SoylentNews

"Anonymous Cowherd" writes:

Voltaire Network, a French news collective, reports that NorthCOM is contemplating taking control of the COVID-19 response away from the Executive Branch.[1]

It's hard not to regard this as an improvement, but as a few of my ex-military friends have said, this would border upon a military coup.

Which leads to the question: how does one engage in democracy in a time of pandemic?

As a UNIX systems administrator with decades of experience[2], I immediately look to encryption as the tool by which our democracy might be saved.

Here is what I propose:

0) We start with an open source project. The purpose of this project - let's call it 'PANDEMIX' - is to harness public key encryption so as to allow people to communicate and to vote, securely and with confidence that they are not being interfered with.

1) PANDEMIX will need a standalone key client. The goal of this client is to turn any computer into a machine that can be used to securely generate a reasonably large public and private encryption key, via openssl(1) or similar software. Initially, this encryption key will be 65536 bits in length; large enough to be difficult to attack but small enough to still fit in memory or onto a CDROM.

2) The PANDEMIX kernel would need to be rigorously trimmed of all network interfaces so that if one were to download this software one could use it with confidence that there was no way it could leak information, IE, that the machine was truly air-gapped at the time that it was used for key management.

3) The PANDEMIX project will also need a key server. There are many already available but it may be preferred that the project have its own, dedicated, secure key server. For purposes of ownership and administration, I nominate the United States Postal Service (USPS) as the intermediate caretaker of these servers and this service, with the United States Library of Congress tasked with operating one or more read-only mirror servers.

(At this point the intelligence agencies will rebel because what I have described, in 1), is probably exactly what they have laboriously installed inside their TEMPEST-protected rooms inside every military base and diplomatic facility and safe house around the planet, spanning hundreds of different governments and thousands of different agencies. But such a project is a prerequisite to reliable encryption - which is now a prerequisite to reliable democracy. Which many of these agencies claim to represent, and defend. We must all evolve.)

4) Every person who wishes to participate in the Great American Experiment will need to go to their local USPS office and use the PANDEMIX kiosk in the lobby to generate a key pair, and burn it to CDROM. To be issued a key pair, you will need to meet criteria for identification. After you use the kiosk, it is sterilized for the next user, with UV-C and ozone. Key registration is done separately, online.

5) The PANDEMIX project will also need a web server, which has been modified with business logic to support the use of encryption keys for identification and authentication, as well as logic to implement and enforce Roberts' Rules of Order. This web server could probably double as a mirror key server, making key lookups much faster and eliminating some network latency from the overall architecture.

6) The PANDEMIX project may also optionally wish to provide a web client, which is optimized to protect voter privacy and to enforce the use of encryption keys for identification and authentication.

You've probably noticed one loophole: bad guys can download PANDEMIX and generate their own keys and register them on our server and then override our acts of consensus with fake voters. But I'm confident that can be fixed; probably through USPS inspectors tracing fake voters and prosecuting them for identity theft. I suspect there will always be attempts at voter fraud.

I can't claim much credit for designing this architecture, bits and pieces of it have been floating around on the Internet ever since the 1990s. But TPTB have always worked to keep such things from coming to fruition.

Now, TPTB are struggling to stay alive and the military is watching things fall apart under the oversight of Donald Trump, and I don't think they are going to let the country descend into riots, looting, and anarchy.

They would probably appreciate some input from the citizens.

And, you know what? The military knows all about encryption. The politicians fear encryption ... but the military does not. It's a tool. Everybody uses it.

Food for thought.

~childo

[1] https://www.voltairenet.org/article209630.html [voltairenet.org]
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/fscked/ [linkedin.com]

Original Submission