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posted by martyb on Friday April 03 2020, @01:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the eternal-vigilance dept.

The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online:

To protect governments as well as people's rights from coronavirus, we need to use tech as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

[...] Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we've so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus's challenge to democracy.

In a democracy, citizens need to be able to vote, politicians to deliberate, and people to move about, meet, and act collectively. Democratic politics is a mixture of mass involvement and endless meetings. All this is hard when people can be infected with a potentially deadly virus if someone simply coughs nearby. The obvious answer might seem to be to move democracy to the internet, but some parts of democracy translate badly to an online world, while others are already being undermined by emergency powers (for example, Hungary's parliament just passed a law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree) and by the rise of digital surveillance.

[...] Democratic politics also happens in the streets, at political rallies, public meetings, and demonstrations. It is hard to see how such mass gatherings will return any time soon if they continue to be dangerous, or even banned, on grounds of public health.

[...] state efforts to fight the virus by tracking citizens might undermine democracy by concentrating power in the hands of an unaccountable authority. This might even happen from the bottom up. Citizens in fear of contagion might start liking the idea of ubiquitous and decentralized surveillance as a service, as evidenced by the popularity of coronavirus symptom-tracking apps in the UK and elsewhere.

[...] Some pundits argue that information technology is the answer to democracy's problems. There would be no risk of catching coronavirus if physical democracy became virtual.

[...] online voting systems, such as Voatz, which was used in the 2018 midterms in West Virginia, have critical security vulnerabilities. As cryptographer Matt Blaze says, many experts believe internet voting is a bad idea.

Online voting may one day provide the illusion of democracy while actually destroying it.


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  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday April 03 2020, @03:41AM (1 child)

    by Hartree (195) on Friday April 03 2020, @03:41AM (#978576)

    Ah, the days of yore when Jeff "Hemos" Bates, long ago of the green site, was the panel leader for a meeting on the future of internet voting at The Foresight Institute.

    I pointed out that Hank The Angry Drunken Dwarf had just won the online poll for People Magazine's Most Beautiful Person in the World.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_the_Angry_Drunken_Dwarf#Most_Beautiful_Person_poll [wikipedia.org]

    I think he was less enthusiastic about the idea after that. I know that I'm still utterly unenthused with the idea of a centralized internet voting system. It's just asking to be hacked. We've already seen quite enough of break ins by foreign actors in the rather distributed systems already used in some related election tasks (voter roles, etc.). Do you really think they, or the candidates and parties, could resist such a juicy target? Perhaps they could, but I don't want to tempt them.

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  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday April 03 2020, @05:33AM

    by captain normal (2205) on Friday April 03 2020, @05:33AM (#978605)

    All's I can say is "No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." H.L. Mencken
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken [wikipedia.org]

    --
    When life isn't going right, go left.