It’s Time to End Computerized Elections – By Fred Kaplan (Slate) / Feb 4 2020
The Iowa app debacle was an inexcusable fiasco. It was also inevitable.
The Iowa app fiasco could stand as a parable of our jerry-built political system—the worst-case scenario of what happens when the inflated value of rural outliers meets the half-baked infatuation with high technology.
It is as yet unknown how the Iowa Democratic Party—an independent fiefdom that functions quite separately from the national committee and quite full of its outsize importance—hired the company called Shadow to create the app for reporting the caucus tallies from the state’s remote precincts Monday night. But a survey of a half-dozen heavyweights in the cybersecurity field suggests the firm is not a known quantity.
Jake Williams, a former NSA analyst now working as principal consultant for the private firm Rendition Infosec, said in an email that a LinkedIn search on Shadow shows no one “with development experience on critical infrastructure.” He added, “It looks like a huge web of ‘who knows who’ rather than ‘these folks have the technical expertise to pull this off.’ ”
Investing hundreds of millions of dollars into security—then doing it again every four or eight years after hackers find a way around your new wall—is a mug’s game.
The fact, as has since been reported, that the system was never tested at full scale is simply inexcusable—a clear sign that the Iowa Dems signed the contract without first vetting the design with an esteemed IT professional or, possibly, without even knowing such vetting was necessary.
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-debacle-end-computerized-elections.html
