Privacy Please
A genuine and informative podcast about data privacy and security. Your reliable place for best practices, interviews, belly laughs, and real stories.
Privacy Please
S5, E225 - Election Week 2024: Enhancing Transparency in the Overall Election Process
In this episode of Privacy Please, uncover how cutting-edge technologies are transforming voting, and enhancing privacy and integrity in the digital age. Explore decentralized platforms like Mastodon for greater user control and transparency, and see how Bitcoin is shifting power away from traditional authorities. Dive into the potential of cryptographic tools and blockchain to authenticate media and voting information, reducing misinformation and boosting election transparency. Tune in to discover how these innovations promise a bright future for trust in technology.
Welcome to another episode of Privacy Please, where we break down complicated tech stuff into bits everyone can understand. We're your hosts, Cameron Ivory and Gabe Gumps. I'm gonna break a little bit down of enhancing transparency in that overall election process. How you been, Cam.
Speaker 2:Doing well, doing well. What are we talking about today, gabe? Actually, you know what, how you doing.
Speaker 1:I'm solid. No complaints out here. We've got a couple hurricanes behind us at this point, so you know things are looking up.
Speaker 2:They are looking up and outward and, yeah, we got some decent fall weather these last few weeks, which is nice yeah.
Speaker 1:As we roll into election season.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Actually, I mean technically, I guess we're already in election season. We've been in election season, by my count, for like 20 years, though I don't know if the election season stopped since 2014 or maybe even before that. But yeah, that's what we're going to. We're going to break some of that down today. We're going to break a little bit down of enhancing transparency in that overall election process through technology. Privacy and security are very intimate parts of our election process, extremely important parts of our election process the validity of every vote one man, one woman, one vote and the privacy with which we can establish ourselves under that rule. So we should get into that today.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of technology at the center of elections. A couple of years ago it was election voting machines were at the center of elections from a technology perspective and there was a lot of hand-wringing about whether or not those machines did their jobs properly and things of that nature. And so again, transparency in the process, jobs properly and things of that nature. And so again, transparency in the process. Those machines very intentionally spit out paper records still, because as transparency goes, believe it or not, nothing beats good old fashioned papers. Nothing beats good old fashioned paper. But as an election process goes, and, as transparency goes, there's a need for transparency through other parts of the process, not just the actual voting part of the process, but the information that people consume to make those ever so important decisions as to who they're casting their vote for.
Speaker 1:And so there's been a lot of AI generated misinformation. We can talk about the dead internet theory, where there's more bots online than humans. I believe it. I put a handful of those bots out there myself like guilty as charged, but they're not spewing misinformation, but AI generated misinformation from deep fakes. So you've got your video and your audio, just to the written, is really good, really really good. And so it's not easy for even sometimes the more experienced of us to discern what this content is, the validity of it, where it comes from, et cetera. And so there's a lot of technology. That has been well. We've been at this show now for five years, and in that five years alone we've seen a lot of privacy preserving and privacy enhancing technologies really take off, including the decentralized privacy preserving and protecting space right. There's been a lot of-.
Speaker 2:That was my first question for you. Yeah, Since we're on that topic, just for the listeners and everything. When it comes to decentralized technology, Gabe, from your view, how does decentralized technology differ from traditional systems? Or in the context of something like the selection or security or whatever?
Speaker 1:lot about things like censorship on those closed platforms, right? So if you take X, for example, aka Twitter, it is a centralized platform. It's owned and operated by one individual right Like one person, one entity, if you would. However, there are other similar platforms, right? Mastodon comes to mind. Mastodon is probably the most known popular decentralized federated network that looks, feels, acts like Twitter does. It's an alternative to Twitter and so there's a lot more transparency, for example, in who is making decisions about what content ends up on Mastodon. And there are different Mastodon instances, so you can run one, I can run one, and then you and I can federate so that your post that ends up on your server is also in mine and vice versa. Or you could say you know what? Cam's gone off the deep end. I don't trust the content on that network any longer. You can remove, you can deassociate, you can defederate from that network, right. So there's some transparency in the who controls the platform. That's not to still say that you know there isn't trust involved, like anyone on our Mastodon networks has to trust that Cam and Gabe are actually doing all of the right things by us from a privacy perspective. But the primary difference between centralized and decentralized is ownership, and with that ownership comes the ability to make decisions, privacy impacting decisions, censorship decisions. Do I let them advertise it, do I not? Do I silently suppress some of the things they try to share, do I not? There's all of those things. Are there people having conversations on the platform that we find problematic to our own agenda and so we retaliate? There are all of those things.
Speaker 1:Decentralization has been very popular across a number of things. In the money world, we've seen a lot of all the random coins pop up, all the random digital coins. Decentralizing who owns the money? Right, you know, we take Bitcoin as the primary example. But you have a central banking authority held in the World Bank. You have that in the US government. You have a central banking authority, et cetera. But things like Bitcoin give you a decentralized option for that. No one gets to control the creation, distribution, et cetera, of that money.
Speaker 1:So, that's a lot of what we see coming to the forefront of how do we enhance transparency in the overall election process as it pertains to information, and I think things like decentralized social networks are a really really, really, really good place to start with that Really good place to start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and since we're on that topic, when you mentioned the things that we talk about on the show, just as a reminder, disclaimer, it's not legal advice. We're not lawyers. Everything we say is our opinions, not our companies. You know things like that. So, again, we appreciate everyone that tunes in. So these anyways. I am indeed not a lawyer, so do not at me. Do not at me.
Speaker 1:I know a thing or two about decentralized networks, so if you want to at me on that topic, go ahead and take your chances. For sure, go ahead and take your chances. But no definitely not legal advice. This is just good life advice we're slinging out to you.
Speaker 2:That's right. What about blockchain? What does that have to do with elections, Gabe? What role does that have to do with elections, Gabe? What role does that have in elections?
Speaker 1:Blockchains provide a mechanism for openly recording transactions. Right Like, you, can openly record a transaction and make that transaction immutable, namely no one else can ever change that.
Speaker 1:So you can track the history of it, and so you know. There's been talks of using blockchain-like technology in the voting process itself. Right Like, I cast my vote on a blockchain. It should ostensibly be preserved there forever. It is also not quite as private, though, right? So one of the things about blockchain is it is posted for all to see. That is part of the transparency in it. So when you, for example, when you use Bitcoin and you send money from one wallet to another, that transaction is publicly posted. It is very much captured forever and all time to always see. But you could also tell like wallet A sent $10 to wallet B, and I know that wallet A belongs to Gabe and wallet B belongs to Cam. So there is so much transparency in things like blockchain that it doesn't always serve well for also preserving privacy.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of things that have sprung up in the world to help with that, like tumblers, et cetera, but that probably wouldn't work in. Maybe it would. I don't know how well that would work in the voting scenario, but then again, there's still the. Now you have to trust the nodes in this blockchain system that they are indeed not. They haven't been, for example, some blockchain technologies. It's a majority vote thing right, like all of the checks are done, and if 51% of all of the nodes agree that this is accurate and right, then it is. But there are ways in which one could take over such a system. They're not silver bullets. Things like blockchain are definitely not silver bullets to decentralization, but a very, very important cog in that, in that machine yeah, it's good to know.
Speaker 2:How much do you know about cryptographic tools?
Speaker 1:decent amount. It depends on how far down the stack we want to go. I dabble dabble as as as an armchair understander of topics in that realm specifically, but definitely not a lot deeper than that. We've got some friends in the network, though, and the Friends and Family Network we could probably bring on to talk about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd be interested to know about that because you know, when it comes to tracking media providence and changes, and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that piece of information? Who it said it's from? So back to the deep fake thing. Right like I can stand up a website that looks and feels like a new independent website and then repost an article that I claim to be from the associated press, right which is a thing that, like other news, agencies cite other news agencies and most people don't go check those sources but the associated press as an entity and pretty much everyone in their newsroom.
Speaker 1:They all have their own public keys that they use to secretly share, or not even secretly. Let me rephrase that to validate who they are sharing information with and vice versa, so that you can actually, for example, validate, say, the provenance of the email you got came from Joe Smith at the Associated Press, extending that all the way out, so that the news articles themselves use some similar type of method, which would be great, just basic PGP right, like just public key, private key pair, where every time an article is posted, it posted its key and then you could import into your browser. You know your key and then it can check. And so, like you can, just like when you see the little lock in your browser that says, ah, my site is secure, like I went to chasecom and I logged in, you know, you can, you should, should be able to, should be able to beyond. Theoretically we could, we could implement such technology in the real world to to prove the providence of things like news articles. But there's, there's very much a nesting doll of that all the way down like a.
Speaker 1:I have to now also trust the associated press and although I might, you might not right like you know, that's that's pretty common I hear people voice their opinions on different news agencies Like I trust the Washington Post, I don't trust the Washington Post and so even if you can prove the provenance of it being from the Post, then there's still always a trust element. But today there's a double trust element there's. I have to trust that. I trust the source and then I have to trust where I get that information from. If I didn't get it directly from a known location that the Washington Post posts information, like their webpage, their Twitter feed, then maybe I shouldn't trust it. But we see a lot again of fakes and they're really, really good at just convincing you that that source is real and that story is real yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next couple years.
Speaker 2:For sure, when it comes to the ai thing. Um, you know, you see videos where they're clearly ai generated but I mean the impact of misinformation, especially when it comes to something like the election like we were talking about offline back in 2016, 2015,. That election, was it 16?
Speaker 1:16,.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, there was always that big concern of just you know, the voting and the ballots and the and the dis and misinformation that was swirling all around this.
Speaker 1:I'd argue it's still there to today. It feels like it's not as loud as it has been in the past, but maybe some of us have just gotten better at filtering it out or just more deaf to some of it. But it hasn't exactly gone completely away.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:We can almost guarantee, given currently how close you know polls, air quotes, however accurate those things are. But you know, if they're fairly accurate and this race is as tight as it is here stateside, then there's almost guaranteed to be some voices that are going to call foul play. So you know again, transparency in that entire process. How can technology come to its rescue?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. Yeah, going back to the decentralized technologies, do you think that there's any, would you know of any potential barriers on kind of implementing those technologies into, like an existing, the existing electoral systems that we have right now?
Speaker 1:your biggest barriers, everyone and everything. It take a lot of work to convince the entire american public to trust the process purely to technology. I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because paper is a big thing. Still, paper is still a big thing.
Speaker 1:I don't know how much people really trust digital.
Speaker 1:Maybe, they do right, Because I've heard people say things like well, my bank, I don't need ID to deposit a check into my bank account from my phone. It's like that's true, but have you ever seen how much fraud goes on in the banking world? Have you ever seen how much money is spent on anti-fraud systems in the banking world? It's a lot. Do you know how much actual digital shenanigans occur in that world? I think that would be one of the biggest barriers. It's convincing the people to trust the system. And then again it goes back to who's going to control the system.
Speaker 2:It's a decentralized system.
Speaker 1:Even the decentralized systems have to be owned by someone. Is this where we bring back a well-regulated cloud militia, a properly armed DevOps militia, to own and operate our decentralized technology stack? There's definitely still some things that would have to occur there. Yeah, but I think your number one hurdle is I don't know. Are you going to convince everyone of voting age from 18 to 80 and above right that they should trust this system? I don't know. I will tell you right now. You would have a hard time convincing me. I would just as soon stick to paper.
Speaker 2:Yeah, agreed, you would have a very difficult time convincing me.
Speaker 1:I, by contrast, have been an ethical hacker for a healthy number of years, and so you know I live in my brain lives a different picture of technology and the ease with which it can be abused, so I don't think you can convince me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like bending the light. Yeah Well, I mean to kind of wrap things up here in terms like we've kind of already touched on this, but you know, the privacy and ethical considerations of blockchain and decentralized networks, technologies, whatever. I mean, what do you, what do you kind of see happening? What do you think we're going to see if this is going to start to be implemented? I mean, is this something you see that actually will pay off in the end, or is it just going to be another thing? I think we are.
Speaker 1:I think we're a long way away from seeing it make a meaningful impact in our everyday lives, but I don't think it's going to fade. You know, again, it hasn't quite gotten groundswell amongst all the masses, but platforms like Mastodon are really taking off right, like decentralized Twitter. There are decentralized versions of YouTube out there, right, similar platforms. I think at the ground level, like starting now, we'll see more of that. We'll see more of this technology build itself up from the ground floor, more grassroots and, uh, eventually make its way into into more of of our lives in this, in this way yeah, a lot of things to think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Just with future elections, and this topic of the thing that I always think about is and you talk about as well is, like you know, balancing that innovation and privacy and trust, and I think that's always going to be a challenge, but I'm glad that it's something that our leaders and our nerds, all the smart people that are figuring these things out and putting them together it's I think it's top of mind for most of them. There's just so much that can go into this, I mean, especially with AI. Ai is it's going to start getting more and more implemented for more and more, more and more businesses and organizations too.
Speaker 1:It's going to be interesting Because who you know?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's another, that's a whole other episode. Right there we're talking about the government, but We've never done an episode on just the government yes.
Speaker 1:We should do an episode on the government. We'll invite the smoking man on and actually go as him for Halloween. The smoking man.
Speaker 2:That could be interesting. Gabe, any other thoughts for the listeners before we wrap this one up. Anything to leave them.
Speaker 1:Remember to trust but validate. Trust but validate that's your best weapon in today's world. Believe nothing you read and half of what you see.
Speaker 2:That's good, that's good.
Speaker 1:That's just good, solid advice right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would have to agree. Yeah, all right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for always supporting us. Gabe, as always, pleasure, always good to see you. Yes, sir, and we'll see you guys next week. Appreciate you. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe, smash that button. Smash that button. We'll see you guys next week.
