November 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Your source code, for sale
by hal＠finney.org 07 Nov '04

07 Nov '04

Enzo Michelangeli writes: > In the world of international trade, where mutual distrust between buyer > and seller is often the rule and there is no central authority to enforce > the law, this is traditionally achieved by interposing not less than three > trusted third parties: the shipping line, the opening bank and the > negotiating bank. Interesting. In the e-gold case, both parties have the same bank, e-gold ltd. The corresponding protocol would be for the buyer to instruct e-gold to set aside some money which would go to the seller once the seller supplied a certain receipt. That receipt would be an email return receipt showing that the seller had sent the buyer the content with hash so-and-so, using a cryptographic email return-receipt protocol. > > You could imagine a trusted third party who would inspect the code and > > certify it, saying "the source code with hash XXX appears to be > > legitimate Cisco source code". Then they could send you the code bit > > by bit and incrementally show that it matches the specified hash, > > using a crypto protocol for gradual release of secrets. You could > > simultaneously do a gradual release of some payment information in the > > other direction. > > But it's hard to assess the value of partially-released code. If the > gradual transfer bits-against-cents is aborted, what is left to the buyer > is likely to be unusable, whereas the partial payment still represents > good value. Actually you can arrange it so that neither the partially-released code nor the partially-transferred ecash is of any value until the whole transfer finishes. For example, send the whole thing first in encrypted form, then release the encryption keys bit-by-bit. If someone aborts the protocol early, the best each side can do is a brute force search over the untransferred bits to try to find the key to unlock the data they received. > A more general issue is that source code is not a commodity, and > intellectual property is not "real" property: so the traditional "cash on > delivery" paradigm just doesn't work, and looking for protocols > implementing it kind of moot. If the code is treated as trade secret, > rather than licensed, an anonymous buyer may make copies and resell them > on the black market more than recovering his initial cost, at the same > time undercutting your legitimate sales (see e.g. the cases of RC4 and > RC2). This can cause losses order of magnitude larger than refusing to pay > for his copy. That's a good point. Maybe you could use some kind of DRM or trusted computing concept to try to force the buyer to lock up his received data. For source code that would be pretty difficult though, it needs to be handled in flexible ways. Hal

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The Values-Vote Myth
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Nov '04

07 Nov '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/opinion/06brooks.html?hp=&pagewanted=prin…> The New York Times November 6, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST The Values-Vote Myth By DAVID BROOKS Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them. In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top. This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong. Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily. It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues. Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result. The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums. He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror. The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not. The red and blue maps that have been popping up in the papers again this week are certainly striking, but they conceal as much as they reveal. I've spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is no one explanation. It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction. In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues. But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are? What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
by James Donald 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

-- John Young wrote: > Commie is the term used here like is nazi used elsewhere as the most > fearsome if thoughtless epithet. Nazi here is a term of endearment, > and also admirable role model by some. > > Calling someone both is not allowed, check the FAQ under impurity. I routinely call people like you nazi-commies. As George Orwell observed, anyone who thinks there is a significant difference between nazis and commies is in favor of one or the other. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG tcPPLhn9aMTaLb/hq3C0TK4TWGyDiUmRgFC+48C2 4sa/dBFoKxqt/B8oRTgvooxp3PmvXeSL3LjqpFI+W ___________________________________________________________ $0 Web Hosting with up to 120MB web space, 1000 MB Transfer 10 Personalized POP and Web E-mail Accounts, and much more. Signup at www.doteasy.com

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More Evidence The Vote Was Rigged
by Jei 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

http://www.rense.com/general59/rig.htm More Evidence The Vote Was Rigged >From Wayne Nash 11-5-4 I don't want rain on the parade but I am getting quite a few emails from various sources citing possible irregularities with the voting process. So, I did a little research myself on the net to see what I could find. As a political scientist I could not resist. Regardless of the veracity of any claim to possible irregularities I suggest that this question of legitimacy of the process needs to be addressed if everyone casting their vote is to feel that their vote is being properly counted. No one can feel disenfranchised in a real democracy. Otherwise, you end up with a dictatorship and not a democracy at all. Unless BOTH sides feel the system is verifiable then you may end up with a banana republic 'democracy'. This is not question of who won the election. It is a matter of much greater importance; the legitimacy of the democratic process itself. Here are a couple of sites which address the issue: 1. http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ 2. http://www.electoral-vote.com/ On this last web site I found this interesting bit of information: "Various people sent me mail saying that it is awfully fishy that the exit polls and final results were substantially different in some places. I hope someone will follow this up and actually do a careful analysis. Does anyone know of a Website containing all the exit poll data? If we go to computerized voting without a paper trail and the machines can be set up to cheat, that is the end of our democracy. Switching 5 votes per machine is probably all it would take to throw an election and nobody would ever see it unless someone compares the computer totals and exit polls. I am still very concerned about the remark of Walden O'Dell a Republican fund raiser and CEO of Diebold, which makes voting machines saying he would deliver Ohio for President Bush. Someone (not me) should look into this carefully. The major newspapers actually recounted all the votes in Florida last time. Maybe this year's project should be looking at the exit polls. If there are descrepancies between the exit polls and the final results in touch-screen counties but not in paper-ballot counties, that would be a signal. At the very least it could be a good masters thesis for a political science student. The Open voting consortium is a group addressing the subject of verifiable voting." Could there be a possible problem here? Let's see... * In states where there were paper ballots the results exactly matched the exit polls. * In states where there were only electronic 'touch-screen' paperless voting machines Bush showed an inexplicable 5-8 point or more difference from the polls, contradicting otherwise accurate exit polls. * The software used in these voting machines is so sophisticated that you can't even check out the programming because it disappears leaving nothing to verify, no source code, no nothing. Below are 3 articles explaining how these E-voting programs work. The man who published these articles is apparently an expert on this E-voting subject and a computer scientist. Article 1 http://www.southbaymobilization.org/newsroom/ articles/04.0303.ADeafeningSilence_article.htm Article 2 http://www.southbaymobilization.org/newsroom/ articles/04.0618.SecretAgentPrograms_article.htm Article 3 http://www.southbaymobilization.org/newsroom/ articles/04.0701.EVoting_TheNewCloseUpMagic_article.htm Another site takes the subject seriously... http://www.rense.com/general59/steI.HTM Highlight: * SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis... ...on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. * In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error. * Analysis of the polling data vs actual data and voting systems supports the hypothesis that evoting may be to blame in the discrepancies. * The media was a bit taken aback that the results didn't match the exit polls AT ALL. Most of the commentators were scratching their head in disbelief at the results. The media has gracefully claimed they "just got it wrong." Some examples? WISCONSIN: Kerry leads Female voters by 7%, Bush leads male voters by 7%. Male vs. Female voter turnout is 47% M, 53% F. That means Kerry statistically has a 7% edge in exit polling in Wisconsin. Actual results however show Bush ahead by 1%, an unexplained difference of 8%. NEVADA: Kerry leads in the exit polls by a clear margin, but is still behind in the reported results. This state is even closer. Actual is just 1% favor of Bush. Exit polls show Kerry with a wider margin. Women favored Kerry by 8% here out of 52% of total voters. Men favored Bush by just 6% out of 48% of total voters. Actual reported results don't match exit polling AT ALL in Nevada. Easy Programming? According to the programmer cited above here is how easy it is to "make magic" ... We need COUNTERS - (B) = Bush; (K) = Kerry; (V) = Vote; (T) =Tally 1. If V = B, add 1 to B 2. If T = 8, add 1 to B; Clear T; Skip 3 3. If V = K, add 1 to K; Add 1 to T This extremely simple bit of programming would shift 12% of the vote from Kerry to Bush, it would defy exit polls, and it would make it look like Bush had a huge popular win. _____ Feel free to pass this on to your Republican and Democratic friends. If you are American, this should concern you regardless of who won this election or wins future elections. If your process is flawed your democracy is flawed and everything you believe in is on the line. I am sure that people on the ground are acting in good faith and voting according to their values and beliefs. It is the people at the top that concern me.

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Observable Elections
by Jei 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

http://www.infosecwriters.com/hhworld/hh9/voting.txt Hitchhiker's World (Issue #9) http://www.infosecwriters.com/hhworld/ Observable Elections -------------------- Vipul Ved Prakash <mail(a)vipul.net> November 2004 This is an interesting time for electronic voting. India, the largest democracy in the world, went completely paper- free for its general elections earlier this year. For the first time, some 387 million people expressed their electoral right electronically. Despite initial concerns about security and correctness of the system, the election process was a smashing success. Over a million electronic voting machines (EVMs) were deployed, 8000 metric tonnes of paper saved[1] and the results made public within few hours of the final vote. Given the quarrelsome and heavily litigated nature of Indian democracy, a lot of us were expecting post-election drama, but only a few, if any, fingers were found pointing. Things didn't fare so well in the United States. The Dieobold electronic machines, slated for use in many states for the November 2004 Federal elections, turned out to have rather large security holes. Cryptography experts, Avi Rubin et al, did a formal analysis of the machines and found that they could be subverted to introduce votes that were never casted[2]. An independent government-backed analysis confirmed this[3] and concluded that the Diebold voting system "as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at a high risk of compromise." It is clear, even to a cursory observer, that Diebold systems are sloppily designed, never mind the sloppiness is a function of incompetence or intent. The recent controversy from the "Black Box Voting" security advisory titled "the Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole"[4] has added to the confusion. It claims that a code entered at a remote location can replace the real vote count with a fabricated one. This security hole, discovered last year, is still not fixed says the advisory. In response, Diebold claims that this is possible, but only in debug mode, which does little to make people confortable. What is disturbing to me as a technologist is the burgeoning public opinion that electronics is an unviable medium for conducting the serious business of elections. Over the last year I've seen numerous formal reports and articles in popular press[5] equating the failures of Diebold systems with the untenability of electronic voting. This is rather silly. Diebold systems are not only poorly engineered, they are also seriously flawed in design. Even if they were immaculately bug-free, they are so far from what electronic voting systems should be, that I have trouble categorizing them as "voting systems". "Electronic counters" is more accurate. Various augmentations have been proposed to Diebold systems; most revolve around parallel paper trails. Verified Voting[6] for example proposes that a vote be printed based on the voter's touch-screen selection, so the voter can touch, feel and verify their vote before casting it into a traditional ballet box. These votes would then be processed with an OCR type machine to compute a cumulative result and the physical votes would be saved so an independent party can verify the electronic result at a latter date. This is a reasonable tradeoff -- after all integrity of elections is way more important than saving trees and time. While this is the best recommendation for the upcoming elections, it subtly promotes the primacy of paper and distrust in electrons. We know that paper elections are no more secure. The history of vote tampering in paper based elections is quite illustrious (I'll simply refer the gentle reader to [7]) and the reason electronics was considered in the first place was to eliminate such tampering. Verified Voting recommends that count of the physical votes is to be considered superior than that of the electronic counterparts in case of a difference. What happens if the process of this count is tampered using traditional methods? We are back to square one. The central point that I want to get across in this paper is that the promise of electronic voting is not merely a quicker, slightly more secure and ecologically enlightened replacement for paper elections. Electronic voting, if implemented correctly, could be a major qualitative leap, not only changing the way in which we approach democratic elections, but also the the way in which we expect a democratic government to function. Cryptographic Integrity I want to draw attention to the work done by cryptographic community in the last 20 years to study, formalize and solve many of the problems of Internet Voting. This area of work is focused on building election systems that leave behind a trail of mathematical proofs of the integrity of the voting process. With mathematical solutions to the common issues of vote tampering, it becomes unnecessary to trust election officials and it becomes possible to build voting systems that are open and universally verifiable. A voting system for appointing a democratic government has certain "ideal properties". These are rather obvious, but I recount them for the purpose of this discussion. First, all votes must be counted exactly like they were casted. Altering a vote, or leaving one out from the final tally must be impossible. Ballot stuffing, ie. artificial injection of invalid votes must be impossible as well. The system should reject non-eligible voters, and ensure eligible users can cast only a single vote. And, finally, votes must be absolutely anonymous -- even the voter should be unable to prove the way in which they voted. Systems like Diebold's depend on large-scale observation to uphold the ideal properties. Large-scale observation is hard, and once an act of tampering is done, there is little that can be done to detect or correct it. The attacks such as the one described by the Black Box Voting advisory are particularly heinous, since they compromise the entire election process. The ideal properties are true in paper elections when they are implemented perfectly, but the nature of paper precludes proofs of correctness without compromising anonymity. The problems are much the same as in the "Electronic Counter" systems; without correctness proofs, it is largely infeasible to detect and correct tampering. Cryptographers have been trying to emulate the property of anonymity that is inherent to paper when it us used as cash or votes. The research in the field has led to invention of several mathematical primitives and computing systems that not only model paper but go beyond to provide proofs of the properties they emulate. Techniques like blind signatures, homomorphic encryption, digital mixes and onion routing have been used to build systems that provide strong anonymity. The pioneering cryptographer David Chaum introduced the blind signature in order to build permit truly anonymous interaction on the Internet[8]. Since then, they have been applied to all manner of problems from untraceable electronic cash to electronic voting schemes. Blind signatures are a class of digital signatures that allow a document to be signed without revealing its contents. The effect is similar to placing a document and a sheet of carbon paper inside an envelope. When the envelope is signed, the signature transfers to the document and remains on it even when the envelope is removed. In his paper, Chaum hinted that blind signatures could be used for secret ballot elections. Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta[9] created the first significant blind signature based voting protocol, which made it practical to use blind signatures in democratic elections. However, some problems were discovered in their work, most notably the system's vulnerablity to a corrupt election authority. I present a system, dubbed ``Athens'', that builds on their work, but solves several problems in their model. I also focus on a real-world election system, rather than an Internet one, and adopt a pragmatic approach, in that I make use of physical resources like volunteers and physical infrastructure usually available for large-scale democratic elections. Athens also borrows elements and thinking from the Sensus[10] system and David Chaum's recent work on Visual Cryptography[11]. Design of Athens The basic procedure for conducting a democratic election is fairly standard. The procedure has four tasks: Registration, Validation, Collection and Tallying. In Athens, these four tasks are carried out with a few specialized machines and software, most of which are connected through the Internet. While Athens employs an Election Authority to oversee the process of elections, it does away with the dependence on trustworthiness of one. Athens philosophy is that there are no truly non-partisan parties; even the Election Authority can't be completely trusted. The Athens model is closer to a "game" between contesting parties, such that the only way to cheat in the game is for all competitors to collude - an axiomatic impossibility. The Election Authority performs tactical tasks to optimize the election process, but all tasks performed by the Authority are open to review by competing parties. Registration Registration is the process of determining eligible voters, and is conducted by the "Registrar" -- a distributed authority put in place by the Election Authority. The Athens registration process involves validating voters (through traditional means) and registering their "Voter Public Key" in the "Register." The corresponding "Voter Secret Key" remains with the voter, magnetically encoded (or bar coded for cheaper implementation) on a "Voting Card". The keys are generated through the "Voting Card Creator Machine". The Card Creator Machine is also implemented as software that can be used by a voter on their home computer. It is not hard to imagine Card Creators installed in local registration offices or even at Kinko's and shopping malls, where they charge a few dollars for generating a card. Fairness in design is important, because Card Creators could compromise the security of the system by storing the key pairs they generate. A card creator is mostly an RSA key generator - it needs computing power of a 300 Mhz PC, and is constructed fairly cheaply. Once the voter enters their personal information into the machine, it spits out two cards: one with the public key, that is handed over to the Registrar and the other with the secret key and identification information required by the Election Authority (like the social security number of the voter.) The second card is known as the "Voting Card" and is used to validate the voter at the time of elections. Both cards also contain a large random number, known as the Voter Id. This is used throughout the voting process to facilitate lookups in the Register without compromising the privacy of the voter. Once all voters have handed their Voter Public Key Card over to the Registrar, the registration process is considered to be complete. As with traditional elections, there is a cut- off date for this process. On completion of registration, the Election Authority hands the Register over to all the competitors. The competitors then check every 1 in 1000 entries (or more according to their capacity) to ensure that they belong to a legitimate voter, i.e. it isn't a fake entry inserted by a corrupt competitor to stuff the ballot. This process is woefully lacking in elections of today, and a hence a major vector for election fraud. Mathematics can do little to alleviate the dangers of registering fake voters, but competitors who depend on the correctness of the Register and raise funds for the purpose can easily perform this task. Register verification would be a lucrative business for independent professional services organizations, so it is not hard to imagine such organizations sprouting up to assume delegation of this responsibility. The competitors also put the Register on the Internet before the election so that voters can ensure their voter key is present in all copies of the Register. When requested, each competing party provides a digitally signed proof that the voter is registered to vote, i.e. their key is present in the Register. The voter, if denied the right to vote, can take this proof to a court of law. A pre-voting verification of eligibility limits the kind of fiasco that occurred in Florida during the Presidential elections of 2000, where a large number of people were denied vote. Validation In most electronic voting protocols, there exists the notion of the "Validator" - a party that holds the Register and validates voters during the election. In Athens, the competing parties, that were handed a copy of the Register in the previous step, all serve as Validators. Athens, therefore, is a multi-validator system. It is reasonable to assume that independents or fiscally constrained parties would team up and have a single Validator represent them. Validators are connected to the Internet and run Validation software, that accepts validation requests over a TCP port. The Validators are firewall'ed off to accept data only from certain IP addresses. The Electronic Voting Machines talk to the Validators via a Proxy. EVMs could theoretically talk directly to Validators, but the reasons for using a proxy will become apparent later. The Proxy is operated by the Election Authority and observed by representatives from all competing parties. Validators have their own RSA key pair, the public portion of which is published widely over the Internet. They also maintain two lists (other than the Register). This is the list of voters who have casted a vote and a list of corresponding validation requests. Before the commencement of the election, the Election Authority chooses a a random number which is known as the "Election Number". The only property of this number is its uniqueness to the election - it should not have been used in a previous election. The Election Number is distributed to all Validators. Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) used in Athens are quite unlike Diebold's or the ones used in the Indian elections. Athens' EVMs are simply "agents" that vote on behalf of the voter. Each EVM has an Id and a RSA key pair. The public part of the EVM key is published widely over the Internet. Communications initiated by the EVM are signed with EVMs secret key. The elections are considered formally commenced, when the Validators broadcast the Election Number and their public keys to EVMs via the Proxy. The Athens Voting Protocol The voter enters a private booth and swipes their Voting Card on the EVM. The EVM reads the secret key and the Voter Id off the Card. The EVM has a little printer attached to it, much like a cash register receipt printer, on which it prints out the Voter Id. It the sends the voter Id off to the Validators via the proxy to initiate a "voting session" on behalf of the voter. If the voter has already casted a vote, Validators return a "proof" of previously casted vote. The proof and its implications are discussed a little later. If there's no previous vote, the Validators send a positive acknowledgment and the EVM asks the voter to cast a ballot. The voter enters their vote using the on-screen display. The EVM concatenates the Voter's choice with the Election Number (EN) and the result is encrypted with a secret key (randomly generated) using a symmetric cipher like AES. The encrypted ballot is then blinded. At this point, the EVM has: Voter Id + Blind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN)) The blinded ballot is then signed with the voter's secret key. The EVM also signs the EN with the Voter's key. The EVM now has: Voter Id + VoterSignature(EN) + VoterSignature(Blind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN))) + Blind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN)) The EVM sends the signed, blinded ballot over to the the Proxy, that sends it to all Validators. Upon receipt, a Validator looks up the public key corresponding to the Voter Id and uses it to check the voter signature. If the voter signature is valid the Validator signs the blind with its own key. It adds the Voter Id to the list of voters who have casted a vote and keeps, in another list, the original blinded request, the signed EN, and the timestamp of request as a proof of the casted vote. It sends the signed blinded ballot back to the Proxy, that forwards it to the originating EVM. The data packet contains: EVM Id + Voter Id + ValidatorSignature(Blind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN))) If the Validator can't validate the signature, it sends a VERIFY_FAILURE error to the EVM: EVM Id + Voter Id + VERIFY_FAILURE + ValidatorSignature( VERIFY_FAILURE + Blind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN)) ) If the Validator can't find the Voter Id, it sends an INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE error to the EVM: EVM Id + Voter Id + INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE + ValidatorSignature( INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE + Blind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN)) ) As described earlier, if the Voter has already casted a vote, the Validator sends a proof of the vote, which contains: REPEAT_VOTE_FAILURE + Proof Where Proof is: EVM Id + Voter Id + Request_Timestamp + PreviousBlind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN)) + VoterSignature(PreviousBlind(Encrypted(Ballot . EN))) + VoterSignature(EN) Once the EVM has received responses from all Validators, it informs the voter that their vote was casted. If all Validators sent a positive response the EVM prints out the message "Vote successfully casted" (immediately following the previously printed Voter Id), and instructs the voter to take the printed receipt. If any of the Validators return a failure, the EVM prints out all Validator responses, including the steps for unblinding and decrypting the original vote. A little later I will demonstrate how this receipt can be used to detect various types of tampering and attacks on the system. For now, we will assume validation was successful. For a successful validation, the EVM removes the blind and is left with ``n' validated encrypted ballots: Validator_1_Signature(Encrypted(Ballot . EN))) .. Validator_n_Signature(Encrypted(Ballot . EN))) + Encrypted(Ballot . EN) This data encapsulates a secret vote by a voter whose eligibility has been attested to by all competing Validators, none of whom know the way in which the vote was cast. Additionally, any independent party can now confirm the integrity of the vote by checking the Validator signatures. The EVM places the signatures, the ballot and the secret key used to encrypted the Ballot on a "Tally Queue". For votes that failed, the failure messages are placed on the Tally Queue instead. Tallying When the Election is over, several pieces of data are published over the Internet in a public forum that has properties of a Usenet group (ie. published information can't be retracted). First, the Validators publish their list of Voter Ids that casted a vote along with "proofs" of validation request, where the proof is exactly the same as one described above. This includes all the data on the two lists maintained by the Validators. Once Validators have published their lists, the proxy opens up the constraints on EVM communication, such that they can all talk to each other and read and write in the public forum. The proxy informs EVMs of this event and sends them a list of IP addresses all EVMs. The EVMs then participate in an Onion Routing protocol[12] to publish the encrypted ballots and Validator signatures on these ballots from their Tallying Queue. Once encrypted votes and Validator signatures are faithfully transmitted over to the public forum, EVMs enter a second round of Onion routing to publish the AES passwords to decrypt the votes. The Onion Routing protocol strips the origination information, so it becomes impossibly hard to corelate votes to EVMs, thereby making the publication anonymous. At this point, all data required to do a tally is available publically. It should be noted that almost everything that transpires during the election process, with the exception of the data that links the voters to their votes, is made public at the end of the election. This level of transparency is one of the greatest benefits of a well designed electronic voting system. In Athens, the tallying is done by the Election Authority, but anyone equiped with Tallying software can check the tally independently. Athens tally is straightforward. Ballots that have valid signatures from _all_ Validators are selected as countable votes. These are decrypted with the published AES secret keys, votes are separated from the Election Number, and counted to produce a final tally. Security of Athens To analyse the security of Athens, I will show how various common attacks are made trivially detectable by the Athens architecture. Denial of Vote Attacks The pre-election registration verification keeps the Registrar honest. If the registrar drops people from the Register, there's a high probability that the drop will be detected and the Registrar will be answerable in a court of law. Since competing parties are independently undertaking the verification, it is in everyones interest to keep the process honest. During the election, two different types of denial attacks are possible. The first attack is where one of the competitors know (based on the Voter Id, or region), the way in which the voter will cast a vote. Outspoken supporters, representatives and volunteers of a party are vulnerable to this attack. A competing Validator could try to deny them the vote by raising one of the three possible errors: INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE, VERIFY_FAILURE or REPEAT_VOTE_FAILURE. To protect from the INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE denial attack, a copy of the register is published widely prior to the commencement of the elections. A receipt generated by the EVM with a valid Voter Id and an INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE notice is an easily established proof of Validators' corruption. VERIFY_FAILURE is also trivially established with help of the positive validation requests from competing Validators (also on the receipt), the public Register and the voter's Voting Card. The attack based on the third error, REPEAT_FAILURE is more interesting. What if a Validator refuses to Validate a vote by claiming that the Voter has already voted? In that case, the Validator must provide a proof of the previous Validation request. Since the proof contains a signature made on both the EM and the Blinded ballot by Voter's secret key, the Validator cannot provide such a proof with the knowledge of the key - which is unavailable to the Validator. This is why Athens requires Validators to keep a copy of all validation requests, and conducts the validation process in 2-steps, so the first validation request can't be used as a proof. Also, since the Election Number is encoded in the ballot, and a signed EN is part of the proof, validation requests from previous elections can't be cited as proofs. An incorrect proof is easily verifiable by the EVM as well as the voter and a court of law with help of the printed receipt. A different kind of denial of vote attack can be mounted by the EVMs. In this attack the EVMs withhold publication of validated votes. However, such withholding is easily discovered in Athens because the list of proofs published by the Validators indicate the number of casted and verified votes. Ballot Stuffing Attacks There are several ways in which an attacker can try to stuff ballots. The first method, that was discussed earlier, is by registering fake voters during the registration process. Since the Register is open to independent scrutiny by all competitors, the risks of adding fake voters is high and hence discouraged. Another ballot stuffing attack is to cast votes for absentees. This attack is very hard in Athens, since it requires the knowledge of absentees' secret keys. The third way to stuff the ballot is for an eligible voter to cast multiple votes. This is made impossible in Athens with help of Validation proofs. Even when the Validators of n-1 colluding parties (where n is the number of competing parties), validate multiple requests from Mallory (a colluding voter), the non-colluding party is able to present a proof of Mallory's first vote and deny all subsequent requests with impunity. The Tallying process requires an affirmation from _all_ Validators, so such votes are not counted. Vote Alteration Attacks The Athens protocol requires that EVMs act honestly on the behalf of the Voter. A corrupt EVM could easily display to the voter that it has casted a vote their choice, but actually cast the vote for another party. This attack would be impossible if the EVM was required to print out a receipt of every vote that included the blinded ballot, signed by Voter's secret key, the steps to unblind it and the secret AES key with which the actual vote was encrypted. The voter could then look up the encrypted ballot after it was published and ensure the vote was cast and counted correctly. Doing this, however, would leave the voter with a proof of vote that could lead to vote coercion or vote buying. It is not sufficient to blindly trust the EVM either. Code reviews, or open source development of the EVM software (while should be encouraged) do not guarantee that the code running on the deployed EVM is the one that was reviewed. To keep the EVMs honest, Athens implements a sub-protocol for EVM verification. All competing parties add a few thousand fake voters to their own copy of the Register, and generate corresponding voting cards. These voting cards are then used by designated verifiers (volunteers) to cast arbitrary votes (usually for the party that runs the Validator) to test the EVMs. The volunteers are normal, eligible voters with multiple voting cards - they first vote with their real card, and then pull out the fake ones to run a series of tests. When the designated verifier casts a vote with one of the faked card, the vote is verified correctly by the Verifying Validator (the one who has the fake keys on it copy of the Register), while other n-1 Validators decline validation with an INVALID_VOTERID_FAILURE. This causes the EVM to print out the entire transaction, down to the selection of the actual vote that the EVM tried to validate. If the EVM is systematically altering votes, the designated verifier ends up with a receipt showing a selection that was different from his actual selection. If the EVM attempts to cover up its deception by printing a receipt that says "Vote successfully casted", the designated verified immediately knows the EVM is lying, since the n-1 Validators would have failed the verification. If the EVM tries to back paddle and cast a correct vote after it receives the INVALID_VOTERID_FAILUREs, the duplicate vote attempt is detected by (at least) the Verifying Validator, who responds with a proof of the previous validation request. Unable to differentiate a normal voter from a designated verifier before sending a verification request, the EVM is forced to act honestly. Athens requires the physical constraint of using a proxy for all communications originating from the EVMs, to ensure EVMs have no out-of-bound, out-of-protocol communications with Validators and other parties. This provides a single, focused point of observation for the competing parties, and can be performed fairly easily with a protocol decoder. In sum, Athens uses cryptographic primitives to build an electronic voting system that ties in the processes of registration, voting, and tallying into a protocol that is secure, anonymous and truly transparent. Since all aspects of the protocol are verifiable the potential for fraud is greatly reduced. Even more importantly, open systems like Athens inspire confidence and promote participation in the election process - the very foundation of democracy. Partial Observability "Participation" brings us to the one of the topics that originally led to my interest in electronic voting. I know many intelligent and politically sensitive Indians who have never casted a vote in Indian democratic elections. I am one of them. My reason for electoral inaction is not apathy, but simple statistics. In a country of a billion people, my vote doesn't really count. To be more precise, if one party wins by 80% then my vote, in either direction, is not useful. However, if a party that I don't support happens to win by a small margin, my vote (and those of others like me) could have made all the difference. Of course, I have no way of knowing this till it is too late. I could pay attention to gallop and exit polls, but those can be quite wrong as demonstrated in the Indian general elections earlier this year. It is no surprise that the voter turnout in what is perceived to be a hotly contested election is higher than expected. A comprehensive IDEA survey[13] on voter turnout failed to find corelations between turnout and various factors they studied, but they found that "there does seem to be a clear link between voter turnout and the competitiveness of electoral politics in a political system. In the 542 elections where the largest party won less than half of the votes turnout was a full 10% higher than the 263 elections where a single party won over 50% of the popular vote." Publishing partial results is a tactical nightmare in paper based or electronic counter based elections. However, a system like Athens could enter the Tally phase several times during the election at no additional cost to provide an "intermediate tally". The frequency and timing of the intermidiate tallies could be function of the size of the electorate and number of uncounted votes - large enough to protect the anonymity of the voters and small enough to provide an updating sense of the final result. The intermediate tallies could be broadcastd on TV, Radio and the Internet (much like Stock tickers), and would functions as "get out the vote" campaigns, to encourage the statistically informed to go out and vote. This property of elections that I like to call "partial observability", could greatly boost participation and otherwise alter the dynamics of the election process. It is just one of the ways in which electronic voting could qualitative change the elections and democracy. Bibliography [1] Indian Election 2004, Facts and Figures http://www.indian-elections.com/facts-figures.html How Stuff Works, How many sheets of paper can be produced from a single tree? http://science.howstuffworks.com/question16.htm [2] T. Kohno, A. Stubblefield, A. Rubin, D. Wallach, Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, May 2004. http://avirubin.com/vote/analysis/index.html [3] Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Risk Assessment Report: Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting System and Processes, SAIC-6099-2003-261, 2 September 2003. http://www.dbm.maryland.gov/DBM%20Taxonomy/Tech- nology/Policies%20&%20Publications/State%20Voting%20- System%20Report/stateVotingSystemReport.html [4] Black Box Voting, Consumer Report Part 1: The Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole, 26 August 2004 http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78 [5] Paul O'Donnell, Why you are still voting on paper, WIRED, August 2004. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/start.html?pg=7 [6] VerifiedVoter.org [7] CRS Report for Congress, Election Reform and Electronic Voting Systems: Analysis of Security Issues. http://www.epic.org/privacy/voting/crsreport.pdf [8] D. Chaum, Achieving Electronic Privacy http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/mepeirce/Project/Chaum/sciam.html [9] A. Fujioka, T. Okamoto, and K. Ohta, A Practical Secret Voting Scheme for Large Scale Elections. 1992. http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~rivest/voting/papers/- FujiokaOkamotoOhta-APracticalSecretVotingSchemeFor- LargeScaleElections.pdf [10] L. Cranor, R. Cytron, Sensus: A security conscious electronic polling system for the Internet. http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/hicss/ [11] D. Chaum, Secret Ballot Receipts and Transparent Integrity. http://www.vreceipt.com/article.pdf [12] R. Dingledine, N. Mathewson, P. Syverson, Tor: The Second- Generation Onion Router. http://www.freehaven.net/tor/cvs/doc/design-paper/tor-design.html [13] IDEA, Voter Turnout: A Global Survey http://www.idea.int/voter_turnout/voter_turnout.html

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Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
by Chris Kuethe 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

Fun bits to read, somewhat related to Owell and the perceived notional differences between various... extremists. http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedia/f/fa/fascism.html http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/opinion/essays/storgaard1.html http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm Certainly one could infer from reading "Politics and the English Language" that Orwell could've or would've thought such a thing. If anyone finds it before I do, post a link, will ya? CK On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 18:38:21 -0500, R.A. Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> wrote: > > At 9:31 AM -0800 11/6/04, James Donald wrote: > >As George Orwell observed, anyone who thinks there is a significant > >difference between nazis and commies is in favor of one or the other. > > I'm going to have hunt that one up for my .sig file. > > Thank you. > > > > Cheers, > RAH > > -- > ----------------- > R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> > The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> > 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA > "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, > [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to > experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' > > -- GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?

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No, Canada!
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/11/06/no_canada?mode=…> The Boston Globe THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING No, Canada! You don't want to go there By Alex Beam, Globe Staff | November 6, 2004 You have probably heard the idle chatter: ''I'm thinking of moving to Canada." You may have received the JPEG Sent 'Round the World, labeling the northern part of North America -- the right-thinking part, as liberals would have it -- as the United States of Canada, and the pro-Bush leaning ''red" US states as Jesusland. It sounds so alluring. Good beer. Cheap Viagra. Hardly any crime. Friendly, if somewhat ineffectual, people. Terrific, if underappreciated, novelists. (This means you, Rohinton Mistry.) Secure borders, courtesy of the US Department of Defense. But before you pack, consider this: There are plenty of reasons not to move to Canada. Let me count the ways. 1. They don't really want you. Canada is full of losers like you. If you're really rich, or a brain surgeon, maybe. But if you are, say, a newspaper reporter, be prepared to wait at least a year just to live there legally, and several more years to become a citizen. If you have some special qualifications, like a PhD, plus a lot of work experience, and if you are under 50, you have a better chance of crashing the gates of Snow Mexico. Or if you're loaded. That's right. If you have a net worth of $800,000 Canadian or more, and are willing to invest $400,000 of it in Canada, come on in! And you thought George Bush's America was a plutocracy. . . . Think again. 2. Speaking of brain surgery -- have you tried Buffalo? Here is what John Kerry didn't tell you: The problem with free, single-payer health care is that you get what you pay for. Even the Canadians acknowledge that their health system is in crisis. (Sound familiar?) They speak about the inequities of their two-tiered system, where publicly funded patients wait weeks, if not months, to consult specialists or have routine surgery, while private patients get quick service. In fact, it's a three-tiered system. The very well-to-do travel to the United States for some procedures. We refer you to a recent editorial in The Windsor (Ontario) Star: ''A growing number of sick and tired Canadians are beginning to look to the US for ideas on how to improve our failing health-care system. But Kerry, inexplicably, is looking north for health care ideas." 3. Parlez-vous francais? Somehow I doubt it. And yet if you want to work for the Canadian government -- the country's largest employer -- chances are that you have to be bilingual. And the private sector is following suit. C'est dur, eh? 4. How do you like your free speech -- well chilled? Canada has no First Amendment and adheres to primitive British-style libel laws. Here is a hilarious definition of defamation la Canadienne, from the Media Libel website: ''A defamatory statement exists if the publication tends to lower the plaintiff's reputation in the estimation of those who are commonly referred to as 'right thinking' members of society." Allow me to reiterate my widely known position: Celine Dion is the greatest singer who ever lived. Just this year, the Canadian Parliament passed what the religious right has branded a ''Chill Bill," or ''The Bible as Hate Speech Bill," effectively preventing churches from using the Bible to preach against homosexuality. ''With the passage of Bill C-250, Canada has now embarked upon a course of criminalization of dissent," according to a statement released this spring by the Catholic Civil Rights League. Fine, you say. Enough gay-bashing by Bible-waving Christian loonies. But remember John Ashcroft's motto: Your rights are next. 5. It's the black hole of sports fandom. You would seriously consider leaving the home of North America's greatest baseball team -- ever -- and of North America's greatest football team, for . . . what? Canadian football is played on a field that's too long (that's why each team has 12 players), and there are only three downs. Huh? Fifty percent of Canada's Major League Baseball infrastructure -- les Montral Expos just decamped for Washington, D.C., because of audience indifference. Canada's one great sports treasure, professional hockey, isn't being played this year. You hadn't noticed? And you can't even name its national sport, can you? What if that question is on the citizenship application? 6. Have you heard the joke about the Canadian dollar? Not lately. Without putting too fine a point on this, Canadian currency has been laying a Euro-style smackdown on the US greenback. What this means to you: less purchasing power. Wait, there's more. You think you're living in a high-tax state right now? Hahahahahaha. 7. The biggest argument against immigrating to Canada is: You're going in the wrong direction! With all due respect to our northern neighbors, anyone who is anyone bolted years ago. Peter Jennings, Mike Myers, Joni Mitchell, Jim Carrey, Frank Gehry (would they take him back?) -- the list goes on and on. Have talent, will travel -- southward. You might want to ask yourself why. So please, think twice. They don't want you, and we would prefer that you stay. If the new administration is a problem, just don't turn on your television for the next four years. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Broward machines count backward
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

<http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_B…> Palm Beach Post Broward machines count backward By Eliot Kleinberg Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Friday, November 05, 2004 FORT LAUDERDALE - It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly. Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software. Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals, and officials are confident they are accurate. The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. All were placed in their own precincts and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a main computer. That's where the counting problems surfaced. They affected only votes for constitutional amendments 4 through 8, because they were on the only page that was exactly the same on all county absentee ballots. The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties; Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties use different companies. The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said ES&S told her it had sent software upgrades to the Florida Secretary of State's office, but that the office kept rejecting the software. The state said that's not true. Broward elections officials said they had thought the problem was fixed. Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward should have split the absentee ballots into four separate precincts to avoid that and that a Broward elections employee since has admitted to not doing that. But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to the canvassing board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said occurred." Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating that it learned of the problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades would be submitted to Hood's office next year. The company was working with the counties it serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity and said no other counties reported similar problems. "While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the ballot and structuring the precincts, we . . . regret any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the statement said. After several calls to the company during the day were not returned, an ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she did not know whether ES&S contacted the secretary of state two years ago or whether the software is designed to count backward. While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a different Br oward elections supervisor and a different secretary of state. Snipes said she had not known about the 2002 snafu. Later, Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm not pointing a finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to be at fault, actions might include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its contract. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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RE: No, Canada!
by Tyler Durden 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

Wow. What kind of fucking idiot wrote this thing? A piece like this can actually get published? This is the biggest set of arguments I've seen yet for moving TO Canada! BTW: I always thought that "Economic Immigration" was an excellent idea....it siphoned off tons of Hong Kong millionares before the PRC took over. The US should have been doing it in addition to the non-Express route. -TD >From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> >To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: No, Canada! >Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 09:57:22 -0500 > ><http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/11/06/no_canada?mode=…> > >The Boston Globe >THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING >No, Canada! > >You don't want to go there > >By Alex Beam, Globe Staff | November 6, 2004 > >You have probably heard the idle chatter: ''I'm thinking of moving to >Canada." You may have received the JPEG Sent 'Round the World, labeling the >northern part of North America -- the right-thinking part, as liberals >would have it -- as the United States of Canada, and the pro-Bush leaning >''red" US states as Jesusland. > >It sounds so alluring. Good beer. Cheap Viagra. Hardly any crime. Friendly, >if somewhat ineffectual, people. Terrific, if underappreciated, novelists. >(This means you, Rohinton Mistry.) Secure borders, courtesy of the US >Department of Defense. > >But before you pack, consider this: There are plenty of reasons not to >move to Canada. Let me count the ways. > >1. They don't really want you. Canada is full of losers like you. If you're >really rich, or a brain surgeon, maybe. But if you are, say, a newspaper >reporter, be prepared to wait at least a year just to live there legally, >and several more years to become a citizen. > >If you have some special qualifications, like a PhD, plus a lot of work >experience, and if you are under 50, you have a better chance of crashing >the gates of Snow Mexico. Or if you're loaded. That's right. If you have a >net worth of $800,000 Canadian or more, and are willing to invest $400,000 >of it in Canada, come on in! And you thought George Bush's America was a >plutocracy. . . . Think again. > >2. Speaking of brain surgery -- have you tried Buffalo? Here is what John >Kerry didn't tell you: The problem with free, single-payer health care is >that you get what you pay for. > >Even the Canadians acknowledge that their health system is in crisis. >(Sound familiar?) They speak about the inequities of their two-tiered >system, where publicly funded patients wait weeks, if not months, to >consult specialists or have routine surgery, while private patients get >quick service. In fact, it's a three-tiered system. The very well-to-do >travel to the United States for some procedures. > >We refer you to a recent editorial in The Windsor (Ontario) Star: ''A >growing number of sick and tired Canadians are beginning to look to the US >for ideas on how to improve our failing health-care system. But Kerry, >inexplicably, is looking north for health care ideas." > >3. Parlez-vous francais? Somehow I doubt it. And yet if you want to work >for the Canadian government -- the country's largest employer -- chances >are that you have to be bilingual. And the private sector is following >suit. C'est dur, eh? > >4. How do you like your free speech -- well chilled? Canada has no First >Amendment and adheres to primitive British-style libel laws. > >Here is a hilarious definition of defamation la Canadienne, from the Media >Libel website: ''A defamatory statement exists if the publication tends to >lower the plaintiff's reputation in the estimation of those who are >commonly referred to as 'right thinking' members of society." Allow me to >reiterate my widely known position: Celine Dion is the greatest singer who >ever lived. > >Just this year, the Canadian Parliament passed what the religious right has >branded a ''Chill Bill," or ''The Bible as Hate Speech Bill," effectively >preventing churches from using the Bible to preach against homosexuality. >''With the passage of Bill C-250, Canada has now embarked upon a course of >criminalization of dissent," according to a statement released this spring >by the Catholic Civil Rights League. > >Fine, you say. Enough gay-bashing by Bible-waving Christian loonies. But >remember John Ashcroft's motto: Your rights are next. > >5. It's the black hole of sports fandom. You would seriously consider >leaving the home of North America's greatest baseball team -- ever -- and >of North America's greatest football team, for . . . what? Canadian >football is played on a field that's too long (that's why each team has 12 >players), and there are only three downs. Huh? > >Fifty percent of Canada's Major League Baseball infrastructure -- les >Montral Expos just decamped for Washington, D.C., because of audience >indifference. Canada's one great sports treasure, professional hockey, >isn't being played this year. You hadn't noticed? > >And you can't even name its national sport, can you? What if that question >is on the citizenship application? > >6. Have you heard the joke about the Canadian dollar? Not lately. Without >putting too fine a point on this, Canadian currency has been laying a >Euro-style smackdown on the US greenback. What this means to you: less >purchasing power. > >Wait, there's more. You think you're living in a high-tax state right now? >Hahahahahaha. > >7. The biggest argument against immigrating to Canada is: You're going in >the wrong direction! With all due respect to our northern neighbors, anyone >who is anyone bolted years ago. > >Peter Jennings, Mike Myers, Joni Mitchell, Jim Carrey, Frank Gehry (would >they take him back?) -- the list goes on and on. Have talent, will travel >-- southward. You might want to ask yourself why. > >So please, think twice. They don't want you, and we would prefer that you >stay. If the new administration is a problem, just don't turn on your >television for the next four years. > > >-- >----------------- >R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> >The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> >44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA >"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, >[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to >experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

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Re: Hi
by Mv 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

:) [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/octet-stream which had a name of price.scr]

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