Communications of the ACM

to undermine democracy. For example, various dirty-tricks efforts in Richard Nixon’s House, Senate, and Presidential elections were a harbinger of the use of non-technological tactics. The Kerry Swift-boating attacks in 2004 should have been another warning sign. However, the 2016 election should really bring Citizens’ United, targeted disinformation, creative redistricting, and other issues to the forefront, although most of the computer scientists working in this area are generally still focused primarily on the computer systems, because the politicians have often been rather disinterested in the big picture or in the technology—apart from some recent concerns about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and related issues.

Redistricting and disenfranchisement
are also huge concerns.

As I write this, the Supreme Court has just upheld Ohio’s law to remove voters who are not voting “frequently enough.” In addition, the Supremes seem to be unable to cope with mathematical reasoning and sound logic.

Leah, as you yourself have suggested to me quite incisively in a broader context, “if we can’t agree on parameters for using or distributing a particular set of tools, we cede it to malicious forces as a matter of course.”

When we spoke previously, you were
working on an effort to develop new
systems that could be much more trust-
worthy. Can you give me an update?

Certainly. Our hardware-software design and development efforts based on our CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) instruc-tion-set architecture (ISA) began in 2010, and will now continue into early 2021. We are also formally verifying that the ISA satisfies certain critical properties. This is joint work between SRI and the University of Cambridge. Our website ( http://www.cl.cam. ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/) includes the latest hardware ISA specification (along with several variant possible CHERI implementations, and ongoing tech transfer), as well as our published papers.

Leah Hoffmann is a technology writer based in Piermont, N Y, USA.

ly on the technical security of voting systems, and not enough on the hackability of human behavior? Aside from the public opprobrium that Facebook and other social media outlets have since faced, do you think we are doing better to incorporate the total scope of threats to free and fair elections?

Given the enormous risks of direct-recording election equipment (DREs) with only proprietary software, proprietary data formats, and proprietary data during elections, and no meaningful audit trails or possibilities for remediating obviously fraudulent results, our initial efforts were urgently devoted to making the case for voter-verified paper trails that would be the ballot choices of record. For example, I testified in January 1995 for the New York City Board of Elections, and David Dill, Barbara Simons, and I spoke in multiple hearings in 2003 before the Santa Clara County (CA) supervisors, who were planning to acquire $24-million worth of paperless DREs. Dan Boneh, David Dill, Doug Jones, Avi Rubin, Dave Wagner, Dan Wallach, and I participated for seven years beginning in 2005 in an NSF (National Science Foundation) collaborative effort called ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections. (For more recent analysis, see Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count, by Doug Jones and Barbara Simons; http://www.timbergroves.com/bb/.)

It was evident that unauditable DREs
were a huge weak link. On the other
hand, I have long maintained that es-
sentially every step in the election pro-
cess represents a potential weak link
mentors,
Roger Nash Baldwin, who founded
the ACLU (American Civil Liberties
Union) in 1919.

Altruism is perhaps the most impor-
tant virtue we need to maintain, espe-
cially in times of adversity. “And that’s
the word: Altruism.”
With today’s fake news and myriad
forms of disinformation, perhaps we
need a word similar to altruism for the
“unselfish concern for the truth,” which
we might pronounce as all-true-ism.

What do you make of the fallout from
the 2016 election?

As a civilization, we must work even harder to promote common sense, reality, the relevance of science and dependable engineering, and above all, the truth. All of these are fundamental to human rights, election integrity, freedom of speech, civil rights, and the preservation of democracy. The risks relating to technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and social media, are generally not sufficiently well understood from the perspective of security— especially in the absence of trustworthy systems and trustworthy people, and in the presence of misanthropes with no respect for values, ethics, morals, and established knowledge.

Are you optimistic about the GDPR
(the European Union’s General Data
Protection Regulation) and other pri-
vacy initiatives?

Many efforts relating to security and privacy fall victim to the reality that our computer systems are still inherently untrustworthy, and easily attacked by the Russians, Chinese, corrupt insiders, and potentially everyone else. Everything seems to be hackable, or otherwise adversely influenced, including elections, automobiles, the Internet of Things, cloud servers, and more. Essentially, the needs for better safety, reliability, security, privacy, and system integrity that I highlighted 24 years ago in my book, Computer-Related Risks, are still with us in one form or another today. If we do not have systems that are sufficiently trustworthy, respecting privacy remains even more challenging.