Try it #2: The poll for TIME magazine’s top 100 influential people for 2009 was hacked by members of 4chan website. They figured out the voting URL protocol and wrote auto voters, which were then used by others to vote, and spam links were posted everywhere tricking the competition into voting for those chosen by the members, so that the top 21 names spelt “marble cake, also the game” with their first letters. The top personality was moot, who was the founder of 4chan.
Try it #3: Pretty Good Democracy is a system that is a tradeoff between privacy and verifiability as both are not possible. In this, each voter is given a random code for each ballot measure. The voter transmits their choices in code to a server and receives an acknowledgement. A group of trustees register this vote, translate the codes to actual choices, record the choice, and send the acknowledgement. This will fail if enough of the trustees collude or if the codes cannot be kept secret.
Technology in context: Law enforcement
The police use hardened mobile computers that interface wirelessly with National Crime Information Center (NCIC), maintained by the FBI and has the capacity to handle 5 million queries per day about various crimes. A perpetrator who is arrested is processed using digital technology by using digital photographs of the criminal, entering the information into automated warrants and booking system, which handles everything including allotting a cell, automatically thereby increasing the productivity. The fingerprints are scanned digitally and sent to FBIs Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which can classify or search these prints out of a database of 66 million fingerprints of criminals, 25 million civilians, and seven thousand terrorists.
Computer forensics is the examination and analysis of data located on digital storage media scientifically for presenting as evidence in courts. Computers can be the means (piracy, transmitting trade secrets and similar crimes) or the computers can be the target of the crimes (Distributed denial of services, data theft, and similar acts). To gather digital evidence from a computer, in the case of a crime is to make an exact replica of the hard disk on write-once media, which is tamper proof. This is then searched for evidence. Deleted files can be recovered and temporary files and internet cache can yield information. When a computer is a target, then first a disk image of the server is taken and logs checked for evidence. Using a honeypot computer to track the intruder or using intrusion detection systems are two other methods of discovering intruders. Due to privacy concerns, they must adhere to privacy regulations, log their actions scrupulously, and examine all angles of an issue. In some cases, due to not adhering to the privacy laws or not documenting the steps taken for collecting and processing evidence meticulously can cost a conviction.
Works Cited
Goodin, Dan. Hackers stuff ballot box for Time Magazine's top 100 poll. 17 April 2009. Web. 14 March 2016.
Jamrich Parsons, Dan Oja. New Perspectives on Computer Concepts, 2016. Course Technology, Cengage Learning: Course Technology, Cengage Learning, 2016. Print.
Perera, David. Pretty Good Democracy suggests path to Internet elections. 10 August 2011. Web. 14 March 2016.
