Democracy has never been more vulnerable. The problem is right here in America. How to Sabotage an Election Become an election judge and carry a refrigerator magnet in your pocket Program every fifth vote to automatically record for your candidate Bury your hacked code Avi Rubin, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in systems security knows something the rest of us don’t. Maybe we suspected it, maybe we’ve thought it, but we didn’t have proof. Until now. The electronic voting machines being used in 37 states are vulnerable to tampering, and because the manufacturers are not required to reveal—even to the government—how they operate, voters will never know if their votes are recorded accurately. Follow Rubin on his quest to wake America up to the fact that the irregularities in the 2004 elections might not have been accidents; that there are simple solutions that election commissions are willfully ignoring; that if you voted on an electronic machine, there’s a chance you didn’t vote the way you wanted to. Learn what you can do the next time you vote to make sure that your vote is counted. Imagine for a moment that you live in a country where nobody is sure how most of the votes are counted, and there’s no reliable record for performing a recount. Imagine that machines count the votes, but nobody knows how they work. Now imagine if somebody found out that the machines were vulnerable to attack, but the agencies that operate them won’t take the steps to make them safe. If you live in America, you don’t need to imagine anything. This is the reality of electronic voting in our country. Avi Rubin is a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a specialist in systems security. He and a team of researchers studied the code that operates the machines now used in 37 states and discovered the following terrifying facts: The companies hired to test the election equipment for federal certification did not study the code that operates the machines and the election commissions employed no computer security analysts. All votes are recorded on a single removable card similar to the one in a digital camera. There is no way to determine if the card or the code that operates the machine has been tampered with. It’s very easy to program a machine to change votes. There’s no way to determine if that has happened. There were enough irregularities with the electronic voting machines used throughout the 2004 election to make anyone think twice about using them again. Avi Rubin has testified at Congressional hearings trying to alert the government that it has put our democracy at risk by relying so heavily on voting machines without taking the proper precautions. As he has waged this battle, he has been attacked, undermined, and defamed by a prominent manufacturer. His job has been threatened, but he won’t give up until every citizen understands that at this moment, our democracy hangs in the balance. There are simple solutions and, before you vote in the next election, Rubin wants you to know your rights. If you don’t know them and you use an electronic voting machine, you may not be voting at all.

Since the mid 1990s, when the general public began using the Internet, governments and commerce have made vast investments in digital communications technology. There has been confusion and sometimes controversy over these, for example the proposed UK identity card system. The far-reaching commercial and social implications of decisions made in invisible or opaque specialist fields should concern every citizen. This book argues that decisions should be based on an understanding of the systems, technology and environment within which they operate; that experts and ordinary people should work together; and that technology and law are evolving in restrictive rather than enabling ways.

’Why do we vote in schools?’ ’What is the social meaning of secret balloting?’ ’What is lost if we vote by mail or computers rather than on election day?’ ’What is the history and role of drinking and wagering in elections?’ ’How does the electoral cycle generate the theatre of election night and inaugurations?’ Elections are key public events - in a secular society the only real coming together of the social whole. Their rituals and rhythms run deep. Yet their conduct is invariably examined in instrumental ways, as if they were merely competitive games or liberal apparatus. Focusing on the political cultures and laws of the UK, the US and Australia, this book offers an historicised and generalised account of the intersection of electoral systems and the concepts of ritual, rhythm and the everyday, which form the basis of how we experience elections. As a novel contribution to the theory of the law of elections, this book will be of interest to researchers, students, administrators and policy makers in both politics and law.

The 2000 presidential race resulted in the highest-profile ballot battle in over a century. But it is far from the only American election determined by a handful of votes and marred by claims of fraud. Since the founding of the nation, violence frequently erupted as the votes were being counted, and more than a few elections produced manifestly unfair results. Despite America's claim to be the world's greatest democracy, its adherence to the basic tenets of democratic elections-the ability to count ballots accurately and fairly even when the stakes are high-has always been shaky. A rigged gubernatorial election in New York in 1792 nearly ended in calls for another revolution, and an 1899 gubernatorial race even resulted in an assassination. Though acts of violence have decreased in frequency over the past century, fairness and accuracy in ballot counting nonetheless remains a basic problem in American political life. In Ballot Battles, Edward Foley presents a sweeping history of election controversies in the United States, tracing how their evolution generated legal precedents that ultimately transformed how we determine who wins and who loses. While weaving a narrative spanning over two centuries, Foley repeatedly returns to an originating event: because the Founding Fathers despised parties and never envisioned the emergence of a party system, they wrote a constitution that did not provide clear solutions for high-stakes and highly-contested elections in which two parties could pool resources against one another. Moreover, in the American political system that actually developed, politicians are beholden to the parties which they represent - and elected officials have typically had an outsized say in determining the outcomes of extremely close elections that involve recounts. This underlying structural problem, more than anything else, explains why intense ballot battles that leave one side feeling aggrieved will continue to occur for the foreseeable future. American democracy has improved dramatically over the last two centuries. But the same cannot be said for the ways in which we determine who wins the very close races. From the founding until today, there has been little progress toward fixing the problem. Indeed, supporters of John Jay in 1792 and opponents of Lyndon Johnson in the 1948 Texas Senate race would find it easy to commiserate with Al Gore after the 2000 election. Ballot Battles is not only the first full chronicle of contested elections in the US. It also provides a powerful explanation of why the American election system has been-and remains-so ineffective at deciding the tightest races in a way that all sides will agree is fair.

If you’re a security or network professional, you already know the “do’s and don’ts”: run AV software and firewalls, lock down your systems, use encryption, watch network traffic, follow best practices, hire expensive consultants . . . but it isn’t working. You’re at greater risk than ever, and even the world’s most security-focused organizations are being victimized by massive attacks. In Thinking Security, author Steven M. Bellovin provides a new way to think about security. As one of the world’s most respected security experts, Bellovin helps you gain new clarity about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. He helps you understand security as a systems problem, including the role of the all-important human element, and shows you how to match your countermeasures to actual threats. You’ll learn how to move beyond last year’s checklists at a time when technology is changing so rapidly. You’ll also understand how to design security architectures that don’t just prevent attacks wherever possible, but also deal with the consequences of failures. And, within the context of your coherent architecture, you’ll learn how to decide when to invest in a new security product and when not to. Bellovin, co-author of the best-selling Firewalls and Internet Security, caught his first hackers in 1971. Drawing on his deep experience, he shares actionable, up-to-date guidance on issues ranging from SSO and federated authentication to BYOD, virtualization, and cloud security. Perfect security is impossible. Nevertheless, it’s possible to build and operate security systems far more effectively. Thinking Security will help you do just that.

Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region. Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region.

This book, The State of the American Mind: Stupor and Pathetic Docility Volume One begins to unravel some of the most obvious, perplexing, embarrassing and enduring problems and contradictions of American history and sociology, viz., how could the American revolution that started with the most ringing and most inspiring Declarations of human equality in world history end up establishing the most vicious, exploitative society the world ever knew Black chattel slavery and only ten percent white enfranchisement, etc. Further, how could men of such great wisdom and intellect like George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others who were Enlightenment scholars and clearly knew that slavery was despicable and evil, because they had variously experienced white servitude and slavery themselves, collude to establish and institutionalize the horrible system of Negro chattel slavery in America; and also disenfranchised over 90 percent of people of their own race actions that racism could not explain. The structural/institutional slavery system they established, and the resultant consequent racism hobbles America today as it did in the past, and forced Eric Holder, the Attorney General to declare that, America is a nation of cowards, when it comes to race discussions. Thus, this book starts with serious critical discussions of race in America and reveals what no textbook has ever done, viz., that most early American whites and Blacks were slaves an uncomfortable fact that would shock most Americans because it contradicts the orthodoxy or the dominant narrative that only Blacks were brought here in chains. Further, the book also shows the year Black slavery started something almost, all textbooks got wrong. It also shows who, was the fi rst Black slave in America something no textbook ever mentions. It also shows when and how racism started in America and many other very sensitive and embarrassing but necessary issues that America avoids but must be frankly discussed for America to move forward. This book therefore shatters the two dominant themes of Americas history and sociology that Blacks were brought into America in chains as slaves while whites came to America in search of freedom, as Harvard educated President Obama famously told us in his race speech. Thus, the crowning lesson of this book, in addition to discussing some critical policy issues like education, health care, etc., is that it discovers the centripetal force of the American society that eluded contemporary Americans because American bosses have laboriously concealed the facts from the public the scary but clearly healthy uniting fact that most Americans are united by their common ancestry, their universal history and experience of servitude, bond-indentures and slavery. Nothing is more universal, more common and more shared in American history and sociology than the fact that most of our ancestors, black and white, were servants, bond-indentures and slaves who were dominated and super-exploited by few overlords. Colonial America was the preferred dumping ground for British, outcasts, rejects, criminals, masterless class, vagabonds, bond-indentures, slaves, etc., until 1776 when Australia replaced America as the British dump for its rejects and surplus citizens. Thus, that America was a nation founded by British rejects and losers is inherently more rational than the prevailing orthodoxy or the Obama theory of Americas founders that they were great honorable men who journeyed across the ocean for freedom because of the obvious reason that good, powerful achieving citizens do not normally emigrate to new uncharted lands.

Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with information technology and digital media. This book claims that what people really care about when they complain and protest that privacy has been violated is not the act of sharing information itself—most people understand that this is crucial to social life —but the inappropriate, improper sharing of information. Arguing that privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information, Helen Nissenbaum counters that information ought to be distributed and protected according to norms governing distinct social contexts—whether it be workplace, health care, schools, or among family and friends. She warns that basic distinctions between public and private, informing many current privacy policies, in fact obscure more than they clarify. In truth, contemporary information systems should alarm us only when they function without regard for social norms and values, and thereby weaken the fabric of social life.