Not Descended From No Monkey

When I was in high school, I once got into a conversation with my mother on the topic of evolution. I think I was reading a lot of Stephen Jay Gould at the time, and I asked my mother what she thought of evolution.

"Well," she sniffed, "all I know is, I'm not descended from no monkey."

"Okay," I responded, "why do you believe that?"

"Because I know it. I'm not descended from no monkey."

I wasn't going to point out that no scientist has ever proposed that humans are descended from monkeys. I thought that the bigger problem was the fact that my mother was sticking to an emotional judgement instead of being rational.

"Yeah, but what's your evidence?"

"I don't need any evidence. I'm not descended -- "

"-- from no monkey. We've firmly established that. But out in the real world, whatever is, is, no matter what you think. So, suppose evolution is true?"

"It's not."

"Fine, but let's just say for the sake of argument that it is."

"But it's not."

"For the sake of argument, okay? Not really, but let's say it is. Then, when you say, 'I'm not descended from monkeys,' you're just wrong, right? No matter how strongly you feel about it."

"I'm not, and that's all there is to it."

This is where we left it.

My conversation with my mother was a miniature of the so-called "debate" between creationism and evolution. It's not even a debate, because nobody can even agree on the ground rules. One on side of the conflict, you have people who believe that we can observe the world, apply reason to our observations, and deduce rules which correctly describe the way the world works. On the other side, you have people who believe that all facts, observations, knowledge, and reason must be ditched in favor of the inerrancy of a rather thin book of the mistranslated myths of an ancient nomadic desert shepherd tribe. You just can't tell these people that when your beliefs come into contact with the facts of objective reality, reality always wins. You may fervently believe that you can fly by flapping your arms and reciting the Lord's Prayer, but that doesn't make it true. Rationalism seems to win eventually, but it takes generations, like it did to persuade people that the Earth moves around the sun. Believe it or not, they used to burn people at the stake for saying that.

You can't use reason to persuade irrational people to be rational, and therefore, it seems the "debate" will continue for a very long time to come; because my mother isn't descended from no monkey.

I Knew I Shouldn't Have Bought This Mug...


It was expensive, too.

Buying Blue

Contemplating the recent electoral disappointment has crystallized some of my thoughts on money, politics, and effective action. I started to wonder how much of the money I spend in the marketplace goes to support bad candidates and bad causes; and I started to wonder how I could spend my money to help good candidates and good causes. It's nice to know that I wasn't alone in this thinking.

A series of web sites have gone up in the last few weeks which give us a portion of the tools we're going to need in the coming months and years. By using publicly-available records, they have compiled databases of companies' political contributions, allowing you to compare and contrast brands and companies, and make your own decisions about how to spend your money.

Project Blue Christmas
Cobb 24
Buy Blue
Choose The Blue

When you spend your money, you should be taking more into consideration than just the price. Think about the real cost of doing business with companies which are actively lobbying to destroy Social Security, worker rights, environmental protections, and an equitable tax system. Every dollar you give Wal-Mart, for example, is a dollar they are going to use as a club against you.

The buy blue movement is a reaction to the reality that the corporations have essentially taken over politics in America. They call the tune. They set the agenda. Sure, we "voters" get our say, sort of, assuming the voting machines are reliable, but we only get to vote once every other year, for slates of candidates and issues already vetted by the corporations, campaigning on corporate money. Where do these corporations get all their money? Largely from you and me, their customers. We should at least look at what sort of candidates and issues our dollars are going to support, and try to steer those dollars in a more effective direction. We can vote with our dollars, and those votes definitely get counted.

After we wait for the moral outrage of the Republicans to subside ("Wal-Mart has a perfect right to support whatever it wants!", which boils down to, "how dare you try to tell me how you should spend your money!"), the single vulnerability I see to the buy blue idea is the fact that the contribution records are all public, as required by law. If the Buy Blue Movement really does start to get traction, I fear that the corporations will respond mainly by working out ways of hiding their donations, or removing the provisions of the law which require public disclosure of donations.

Perusing the databases on the sites provided a small number of amusing surprises. Amazon, for example, is a huge Republican contributor. I will in future be steering my business towards Barnes and Noble, which contributes 100% to Democrats, or Powell's, which does not have any contributions on record.

H.J. Heinz, earlier in the year a target of a boycott by idiot Republicans for having some connection to John Kerry -- i.e., he's married to a prominent stockholder -- gives 98% of its money to Republicans.

Dunkin Donuts gives 74% of its contributions to Republicans, whereas Starbucks gives 100% of its contributions to Democrats. Unfortunately, I still despise Starbucks coffee, and I will still buy Dunkin coffee, but there are ways to cut back just the same. I have become used to picking up a couple of pounds of coffee at Dunkin, but I think I will go back to buying it from the local Whole Foods Market (100% D) instead.

We have also moved all of our banking business away from Fleet, which is now Bank of America, and to a local credit union. Bank of America split its donations, but actively supported George W. Bush and Dennis Hastert. (And here I was thinking bankers, of all people, could read a balance sheet!) We were happily surprised that the credit union gives us great service, great hours, and great rates.

I actually believe in the power of giving your business to local companies more than I believe in the power of giving your business to "democratic" companies. For example, all of the computers I have bought in the past seven years have come from a local vendor (PCs for Everyone) rather than from the likes of Dell, HP, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. More on the virtues of spending locally later.

Annals of Unfortunate Product Names

Part 49 of a series. Collect them all!



It's just so easy to miss the little "2", isn't it?

Scam Codes

I don't know if the Clinton Curtis affidavit is a genuine document, or if many of its claims will withstand deeper scrutiny. Curtis claims to have developed a means for rigging electronic voting machines at the request of a Florida state representative, who is now in the US House. A number of liberal blogs, including The Blue Lemur and The Brad Blog are carrying the story, but it is starting to percolate into other venues, notably Slashdot, and get some traction with the "mainstream" corporate media.

It's pretty shocking material. Curtis claims he developed what he thought was demonstration code, intended to show how a touch-screen electronic voting machine could be rigged with a backdoor which meets three criteria: (a) It must be touchscreen-capable, (b) It must be capable of being triggered without any special equipment, and (c) It must be undetectable, even if the source code is inspected. Curtis claims that these requirements came directly from the congressman.

Curtis claims he developed a vote fraud prototype which presents itself as an ordinary touch screen voting machine, but with hidden buttons. A user with the knowledge of where the hidden buttons were could, by activating the correct sequence of such hidden buttons, change the vote totals! He writes:

"...By clicking the correct order of invisible buttons the candidate selected by the user is compared to other candidates within that same race. If the candidate they selected is leading the race, nothing happens. If the other candidate is leading the race, the vote totals are altered so that the selected candidate is now leading the race with 51% of the vote. The other candidates then share the remaining 49% in exact proportion to the totals they had previously. In the prototype supplied to Feeney, the vote totals showed on the screen. In an actual application, the user would receive no visible clues to the fraud that had just occurred..."

In order to more visibly demonstrate what Curtis is talking about here, I have created a small Flash movie which essentially replicates his prototype:



The movie includes some decoration around a pretty basic interface. Select a candidate, press "Cast Vote", and the totals are incremented accordingly. If you don't like the totals, or the candidates, or the order, just press "Setup", type in the values you like, and press "OK". (Press "Setup" again to dismiss the setup screen.) You can toggle the display of the vote totals, too, to simulate that aspect of a real voting machine. For simplicity's sake, I have assumed a three-person race, although there's no reason this wouldn't work for any number of candidates or races.

The vote fraud is possible on this simulation, as in Curtis's, by the use of hidden buttons. I have placed mine just to the left of each candidate's radio button. The sequence is important, since we only want people who know what they're doing to trigger the reallocation of votes, and we want to be able to select which candidate is favored.

In my simulation, it's a five step process. It's easier to do it than to describe it, but here goes:
1. You must click your selected candidate's hidden button 3 times, (*Just to the left of the circular radio button next to the candidate's name*)
2. Then click any other candidate's hidden button 3 times,
3. Then click your selected candidate's hidden button twice,
4. Then click any other candidate's hidden button twice,
5. Then click on your selected candidate's hidden button.

Try it!

When you do this, if you are displaying the vote totals, you will see that your candidate is now winning the race with 51% of the vote, and the total number of votes is unchanged. (This is important since precincts count voters very carefully to match up with their machine totals at closing.)

If this were an actual voting machine, how could I use it in practice? I would have to have people planted in as many voting stations as possible. They could be election officials or they could be ordinary voters, as long as they knew the correct sequence of hidden buttons to press. They could enter the fraudulent sequence at any time, although it would make a lot more difference later in the day than sooner. (If the code was entered at, say, 6:00 pm, when the polls have been open for 11 hours already, it is not likely that two hours of honest voting could overwhelm the results.) However, in order to make the scheme work, it would be imperative that the machines provide no audit trail, and that the inner workings of the machine, i.e. the source code, is never available to inspection, by the government or by the general public.

Now let's see. Which party controls a vast majority of local election officials and has virtually unfettered access to the machines? Which two companies make the machines which count 80% of the vote in America, are owned and operated by big party activists, which have successfully resisted putting any paper trail whatsoever into their machines? Which candidate wins when the source code for these machines are protected as "trade secrets", unavailable for view by anyone except company officers?

Who wins? It's as easy as Bush, Bush, Bush, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Bush, Bush, Kerry, Kerry, BUSH!

It doesn't matter if the Curtis affidavit is genuine. What matters is that rigging the vote in the way that Curtis describes is plausible -- indeed, as I have demonstrated above, it's easy. Curtis claims that the code to perform the vote fraud would be easy to detect if the source code was inspected (he says he couldn't meet all three criteria because of that), but I am not so sure that's the case. Experienced programmers know that it's relatively easy to obfuscate the purpose of any block of code, and although it's theoretically possible to find it by inspection, it's not hard to make that a very difficult practical task. As an example, here's the code which is responsible for most of the Flash movie above:

riggedvote.as

It's not a lot of code, just a couple of hundred lines, and I haven't taken any special care to hide the fraud, but it takes some work to find it just the same. Now imagine hiding that nugget of code inside hundreds of thousands of lines of code. If some enterprising Microsoft hackers can hide a Flight Simulator in Excel, it's not hard to hide a little bit of fraud in a voting system.

I think the only way to make electronic voting trustworthy is to make it auditable at every level. This means careful validation and certification of open public source code, and an auditable paper trail.

Until then, your vote is only as good as the intentions of the person who follows you into the voting booth.

Verified Voting
Black Box Voting
20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA