- WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The
Pentagon said on Thursday it had scrapped its program to allow U.S. troops
and other Americans overseas to vote through the Internet because the system
was so vulnerable to computer hackers it could cast doubt on the integrity
of U.S. election results.
-
- The Pentagon heeded the advice of cyber-security experts
who urged in a Jan. 21 report the program be abandoned because it was impossible
to create a voting system with current personal computers and the Internet
that would stop hackers or terrorists from tampering with election results.
-
- The $22 million Secure Electronic Registration and Voting
Experiment, or SERVE, program was supposed to allow 100,000 U.S. troops
and civilians overseas to cast votes through the Internet during this presidential
election year.
-
- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wrote a memo
on Jan. 30 saying the Pentagon "will not be using the SERVE Internet
voting project in view of the inability to assure legitimacy of votes that
would be cast using the system, which thereby brings into doubt the integrity
of election results," said a defense official, speaking on condition
of anonymity.
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- Pentagon officials previously defended the system and
said enhanced security procedures had been implemented.
-
- The first tryout for the SERVE system had been scheduled
for this past Tuesday's South Carolina presidential primary, but the Pentagon
put the system on hold.
-
- "I do appreciate the need for providing better absentee
voting for military personnel and civilians overseas. I just don't think
that the Internet was the way to do it. I applaud their decision,"
Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at
Johns Hopkins University and an author of the report, said in an interview.
-
- These overseas Americans currently rely on absentee paper
ballots. Obtaining and returning ballots from distant lands can be frustrating
and dependent on sometimes-unreliable foreign postal services.
-
- Wolfowitz's memo, written to David Chu, under secretary
of defense for personnel and readiness, allows the Pentagon to continue
work already in progress to look into "other technical applications
for voting on the Internet or electronically," the defense official
said.
-
- "The door is still open to other methods. It's just
that the SERVE we have decided not to use," he said.
-
- The cyber-security experts argued in their report that,
with votes cast on the Internet, elections could be vulnerable to a range
of cyber attacks that already have affected banks, Web providers and other
businesses operating online.
-
- Because the danger of successful large-scale attacks
by hackers on an Internet voting system was so great, they asked the Pentagon
to shut down development of SERVE and not attempt anything like it in the
future until the Internet and personal computers are fundamentally redesigned
to ensure security.
-
- "There are two main problems: one is that PCs (personal
computers) are insecure. And the second is that the Internet is insecure,"
Barbara Simons, a retired IBM researcher also an author of the critical
report, said in an interview.
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- "The people who were working on SERVE were very
dedicated and hard working. And they understood a lot of the issues. But
you can't make something work if it's an impossible problem. And this is
an impossible problem right now," Simons said.
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- http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4297714
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