The government has admitted that it is aware of security concerns about internet votes being cast in local elections in England on Wednesday May 3.
The Department for Constitutional Affairs said it had been made aware of potential loopholes in some pilot schemes allowing people to vote online, but said it believed security procedures were robust enough to withstand attempts by hackers to rig the ballot.
However, internet security experts told The Guardian some systems being used were “catastrophically weak. We are very confident that we could take over all their systems and rig the vote any way we wanted,” said one researcher, who the paper said asked to remain anonymous.
-The Guardian
There is something so clearly Orwellian about the notion of millions of blameless individuals being observed by robot surveillance equipment that it may come as a surprise to hear that CCTV cameras are, in fact, hugely popular with the general public. In his testimony to the Home Affairs Select Committee yesterday, the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warned in stark terms about the danger of Britain sleepwalking into a “surveillance society”. But he was forced to admit that, for much of the population, the presence of security cameras represented reassurance rather than a threat to their civil liberties.
This dilemma – the delicate trade-off between security and privacy – is going to be tested further, as Mr Thomas made clear, by yet more technological innovations. The possibility of adding microphones to CCTV cameras (which may themselves be so small as to be hidden) could add a whole new dimension to the controversy: listening to, or recording, the private conversations of presumably innocent people is grossly intrusive and unacceptable. But there are no glib solutions: we will need constant vigilance and public transparency on this issue if historically important freedoms are not to be traded for what may, in the end, prove to be transitory ones.
– The Telegraph
