Without jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon, I'd also like to see this applied to voting software. I know it's a hot topic, and I'm honestly not trying to get political.
Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism to protect IP that I can't think of.
The beauty of voting software is that you don't have to verify the code if you hold the vote correctly. If the software provides a voter verifiable paper trail, the voter can verify their vote before turning it in.
The county can then verify the software by manually counting a random selection of paper votes to see if they match the software. If they do, then the software is correct, otherwise it is not. You then have a full by-hand recount and tell the vendor to fix their software.
I feel very strongly that all votes in all important elections should be counted by hand, and be open for anyone to observe the process (within reasonable limits on disruptive behavior).
Not because of the possibility of voting machines being hacked, but because it is important for the public to have trust in the system. It is difficult to trust a system you do not understand, and only a very small minority is ever going to be able to audit voting software.
(I'm not American, so this is in no way a comment on your current predicament.)
I agree, for my own piece of mind. But I am also certain that it would have made no difference in our current predicament with a third of the country thinking the election was stolen.
It has been shown to us time and time again that no actual evidence is required to get people to believe what they want to believe.
And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.
>But I am also certain that it would have made no difference in our current predicament with a third of the country thinking the election was stolen.
It would have changed some peoples minds I don't know if the change would have been a few thousand or 10s of millions. I can't say if it would have a dent in the 1/3 of people or not. I can't predict that. It would have helped me with my own peace of mind. And frank I think it's overall the right thing for us to do.
>And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.
Disinformation is powerful, I'm not suggesting this alone would fix that. I disagree that more technical evidence is harmful. Global warming is benefiting from transparency and evidence. It takes generations to change political will not years. The evidence there has shifted our whole economy, just maybe not fast enough.
There will always, always be deniers. Global warming, flat earth, vaccinations, etc. Evidence _helps_ battle deniers in these areas, but it takes generations for these ideas to become mainstream and the deniers to go from 99% of people to 2% of people.
Why would people who weren't convinced by reputable evidence in the first place be convinced by slightly better evidence that is only better in a technical hard to express and prove fashion. This is especially true when the people doubting are the least educated and least intelligent.
It's like saying that better proof of evolution would convince some portion of creationists. That's just not how misinformation works.
Misinformation works by targeting vulnerable parties with misinformation that aligns with their existing vulnerabilities and beliefs in order to power relevant action with long stored and fruitful sources of hate, bias, and scorn in a fashion that bypasses the brain and goes right for the gut.
Like 30% in America believe in a young earth that is thousands not billions of years old.
If Bob is a scientist of some sort and presenting interesting scientific work to the community and incidentally advising the government on environmental policy that will harm some business and you want to crush support for this by playing on existing biases with this group you advertise to the young earth crowd about how bob is anti God and see if you can tie bob to as many negative things they already dislike as you can.
You aren't fighting an intellectual battle to set their ideas on bob let alone deeper ideas you are fighting an emotional battle to galvanize existing deeply held beliefs to obtain useful action like calling up and yelling at their congressman or voting.
In that context asking Bob to present a better case is laughable. The relevant parties never engaged their brain in the first place.
Seems like both you and your parent comment are talking about software audits & auditors. I don't know if that exists in this form, but it seems reasonable that if you can get a security audit you should be able to get a correctness audit. And of course those auditors would be under some heavy-duty NDAs, given the nature of the work.
I completely agree, but you can have an auditable voting record in an election without relying on software integrity. That's not really the case, from the defendant's point of view, in a trial that relies on probabilities implemented in the software. In the case of voting, it is software-assisted. In a case like this article, it is software driven.
It shouldn't be considered conspiracy theory that, technically speaking, many things in our nation are an insecure joke, including our system of voting.
Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism to protect IP that I can't think of.