Reply #35: What's at stake is the control of a multi-trillion-dollar economy and the [View All]

mightiest military in the world. Which the Bu$hies think they can use to rule the world (tho' it hasn't been enough to subdue Iraq -- there are things military might simply cannot do...)

One of my friends consults for a Fortune 1000 client that was eager to get into the electronic voting machine business. The market is huge, and the profits obscene; the only concern was whether they could make their e-voting machines secure; management recognized that if their machines were used to rig a national election, their good name would be ruined -- forever.

Now then: it is an axiom of computer science that any system can be hacked if somebody commits sufficient resources to doing so; to make a system secure, you engineeer it so that it costs more to crack it than the economic benefits to the cracker. Thus, for example, security on an ATM doesn't have to be that good -- because the maximum cash dispensed is $500.00 per transaction.

Accordingly, my friend advised his client that computer voting cannot be made secure because the benefit to the cracker is control of a multi-trillion-dollar economy. If it took the private-sector equivalent of the entire NSA to crack an e-voting system, it still would be a bargain.

Accordingly, the client wisely chose to stay OUT of the e-voting business; my friend's advice was part of the package presented to the CEO and to the Chairman of the Board for their decision.