Mr. King, of Kennesaw State, scoffs at his colleagues' warnings about the insecurity of Diebold machines and their calls for a paper record. "We've held 3,000 elections on this equipment," he says. "We can't hack it, and I have the source code. We can't break the system."
Holding his face in his hands to express his frustration, he says Mr. Felten's illicit actions in the video could not happen in Georgia, with its multiple layers of security.
One of Mr. King's protégés, Chris Ambrose, a Kennesaw State junior majoring in information systems, who works at the center, is harsher in his assessment of Mr. Felten's video.
"This guy's an idiot," says Mr. Ambrose. He struggles to lift one of the heavy voting machines and turn it over to demonstrate what, he says, would be required to infect the machine with a virus. On the video, he says, Mr. Felten makes the process look effortless.
I think I've gone on record before saying that the computer security research community and the elections people are talking past eachother. Computer security people see all of the ways they can manipulate a machine, and pine for the days of gyms filled with old ladies counting little peices of paper. Elections officials have experience with the logistical nightmare that is, and think the theoretical problems with computers are less real. In the middle is this mythology that we've ever held a completely accurate election, which I don't really beleive after looking at this for the past few years. I don't think its possible and shudder to think how bad things might have been in the 1800s. We need new approaches.
There is, however, lots of blame to go around about the standoff, and this picture of an IS undergrad calling Ed Felton an idiot sums it up nicely. Everyone needs to open their minds.
