INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EVMs AT IIT, CHENNAI, FEB. 13, 2010
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Intl. Conf. on EVMs at IIT, Chennai, 13 Feb. 2010, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Politics/Elections
Contact: Save Indian Democracy (US)
Email: saveindiand...@gmail.com
Web: http://saveindiandemocracy.org
Ph: 981-015-6791 (India), 986-602-1393 (India), 732-368-0122 (US)
Conf Details: http://saveindiandemocracy.wordpress.com/conferences/
New Delhi (Feb 1, 2010): The event organized by Save Indian Democracy
is at IIT Chennai, Central Lecture Theater (CLT) from 6:30PM to
8:30PM.
International experts who are pioneers and have significantly altered
the course of usage of EVM's in their countries are invited to India
by Center for National Renaissance. Details of experts from
Netherlands, Germany, United States drawn from legal, political and
academic arenas in their countries is given below. (Detailed bio-
data is given at the end).
What is EVM and what are the issues related to EVMs? EVMs are
electronic voting machines that are used in India for more than two
decades by Election Commission of India (ECI). India went full with
EVM in most recent two elections (2004 and 2009). Many activists
have been raising concerns about EVM as far back as 2001 but their
increased usage has seen spate of PILs etc from different political
parties, activists as well as encouraged demonstrations of tamper-
ability of similar EVMs build based on ECI published specifications.
The concerns are not just reliability of EVMs but serious allegations
of tampering.
At the same time India was initially moving towards EVMs as a way to
use technology for improving efficiency, internationally also
several countries have moved into that direction with some countries
making huge investments running into millions of dollars. But what
is the international scene today. All over Europe, several
countries (Germany, Netherlands, Ireland) rejected EVMs or canceled
early during feasibility studies (Italy etc). In US, more than 21
states banned EVMs or require paper trail and 18 additional states
use paper trail in state or local jurisdictions.
Are there lessons for India from International Experience? Are EVMs
in India significantly different from EVMs used internationally?
Should we be concerned? What, if any, are threats to Indian
Democracy?
The planned activities are geared to bring an open discussion on
these issues with international and national experts and help protect
Indian Democracy.
Details of international experts:
1) Rop Gonggrijp, Netherlands Computer hacker, successful
Entrepreneur who is instrumental in banning of EVMs in Netherlands
due to security reasons, in spite of huge investments made by
Netherlands in EVMs
Dr. Till Jaeger, Germany Attorney who argued the landmark German
Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned EVMs in German
Elections
Dr. David Dill, USA (via Video Conference) University of Stanford,
pioneer for reformation of usage of EVMs in US elections that
resulted in 21 states in US either ban EVMs or require paper trail
and additional 18 states require paper trail in state or local
jurisdictions. Founder of Verified Voting Foundation. In 2004, Dr
Dill received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award"
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2004.php
for "for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for
integrity and transparency in modern elections."
Dr. Alex Halderman, USA Computer Science Professor, University of
Michigan, noted expert of Electronic Voting Security who demonstrated
first voting machine virus, lead team of Scientists from Princeton
and Berkeley for "Top to Bottom" review of California EVMs.
DETAILED BIO DATA OF INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS
Rop Gonggrijp, Netherlands Computer hacker, successful Entrepreneur
who is instrumental in banning of EVMs in Netherlands due to security
reasons, in spite of huge investments made by Netherlands in EVMs
[image:
?ui=2&view=att&th=1265d4da1c4c38e3&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_1265d4da1c4c38e3&zw]
Born on Feb 14, 1968, Rop Gonggrijp is Dutch hacker, founder of
internet service provider (IPS) XS4ALL, instrumental in exposing the
vulnerabilities of Electronic Voting Machines to The Netherlands that
resulted in banning of EVM machines in spite of huge investments made
into them. Mr. Gonggrijp is now considered a key figure in the
growing international movement for election transparency and
verifiability.
Known as teenage hacker in his young days, Rop Gonggrijp founded
hacker magazine Hack-Tic in 1988 and was considered major security
threat by authorities of Netherlands. In 1993, he and others around
Hack-Tic founded ISP XS4ALL that is first ISP that offered internet
access to private individuals which he sold the company to former
enemy Dutch-Telecom. After he left XS4ALL, he founded ITSX, a
computer security evaluation company which was bought by Madison
Gurkha in 2006. In 2001, Mr. Gonggrijp started work on Cryptophone,
a mobile telephone that can encrypt conversation. Since 1989, Mr
Gonggrijp has been main organizer of hacker events held every four
years that are attended by thousands of hackers across the world.
After his home city of Amsterdam switched to electronic voting in
2006, mr. Gonggrijp started publicly questioning the security of the
voting machines in use in The Netherlands as well as oppose the
inherent lack of transparency when the vote count only happens inside
a computer. With Amsterdam now also using computers, The Netherlands
(pop. 17M) was 100% electronic voting. "We do not trust voting
computers", the organisation founded by mr. Gonggrijp, has managed to
convince the dutch public and government that the machines were not
worthy of the trust placed in them.
After two government-appointed committees could do nothing but agree
with the organization's point of view, voting computers were
abolished and the country is now once-again voting using hand-counted
paper ballots. The municipal election officials will probably never
like the paper ballots as much as they liked the machines, but the
recent elections for European Parliament passed without incident.
Mr. Gonggrijp also co-authored the CCC technical report on voting
computers as requested by the German contitutional court and he is a
key figure in the growing international movement for election
transparency and verifiability.
Dr. Till Jaeger, Germany Attorney who argued the landmark German
Supreme Court Judgment that effectively banned EVMs in German
Elections
[image:
?ui=2&view=att&th=1264365b69f98e9e&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_1264365b69f98e9e&zw]
Born in Dec 1969, Dr. Till Jaeger, is attorney from Germany who
successfully argued the landmark German Supreme Court Judgment that
effectively banned the usage of Electronic Voting Machines in
Germany's elections for reasons of transparency and verifiability.
"Dr. Till Jaeger has been a partner at the law firm JBB Rechtsanw�lte
since 2001.
He advises large and medium-sized IT businesses as well as government
authorities and software developers on matters involving contracts,
licensing and online use. Till Jaeger also covers conventional areas
of copyright law and entertainment law.
One particular focus of Till Jaeger�s work is on the legal issues
created by open source software. He is co-founder of the Institute
for Legal Aspects of Free & Open Source Software (ifrOSS),
contributing to its work with academic publications, lectures and
seminars in the fields of software law and copyright law.
Till Jaeger represented the physicist and software-engineer Dr.
Ulrich Wiesner at the German Constitutional Court in the proceedings
regarding complaints requesting the scrutiny of the elections to the
16th German Bundestag. This lawsuit ended successful with the
decision that the German Federal Voting Machine Ordinance is
unconstitutional for lack of transparency and violation of the
principle of democracy.
Till Jaeger graduated in law from the University of Mainz and has
also studied in Dijon, France. He started his legal clerkship in
Brandenburg in 1996. After that, he was given a DFG scholarship to
attend a post-graduate course on EU law and the protection of
personal rights in Munich. In 1999-2000 he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on
copyright law at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property,
Competition & Tax Law Munich."
Dr. David Dill, USA (via Video Conference) University of Stanford,
pioneer for reformation of usage of EVMs in US elections that
resulted in 21 states in US either ban EVMs or require paper trail
and additional 18 states require paper trail in state or local
jurisdictions. Founder of Verified Voting Foundation.
[image:
?ui=2&view=att&th=1264365e40268b18&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_1264365e40268b18&zw]
David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science
http://www-cs.stanford.edu/
and,
by courtesy,Electrical Engineering <http://www-ee.stanford.edu/
at Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/
He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-
Mellon University (1982 and 1987).
Prof. Dill has been working actively on policy issues in voting
technology since 2003. He is the author of the "Resolution on
Electronic Voting", which calls for a voter-verifiable audit trail on
all voting equipment, and which has been endorsed by thousands of
people, including many of the top computer scientists in the U.S. He
has served on the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Task Force
on Touch-Screen voting, the Citizens DRE Oversight Board of the Santa
Clara County Registrar of Voters, and on the IEEE P1583 Voting
Equipment Standards Committee. He has testified on electronic voting
before the U.S. Senate and the Commission on Federal Election Reform,
co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III. He is the founder of
the Verified Voting Foundation http://verifiedvotingfoundation.org/
and VerifiedVoting.org http://verifiedvoting.org/
and is on the board of those organizations. In 2004, he received the
Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award"
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2004.php
for "for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for
integrity and transparency in modern elections."
Prof. Dill has research interests in a variety of areas, including
computational systems biology and the theory and application of
formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware,
protocols, and software. He has also done research in asynchronous
circuit verification and synthesis, and in verification methods for
hard real-time systems. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was
Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation. http://www.0-in.com/
Prof. Dill's Ph.D. thesis, "Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical
Verification of Speed Independent Circuits" was named as
aDistinguished Dissertation by the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM), and published as such by M.I.T. Press in 1988. He
was the recipient of an Presidential Young Investigator award from
the National Science Foundation in 1988, and a Young
Investigatoraward from the Office of Naval Research in 1991.
He has received Best Paper awards at International Conference on
Computer Design in 1991 and the Design Automation Conference in 1993
and 1998. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2001 for his contributions to
verification of circuits and systems, and a Fellow of the ACM in 2005
for contributions to system verification and for leadership in the
development of verifiable voting systems. In 2008, he received the
first "Computer-Aided Verification" award, with Rajeev Alur, for
fundamental contributions to the theory of real-time systems
verification.
Dr. Alex Halderman, USA Computer Science Professor, University of
Michigan, noted expert of Electronic Voting Security who demonstrated
first voting machine virus, lead team of Scientists from Princeton
and Berkeley for "Top to Bottom" review of California EVMs
[image:
?ui=2&view=att&th=12643661dfc65e82&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_12643661dfc65e82&zw]
Born in Jan 1981, Dr. John Alexander Halderman, is a Computer
Science Professor from University of Michigan, is noted expert on
electronic voting security who demonstrated first voting machine
virus, served as a technical expert in California's "Top to Bottom"
voting systems review leading a team of scientists from Princeton and
U.C. Berkeley.
J. Alex Halderman is a professor of computer science and engineering
at the University of Michigan, where his research spans applied
computer security and tech-centric public policy. Professor
Halderman is a noted expert on electronic voting security. In 2006,
he conducted the first public, independent security review of a
touch-screen voting machine, the Diebold AccuVote TS, and
demonstrated the first voting machine virus. He later served as a
technical expert in California's "Top-to-Bottom" voting systems
review, leading a team of scientists from Princeton and U.C.
Berkeley. In addition to exposing voting security flaws, he has
investigated ways to improve the security and efficiency of the
election process by making smarter use of technology.
Professor Halderman earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton
University with a dissertation focused on studying computer security
failures in order to strengthen future designs. Besides electronic
voting, his research interests include Internet security, data
privacy, digital rights management, and cybercrime. He was a
founding member of Princeton's Center for Information Technology
Policy, where he continues to hold an appointment as a visiting
research collaborator.
Web site http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/
Dr. Gitanjali Swamy, PhD Berkeley, MBA Harvard, (In 2000,
demonstrated to then Election Commissioner M.S. Gill the
vulnerabilities of chips in EVMs)
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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harmony
- lahore dillie bus line
- evm machines.
<use...@mantra.com and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr. Jai Maharaj)> wrote in
message news:20100207WQl6gU32p0H8p61vS04lG1V@Q9XAC...
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
agents as possible in and around Lahore, partially to help the US.
And the EVMs? Well the manufacturer needed testing grounds, surely.
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
In article <4b70d9a3$0$12454$bbae...@news.suddenlink.net>,
"harmony" <a...@hotmail.com> posted:
>
> vajpayee's himalayan blunders:
> - lahore dillie bus line
> - evm machines.
> Dr. Jai Maharaj posted: