Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in New Mexico finished testing the system on human volunteers. The Air Force now wants to use this Active Denial Technology (ADT), which it says is non-lethal, for peacekeeping or riot control at "relatively long range" - possibly from low-flying aircraft.

Microwave beam weapon to disperse crowds (New Scientist)

] In a final report released July 31, the President's
] Commission on the U.S. Postal Service said sender
] identification technologies such as "personalized stamps"
] that embed digital identification information would not
] only improve mail tracking and delivery operations but
] would also enhance the security of the entire mail
] system.

No more anonymous mail.

U.S. Postal Service eyeing technology for 'smarter' mail - Computerworld

] Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the
] voter can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds
] to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated. 

Lots of links to resources on electronic voting systems on this site if you dig around.

Voting systems are easy to manipulate, whether you are building misleading ballots, stuffing ballot boxes, flyering the inner city with notices about the election that include the wrong date, or simply paying off some friends in hollywood to run against you so that the serious candidates are forced to back down. :)

Its very difficult to build a ballot that cannot be stuffed. Tying things to drivers licenses is not enough. Creating all kinds of fake drivers in a district is really easy to do, and the people in a position to do it also run the election. Answers here are really hard to come by. You could publish a list of every voter's address. People could verify that the number of voters is the same as the number of votes. People could also attempt to audit this data independently. Run, for example, some software that correlates the addresses with physical space using a mapquest database in order to make sure that the people live at real addresses that don't overlap and that the population densities aren't out of whack. This might be a resource for spammers, but then again, so is the phonebook. In many states the voter registration lists are already available to political parties. Its just a matter of putting it online.

As for the votes themselves, all the security experts here argue for paper validated audit trails. Now, versus some questionably designed electronic system, yeah, I can see that being useful, but I don't share their agreement that electronic voting systems are bad, for one reason that I don't think they are considering.

Why not publish all the votes on the Internet? Why is the counting process always something that happens in a back room of a high school by a bunch of "bipartisan" old ladies?

When I vote, I get a random number. I can go on the website later and verify that my random number got tabulated correctly. I can count all the votes on the website using my own software and decide for myself who won the election.

The subject of voter coercion comes up. It always does. This is probably the least common and most difficult way of manipulating an election, and yet people always raise it. So, we have systems that are secure against voter coercion but not secure against ballot stuffing. Sigh...

If you want to protect against that in this system, you need only publish some of the votes immediately for people in the voting booths. If they don't want to tell the person coercing them what their random number was, they can simply hand out another random number that has the vote the coercor is looking for.

So, in sum, I think that electronic voting systems can be much more secure then any existing paper or ele... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Rebecca Mercuri's Statement on Electronic Voting

] An even greater risk is putting this subpoena power in
] the hands of anyone willing to pretend to have a copyright
] claim. These fraudulent requests will be impossible to
] distinguish from legitimate ones.

The EFF spoke of this at Defcon... That as these subpoenas become an established proceedure, which is almost the case now, they will be a powerfull tool for stalkers, batterers, and other kinds of predators. You don't really care about being in contempt of court if you are planning to assault someone. Predators will use these subpoenas to track down their victims. The internet will really become a very unsafe place unless you use an anonymizing proxy network.

Whether its the elminiation of judicial oversite for subpoenas or the approval of vigilanti computer hacking, Congress seems to be absolutely committed to the erosion of critical, fundamental pillars that underlie the very rule of law in the United States in an attempt to give their friends in the media industries what they want. Enabling predators is obviously far far worse then any amount of copyright infringement that might be going on, but thats just the beginning. If they continue down this road, Congress must eventually must conceed that by picking away at the rule of law they are in fact picking away at their own authority and their own reasons for existance. Do it here, and establish that its legal here, and it will pop up somewhere else, and then again, and again, until there are very serious threats to the stability of this system of goverment.

Of all possible ways to address this problem, these people have chosen a path that is dumber then any I had imagined... Between these actions, and the pressures they exert which will naturally lead to the development of extremely strong anonymizing proxy technology, Congress is breaking ground, at this moment, on a very, very ugly future for all of this. And they have absolutely, positively, no fucking clue about the implications of their actions. Tim May might just turn out to have been right all along.

The implications of DMCA subpoenas on privacy/stalking

] A software engineer from Oregon pleaded guilty Wednesday
] to aiding the Taleban and now faces the likelihood of
] seven to 10 years in jail.
]
] The Justice Department says Maher Hawash, a naturalized
] American citizen of Palestinian descent, pleaded guilty
] to a charge of conspiring to supply services to the
] Taleban following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York
] and Washington.

Hawash was guilty

] MANCHESTER, New Hampshire -- A security flaw at a website
] operated by the purveyors of penis-enlargement pills has
] provided the world with a depressing answer to the
] question: Who in their right mind would buy something
] from a spammer?

Wired News: Swollen Orders Show Spam's Allure

] A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Ryan Lackey, CTO
] for HavenCo, a company dedicated to providing secure
] off-shore data hosting from Sealand, a principality off
] the coast of England.

A little dated, but Ryan Lackey addresses real world questions about taking data havens out of sci-fi and into, in this case, the north sea.

Slashdot | Answers From Sealand: CTO Ryan Lackey Responds

] Police in Florida are creating a counterterrorism
] database designed to give law enforcement agencies around
] the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of
] records about both criminals and ordinary Americans.

Mini-TIA?

The problem with systems like this is not so much the information they have but the sort of questions you are allowed to ask them.

Asking who has brown hair and a red truck within a 20 mile radius, in the context where this is a suspect description in a murder, is a standard question that police ask all the time. Having this information more readily available is probably a good thing (unless you're an anarchist).

However, if you run a correlation which shows that people who have brown hair and red trucks are 30 percent more likely to commit murders then average, and subsiquently decide to submit people fitting that profile to additional scrutiny at airport security, you've crossed into pre-crime, and that is where the policy debate lies.

This question is going to continue to be raised. Poindexter, for all his faults, is a leader. He is way ahead of the curve. We'll see a lot more of this over the next 20 years from all kinds of directions, just as we are seeing similar techniques used in unrelated fields (Customer Relationship Management).

Objective research into the effectiveness of pre-crime, and the impact of it upon innocents, is sorely needed. Unfortunately, finding objective researchers is going to be damn near impossible. On the one side we've got arms dealers and drug smugglers, and on the other side we've got civil liberties advocates. Much like the studies on RF related cancer, the truth is probably only going to be found somewhere in the dialog between them, in an environment where both sides are given the resources they need to do the studies they want to do, and there is absolutely no political pressure to rush things into application.

U.S. Backs Florida's New Counterterrorism Database (TechNews.com)

] A widely publicized project to transform a man-made
] platform off the coast of England into a haven for
] controversial Web businesses has failed due to political,
] technical and management problems, one of the project's
] founders said.

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk? | CNET News.com

] After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war
] activists that they were being unfairly targeted by
] airport security, Washington has admitted the existence
] of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names
] long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at
] airports.

Washington admits that it keeps a "political" no fly list as well as a terrorist no fly list.

Washington cops to political no-fly-list.