open source necessary condition for voter confidence

open source necessary condition for voter confidence

Posted Aug 20, 2004 2:49 UTC (Fri) by jabby (subscriber, #2648)
In reply to: Will 'controlled open source' software take over election work? (NewsForge) by JoeBuck
Parent article: Will 'controlled open source' software take over election work? (NewsForge)

I don't trust any third party... or even a couple of them. I want to be able to review the code myself and to have the local computer science department perform a code review and the military and all interested political parties and the foreign governments who are affected by our political choices... Yes, everyone should be able to inspect the code. No more "trade secret" or "competitive advantage" whining from the companies who are making money hand over fist at the taxpayers' expense.

Remember Linus' Law: "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." How long do you think it would take for *someone* *somewhere* in the world to find subverted code? With as much as there is at stake in the general election, my guess is "not long." When the Diebold source was leaked on the internet it took very little time for computer scientists to examine the code and find dozens of critical weaknesses.

Also, the compiler has to be open source and inspectable as well. I'm not forgetting the famous backdoor-inserting compiler hack by Ken Thompson:

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

This actually demonstrates that you can't trust any program that handles programs, but I would still maintain that you are *far* better off with open source than with closed source. With closed source, only those "trusted parties" (who sign NDAs and are therefore bound in ways that make them untrustworthy) can see the source code and try to compile it and verify the binary. That's when you have the problem of closed source compilers and the inability to verify that the binary produced actually obeys the code that you approved and fed to it.

As for confidence in the election, I fail to see how closed-source (secret) software running on closed-source, proprietary operating systems and inspected by only a few "trusted parties" is going to inspire confidence. In general, people are smart enough to know that transparency is good and trustworthy and that wherever something is hidden from public view there resides the temptation to deceive the public.

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