Future Imperfect #35: Hacking the vote
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been reading about the potential for election fraud, a national council of historians, augmented property ownership, and the nascent sport of FPV drone racing. Oh, and a fascinating text analysis of Donald Trump’s tweets.
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Hacking the vote
A couple weeks ago I wrote about one way that governments could revert back to older technologies as good infrastructure policy. Today, it’s worth thinking about the ways that kind of thinking could benefit electoral security. From Politico, How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes.
Beginning in the late ’90s, Appel and his colleague, Ed Felten, a pioneer in computer engineering now serving in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, marshaled their Princeton students together at the Center for Information Technology Policy (where Felten is still director). There, they relentlessly hacked one voting machine after another, transforming the center into a kind of Hall of Fame for tech mediocrity: reprogramming one popular machine to play Pac-Man; infecting popular models with self-duplicating malware; discovering keys to voting machine locks that could be ordered on eBay. Eventually, the work of the professors and Ph.D. students grew into a singular conviction: It was only a matter of time, they feared, before a national election — an irresistible target — would invite an attempt at a coordinated cyberattack…
The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course). They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized.
If you really want to be scared, here’s what happened when the Princeton team was able to take a crack at an electronic voting machine in practice.
On October 1, 2010, two employees in the Washington, D.C.-based Office of the Chief Technology Officer, stormed down a hallway and charged through the double-doors that opened into the basement-floor server room. Earlier that day, they had learned strange news: Someone had called into the hotline to report a bug on the board’s paperless ballot system. The program seemed to play obnoxious brass-band music each time subjects submitted their ballot. The names on the ballots had all been changed to villainous robots: Bender for State Board of Education (from Futurama); Hal 9000 for Council Chairman (from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Then they learned that the hackers were likely watching them on the closed-circuit circuit feed, through the camera that was gazing down at them, right now.
Some 520 miles away, the scene played on a screen in the hacker’s cramped headquarters. A whiteboard behind the computer declared a series of instructions in brown and purple marker, each skewered with a squiggly strike-through, followed by a perfunctory checkmark: “Replace old ballots.” Check. “Steal temp ballots. Check. “Rig to replace new ballots.” Check. The hackers exchanged high-fives in adulation. And when the D.C. tech officers’ faces appeared on the screen, Alex Halderman peered back.
Why does this matter? In an election that has already featured hacked emails and claims of vote rigging, something like this ought to be taken extremely seriously. There are a number of potential solutions mentioned in the piece, ranging from cryptographic voting to Risk Limited Auditing. Regardless, in the short term, I think it makes sense to go back to a relatively more secure system of voting—the old paper ballot.
The first step toward psychohistory
Tired of politicians who either willfully or ignorantly lack the historical context around world events? Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson suggest that it’s time for a national council of historians.
For too long, history has been disparaged as a “soft” subject by social scientists offering spurious certainty. We believe it is time for a new and rigorous “applied history” — an attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing precedents and historical analogues. We not only want to see applied history incorporated into the Executive Office of the President, alongside economic expertise; we also want to see it developed as a discipline in its own right at American universities, beginning at our own.
When people refer to “applied history” today, they are typically referring to training for archivists, museum curators, and the like…Mainstream historians take an event, phenomenon, or era and attempt to explain what happened. They sometimes say that they study the past “for its own sake.” Applied historians would take a current predicament and try to identify analogues in the past. Their ultimate goal would be to find clues about what is likely to happen, then suggest possible policy interventions and assess probable consequences…
Start with the issue that the president and his national-security team have been struggling with most: ISIS. Recent statements indicate that the administration tends to see isis as essentially a new version of al-Qaeda, and that a top goal of U.S. national-security policy is to decapitate it as al-Qaeda was decapitated with Osama bin Laden’s assassination. But history suggests that ISIS is quite different in structure from al-Qaeda and may even be a classic acephalous network. When we searched for historical analogues to ISIS, we came up with some 50 groups that were similarly brutal, fanatical, and purpose-driven, including the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution. By considering which characteristics of isis are most salient, a Council of Historical Advisers might narrow this list to the most relevant analogues. Study of these cases might dissuade the president from equating isis with its recent forerunner.
Why does this matter? Let’s not pretend that our leaders have either the time or the inclination to educate themselves sufficiently on every point of policy. It’s objectively impressive that their staffs are able to get them as well-versed as they are—which to be honest is a little bit underwhelming.
I’m all for investing in additional historical guidance for the government, though I can also see this becoming a bitterly divided partisan issue. If there’s one thing that America’s 2016 election cycle has proven, it’s that each side has its own accepted set of facts. To think something as charged as world history would be exempt is perhaps wishful thinking.
The limits of property ownership
When you own property, it’s accepted that you have exclusive rights to a certain amount of both the earth beneath it and the air above it. So when an augmented reality game overlays virtual monsters on your property, do you have a right to kick them out? Time to think about how AR affects property rights.
It is “quite a novel lawsuit,” she writes, referring specifically to [a] New Jersey case. “It is laughable, on the one hand, yet it does raise interesting questions around who owns the augmented reality space overlaid on people’s real world properties. When you own land, there are limits to how far above and below your house you own. A new question would be the extent of your rights to the new dimension on top of your property that is augmented reality.”
For Hill, this goes on to raise a series of related questions, including, “if augmented reality really catches on, and an internet environment overlaid on our real world surroundings becomes common, what will be the rules around using that augmented space? Could anyone put a virtual billboard on the front of your house or would they need your permission?”
Could you sell, lease, or subdivide the digital rights to your own home, yard, or lobby? Could you extract a toll, tax, or commission from virtual usage?…A digital entertainment company could prove to have de facto access to your yard, your car, your front stoop, your place of business, using any one of those merely as a stage or platform for passive economic activity.
Why does this matter? Consider this the 85th new problem to deal with now that Pokemon Go is a thing. It’s an interesting dilemma—I’d be shocked if the New Jersey lawsuit is won, mostly because the activity that is truly objectionable is trespassing, not the virtual presence of Pokemon. However, this could certainly spur adoption of opt-in or opt-out clauses in future AR games.
Your next sport of choice
At New York City’s Governor’s Island, we may have witnessed the birth of a new sport. Are you ready for first-person drone racing?
The next generation of human flight isn’t so much humans actually flying, but feeling as if they’re flying. First-person-view (FPV) drone racing has caught on as a popular recreational sport over the past two years and is now being talked about as the next emerging sport on the heels of this past weekend’s national championship in New York and the first world championships in Hawaii in October.
“It taps right into an inherent DNA structure in humanity where we all have had the dream of flight,” Refsland said. “We’ve always wanted to fly. What flying first-person-view has given us is give us superpowers and made us superheroes. Now you can literally fly.”
Interest, and money, is flowing into the sport, but the biggest barrier isn’t just technology—it’s entertainment.
The biggest issue at the moment for drone racing is that what makes it so addictive for the pilots is also what makes it so hard to enjoy for casual spectators. While the FPV goggles make pilots feel as if they are sitting in the cockpit of a plane they are flying, soaring over and around obstacles, many of the spectators on Governors Island over the weekend had a hard time deciphering which pilot was manning which drone and had no idea who was in first place. From afar, it looked like eight oversized bugs buzzing around in circles, with one occasionally splattering on an iron beam or Plexiglas wall. The fans who put on goggles to see what the pilots were looking at quickly took them off because of the quality. The FPV footage for live races is still mostly in standard definition and looks like grainy footage shot from an old home video camera in need of tracking adjustment.
“I think it could be a good sport for TV if the FPV was high definition,” said Juan Pablo Montoya, who has won races in Formula One, CART, IRL, IndyCar, Grand-Am and NASCAR. “I think visually you have to come with goggles to be able to appreciate it because they’re so small and they fly so quickly. I think as the sport grows, the drones will be bigger and tougher and easier to see, but I think the potential is there. I think it could potentially be huge and a fun spectator sport to watch.”
Why does this matter? Sport has evolved significantly over the past fifty years, going from a primarily in-person experience to a primarily televised experience. The digital enhancements of the past ten years belie the true disruptor ahead: virtual reality.
I could definitely see FPV drone racing as the first mainstream VR sport, though the technology does need to catch up to lure in those casual audiences.
WALL-E meets interplanetary mining
Today, a short film called Wire Cutters. Kudos to Jack Anderson for his award-winning piece where “a chance encounter proves fateful for 2 robots mining on a desolate planet.”
GIF of the Week: Tempting fate (and the force)
Olympic Event of the Week: Women’s shot put! USA! USA! USA!
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