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ComputerWorld Independent 

Would a US digital dollar let the government track you?

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US legislators continue to press for the creation of a digital dollar, raising questions about whether the move could make it easy for the federal government to track business and consumer transactions.

Putting all the digital dollars on one electronic ledger operated by the Federal Reserve would also be a tempting target for cyber criminals.

In March, lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow the US Treasury to create a digital dollar and pilot it to determine its viability. That same month, President Joe Biden called for more research on developing a national digital currency through the nation’s central bank. The order highlighted the need for more regulatory oversight of cryptocurrencies, which have been used for nefarious purposes such as money laundering and other criminal activities.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

MIT researchers say mobile voting app piloted in U.S. is rife with vulnerabilities

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2020 13:30:00 -0800

Elections officials in numerous states have piloted various mobile voting applications as a method of expanding access to the polls, but MIT researchers say one of the more popular apps has security vulnerabilities that could open it up to tampering by bad actors.

The MIT analysis of the application, called Voatz, highlighted a number of weaknesses that could allow hackers to “alter, stop, or expose how an individual user has voted.”

Additionally, the researchers found that Voatz’s use of Palo Alto-based vendor Jumio for voter identification and verification poses potential privacy issues for users.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

U.S. Air Force to pilot blockchain-based database for data sharing

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2020 13:23:00 -0800

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) is planning to test a blockchain-based graph database that will allow it to share documents internally as well as throughout the various branches of the Department of Defense and allied governments.

The permissioned blockchain ledger comes from a small Winston-Salem, N.C. start-up, Fluree PBC, which announced the government contract this week. Fluree is working with Air Force’s Small Business Innovation Research AFWERX technology innovation program to launch a proof of concept of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) later this year.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Iowa Caucus chaos likely to set back mobile voting

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 12:51:00 -0800

A coding flaw and lack of sufficient testing of an application to record votes in Monday’s Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus will likely hurt the advancement and uptake of online voting.

While there have been hundreds of tests of mobile and online voting platforms in recent years – mostly in small municipal or corporate shareholder and university student elections – online voting technology has yet to be tested for widespread use by the general public in a national election.

“This is one of the cases where we narrowly dodged a bullet,” said Jeremy Epstein, vice chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC). “The Iowa Democratic Party had planned to allow voters to vote in the caucus using their phones; if this sort of meltdown had happened with actual votes, it would have been an actual disaster. In this case, it’s just delayed results and egg on the face of the people who built and purchased the technology.”

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Seattle tries out mobile voting

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

About 1.2 million Seattle area voters will be able to use their smartphone, laptop or a computer at their local library to vote in a current election this year.

This will be the first-time online voting is available to all eligible registered voters of a district, according to a foundation behind the initiative.

The King Conservation District in Washington State is the third region in the U.S. to partner with the non-profit Tusk Philanthropies on a national effort to expand mobile voting, and Washington is the fifth state to pilot mobile voting in general. The King Conservation District is a state environmental agency that includes Seattle and 33 other cities, but it is separate from the King County Elections agency and operates under a different budget.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Amid privacy and security failures, digital IDs advance

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Frustration over a growing number of privacy and security failuresin recent years is driving the creation of digital identities controlled only by those whose information they contain.

Known as “self-sovereign identities,” the digital IDs will be used by consumers, businesses, their workers and governments over the next few years to verify everything from credit worthiness and college diplomas to licenses and business-to-business credentials.

“We are slowly graduating from crawling to walking. It takes one to two years ’til we have reliable capabilities to spark meaningful decentralized identity adoption,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director at Gartner. “A major non-technical hurdle is for organizations to learn the concept and take the necessary steps to appropriately adapt their business processes to decentralized identity ecosystems.”

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Utah county moves to expand mobile voting through blockchain

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

Disabled voters in Utah County will be able to use their smartphones to vote in the November municipal election, an expansion of an earlier pilot test of the blockchain-based technology and anothert step toward allowing all voters to cast ballots with a mobile device.

The county, which has more than a half million residents, is the third in the U.S. to partner with Tusk Philanthropies, a non-profit focused on expanding mobile voting nationally. The latest pilot is a collaboration between the Utah County Elections Division, Tusk Philanthropies, the National Cybersecurity Center and Boston-based voting app developer Voatz.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Why blockchain-based voting could threaten democracy

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 03:00:00 -0700

Public tests of blockchain-based mobile voting are growing.

Even as there’s been an uptick in pilot projects, security experts warn that blockchain-based mobile voting technology is innately insecure and potentially a danger to democracy through “wholesale fraud” or “manipulation tactics.”

The topic of election security has been in the spotlight recently after Congress held classified briefings on U.S. cyber infrastructure to identify and defend against threats to the election system, especially after Russian interference was uncovered in the 2016 Presidential election.

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