Being Pwned 269 comments
An anonymous reader writes, "After the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation demonstrated glaring security holes in Dutch voting computers last week, the Dutch government has ordered (Dutch) all software to be replaced, all hardware to be checked, unflashable firmware to be installed, and an iron seal to be placed on voting machines. A certification institute will double-check all measures, and on election day will cull random machines to check them for accuracy. The Dutch intelligence service AIVD has been approached to consult on the radio emissions issue. Furthermore, foreign observers will monitor the upcoming elections on November 22nd. But the action group is still not confident (Dutch) that all problems are solved." US elections are controlled at the local level, so unfortunately such a nationwide fix would not be workable here.
[+]
Your Rights Online: Voting Machines Banned by Dutch Minister 155 comments
5heep writes "Dutch Government Renewal Minister Atzo Nicolai has banned the use of one type of computer voting machine in national elections next month. The turnabout came after a group called We Don't Trust Voting Computers protested the vulnerability of electronic voting to fraud or manipulation. The reason for this ban is the radio signals emitted by the machines which can be used to peek at a voters' choice from several dozen meters away."
[+]
Politics: Web-Based Assistant Changes the Face of Dutch Politics 190 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The elections held in The Netherlands on Wednesday have shaken the country. Almost 10 million votes were cast, and statistics show that a full half of those who voted used a popular web-based voter guide. This guide is operated by the independent institute for the public and politics. Advice is given to the visitor upon answering a number of multiple choice questions on some common political topics. Statistically, a number of people ended up scoring in support of populist parties both on the far left and far right. No bias was reported to exist in the test itself. However, these parties have ended up with an unforeseen amount of power as a result of the election. The voter participation was high, and the web-based advisories may have motivated people with little interest in politics to cast a vote anyway. Can politics be simplified to a ten minute test?"
[+]
Politics: Deathblow To a Voting Machine 140 comments
SiggyRadiation writes "According to their newsletter (my English translation here), the Dutch group that 'doesn't trust the voting computers' has won a round against the industry and the civil servants that seem hell-bent on reintroducing voting machines — NewVote, made by SDU — that the Dutch minister of the interior has suspended. Apparently SDU provided 5 slightly different samples of its machine to the Dutch version of the NSA (well... the very humble Dutch version anyway) for testing purposes. Of those five, four machines emitted radiation in such a way that the votes cast could be monitored. SDU's NewVote received its final deathblow when it became clear that the one machine that stayed within the radiation limits used a green-on-red color-scheme for its screen. And that would be a small problem for the 4% of all men that cannot distinguish between red and green."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Let me guess (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a map [google.com]. The blob to the left is the UK. Holland is right to it ("east" for nerds) while Norway is in the top-middle of the screen.
Parent
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Funny)
Jon's from Norway, not Holland.
But, as most Americans know, Holland is the capital of Norway.
Parent
Re:Let me guess (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Comments on the PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
I would first like to say that I admire your diligence in this matter and gratefully appreciate the work and effort you have put forth to protect the votes of many people the world over including my own.
Secondly, I would like to point out that, although you are a group of experts/scientists, I have witnessed concerns based on science go unheeded by politics--at least in the United States. I hope it is different in other countries, but I have seen a large organization of scientists from all walks of life oppose some of the current administration's actions here with little or no effect on the populace.
Whether this is because people still view scientists as nerds or outcasts of society, I cannot comment on. I only want to make it known--at least on Slashdot--that I support what you're doing and am amazed at the work contained in this PDF. I am more so amazed that someone was kind enough to take the time to translate it to English.
I hope your efforts are met with international recognition as being a champion of voting security--although I fear the reality is you may be criticized and possibly even sued.
My favorite criticism listed in the PDF: After reading a bit of the PDF, I must say that the only thing I don't like is that there is no clear solution offered aside from allusions to opening up the process and technology on how all of this works so that it can be scrutinized. It is pointed out that Security by Obscurity is not the best route
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You have mechanical counters behind a curtain. At the end of the curtain is a turnstile. When you walk out of the turnstile, it allows one increment of a counter per group (a group is a race or issue). At the other side of the curtain you have a large group of people monitoring the count. The numbers are large enough to read. Through closed circuit television, there is a live feed to the central counting facility as well as to regional TV. Also a f
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
a minor point: The report was written in English; not written in Dutch and then translated. Some of the writers don't speak Dutch.
Re:there will always be problems with a secret bal (Score:3, Insightful)
Here Please? (Score:2)
These things clearly need to be critically looked at.
Re:Here Please? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference isn't that nobody is doing this in the US. It's that nobody is listening in the US. In order to become a democratic country again, you don't need to elect a new president, you need to elect a new media.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:(Memory) Pages and Child (functions)... (Score:4, Funny)
If you re-program those machines to show child porn on election day, you'll surely get a scandal, even if the actual votes don't get manipulated ... but then, a little background picture showing a naked breast will do as well. Just be careful that the nipple isn't obscured by the names of the candidates. :-)
Go with the breast. Sexual exploitation of children still seems to be a partisan issue. Breasts are an uncontested national crisis.
*head explodes*
Parent
"Pwned"?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Pwned"?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Corruption of 'owned'. Someone made a typo, and the typo became popular. (Guess this says something about AOL, or
BTW, your question garnered 8 smartass replies, not one of them containing this answer. Come on, people, if you need to be wiseacres, at least answer the original question!
Parent
It's not a typo, it's a new word (Score:3, Insightful)
'Pwned' may have started as a typo, but it's now a full-fledged word with a different meaning than 'owned'. Compare:
I owned that car. (That car used to be mine, before I sold it)
I pwned that car. (We were racing, and I left it way behind)
First there was the slang word "ownage", which means dominance, and is
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
'iwned' is when you are killed by a stingray... (Score:3, Funny)
Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.preinheimer.com/dump/Es3b-en.pdf [preinheimer.com]
MirrorDot of the PDF (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Meanwhile, at Pirate Party QH (Score:2)
Yeeeeaarrrrgggghhhhh!!! Avast Mateys!! We'll be needin' to get some of these here votin' machines fer the next elec-shun!! We'll teach those scurvy dawgs a thing or two... Arrrrrr!!!
create mirrors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hrm, funny, every time we complain that slashdot should go through the process of automating a simple mirror process to avoid hammering an unsuspecting server into rubble, all the "editors" go pointing at the FAQ as some sort of ironclad reasoning against doing so. But here we have an "editor" instructing the readership to do slashdot's work for them. This all just points to the fact that OSTG will pay the bandwidth bills if it means ad revenue, but doesn't want to actually foot the bill to use their server complex for disseminating information.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Erm, I'm sorry, where does it state that it is Slashdot's job to mirror linked sites and documents?
I think you're viewing Slashdot as a content provider, which is not what it is -- at its most basic level, it's a content indexer. The whole point of Slashdot (IMO) is the community -- it's the community discussion that I log in for, and it's the community who can choose to help out linked sites by creating and posting mir
mirror (Score:3, Informative)
The Dutch get outraged but Americans don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
So here we have a similar set of circumstances--only the nation at risk has really changed--and the Dutch appear to be fighting mad over this. What gives?
Re:The Dutch get outraged but Americans don't? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Dutch get outraged but Americans don't? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
* sigh * (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because most of the Diebold problems are theoretical at this point. Someone COULD do all these nasty things and steal elections. Until we have some PROOF that someone stole an election from us using these machines, Americans will do what they always do, change the channel and
Re:The Dutch get outraged but Americans don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, same thing.. [princeton.edu] but the question? Good question.
The obvious answer is that they're freedom-hating socialists.
But seriously? It's the culture. The Netherlands and the Nordic countries are about the same like this. Big on democracy, accountability, transparency, highly intolerant of corruption, etc.
In the end, it's basically a self-fulfilling thing, really. People trust the system --> therefore they have low tolerance for corruption --> get very pissed when it happens --> therefore they have low corruption --> therefore they trust the system.
It's not just faith in the Government itself, but to all the institutions, and the parliament, etc. And there's a lot less political polarization. Of course part of the latter is due to the multi-party system. I used to be agnostic on which system was better, but now I'm pretty convinced that the many-party parliamentary system is superior to the US system.
In particular the President has just too much power and it's emphasized too much as well. And too much negative power - the Veto is too strong, and the constitution is (IMHO) too hard to amend. I don't think the Founding Fathers would have done it the same way if they'd anticipated there'd be another 37 states. This is of course heresey - which is another problem; Not only is it hard to change, but there's a strong disinclination against doing so since it's been raised almost to the status of some kind of Holy Scripture. With the Founding Fathers as some kind of prophets. Every dang constitutional debate is always in terms of "What did the F.Fs intend?"*. There's just too little impetus.
(*Damnit, I'll tell you what they wanted: They wanted a democracy based on ideas of critical reason. They sure as heck didn't want to be elevated to the status of unquestionable demigods.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or if they'd anticipated 820k people per Member of the House instead of 30k. That's where the accountability really drops off for the legislative branch.
I find this statement very funny, sorry -- because ascribing them such a humble perspective across-the-board does kind of elevate them to that status.
Re:The Dutch get outraged but Americans don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you seen any of the constitutional amendments they've been trying to pass lately? Have you seen how close some of the anti-freedom votes have been? I'd frankly feel safer if the amendment process required modern politicians to build a time machine and get John Hancock's signature first.
Parent
voting does not need technophilia (Score:5, Insightful)
of course you can do fraud scams with simple paper ballots too: lose them for entire districts, stuff the boxes with fake votes, etc. but any more complexity in the voting system doesn't remove these scams, it just adds a new layer of possible scams
fraud happens in all forms of voting mechanisms, and voting is just too much of an important and vulnerable part of our social cohesion and the source of so much faith in and integrity of our government. being so vital and vulnerable, the point in my mind would be to oversimplify the voting process on purpose. the more complex the system, the more points of failure and the more possibilities of fraud. so make the process very simple: paper ballots
i mean seriously, why the technophilia? voting is a problem that is not solved better with more technology, just made more complex. paper ballots, period, end of story, for all time. the slashdots crowd of any crowd of people should know all about the various and sordid ways malfeasance can be achieved in electronic communication and electronic storage. voting is not a complex math problem. it's very simple. no computer need apply
electronic voting can be a downright scary prospect. don't mess with it, simplify it, which means avoiding computers in the voting process like the plague. i'm not a luddite, i am simply saying that specifically in reference to the voting process, it must be simplified technologically to ensure faith and integrity in our government
because people already doubt enough about how much their vote counts. why give them yet another paranoid schizophrenic reason for them to think their vote doesn't count/ doesn't matter ("it doesn't matter man, it's all in the computer, and they just change the votes to whatever they want them to be man")
bottom line: faith and integrity in our government is far more of an important issue than any speed of transmission/ tabulation. no electronic voting. no mechanical voting. paper ballots only. of course malfeasance can still occur with paper ballots. but with more complex systems, you only add more points for manipulation. this is not a luddite's point of view. i am as much a technophile as the next slashdotter. i just have an appreciation for the limits of technology's ability to solve problems, and that for some limited subset of problems, due to malfeasance and the potential for it, more technology need not apply. voting is such a problem
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As an engineer, it's annoying to me when politicians attempt to equate "spiffy touchscreen machine with lots of features" with an improvement in the voting process. The voting process in this country is ju
FIELD / SERVICE (Score:4, Interesting)
Hello? Did someone not get the memo about secure passwords? Or better yet, no default passwords at all? Granted, physical access makes the point rather moot, but if this is the kind of security the designer had in mind, it looks like they can give Diebold a run for their money . . .
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have a Solution! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, anyone else walking through the door stands to have their ATM and credit cards wiped out, but hey, it's a small price to pay for Democracy, don't you think.
For the severely humor-impaired, the above is intended as a joke and in no way reflects the author's actual thoughts on this matter.
Very elegant way to steal the election... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US, you could steal an election with a small software update on a small percentage of the machines. The tallies would all add up and most of the votes counted would reflect the votes cast -- but just enough wouldn't to skew the ultimate result. The only hint you would have something was wrong would be a minor but crucial deviation between exit poll results and the official count.
It makes for a good simulation for students to put together to see just how simple it is to do.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [rollingstone.com]
Also used in Ireland (Score:3, Informative)
As well as being used in Holland and France, thousands of these NEDAP machines were bought by the Irish government with a view to replacing our paper election system with electronic voting. They had been used in a few pilot constituencies, and were due to be rolled out nationwide for the 2004 local and European elections. Luckily, determined lobbying by computer professionals (Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting [cs.may.ie]) and others forced the Government to set up an independent Commission on Electronic Voting [www.cev.ie], who decided that they couldn't stand over the use of the machines without further testing.
Interestingly enough, these Dutch hackers used the First Report of the Commission on Electronic Voting [www.cev.ie] to glean a lot of the technical details about the machines.
The most recent report of the Commission (July 2006 [www.cev.ie]) concluded that the machines needed some modification but were basically okay, but that the software used to manage an election was basically a joke and should be scrapped. The Government tried to use this as vindication of their actions in procuring the system, even though they had been perfectly willing to let a nationwide election go ahead with dodgy software.
Even that fig-leaf of respectibility has now been removed, and I expect that the Government will soon be moving the machines out of their costly storage facilities, and into the nearest recycling centre. As the Dutch hackers showed that they could be used to play chess, perhaps an amusement arcade will take them off their hands.
Lots of info at the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting site linked above, including a discussion list archive which has covered every imaginable angle on E-Voting.
Nedaps reaction (Score:3, Informative)
Translation:
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's a Dutch blackbox, so it's obviously an African-European box!
However I have a problem on how to call black people in Africa. African-Africans?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:on that note (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:on that note (Score:5, Insightful)
If the parents at home told the kids they did not approve of what was happening, and got off their asses and told the schools at pta mettings and other opportunities things would be very different.
Kids do pay attention to the parents... and they see mommie and daddy happily rolling over and playing dead.
Parent
Re:on that note (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well at least.. (Score:5, Informative)
"they can't open it with a minibar key.."
Don't be so sure...
From their report (the PDF linked above):
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in NYC - we know about machine politics, ward heelers and all kinds of fraud. But no evidence of them lately. The Chicago examples that people usually think of are ancient history. We're talking about criminal fraud happening next month, by those doing it in the past 2-10 years. That sounds like "Republicans" to me.