In Industry First, Voting Machine Company to Publish Source Code | Threat Leve... - The Diigo Meta page

• 29 Oct 09
  

  Brad Friedman

  • In the press release announcing the public-source system, a Sequoia vice president is quoted saying that “Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security.”

    
    

    “Fully disclosed source code is the path to true transparency and confidence in the voting process for all involved,” said Eric Coomer, vice president of research and product development for Sequoia, in the press release.

  • The company has long had a reputation for vigorously fighting any efforts by academics, voting activists and others to examine the source code in its proprietary systems, and even threatened to sue Princeton University computer scientists if they disclosed anything learned from a court-ordered review of its software.
  • 5 more annotations...
  • • Ed Felten
    • was pleasantly surprised to see the company opening its new system to examination after vehemently resisting it in the past.
    • Given that Sequoia is now acknowledging the value of code disclosure as something that can lead to better security rather than worse security, as it has claimed in the past, Felten said “it seems that it should follow that they would now be willing to release code for all of their other products as well.”
    • Spokeswoman Michelle Shafer said Sequoia’s public source system has been in the works for months, and that the announcement this week was timed for a National Institute of Standards and Technology workshop discussing a common data format for voting systems.

    • Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a group that has long lobbied for fully auditable voting systems, applauded Sequoia’s efforts.

      
      

      “It’s good to know the vendors are developing a new transparent optical-scan system,” she said. “That is probably the biggest recognition of the direction that the voting public wants to see the market going.”

• 28 Oct 09
  

  David Corking

  Interesting. I prefer marking x's on paper :)

  Open source Culture Politics Law Linux CLI

  • She said the firmware on the company’s new Frontier optical-scan machines is written in C# programming language and runs on Linux.

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