We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for our upcoming “Future of News” workshop. It’s May 14-15 in Princeton. It’s free, and if you register we’ll feed you lunch.

Agenda

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Panels

Panel 1: The People Formerly Known as the Audience:

How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be “devolved” from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of “news” as we know it?

• Dan Gillmor, Director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Steve Boriss, Washington University in St. Louis and The Future of News blog
• Reihan Salam, The Atlantic

Panel 2: Economics of News:

How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other “private journalism”, designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?

• Gordon Crovitz, former publisher, The Wall Street Journal
• Mark Davis, Vice President for Strategy, San Diego Union Tribune
• Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Panel 3: Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity:

To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?

• Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs. Blogger at Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
• Kevin Anderson, the Guardian
• David Blei, Princeton Department of Computer Science

Panel 4: The Medium’s New Message:

What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media “producers” look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

• Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor at NYU and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
• Markus Prior, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
• JD Lasica, writer and consultant, co-founder and editorial director of Ourmedia.com, president of the Social Media Group.

Panelists’ bios.

For more information, including (free) registration, see the main workshop page.

Reihan Salam has a new piece at Slate about voluntary collective licensing of music (which was also the topic of an online symposium organized by our center at Princeton). I’m generally a fan of Reihan’s work, but this time I think he got it wrong. His piece starts like this:

What would you do if a bully—let’s call him “Joey Giggles”—kept snatching your ice-cream cone? OK, now what if Joey Giggles then told you, “If you pay me five bucks a month, I’ll stop snatching your ice cream.” Depending on how much you hate getting beaten up, and how much you love ice-cream cones, you might decide that caving in is the way to go. This is what’s called a protection racket. It’s also potentially the new model for how we’ll buy and listen to music.

[…]

Now Big Music is mulling the Joey Giggles approach. Warner Music Group is trying to rally the rest of the industry behind a plan to charge Internet service providers $5 per customer per month, an amount that would be added to your Internet bill. In exchange, music lovers would get all the online tunes they want, meaning that anyone who spends more than $60 a year on music will come out way ahead. Download whatever you want and pay nothing! No more DRM! Swap files to your heart’s content—we promise, we won’t sue you (or snatch your ice-cream cone)!

This idea, that collective licenses amount to extortion — pay us or we’ll sue you — is often heard, but I don’t think it’s a valid criticism of collective licenses. The reason is pretty simple: if this is extortion, then all of copyright is extortion. The basic mechanism of copyright is that the creator of a work gets certain exclusive rights in the work. Exclusive rights means that there are certain things that nobody else can do with the work, without the creator’s permission. “Nobody else can do X” is another way of saying that if somebody else does X, the creator can sue them. When you buy a licensed copy of a work instead of downloading it illegally, what you’re buying is an enforceable promise that you won’t be sued (plus the knowledge that you’re playing by the rules, but that is intimately connected to the lawsuit protection). So the basic mechanism of copyright involves people paying a copyright owner for a promise not to sue them.

To put it another way, if you accept our current copyright system at all — even if you accept only a streamlined, improved version of it — then you’ve already accepted the kind of “extortion” that would be used to sell voluntary collective licenses. The only alternative is a complete redesign of the system, more complete even than a voluntary collective license.

Reihan does recommend a redesign. He endorses Terry Fisher’s suggestion of a government tax on broadband access, with the revenue used to pay musicians based on the popularity of their songs. This system has its benefits (though on balance I don’t think it’s good policy). But if you start out worried about strong-arm extraction of money from citizens, a mandatory tax scheme is an odd place to end up.

This is the fundamental problem of copyright policy in the digital age. It’s easy for people to get copyrighted works without paying. So either you forgo payment entirely, or you give somebody the mandate to collect payment. Who would you prefer: record companies or the government?

I’ve written before (1, 2, 3) about discrepancies in the election results from New Jersey’s February 5 presidential primary. Yesterday we received yet another set of voting machine result tapes. They show a new kind of discrepancy which we haven’t seen before — and which contradicts the story told by Sequoia (the vendor) and the NJ Secretary of State about what went wrong in the election.

The new records are from three voting machines in Pennsauken, District 6. We have the result tapes printed out by all three voting machines in that district (1, 2, 3). As usual, each result tape has a “Candidate Totals” section giving the vote count for each candidate, and a separate “Option Switch Totals” section giving the voter turnout in each party. We also have the Democratic vote totals reported by the county clerk for that district (and some others), which were apparently calculated from the memory cartridges used in the three machines.

The county clerk’s totals show 279 votes in Pennsauken District 6. The per-candidate counts are Clinton 181, Obama 94, Richardson 2, Edwards 1, Kucinich 0, Biden 1, which adds up correctly to 279. The turnout sections of the three result tapes also show a total Democratic turnout of 279 (133+126+20).

But the Candidate Totals sections of the tapes tell a different story. Adding up the three tapes, the totals are Clinton 181, Obama 95, Richardson 2, Edwards 1, Kucinich 0, Biden 1, which adds up to 280. The Candidate Totals on the tapes show an extra Obama vote that doesn’t appear anywhere else.

(Everything seems to add up on the Republican side.)

The State claimed, in response to some (but not all) of the discrepancies I pointed out previously, that I had misread the tapes. This time the tapes are absolutely clear. Here are the Democratic candidate totals from the three tapes:

Here are the turnout sections of the three tapes:

(These images are all scans — the original documents Camden County sent me are even clearer.)

This is wrong. It is inconsistent with Sequoia’s explanation for the previously-noticed discrepancies. It is inconsistent with the State’s theory of what went wrong in the election.

It’s time for an independent investigation.

In an interview today with CNet, Michael Shamos talks about paper trails.  Shamos is a professor at CMU who has served as a voting system analyst for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State. In this article, a transcript of an interview conducted by Declan McCullagh, he spends a fair bit of time trashing paper trails, and by that, he’s referring to the “toilet paper roll” thermal printer attachments that are sold by the major U.S. voting system vendors.

He’s correct, to a limited extent.  He discusses a “20%” failure rate, which he probably gets from some problems in Ohio.  It’s certainly the case that these things are poorly engineered.  The ostensible reason for the continuous paper roll, as opposed to cutting the sheets individually, is that you’d have better reliability.  However, having the votes recorded in the order they were cast is a clear violation of voter privacy.  A more serious concern with paper trails is that it’s unclear whether voters will bother to double-check them at all.  I’ve pointed Freedom to Tinker readers at Sarah Everett’s PhD thesis before and it’s worth doing it again.  The punchline is that roughly two thirds of the test subjects didn’t notice when our homebrew DRE system was lying on its summary screen.  In fact, they gave our machine exceptionally high marks.  They loved it.

Shamos criticizes the EFF, VerifiedVoting, the League of Women voters, and anybody else he can think of because they advocate for paper trails.  The preferred solution that they generally advocate is hand-marked optical scan ballots.  These appear to have better accuracy, and paper ballots are, inherently, paper trails that give us an unfiltered window into the voters’ original intent.  Don’t interpret Shamos’s criticism of toilet-paper rolls as a criticism of hand-marked paper ballots.

Shamos goes on to make a flip comparison between “ATM technology” and voting systems, saying we could have reliable paper trails if we only spent 10x the cost.  This is a very strange argument.  ATMs are expensive because they have a safe full of cash inside.  It’s important that you can’t steal the cash, even if you’ve got time and tools at your disposal.  Voting systems (at least anywhere I’ll ever be likely to vote) don’t dispense money.  Building a reliable printer doesn’t need to be expensive.

Then Shamos gets into the meat of the argument for paper trails.

I’m not advocating that we blindly trust machines. We have to have a way to make sure the (record is correct). If anything happens to that piece of paper, if it gets substituted or lost, there’s absolutely no way to reconstruct the election. that’s unlike an electronic system, which is if one memory fails you have the other.

The security on ballot boxes is much lower than the security on voting machines themselves. In order to do anything with those pieces of paper, they have to be handled by people. What do you think happens?

If I want to screw up an election, all I have to do is modify five votes. Then we have to do a manual recount (which is vulnerable to tampering and ballot-stuffing).

This is completely false.  Paper records are redundant with the electronic records, and that’s a huge feature.  That means that you can compare them, either statistically in aggregate, or even one-to-one (assuming there are serial numbers, which could cause some privacy concerns, but maybe you can obscure those in barcodes).  It’s certainly the case that missing paper votes can be reconstructed from electronic records.  When you have both, you reconcile.  If there’s ambiguity, then you need to resolve that ambiguity.  You then have a forensic problem.  If all the tamper-evident stickers and locks on the paper ballot box were disturbed, maybe you’re more likely to trust the electronic parts.  If the totals are radically divergent, you can’t tell which is more authentic, and the election is tight, then maybe the proper answer (from a scientific perspective) is to throw your hands up and say that you cannot legitimately state who won the election as a result of fraud.  This is defensible, scientifically, but it could lead to a political crisis.  Nobody ever said election administration was easy.

Doing away with the paper only does away evidence that might help you discover fraud.  Even if you cannot come up with the proper answer, it’s better to at least know you were under attack.

The fundamental difficulty with paper trails is that they’re ridiculously kludgey. The problem is that once you mandate paper trails, it cuts off research. There would be no reason to use anything else because it would be illegal.

Speaking as somebody who does research in electronic voting, I don’t feel that laws mandating paper trails would stop me from studying alternatives.  The 2007 VVSG standards process includes an “innovation class” for how vendors can get funky fresh technologies certified for use.  The trick is to make sure that the innovation class isn’t a loophole that vendors can use for the current crop of insecure equipment.

Does that mean you’re suggesting that we should be voting from insecure home computers even if they’re running Windows 98?
Shamos: I can point you to a mechanism (in a paper by Avi Rubin and Dan Wallach) that would allow secure voting on insecure terminals. The notion that the Internet is just not secure enough to do anything important is just wrong. It’s not insurmountable. The right people aren’t thinking about it because you gotta have a paper trail.

Really?  A recent paper that I just submitted to a workshop talked about how Internet voting might work, by virtue of having remote precincts set up in places like embassies and consulates, and using dedicated voting machines.  You could send the results home over the Internet.  Voting on dedicated voting machines with an Internet connection might be workable.  Voting on Windows 98 PCs would be an unmitigated disaster.  Botnets control literally millions of computers out there.  What if you’re voting from a botnet-infested computer?  Could the botnet modify your vote?  Why not?  For these sorts of reasons, the authors of the SERVE Report, including Avi Rubin, recommended strongly against voting on generic PCs.  Shamos says that Avi and I would support secure voting on insecure terminals?  Sure.  We’ll probably be beaten by the bioengineers working on flying pigs.

I say, and the advocates are forced to admit it, that there’s never been any evidence that a DRE machine has been tampered with in an election. They say that doesn’t mean it never happened. I agree with that. But I believe deeply that if people were out there trying to hack elections we would see evidence of failed attempts.

Indeed, there’s no evidence to support a lack of tampering, but that’s meaningless.  A better way to look at this is that the incredibly poor security of modern paperless electronic voting systems makes it cheaper than it ever has been before to manipulate votes.  The cost per vote for electronic manipulation is almost nill, particularly if you allow for viral attacks, where one corrupt DRE can take out the entire tabulation system (a vulnerably shown to apply to Hart InterCivic and Diebold as part of the California Top to Bottom reports from last summer).  Regardless of whether somebody has attempted an attack like this, it’s dirt cheap — cheaper than with paper, because manipulating paper takes more time and more labor.  The economic incentives are clearly in play for electronic election fraud.  The big question is whether it’s more cost effective to manipulate voters through other means (e.g., dubious television advertising, robotic phone calls, etc.).

When a bridge collapses, do we outlaw bridges or do we inspect bridges of similar design? If the design itself is fundamentally flawed, then those bridges are going to have to be taken out of service and rebuilt. If there’s a fix, however, you can add a bracing member.

Excellent point.  DRE systems from all the major vendors have been conclusively shown to be fundamentally flawed in their design.  Even if and when the vendors patch their software, the time delay to push those patches through the certification process guarantees they won’t be ready for November.  Optically scanned paper ballots are available today and they work quite well (despite known security vulnerabilities in the tabulators).  Likewise, junky toilet-paper roll printers are available today, despite known problems with their ability to print and with voter’s ability to catch mistakes.

One last point:

Please don’t use the term “paperless.” It’s a construction of the advocates and it’s false and misleading. They’re not paperless. They just don’t produce a contemporaneous paper that the voter can view.

The word “paperless” is really insidious. The word “less” is meant to imply that they’re thereby missing something. Whoever decided to come up with the term “paperless” deserves a left-handed prize for their imagination. It’s wonderful for them. Paperless.

Yes, “paperless.”  It’s a fine word.  I’ve been using it for years.  It concisely captures the lack of redundancy, the reliance on poorly engineered software, and the risky nature of using paperless DRE voting systems for something as important as a national election.

Paperless electronic voting systems can be made better, using tricks like Benaloh’s challenge mechanism, which can catch a machine, in the act, while it might otherwise be trying to corrupt the vote.  We used a variant on his mechanism in our research prototype (paper to appear this summer at Usenix Security).  Nonetheless, I really like the term “paperless” when hooked to “electronic voting machine” because it creates a burden of proof for the system designer.  You want to go paperless?  Fine.  Prove to us that your system is secure.  Without paper, we’ll assume it’s insecure until proven otherwise.

Recently, HR 5036 was shot down in Congress.  That bill was to provide “emergency” money to help election administrators who wished to replace paperless voting systems with optically scanned paper ballots (or to add paper-printing attachments to existing electronic voting systems).  While the bill initially received strong bipartisan support, it was opposed at the last minute by the White House.  To the extent that I understand the political subtext of this, the Republicans wanted to attach a Voter ID requirement to the bill, and that gummed up the works.  (HR 5036 isn’t strictly dead, since it still has strong support, but it was originally fast tracked as a “non-controversial” bill, and it is now unlikely to gain the necessary 2/3 majority.)

I’ve been thinking for a while about this whole voter ID problem, and I have to say that I don’t really see a big problem with requiring that voters present ID so they can vote.  This kind of requirement is used in other countries like Mexico and it seems to work just fine.  The real issue is making sure that all people who might want to vote actually have IDs, which is a real problem for the apparently non-trivial number of current voters who lack normal ID cards (and, who we are led to believe, tend to vote in favor of Democrats).

The question then becomes how to get IDs for everybody.  One answer is to put election authorities in charge of issuing special voting ID cards.  This works in other countries, but nobody would ever support such a thing in the U.S. because it would be fantastically expensive and the last thing we need is yet another ID card.  The “obvious” solution is to use driver’s licenses or official state IDs (for non-drivers).  But, what if you’ve never had a driver’s license?

As an example, here are Texas’s list of requirements to get a driver’s license.  Notice how they also require you have proof of a social security number?  If you’ve somehow managed to make it through life without getting one, and I imagine many poor people could live without one, then that becomes a significant prerequisite for getting a driver’s license.  And it’s pretty difficult to get a SSN if you’re unemployed and don’t have a driver’s license (see the Social Security Administration’s rules).

One way or another, you’re going to need your birth certificate.  Here’s how you get a copy of one in Texas.  If you don’t have any other form of ID, it’s pretty difficult to get your birth certificate as well.  You’ll either need an immediate relative with an ID to request your birth certificate on your behalf, or you’ll need utility bills in your name.  And if you’re older than 75, the state agency may not be able to help you, and who knows if the county where you were born has kept its older records properly.

It’s easy to see that somebody in this situation is going to find it difficult to navigate the bureaucratic maze.  If the only benefit they get, at the end of the day, is being allowed to vote, it’s pretty hard to justify the time and expense ($25 for the birth certificate, the social security card is free, and $15 plus hours waiting in line for the state ID card).  For potential voters who don’t have a permanent home address, this process seems even less reasonable.

The only way I could imagine a voter ID requirement being workable (i.e., having a neutral effect on partisan elections) is if there was a serious amount of money budgeted to help people without IDs to get them.  That boils down to an army of social workers digging around for historical birth records and whatever else, and that’s not going to be cheap.  However, I’m perfectly willing to accept a mandatory voter ID, as long as enough money is there to get one, for free, for anybody who wants one.  The government is willing to give you a $40 coupon to receive digital signals for an analog TV, as part of next year’s phase-out of analog broadcasts.  Why not help out with getting identification papers as part of phasing in an ID requirement?

[Sidebar: if you’re really concerned about people voting multiple times, the most effective solution has nothing to do with voter ID.  The simple, low-tech answer is to mark voters’ fingers with indelible ink.  It wears off after a while, it’s widely used throughout the world, and there’s no mistaking it for anything else.  I can’t wait for the day when I tune into my nightly newscast and see the anchor giving grief to the sportscaster because his thumb isn’t painted purple.]

We’re excited to announce a workshop on “The Future of News“, to be held May 14 and 15 in Princeton. It’s sponsored by the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton.

Confirmed speakers include Kevin Anderson, David Blei, Steve Borriss, Dan Gillmor, Matthew Hurst, Markus Prior, David Robinson, Clay Shirky, Paul Starr, and more to come.

The Internet—whose greatest promise is its ability to distribute and manipulate information—is transforming the news media. What’s on offer, how it gets made, and how end users relate to it are all in flux. New tools and services allow people to be better informed and more instantly up to date than ever before, opening the door to an enhanced public life. But the same factors that make these developments possible are also undermining the institutional rationale and economic viability of traditional news outlets, leaving profound uncertainty about how the possibilities will play out.

Our tentative topics for panels are:

• Data mining, visualization, and interactivity: To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?
• Economics of news: How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other “private journalism”, designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?
• The people formerly known as the audience: How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be “devolved” from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of “news” as we know it?
• The medium’s new message: What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media “producers” look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

Registration: Registration, which is free, carries two benefits: We’ll have a nametag waiting for you when you arrive, and — this is the important part — we’ll feed you lunch on both days. To register, please contact CITP’s program assistant, Laura Cummings-Abdo, at lcumming@princeton.edu. Include your name, affiliation and email address.

Today we’re kicking off an online symposium on voluntary collective licensing of music, over at the Center for InfoTech Policy site.

The symposium is motivated by recent movement in the music industry toward the possibility of licensing large music catalogs to consumers for a fixed monthly fee. For example, Warner Music, one of the major record companies, just hired Jim Griffin to explore such a system, in which Internet Service Providers would pay a per-user fee to record companies in exchange for allowing the ISPs’ customers to access music freely online. The industry had previously opposed collective licenses, making them politically non-viable, but the policy logjam may be about to break, making this a perfect time to discuss the pros and cons of various policy options.

It’s an issue that evokes strong feelings — just look at the comments on David’s recent post.

We have a strong group of panelists:

• Matt Earp is a graduate student in the i-school at UC Berkeley, studying the design and implementation of voluntary collective licensing systems.
• Ari Feldman is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton, studying computer security and information policy.
• Ed Felten is a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton.
• Jon Healey is an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times and writes the paper’s Bit Player blog, which focuses on how technology is changing the entertainment industry’s business models.
• Samantha Murphy is an independent singer/songwriter and Founder of SMtvMusic.com.
• David Robinson is Associate Director of the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton.
• Fred von Lohmann is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property matters.
• Harlan Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton, working at the intersection of computer science and public policy.

Check it out!

Last week, I wrote about the privacy concerns surrounding Phorm, an online advertising company who has teamed up with British ISPs to track user Web behavior from within their networks. New technical details about its Webwise system have since emerged, and it’s not just privacy that now seems to be at risk. The report exposes a system that actively degrades user experience and alters the interaction with content providers. Even more importantly, the Webwise system is a clear violation of the sacred end-to-end principle that guides the core architectural design of the Internet.

Phorm’s system does more than just passively gain “access to customers’ browsing records” as previously suggested. Instead, they plan on installing a network switch at each participating ISP that actively interferes with the user’s browsing session by injecting multiple URL redirections before the user can retrieve the requested content. Sparing you most of the nitty-gritty technical details, the switch intercepts the initial HTTP request to the content server to check whether a Webwise cookie–containing the user’s randomly-assigned identifier (UID)– exists in the browser. It then impersonates the requested server to trick the browser into accepting a spoofed cookie (which I will explain later) that contains the same UID. Only then will the switch forward the request and return the actual content to the user. Basically, this amounts to a big technical hack by Phorm to set the cookies that track users as they browse the Web.

In all, a user’s initial request is redirected three times for each domain that is contacted. Though this may not seem like much, this extra layer of indirection harms the user by degrading the overall browsing experience. It imposes an unnecessary delay that will likely be noticeable by users.

The spoofed cookie that Phorm stores on the user’s browser during this process is also a highly questionable practice. Generally speaking, a cookie is specific to a particular domain and the browser typically ensures that a cookie can only be read and written by the domain it belongs to. For example, data in a yahoo.com cookie is only sent when you contact a yahoo.com server, and only a yahoo.com server can put data into that cookie.

But since Phorm controls the switch at the ISP, it can bypass this usual guarantee by impersonating the server to add cookies for other domains. To continue the example, the switch (1) intercepts the user’s request, (2) pretends to be a yahoo.com server, and (3) injects a new yahoo.com cookie that contains the Phorm UID. The browser, believing the cookie to actually be from yahoo.com, happily accepts and stores it. This cookie is used later by Phorm to identify the user whenever the user visits any page on yahoo.com.

Cookie spoofing is problematic because it can change the interaction between the user and the content-providing site. Suppose a site’s privacy policy promises the user that it does not use tracking cookies. But because of Phorm’s spoofing, the browser will store a cookie that (to the user) looks exactly like a tracking cookie from the site. Now, the switch typically strips out this tracking cookie before it reaches the site, but if the user moves to a non-Phorm ISP (say at work), the cookie will actually reach the site in violation of its stated privacy policy. The cookie can also cause other problems, such as a cookie collision if the site cookie inadvertently has the same name as the Phorm cookie.

Disruptive activities inside the network often create these sort of unexpected problems for both users and websites, which is why computer scientists are skeptical of ideas that violate the end-to-end principle. For the uninitiated, the principle, in short, states that system functionality should almost always be implemented at the end hosts of the network, with a few justifiable exceptions. For instance, almost all security functionality (such as data encryption and decryption) is done by end users and only rarely by machines inside the network.

The Webwise system has no business being inside the network and has no role in transporting packets from one end of the network to the other. The technical Internet community has been worried for years about the slow erosion of the end-to-end principle, particularly by ISPs who are looking to further monetize their networks. This principle is the one upon which the Internet is built and one which the ISPs must uphold. Phorm’s system, nearly in production, is a cogent realization of this erosion, and ISPs should keep Phorm outside the gate.

I wrote previously about discrepancies in the vote totals reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey’s presidential primary election, and the incomplete explanation offered by Sequoia, the voting machine vendor. I published copies of the “summary tapes” printed by nine voting machines in Union County that showed discrepancies; all of them were consistent with Sequoia’s explanation of what went wrong.

This week we obtained six new summary tapes, from machines in Bergen and Gloucester counties. Two of these new tapes contradict Sequoia’s explanation and show more serious discrepancies that we saw before.

Before we dig into the details, let’s review some background. At the end of Election Day, each Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine prints a “summary tape” (or “results report”) that lists (among other things) the number of votes cast for each candidate on that machine, and the total voter turnout (number of votes cast) in each party. In the Super Tuesday primary, a few dozen machines in New Jersey showed discrepancies in which the number of votes recorded for candidates in one party exceeded the voter turnout in that party. For example, the vote totals section of a tape might show 61 total votes for Republican candidates, while the turnout section of the same tape shows only 60 Republican voters.

Sequoia’s explanation was that in certain circumstances, a voter would be allowed to vote in one party while being recorded in the other party’s turnout. (”It has been observed that the ‘Option Switch’ or Party Turnout Totals section of the Results Report may be misreported whereby turnout associated with the party or option switch choice is misallocated. In every instance, however, the total turnout, or the sum of the turnout allocation, is accurate.”) Sequoia’s memo points to a technical flaw that might cause this kind of misallocation.

The nine summary tapes I had previously were all consistent with Sequoia’s explanation. Though the total votes exceeded the turnout in one party, the votes were less than the turnout in the other party, so that the discrepancy could have been caused by misallocating turnout as Sequoia described. For example, a tape from Hillside showed 61 Republican votes cast by 60 voters, and 361 Democratic votes cast by 362 voters, for a total of 422 votes cast by 422 voters. Based on these nine tapes, Sequoia’s explanation, though incomplete, could have been correct.

But look at one of the new tapes, from Englewood Cliffs, District 4, in Bergen County. Here’s a relevant part of the tape:

The Republican vote totals are Giuliani 1, Paul 1, Romney 6, McCain 14, for a total of 22. The Democratic totals are Obama 33, Edwards 2, Clinton 49, for a total of 84. That comes to 106 total votes across the two parties.

The turnout section (or “Option Switch Totals”) shows 22 Republican voters and 83 Democratic voters, for a total of 105.

This is not only wrong — 106 votes cast by 105 voters — but it’s also inconsistent with Sequoia’s explanation. Sequoia says that all of the voters show up in the turnout section, but a few might show up in the wrong party’s turnout. (”In every instance, however, the total turnout, or the sum of the turnout allocation, is accurate.”) That’s not what we see here, so Sequoia’s explanation must be incorrect.

And that’s not all. Each machine has a “public counter” that keeps track of how many votes were cast on the machine in the current election. The public counter, which is found on virtually all voting machines, is one of the important safeguards ensuring that votes are not cast improperly. Here’s the top of the same tape, showing the public counter as 105.

The public counter is important enough that the poll workers actually sign a statement at the bottom of the tape, attesting to the value of the public counter. Here’s the signed statement from the same tape:

The public counter says 105, even though 106 votes were reported. That’s a big problem.

Another of the new tapes, this one from West Deptford in Gloucester County, shows a similar discrepancy, with 167 total votes, a total turnout of 166, and public counter showing 166.

How many more New Jersey tapes show errors? What’s wrong with Sequoia’s explanation? What really happened? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

Isn’t it time for a truly independent investigation?

Phorm, an online advertising company, has recently made deals with several British ISPs to gain unprecedented access to every single Web action taken by their customers. The deals will let Phorm track search terms, URLs and other keywords to create online behavior profiles of individual customers, which will then be used to provide better targeted ads. The company claims that “No private or personal information, or anything that can identify you, is ever stored - and that means your privacy is never at risk.” Although Phorm might have honest intentions, their privacy claims are, at best, misleading to customers.

Their privacy promise is that personally-identifiable information is never stored, but they make no promises on how the raw logs of search terms and URLs are used before they are deleted. It’s clear from Phorm’s online literature that they use this sensitive data for ad delivery purposes. In one example, they claim advertisers will be able to target ads directly to users who see the keywords “Paris vacation” either as a search or within the text of a visited webpage. Without even getting to the storage question, users will likely perceive Phorm’s access and use of their behavioral data as a compromise of their personal privacy.

What Phorm does store permanently are two pieces of information about each user: (1) the “advertising categories” that the user is interested in and (2) a randomly-generated ID from the user’s browser cookie. Each raw online action is sorted into one or more categories, such as “travel” or “luxury cars”, that are defined by advertisers. The privacy worry is that as these categories become more specific, the behavioral profiles of each user becomes ever more precise. Phorm seems to impose no limit on the specificity of these defined categories, so for all intents and purposes, these categories over time will become nearly identical to the search terms themselves. Indeed, they market their “finely tuned” service as analogous to typical keyword search campaigns that advertisers are already used to. Phorm has a strong incentive to store arbitrarily specific interest categories about each user to provide optimally targeted ads, and thus boost the profits of their advertising business.

The second protection mechanism is a randomly-generated ID number stored in a browser cookie that Phorm uses to “anonymously” track a user as she browses the web. This ID number is stored with the list of the interest categories collected for that user. Phorm should be given credit for recognizing this as more privacy-protecting than simply using the customer’s name or IP address as an identifier (something even Google has disappointingly failed to recognize). But from past experience, these protections are unlikely to be enough. The storage of random user IDs mapped to keywords mirroring actual search queries is highly reminiscent of the AOL data fiasco from 2006, where AOL released “anonymized” search histories containing 20 million keywords. It turned out to be easy to identify the name of specific individuals based solely on their search history.

In the least, the company’s employees will be able to access an AOL-like dataset about the ISP’s customers. Granted, distinguishing whether particular datasets as personally-identifiable or not is a notoriously difficult problem and subject to further research. But it’s inaccurate for Phorm to claim that personally-identifiable information is not being stored and to promise users that their privacy is not at risk.