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>> Those were all very, very interesting remarks but there are a few things I'd like to respond
to but let me start by talking about voter expectations here
and I think there is a huge role here for the demands
that election officials are facing from voters.
I really do sympathize with officials who are having voters ask them
when are we going to vote on the internet.
It's a little bit as if voters were going to the auto industry and saying
when are we going to have flying cars?
Come on already, birds fly.
Airplanes fly.
When are cars going to fly too?
Well it turns out there are just some things that technology is not good at,
and there's some things that however logical they seem there are physical limitations
to what they can do.
Elections are hard because we place very hard requirements on them.
We want simultaneously to have a high integrity count and a secret ballot.
And when you say we want to count things in secret and know that the counts are correct,
that makes it much, much harder than almost every other kind of transaction you do online
because every other kind of transaction we can have very careful fine grained accounting
and verification.
We can have, if you buy something online you get a credit card statement, you get a receipt.
If you find out that something is wrong you can just reverse that individual transaction.
It's not the same with voting because we want to keep every ballot secret
and protect your right to a secret ballot.
If we want to weaken this, if we decide as a matter of public policy
that we no longer want a secret ballot, then there are things we can do that work better,
but we want a system that everyone can trust, that has a secret ballot and has high integrity
and that makes for a very, very difficult engineering challenge.
I think the American Idol comparison is interesting but I think it's obvious to everyone
in this room why it's really not the same problem.
Who cares if the American Idol result is wrong?
Fundamentally people are not going to, the world is not going to end if the wrong person wins.
It's also not necessarily a secret ballot.
So it's a much easier problem to solve.
I want to put in one plug for this because I think an important component
of our social discourse about this, of our public conversation
about voting online is public education and this fall starting in September I'm going
to be running a massive, public online course about electronic voting
and internet voting technologies.
It's being run through courser, which is a multi university online course effort,
but it's free and open to the public.
I really urge election officials in particular to take part in this
and the conversations surrounding it.
If you google my name you can find a link from my website but there are already more
than 5,000 people signed up to take this course and I hope that trying to get this conversation
at a technical and a slightly longer format that a sound byte started is going to help
to change some of the conversations that people are having in the public at large.
>> Before, let me ask a question on the course.
I'm always on the lookout for courses, you know,
I have three cyber corps students in the audience.
The cyber corps, for those of you who don't know,
is a government sponsored scholarship program for people who are studying to go on
and become our next leaders in cyber security in the government and we have three of them
in the room here, three of those students, and it, those of you who are parents
and grandparents who are, have aspiring people who need full ride scholarships you should look
at our CSPRI website; you can get directed to it.
It's a great program.
My question is, of course courser stuff is not for credit.
>> That's right, it's not for credit but it is free and open to the public.
>> Okay. Matt?
>> So, I think some of this is in response to what you just said and some
of this is just general thinking.
The thought about the flying cars is an interesting one although I don't know
that it's analogous in that fly- most Americans, or most citizens I'd say,
don't have an experience of flying themselves, right?
They're not the pilot themselves.
They don't fly the airplane themselves.
They don't conduct that.
What most Americans are familiar with is operating on the internet.
They can go on the internet themselves and do almost their entire lives.
I mean it's almost gotten to the point where I don't need to interact with anyone
to do what I need to do including you know DMV and stuff like that which is great 'cause
who wants to go sit at the DMV and get a license?
And so I get the analogy but I don't think it's exactly correct because in fact people
and citizens have the experience of interacting
on the internet already whereas they don't have the experience of flying
or operating a vehicle in that way.
The other thing I wanted to address, and I think it speaks to the title of this course
and it's a discussion that I'm fascinated by, and that's the concept of national security
in voting because I've heard that, I've had that discussion with a lot of people
and I think it's an interesting one.
Certainly I, as an election official, would actually love if it's seen in that light
because I think it would mean larger budgets because in fact national security,
or if elections were treated as national security, my budget might look a little bit
like DOD and that would be great.
I could do a lot with that kind of budget, a whole lot, right?
And so I think if that expectation is there and the expectation that our systems--
internet or not internet frankly-- should operate at a level of DOD security,
then we need more money to figure that out because in fact, the budget isn't there
to even operate at a level of security that even other county offices operate at.
And so that that's to me is a very interesting discussion, one that I've had with Pam
and others in verified voting because as an election official I think we'd welcome the
money certainly.
What we do with it would be an interesting question
but that was the other comment I wanted to address.
>> Before I get to Costis, it's interesting that you mention the national security issue.
We know a little bit about, talk about Facebook,
we know a little bit about you folks who signed up.
We at least know your names, for most of you your names and emails and affiliations,
so for example I don't know if the person is here but I didn't hear them announce themself,
but we had one sign up-- they may not have come here-- from the Russian embassy, okay?
And it could be the Chinese embassy or what if, would the same discussion be taking place,
in which countries would the same discussion be taking place
and who would be let in and all that sort of thing?
The national security thing is interesting and it hasn't been, and then what do you teach
in terms of cyber security to a international class?
But that's just other things to throw in.
>> Also I wanted to throw in my aspiring sociologist hat.
I have a 25 year old and a 29 year old and they're both very,
very different from me in terms of value systems.
One of the systems that is absolutely almost orthogonal
to mine is confidentiality and secrecy.
They are absolutely okay with just flaunting everything.
Very quick- and the question to them is how quickly can I do something,
so if I had my son here and he was hearing this discussion--
he's with a prestigious Wall Street firm and I don't want to sully his reputation--
[laughter] he probably would say something so what's the big deal
about you know secrecy versus security?
You know have it in the open.
Reconsider.
Because I, as part of the generation X don't have the same value systems you old fogies do.
We're different.
What we do want to make sure is that we can have quick results.
We want to make sure everybody gets a chance to vote and we want
to make sure it's cheap enough to be able to be maintained.
I know it's anathema but I'm just throwing it out that sometimes when things
around you changes, and right now the social structure is changing--
maybe we don't like it as mature adults or aspiring mature adults-- but it is changing.
And therefore the solutions we create have
to reflect not only our value judgments but theirs as well.
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