Monday, February 08, 2010

Intl. Conf. on EVMs at IIT, Chennai, 13 Feb. 2010, 6:30 to 8:30 PM

feb 8th, 2010

see the full details of various events at http://saveindiandemocracy.wordpress.com/conferences/

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: S. Kalyanaraman
Date: Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 8:03 PM
Subject: Intl. Conf. on EVMs at IIT, Chennai, 13 Feb. 2010, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
To:


IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Politics/Elections

Contact:  
Save Indian Democracy (US)
Email:      
saveindiandemocracy.org@gmail.com
Web:       http://saveindiandemocracy.org
Ph:          981-015-6791 (India), 986-602-1393 (India),  732-368-0122 (US)
Conf Details: 
http://saveindiandemocracy.wordpress.com/conferences/


New Delhi (Feb 1, 2010): The event organized by Save Indian Democracy is at IIT Chennai, Central Lecture Theater (CLT) from 6:30PM to 8:30PM.

International experts who are pioneers and have significantly altered the course of usage of EVM's in their countries are invited to India by Center for National Renaissance.  Details of experts from Netherlands, Germany, United States  drawn from legal, political and academic arenas in their countries is given below.  (Detailed bio-data is given at the end).


What is EVM and what are the issues related to EVMs?  EVMs are electronic voting machines that are used in India for more than two decades by Election Commission of India (ECI).  India went full with EVM in most recent two elections (2004 and 2009).    Many activists have been raising concerns about EVM as far back as 2001 but their increased usage has seen spate of PILs etc from different political parties, activists as well as encouraged demonstrations of tamper-ability of similar EVMs build based on ECI published specifications.   The concerns are not just reliability of EVMs but serious allegations of tampering.

At the same time India was initially moving towards EVMs as a way to use technology for improving efficiency,  internationally also several countries have moved into that direction with some countries making huge investments running into millions of dollars.   But what is the international scene today.   All over Europe,  several countries (Germany, Netherlands, Ireland) rejected EVMs or canceled early during feasibility studies (Italy etc).  In US, more than 21 states banned EVMs or require paper trail and 18 additional states use paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.   


Are there lessons for India from International Experience?  Are EVMs in India significantly different from EVMs used internationally?   Should we be concerned?  What, if any, are threats to Indian Democracy?


The planned activities are geared to bring an open discussion on these issues with international and national experts and help protect Indian Democracy.   


Details of international experts:

1) Rop Gonggrijp, Netherlands   Computer hacker, successful Entrepreneur who is instrumental in banning of EVMs in Netherlands due to security reasons, in spite of huge investments made by Netherlands in EVMs


Dr. Till Jaeger,  Germany   Attorney who argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned EVMs in German Elections

Dr. David Dill, USA   (via Video Conference) University of Stanford,  pioneer for reformation of usage of EVMs in US elections that resulted in 21 states in US either ban EVMs or require paper trail and additional 18 states require paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.   Founder of Verified Voting Foundation.  In 2004, Dr Dill received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" for "for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections." 


Dr. Alex Halderman, USA   Computer Science Professor, University of Michigan, noted expert of Electronic Voting Security who demonstrated first voting machine virus, lead team of Scientists from Princeton and Berkeley for "Top to Bottom" review of California EVMs.


DETAILED BIO DATA OF INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS


Rop Gonggrijp, Netherlands   Computer hacker, successful Entrepreneur who is instrumental in banning of EVMs in Netherlands due to security reasons, in spite of huge investments made by Netherlands in EVMs


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Born on Feb 14, 1968, Rop Gonggrijp is Dutch hacker, founder of internet service provider (IPS) XS4ALL, instrumental in exposing the vulnerabilities of Electronic Voting Machines to The Netherlands that resulted in banning of EVM machines in spite of huge investments made into them.   Mr. Gonggrijp  is now considered a key figure in the growing international movement for election transparency and verifiability.

Known as teenage hacker in his young days, Rop Gonggrijp founded hacker magazine Hack-Tic in 1988  and was considered major security threat by authorities of Netherlands.   In 1993, he and others around Hack-Tic founded ISP XS4ALL that is first ISP that offered internet access to private individuals which he sold the company to former enemy Dutch-Telecom.   After he left XS4ALL, he founded ITSX, a computer security evaluation company which was bought by Madison Gurkha in 2006.   In 2001, Mr. Gonggrijp started work on Cryptophone, a mobile telephone that can encrypt conversation.    Since 1989, Mr Gonggrijp has been main organizer of hacker events held every four years that are attended by thousands of hackers across the world.

After his home city of Amsterdam switched to electronic voting in 2006, mr. Gonggrijp started publicly questioning the security of the voting machines in use in The Netherlands as well as oppose the inherent lack of transparency when the vote count only happens inside a computer. With Amsterdam now also using computers, The Netherlands (pop. 17M) was 100% electronic voting. "We do not trust voting computers", the organisation founded by mr. Gonggrijp, has managed to convince the dutch public and government that the machines were not worthy of the trust placed in them.

After two government-appointed committees could do nothing but agree with the organization's point of view, voting computers were abolished and the country is now once-again voting using hand-counted paper ballots. The municipal election officials will probably never like the paper ballots as much as they liked the machines, but the recent elections for European Parliament passed without incident.

Mr. Gonggrijp also co-authored the CCC technical report on voting computers as requested by the German contitutional court and he is a key figure in the growing international movement for election transparency and verifiability.

Dr. Till Jaeger,  Germany   Attorney who argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned EVMs in German Elections

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Born in Dec 1969,  Dr. Till Jaeger, is attorney from Germany who successfully argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned the usage of Electronic Voting Machines in Germany's elections for reasons of transparency and verifiability.

"Dr. Till Jaeger has been a partner at the law firm JBB Rechtsanwälte since 2001. He advises large and medium-sized IT businesses as well as government authorities and software developers on matters involving contracts,
licensing and online use. Till Jaeger also covers conventional areas of copyright law and entertainment law.

One particular focus of Till Jaeger's work is on the legal issues created by open source software. He is co-founder of the Institute for Legal Aspects of Free & Open Source Software (ifrOSS), contributing to its work with academic
publications, lectures and seminars in the fields of software law and copyright law.

Till Jaeger represented the physicist and software-engineer Dr. Ulrich Wiesner at the German Constitutional Court in the proceedings regarding complaints requesting the scrutiny of the elections to the 16th German Bundestag. This lawsuit ended successful with the decision that the German Federal Voting Machine Ordinance is unconstitutional for lack of transparency and violation of the principle of democracy.

Till Jaeger graduated in law from the University of Mainz and has also studied in Dijon, France. He started his legal clerkship in Brandenburg in 1996. After that, he was given a DFG scholarship to attend a post-graduate course on EU law and the protection of personal rights in Munich. In
1999-2000 he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on copyright law at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition & Tax Law Munich."
 

Dr. David Dill, USA   (via Video Conference) University of Stanford,  pioneer for reformation of usage of EVMs in US elections that resulted in 21 states in US either ban EVMs or require paper trail and additional 18 states require paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.   Founder of Verified Voting Foundation.

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David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy,Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). 

Prof. Dill has been working actively on policy issues in voting technology since 2003. He is the author of the "Resolution on Electronic Voting", which calls for a voter-verifiable audit trail on all voting equipment, and which has been endorsed by thousands of people, including many of the top computer scientists in the U.S. He has served on the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Task Force on Touch-Screen voting, the Citizens DRE Oversight Board of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, and on the IEEE P1583 Voting Equipment Standards Committee. He has testified on electronic voting before the U.S. Senate and the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III. He is the founder of the Verified Voting Foundation and VerifiedVoting.org and is on the board of those organizations. In 2004, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" for "for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections."

Prof. Dill has research interests in a variety of areas, including computational systems biology and the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. He has also done research in asynchronous circuit verification and synthesis, and in verification methods for hard real-time systems. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation. 
Prof. Dill's Ph.D. thesis, "Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical Verification of Speed Independent Circuits" was named as a
Distinguished Dissertation by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and published as such by M.I.T. Press in 1988. He was the recipient of an Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1988, and a Young Investigatoraward from the Office of Naval Research in 1991. 

He has received 
Best Paper awards at International Conference on Computer Design in 1991 and the Design Automation Conference in 1993 and 1998. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems, and a Fellow of the ACM in 2005 for contributions to system verification and for leadership in the development of verifiable voting systems. In 2008, he received the first "Computer-Aided Verification" award, with Rajeev Alur, for fundamental contributions to the theory of real-time systems verification. 

Dr. Alex Halderman, USA   Computer Science Professor, University of Michigan, noted expert of Electronic Voting Security who demonstrated first voting machine virus, lead team of Scientists from Princeton and Berkeley for "Top to Bottom" review of California EVMs

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Born in Jan 1981,  Dr. John Alexander Halderman, is a Computer Science Professor from University of Michigan,  is noted expert on electronic voting security who demonstrated first voting machine virus, served as a technical expert in California's "Top to Bottom" voting systems review leading a team of scientists from Princeton and U.C. Berkeley.

J. Alex Halderman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where his research spans applied computer security and tech-centric public policy.  Professor Halderman is a noted expert on electronic voting security.  In 2006, he conducted the first public, independent security review of a touch-screen voting machine, the Diebold AccuVote TS, and demonstrated the first voting machine virus.  He later served as a technical expert in California's "Top-to-Bottom" voting systems review, leading a team of scientists from Princeton and U.C. Berkeley.  In addition to exposing voting security flaws, he has investigated ways to improve the security and efficiency of the election process by making smarter use of technology.

Professor Halderman earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University with a dissertation focused on studying computer security failures in order to strengthen future designs.  Besides electronic voting, his research interests include Internet security, data privacy, digital rights management, and cybercrime.  He was a founding member of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, where he continues to hold an appointment as a visiting research collaborator.

Website http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/.

Dr. Gitanjali Swamy,  PhD Berkeley, MBA Harvard,  (In 2000, demonstrated to then Election Commissioner M.S. Gill the vulnerabilities of chips in EVMs)



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