The Choices Unseen

Conditions: Rainy.


Wakka Wakka

A couple of years ago there was a lot of concern over voting machines in America being vulnerable to attack and therefore democracy itself being in danger of total irrelevance. Then Obama was elected and so everyone stopped caring. But they shouldn't, thanks to a recent experiment carried out by a bunch of hackers. What did they do? They managed to put the game Pac-man onto one of these voting machines without breaking any of the tamper-proof seals.

"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact," the hackers from Princeton and University of Michigan report. "The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case."

This particular Sequoia DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machine model is known as the AVC Edge. It used to be described on the Sequoia website and promotional materials as "tamperproof". It has been hacked previously and has failed time and again in recent elections, even though election officials continue to force voters to use them.

I really don't understand two things about this whole thing. The first is that the Government decided that the only way for electronic voting to work was by people pressing buttons and having the votes go into a database that is then transmitted to the central computer. This is just flat out stupid - having the results get transmitted electronically to any location is creating a huge vulnerability. What makes so much more sense is to have the machine spit out a paper ballot, then have the ballot be counted/collated as per normal.

The other thing I don't understand is how, despite these things clearly having been shown to be not only vulnerable, but downright open to abuse, the American public hasn't risen up and set the damn things on fire. Isn't it written down somewhere that if the government isn't doing things right then the people are supposed to take back control?

Short of adding "tamper-evident" seals to these machines --- the same seals that went undisturbed when Pac-Man was hacked onto the Sequoia AVC Edge machine --- very little has changed since 2006, and most of the same hackable (and often 100% unverifiable) electronic voting systems are still in use today, in both primary elections this year (such as the one where the unknown, unemployed campaign-less Alvin Greene was said to have defeated the four-term state legislator and circuit court Judge Vic Rawl for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination), as well as in the general elections this November.

- truth-out.org/

So sadly we have to conclude that not only is the physical infrastructure of Democracy in America under threat, but it's throbbing heart seems to be in great stress as well.




Film Review: Salt

You know, Paul Greengrass has a lot to answer for, I think, when it comes to the Spy Thriller genre. Bringing his shaky-camera tricks to the second and third Bourne movies (and having them inexplicably so well received by the public) really established this benchmark that every Spy thriller had to be furiously-paced, and bordering on the incoherent. Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA operative who's accused of being a Russian spy, and embarks on a crazy escapade that concerns the presidents of Russia and America, and the brink of World War three.

The classic cold-war ideas of sleeper agents and nuclear brinkmanship are wheeled out again for a fresh airing, but the real star of the show is Angelina Jolie, who simply overrides shoddiness in plot logic or direction with sheer aggression and determination. Salt is as much about what an actor can bring to a role as it is about crazy stunts and shocking twists. It's great to see female actors cutting loose in what would be a traditional male role (apparently written for Tom Cruise) and being totally believable in it.

You have to go a long way in today's spy thriller movie genre to be really impressive, and while this film isn't hugely impressive, it is at least entertaining thanks to Ms Jolie. Sure, there's a complex plot and a couple of daring twists, but it's characters that drive a film, any film, and Salt unfortunately remains a very closed-off character lost in a plot that frankly makes no sense whatsoever. We know why she ends up doing what she does, but it's not easy, or perhaps not allowed, to know how she's feeling about it. And so it goes. Three Sleepers out of Five.


- Peace Out