Monday, September 03, 2018

I’m not sure I would turn this down.
Voting Machine Maker Defends Refusal of White-Hat Hacker Testing at DEF-CON
Not allowing its voting system to be submitted to independent hacking by security researchers at the “Voting Village” at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference does not mean ES&S shows any lack of commitment to security; on the contrary, it was actually meant to protect their systems, the company said.
“Forums open to anonymous hackers must be viewed with caution, as they may be a green light for foreign intelligence operatives who attend for purposes of corporate and international espionage,” ES&S President & CEO Tom Burt said in a letter last week. “We believe that exposing technology in these kinds of environment s makes hacking elections easier, not harder, and we suspect that our adversaries are paying very close attention.”
Burton’s letter was in response to one he received several days before from four U.S. senators calling out ES&S for not allowing its system to be tested by security researchers at DEF CON, and blatantly questioning the company’s commitment to security.
The Senators’ letter was not without merit. ES&S previously acknowledged that some of the voting machines it sold to local governments from 2000-2006 included a specially-configured copy of PCAnywhere, a remote access tool used for tech support. The news was worrying for the security community not just for the potential for hacking into the machines, but because it called into question the company’s credibility, as it had previously denied the inclusion of the tool.




How would this work? Would the government dedicate a few hundred really good programmers to build and continuously modify an algorithm to catch and delete all “inappropriate” content? Probably they would create a new, very large organization and attempt to review the billions of tweets, photos, videos and other types of content. Neither way would work.
UK broadcasters urge the government to create a social media watchdog
A smorgasbord of TV broadcasters, mobile network and internet service providers has urged the UK government to strengthen its oversight of social media companies. In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph, executives from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, as well as Sky, BT and TalkTalk, called for a new, independent regulator to help tackle fake news, child exploitation, harassment and other growing issues online. "We do not think it is realistic or appropriate to expect internet and social media companies to make all the judgment calls about what content is and is not acceptable, without any independent oversight," the collective wrote.


(Related)
Exclusive: U.N. Human Rights Experts Directly Engage With Facebook on “Overly Broad” Definitions in Regulating Terrorist Content
United Nations Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin has asked Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to add precision and rigor to the social network’s guidelines on terrorism-related content. In a letter to Zuckerberg and a significant meeting last week with Facebook executives, Ní Aoláin said the existing definitions risk catching others, such as legitimate opponents of oppressive authorities, in a dangerous net. The rapporteur told Just Security her office will take a similar approach to “other platforms whose practices mirror Facebook.”
George Washington a Terrorist?
Facebook’s broad definition of terrorism does not comport with common or expert understanding of the term. Under Facebook’s definition, the Continental Congress and Washington’s Army might have been censored as terrorist organizations in the American Revolution, just as today’s authoritarian leaders seek to brand opponents to their regimes as “terrorists.”


(Related)
Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy
Last Thursday’s morning papers in India settled something that we have been debating for a while. A front-page report about the arrests of five political activists in The Indian Express read, “Those held part of anti-fascist plot to overthrow govt, Pune police tell court.” We should know by now that we are up against a regime that its own police calls fascist. In the India of today, to belong to a minority is a crime. To be murdered is a crime. To be lynched is a crime. To be poor is a crime. To defend the poor is to plot to overthrow the government.

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