somehow, you shall do and try to do something yourself as well. >> thank you very much. and please, join me in thanking our panelists. thank you so much for being with us .t.o.d.ay. here is a look at live programming coming up across c-span networks today. at noon eastern it's a look at gun violence, mental health and law enforcement issues. events hosted by the university of california's irvine school of law. you can see it live in just under two hours on our companion network c-span. later, a discussion on the 2008 financial crisis and housing policy. george washington university law school is the host. that will be live on c-span2 starting at 4:00 p.m. eastern. on the road to the white house,

both major party candidates are on the campaign trail today. we'll be live at 8:00 p.m. eastern when the republican ticket of donald trump and mike pence will be in the battleground state of wisconsin. see that live c-span, 8:00 p.m. eastern. 45 minutes later it's the democrats' turn, hillary clinton in ft. lauderdale, florida. both campaigns released new ads. here is a look. >> i'm hillary clinton and i approve this message. >> this was me in 1964, the fear of nuclear war that we had as children, i never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. to see that coming forward in this election is scary. >> trump asked three times. >> three times why can't we use nuclear weapons. >> i want to be unpredictable. >> what safeguards are there to stop any president, who may not be stable, from launching a nuclear attack.

>> the commander in chief is the commander in chief. >> our next president faces daunting challenges in a dangerous world. north korea threatening, isis on the rise, libya and north africa in chaos. hillary clinton failed every single time as secretary of state. now she wants to be president. hillary clinton doesn't have the fortitude, strength, or stamina to lead in our world. she failed as secretary of state. don't let her fail us again. >> i'm donald trump, and i approve this message. >> on election day, november 8th, the nation decides our next president and which party controls the house and senate. stay with c-span for coverage of the presidential race, including campaign stops with hillary clinton, donald trump, and their surrogates and follow key house and senate races with our coverage of their candidate debates and speeches. c-span, where history unfolds daily. >> now the atlantic council

hosts cyber security threats that could pose problems for 2016 presidential election and the integrity of the u.s. electoral process. senior reporter from "wired" magazine moderates a discussion which focuses on practices and procedures with the way u.s. votes and safeguards in place to protect the integrity of the vote. this is just over 90 minutes. >> are we all set? good afternoon, everyone and welcome to the atlantic council and october edition of cyber risk wednesday. i'm slightly distracted by the cool prompt on the side that we'll be talking about more. my name is daniel chchlt riu, director of brent scowcroft on

cyber security. hosted by us and in collaboration with our partners at christian science monitor pass code. this afternoon's conversation is on hacking the vote. i feel like there should be music when i say this. also very timely. a bunch of us were saying oi woke up to a radio story on exactly this topic. it's a particularly timely discussion and we have a group that will examine tradeoffs and threats that are facing our electoral system to paper, current u.s. voting computers to internet-based voting in many countries and many other countries. so really a great panel to help us put this whole story of hacking the vote into some context with some real substance behind it.

>> before we dive in encourage you to join on twitter, ac cyber @ac scowcroft and csm pass code. this election year you know we've seen heated discussion about how hacking, data breaches and other crimes could impact voter registration, voting computers, because they are not just voting machines anymore, they really are computers, and even the outcome of the election it's self. but the act of tampering with and undermining trust in the electoral process honestly goes back much further than this election, goes back as long as there have been elections, though the mechanisms have changed over time. the idea of influencing and possibly changing outcomes of elections is nothing new to foreign or domestic players. make no mistake as well, this is an international problem just as much as it is an american problem. there are several examples in europe and north america where

cyber i object security or fear of cyber insecurity have been used to influence public opinion before, during, and after elections. in fact, in your seats you will find a report from two years ago discussing many of these issues and the recommendations contained in it, that are still very relevant today. those of you online will not find that report in your seats but we will post a link to it so that you can find that as well. here in the u.s., voting authority started rapidly implementing e-voting solutions to make voting more accessible and efficient in the wake of hanging chad in 2000 and help america vote act in 2002. a number of electronic solutions were ill-conceived or have not aged well in the 14 years since. it certainly won't come as a surprise to the people in this room and online that computers,

even voting computers, are hackable. additional alarms ring when it comes to voter registration information and systems for tabulating votes which may be dangerously vulnerable even to relatively low skilled hackers. however, it is not just voting technology that's at risk, we've started to see recently in particular hacks of political parties and other entities that can highlight the vulnerability of the entire electoral and political process. the daily leaks we have been seeing lately are having an impact on the political campaigns. while leaks have been common, in politics, these kind of hacks really do represent a new level of scale often dubbed as the electronic watergate where traditional responses may not work. the possibility that more sensitive information is waiting to be released at an opportune moment could create opportunities for foreign powers seeking to interfere with

presidential elections or even criminal entities. with one presidential candidate, i'll let you guess which one, warning his supporters that the election is going to be rigged, quote, unquote, hackers may not even need to compromise voting computers or systems to undermine the people's trust in the election results. merely a credible claim of doing so could have voters cry foul and undermine the legitimacy of the vote at home, in the united states and abroad as others look at the outcome. today, we are here to find out what is truly knew about the cyber threats, how great a threat they can actually be, what actions will best preserve trust in our elections and what can be done in general. before i ask the panelists to join us here on the stage, let me briefly introduce them. i will start with jeremy epstein, who i'm pretty sure brought this device with him. senior computer scientists sri,

on loan from the office. he was sent by sri to the national science foundation secure and trustworthy cyberspace program. also joining us is joseph hall, chief technologist and director of the internet architecture project at the center for democracy and technology. he serves on the board of california voter foundation, the verified voter foundation and the fcc's computer liability and interoperability council. please to welcome masimo tommasoli. he's permanent observer for the international institute for democracy and doctoral assistance. his resume includes work at the organization for economic cooperation and in the italian ministry of foreign affairs. finally kim zetter will be joining us to moderate the discussion.

kim has been covering cybersecurity since 1999, including more of a decade at "wired" magazine. she is a journalist and author who is well-known for covering this range of issues. we are looking forward to her leading this discussion with us today. as always, again, thank you to our media partner pass code, the christian science monitor's new guide to security and privacy. thank you all for joining us here and online. let me invite the panelist to come join us to get us started. thank you for coming. >> good afternoon, everyone. he covered some of the intros i was going to go over. i want to give you some context for why we have a discussion today about hacking the vote, hacking the voting machines. we are talking about hacking the vote this year, unlike any other year we've had before,

we are talking about two kinds of hacking. as he discussed in his intro, not only technically hacking the voting machines but hacking the minds of voters for influencing an election. what do we mean when we talk about hacking voting machines and how did we get here? started with 2002 america vote. it was passed in the wake of the 2000 debacle, the bush v. gore out of florida. that's not why it was passed. it was intended to provide disabled voters, voters that had hearing or sight impediments to give them the ability to vote without assistance in the polling place so they could have a private vote. federal government allocated about $4 billion to states so they could purchase accessible voting machines. instead of buying one or two touch screens, instead of buying them per polling precinct, they decided to go on a shopping

spree and replace all of their voting systems with touchscreen voting machines in many precincts. they are also called direct recording electronic machines, dre. they didn't have a paper trail until academics and voting activists made an issue of it. there was no ability to check the vote and verify it recorded the vote that voters intended to choose. we now have some dres, touch screens that produce a paper trail. we have those that opted for optical machines. you are choosing your choices on a paper ballot, and it gets scanned into an electronic machine. that is problematic in the same way dres are when you don't have an audit after the election. if you have a paper trail and don't do anything with it, to verify the election afterwards, simply having the paper trail doesn't mean anything. we are going to talk about all those issues and influence hacking. i wanted to start because the

help america vote act was passed in 2002. states bought machines. we have had them for over a decade. problem throughout that decade with machines and elections. we have had some resolutions. some states have turned off wi-fi of machines. smart move. there are other problems around the security of the system, the way they are hand, the process of elections and things like that. i want to focus -- maybe we should talk about the win vote and why it is here. then the stage. jeremy brought this beautiful machine, known as the worst voting machine in america. they were decommissioned. they had 3,000 of them. maybe you will explain why we had it. and why it's so problematic. >> a lot of it has been electronics and software but a lot is also about the physical access. how many of you can see what i'm holding? you can have one as a souvenir

if you would like. this is a key that is cheaper than the key that opens hotel minibars. this is what secures the usb key stores all the votes on the abs win votes. it's symptomatic that it is very trivial protection for a very important problem. so the win votes were in use in virginia, mississippi and pennsylvania. they are the only three states that ever used them. virginia was by far the largest market for them. to make a long story short, when they were decommissioned last year, it was after the state discovered they had wi-fi enabled that could not be turned off. we had known they had wi-fi. we didn't realize it couldn't be completely turned off. it turned out it used the wep encryption method. for those geeks in the room, you

will know that was known to be a compromised system ten years ago. it takes a couple of seconds to compromise it. it turns out even though it was compromised, it didn't matter. because the password on it was abcde and couldn't be changed. it turned out it was just a windows machine and you could connect with any other windows machine and download or modify the files. you needed the administrator password. that was admin. it wasn't too hard to break into these. the good news is that the state recognized the problems. >> after a decade? >> they had been using them for a decade. when they finally looked at them they said, oh, four letter word and got rid of them. virginia like most states in the country is moving to optical scans, as you said, kim. about 80% of all voters this year will use optical scans. there are three states that are dre without paper trail.

i'm sorry, five states. south carolina. >> new jersey, delaware, georgia, and louisiana. >> speak up louder. i missed that. >> five states have no paper trail, new jersey, delaware, georgia, louisiana, and south carolina. >> then there's another ten states where depending where you live, you might not have any sort of paper trail. as kim said, it is great to have a paper trail. if nobody looks at it, there is no audit, it does no good. relatively few states do audits and there are unique cases like virginia where it is illegal to do an audit. we can get into that if you care. >> so this machine you wanted to give away. >> when they were decommissioned, i got about 50 of them donated to me by the state. i have been distributing to universities and museums literally around the world for the purpose of research if you

are interested in having one. please let me know. this one is available to a good home. >> we know at least five states are voting on dre machines without a paper trail. let's look at the issue of whether or not voting machines are still hackable today. this machine certainly was. now, it is being decommissioned. given be there has been so much focus and publicity about the system and their hackability, have we see any progress in the sense of how they are being used today? has wi-fi been disabled in other states? have the machines been secured in a better way? do we know? >> i definitely think we are in a better state than we were last decade. specifically something like three out of four voters will cast a ballot using a paper ballot or on something that creates a paper trail. in addition to the geographic distribution, we talked about, you can be confident three out of four people have a paper record. it's a little different on the audit side.

i'm happy to go into it but it's kind of a mess. some of the audit styles people are doing. the whole reason to do an audit is to check the computer tally of the voting computer against a manual tally looking at the actual paper records. that's a way of sort of arriving at ground truth. i think i would like to claim a little bit of the responsibility for the fact that voting machines and the procedures around them have gotten considerably better since the last decade. the election systems commission deserves a lot of credit. that's the federal agency that is tasked with helping local election jurisdictions run secure, robust, useable elections. over time, their testing procedures have gotten better and more sound. the trick is any computer security person will tell you testing only gets you a certain level of confidence. there is always going to be ways to get around it. so for example, some of the things i'm not so confident about are things like tamper-evident tape.

typically we put these numbered seals over seams of the voting machines. if you try to hack your way in and get in there and mess with the brains inside, you have to pull that piece of tape up. it will -- it looks like it has been messed with. it says, void, void, void. stuff like that. typically, a heat gun, something that anybody that's been in a shop class, is all you need to lift that tape without disturbing it. plenty of examples like bad keys, that jeremy was holding up, that are not as good. i think the fact that we have been a little rigorous about saying, please don't ever do networking on these machines. virginia is one of the few places -- i forget, jeremy, i don't even want to state it. there was something you could do from like across the street to one of these machines. do you want to talk about that? >> you could use a pringles can attack. a pringles can is an effective antenna for wi-fi.

you can log into one of these machines from across the street and manipulate the vote. >> that's unique. typically it was the only machine in use in the united states that had wi-fi. >> you didn't even need that. as i recall, any voter in the precinct who had a smartphone could connect to the wi-fi that the voting machine was using and get access. >> the pringles can. >> there are these concepts of voting like one we call software independence, which is the notion that any undetectible error in the software of the machine should not result in an undetectible error in the outcome. that's an am deckic way to look at it. that's why we have things like paper trail and a set of crypto graphic voting methods that aren't widely used. some of us worry about them in other ways. those can provide some sort of hard check against the software

being bad. >> we have two ways of hacking, remote hack if the system is connected to the internet, doesn't have to be directly connected and proximity hack, if you can access the ports on the machine while you're in the poll booth. or if you access the machines while they are in storage before they are distributed. many of these sit in schools and feeders overnight or they sit in an insecured warehouse for years in between elections. >> absolutely. so a really good example, you hear people say these voting machines aren't connected to the internet. that should give you a little bit of comfort but not a whole lot. as said in a recent letter, there was malicious hacking before we had the internet and the network. there were things called -- very few people may see or know what they were but they are viruses that are transmitted by floppy discs, media that you can put in and out of the machines.

when i was at princeton -- i didn't directly work on -- smart people designed a virus for the machine used throughout the entire state of georgia right now. this was a machine where the the default password was 1234, not even space ball's combination 12345. that's not much better, and they designed a virus that would do this, in one election, say the primary election, you would get access to the back of the machine and stick a usb stick on there and this would install. malware on the machine. between the two elections, that would have the opportunity to go from that machine to the election management system, the one computer that tells all the other machines, here is what the ballots are going to look like for the next election. >> the programs. >> the programs, the voting machines, stuff like that. through that, it would spread to all the other voting machines for the next election, the general election. that's a way of installing a piece of malware on a device that over a longer period of

time spreads itself. that's the kind of thing if you think about what kind of attackers would do that kind of thing, that's not something two months ago woke up said ooh, man, maybe we want to hack the vote, so to speak. what you are going to have is much more sophisticated and much more long-term kinds of entities like nation states that may -- are more likely to employ techniques like that, bide their team. they don't always rely on being a perfect way of doing things. georgia is not a swing state by any stretch of the imagination, but there are other platforms that don't have the security we want that may be susceptible to these slower proximity hacks. >> it is interesting that georgia did that sort of test. georgia actually had a problem with certified software in i think it was 2008. they had all these touch screens in the warehouse and using officials at georgia tech university who were helping them with the machines. about two weeks before the election, these helpers went in

and upgraded the software on these debolt systems and no one had oversight over the software. they simply said these machines needed to be upgraded and they installed on thousands of machines. that's sort of a problem of process as well. you can have an external actor that gets access to these machine and does something. you can have a problem with upgrading machines at the last minute in a way that software is not examined or certified. you don't know what it's doing. if you are doing something intentionally, you can design it in such a way it disappears once it has caused its problems so that someone examining the code afterwards is not going to be able to see the malicious code's presence there. >> there was an interesting case in iowa a number of years ago that's very much like that, where there was an upgrade to the windows operating system on -- i don't remember which brand of machine it was.

it turned out it had a certain feature which meant that each voter when they stepped up to the voting machine, it would prehighlight on the ballot whoever the previous voter had voted for. it was a feature of how windows worked. it wasn't anything intentional. nobody recertified it, because they didn't think changing the version of windows would cause a change in the voting behavior. in this case it was an interesting interaction. doug jones from the university of iowa is the one who talks about that in his book. >> interesting. we looked at remote hacking, proximity hacking. i want to look at internet voting. while it's not a huge problem right now, election officials are very keen for internet voting. they'll throw out a lot of reasons for why this is crucial

for going forward and why the young generation of voters with smartphones, this is what they want and they do. they seem to think there is nothing wrong with it, why shouldn't they be able to vote online for more convenience? let's talk about that. how widespread is internet voting right now and some of the issues around it? >> there are more than 30 states that allow internet voting for military and overseas voters. in the case of alaska, any voter can vote online. there are no standards for internet voting systems. national institute of technology that is charged with writing these standards has declined to provide standards saying, we don't know how to do it securely. therefore, we are not going to provide a standard that says how to do it securely. we don't think it can be done at this point. however, as i say, more than 30 states are doing it. so they are basically doing it on their own. it's unclear what, if any, security measures they are bringing to bear in terms of external reviews or anything like that. there's been nothing public that i've seen from anywhere, other than here in the district of

columbia, with the infamous case of the university of michigan hack against a test system they provided. that was the one where they made all the robots win the election. there was a sample election and not a real election of course, and they played the michigan fight song for every voter. >> with regard to -- approximately how many votes would be accounted for from internet voting in this election then? >> it's pretty hard to find that information out. most states do not break out the source for the votes. in their results. they'll tell you this many votes from this county. or even this precinct. they don't tell you this many came over the internet and this many were mail-in, absentee ballots and this many in-person absentee and so on. it's hard to tell.

in virginia i was on the commission that looked at this and i think that there were somewhere in the range of 10,000 voters in the state who were eligible if internet voting had passed, which it did not. there would have been 10,000 people who might have taken advantage of it out of a voting population of about 4.5 million. >> i want to talk about audits and bring you massimo in about election monitoring and influencing. let's discuss auditing. you mentioned -- how many states have auditing at this point? why does virginia particularly oppose a legal -- let's talk about what exactly an audited involves in terms of 1% and all that. >> absolutely. if you're going to capture a paper record, you want to do something with that paper record. count all of them maybe, which is the standard definition of an audit is basically a recount. these are extremely expensive

and extremely time consuming. there had been efforts since 1964 to try to get aspects of counting the paper to check the computer results without having to do a full recount. california passed the first statewide paper audit law in i think 1964. i'm pretty sure. it's morphed over the years to be a 1% manual tabulation of voting machines chosen randomly from certain polling places, certain precincts. they use various ways of generating random numbers to pick a set of polling places in every county that they recount all the ballots in those polling places and compare them to the election result. that is the simplest way to think about an audit. this is the number that's put in the statute, 1%, 2%. some places condition it on if the election was particularly close, like pennsylvania, for example, has a mandatory recount

law, if it's gets below half of 1% in the margin you go. there's a new flavor of audits. the australian ballot, a secret ballot transformed elections in the last century. this thing i'm about to talk about is going to transform elections around the world in the next century. they are called risk-limiting audits. this is a statistical way of counting the paper that ensures you have a large possibility of catching the fact that you misstated the outcome. to say it in plainer terms, if the outcome you reported to the press and the thing everyone waits for election night, that's incorrect, they have a high probability correcting that bad outcome. they are very different than 1%. the idea is you look at the margin of the race and a few other factors. and then you tune the sample that you choose to give you the confidence you need. so for example if the race is extremely close, say the bush v.

gore race in florida in 2000, you may have to do a full recount. but for most cases where there's 5% margin, 2 or 3% margin, you -- the way you do calculations, ensure you count as few ballots as you need to to confirm the actual result. if you can't confirm the result, you enlarge your sample or do a full recount which corrects your misstated outcome. so this is what you need to do to make sure. having the paper is one thing but counting it correctly is another thing. that's something we're still lagging behind. for example, there's almost half states, 24 states, have no mandatory manual audit of their paper. nine states -- 13 states have some post election auditing, but it tends to be 1%, 5%, things that aren't tuned to the margin of the race. they're not very well designed. there are a whole bunch in

mexico and colorado have provisions in the law to bring them in and do a sample and compare them and decide if you need to actually count them all. >> david becker said this morning's "politico," if jill stein starts winning south carolina by a wide margin, that might be a sign that something is off. the ironic thing he didn't say in the article is, if jill stein wins south carolina by 5%, probably there's nothing legally that can be done about it because it won't be within the margin of a recount, so an audit is the only way we would discover it. not that i have anything against jill stein, but it would be a surprising result. to address the question of virginia, as far as i know, i've talked to a bunch of people, virginia seems to be the only state where it's illegal. i say illegal because it's with an asterisk. the asterisk is if every race on the ballot was decided by a margin of at least 10%, and

after all the results had been certified by the state, ie, it doesn't make a difference anymore, then you can do an audit. you can't do an audit any other time. it's not an audit to have an opportunity to correct the outcome. >> right. >> it will tell you, you screwed something up, don't do that again. >> right. they tried this out. they did some sample audits after this. it used to be they were totally illegal. this was an improvement, very small improvement. and the outcome of the audit was the results were pretty similar. of course an audit result will never be exactly the same as the original. you have to know that there's going to be differences because you're going to have human differences in how they look at the colored circles or machine differences. the conclusion was it was very close, it was close enough we were confident in the results, and therefore we never needed to do an audit again. that was the conclusion of the study. it's like if you file your taxes with the irs and they audit you

and say everything's okay. you will never be audited or considered ever again because you obviously know how to do everything perfect. the irs doesn't work that way, yet that was the outcome of that audit examination. >> there was an election in california in a small county. i think this was 2008. where the audit wouldn't have caught the problem. a small county. they discovered -- this was an optical scan machine. they had a paper trail. they discovered that the machine had dropped about 167 ballots. the votes were there after they did the initial canvassing of the ballots after the election. they disappeared some time after that. it would not have been caught in that 1% because the 1% takes a random number of precincts in order to do the audit. and this would not have been included in that 1%.

they decided to try this new radical transparency where they -- while they have their diebold optical scanning machines scanning the ballots, they bought a fujitsu printer. they scanned all the same ballots simultaneously in their scanner. when they compared the results, they discovered the diebold system dropped 167 ballots and the other caught all of them. what do you trust? the risk assessment or risk management -- >> really quickly. there are are what we call in auditing, materiality audits and processing. materiality audits check the numbers, check that you arrived at the right result. process auditing checks that everything that goes into making the result was done correctly. that's where it's very hard to do that right. it's not the thing people get up in the morning -- you don't get up to be a process auditor when you go to work and stuff. it's not the best job in the world. those are the things where we need just as much rigor to that as we do with all the processes

that arrive at the actual results themselves. >> let's switch it for a moment. i want to come back to security of voting machines a little later. let's talk about influence hacking. we have this sort of unprecedented election in the u.s. we've never had this situation before, or have we? it's quite common overseas and you have these problems. the cia has been successful influencing elections in the past. give us an idea of sort of where we are contextually for this kind of situation in the u.s. is it true that we haven't had it before? >> if we place it in the wider context of electoral processes worldwide, there is a growing experience by election observers in dealing with electronic voting. you mentioned a few examples in

the u.s. states that adopted it. outside of the u.s. there is, i would say, consolidated experience in india, in countries like the philippines and brazil, for example. >> you're referring specifically to the machines again. >> i'm referring to machines again, but they are also experiencing internet voting in some cases. although that is not the rule for the latest political elections in those countries. talking about audit, i think you can get what does that mean in terms of auditing a system, so to speak? if the focus is on election day, there will be a lot of interest in looking at the numbers and focusing on the statistical techniques if you had the means that are basically related to the availability of a paper trail that can be used.

but auditing system, auditing the process before election day, three, four months before election day is also practice that election observation nations are trying to introduce in their best implementation of the guidelines adopted internationally. there are examples from the osce in europe and also the carter center. both developed handbooks on observing electronic voting. these are actually drawn from general principles that belong to the election observation per se, not necessarily focused on electronic voting. they have specificity that are related to the medium, to the technique. just to give you an example, you mentioned the risks related to

internet voting. but fauif you assess them, you would look at how data that are produced through electronic voting machines, for example, are processed by computers that may be hooked to the internet. so that is a form of indirect access to the internet that is not normally considered part of the label category internet voting, and still presents risks of manipulation. let me just quote the russian security firm ceo of kasperski labs. he identified, i think it was last friday, on italian tv he was interviewed. he was asked, what is the biggest threat to democracy in your view?

he said it is internet voting, in his view. unless the environment and procedures and the systems are safe enough, there will be a growing tendency towards using these means of voting, and there would be risks, high risks of reaching manipulation, before, during and after elections. in fact, that applies also in different ways to the history of voting, also to paper ballots. so what we had to learn was how -- is really how observing elections can introduce elements of independent assessment that can help election management bodies to make the law enforcement for voting safer, and to increase also the confidence by voters in the system, which is one of the challenges of the u.s. system now. just one, not the only one. in the recent paper from harvard

university, identified five challenges to the integrity of the elections in the u.s. these ones, the risk of hacking is only one of the five. you have the regulation of campaign financing. you have issues about polarization and therefore trust among political parties in the electoral procedures. you have issues of, of course, lack of professional standards in electoral management, especially in highly fragmented environment where elections are managed. i would say the most important one is lack of public confidence in the electoral process. all of these are interrelated, although we focus now on just one of them. i think this should address all of them at the same time. >> let's talk about some of those latter ones influencing and things. there have been reports and

concerns, for instance, the associated press might get hacked. the associated press is, of course, what we are relying on for the results. other media outlets are relying on those as well. what is the potential and what are the possibilities when monitoring election for preventing that kind of influence hacking? the results are not all in, especially in a country as large as the u.s. where you have multiple time zones you're dealing with and you've got partial results being reported on one coast while another coast is still voting. how do you address that issue of false reports coming out other than sort of securing ap's computers and trying to monitor that? >> let me answer in a simple way. what is an election observer mission? it is a group of people who visit a country. you may have in that group expertise that focuses on the technology.

you have other experts. you have media experts, for example. you have legal experts who looks at how the system is defined, designed in order to internaliz internalize the processes linked to electronic voting. and you have also long-term observers coordinator that i think gathers and analyzes the information of long-term observers, those who are in the field, not only during or around election day and can actually monitor also how the media are reacting or influencing public views about the elections. i think this is a combination of expertise in a process that is not linked just to a week or a month, but it covers the entire electoral cycle and can provide, actually, evidence for address ing together with the election management bodies, the bodies that are responsible for the management of the elections, i

think issues like public confidence as a result of, i would say manipulating behaviors by media. >> mm-hmm. go ahead. >> another response to that is that you need to be really patient on election day. i mean, this is one thing that working on elections you learn really quickly. one thing you learn is that election officials get no days off for six to eight weeks before election day. so, please, thank them for doing what they do, because it's hard work. but on the other side, you're not going to have a very high confidence number on election night. and the "ap" works very hard, 5,000 reporters or whatever. but a great story from 2014 in ukraine can illustrate how you really need to be careful what you rely on on election night. so, in 2014 in the ukraine, in march of that year a russian-affiliated hacker group had started poking around the

ukraine's central election commission site. and may 21st, four days before the end of -- the election day, the entire central election commission's infrastructure was totally hosed. someone had gotten there and just basically run rampant with destruction in terms of pulling things apart and -- speaking of software -- 12 minutes before the close of polls, the main website that reports the results reported the ukrainian right leader, dimitri yavosh had won. instantly, the russian state television station started reporting that that was the outcome of the election. and you know, this was exactly a hack designed to influence the hearts and minds of ukrainians and russians and stuff like that. and in the ukraine, at least, they have paper ballots that they deliver to a place in kiev, and they were able to count them. it took them a while, one, to get their servers back up, but two, to actually report what was

the high-confidence result from the paper ballots. and so, you should see anything on election night as being potentially the right answer, but understand that it takes in a lot of states a couple of weeks, even three weeks, to get at what is the official, correct answer, which is called the canvass with two ss. so, don't be so concerned. i mean, it's not going to be the end of the world if we don't get -- or if we get weird results on election night. but i have a feeling the likelihood of that is small. >> jeremy, did you want to add anything? >> no. >> okay. so, you know, in addition to sort of hacking potentially a media outlet, there are also some issues about the election results coming from county websites. and we had some issues about in ohio at one point where the website that was actually delivering the results was being maintained by a third-party company who had ties to the republican party.

and so, there was this issue raised of even if you had the voting machines covered and the security of the voting machines you felt confident in, those results that were then being fed through the system that was telling everyone -- and especially in a state like ohio, which is always a crucial state in a presidential election. so, i guess, you know, you're talking about being calm and waiting for the final results, but really, on election night, we call, we call the president, we call the winner. and i understand what you're saying about, you know, backtracking later on, but -- >> that is what happened in bush v. gore. >> exactly. >> cnn called it and had to backtrack. >> right. >> and it is the academic consensus that that election ended up being called incorrectly. >> but that can influence subsequent voters. >> of course, yeah. this is the problem with having these election day as essentially a national experiment where we run it on one day. it's very susceptible to attacks like denial-of-service attacks and other kinds of things.

for example, there are things called e-poll books, which -- >> i was just going to ask you about that. >> so, when you go and vote, you typically sign in and they check your name off on a list. for the longest time, those have been paper. increasingly, those are being moved to laptops or tablet computers. we have had cases in the past where, you know, the computers wouldn't start or they crashed or they didn't have a network connection. they didn't have a way of making sure you didn't vote at one place on one side of the city and run over to this place and vote at the same time. >> which is almost unknown. >> yeah, absolutely. there is very little, if any, evidence of -- >> voter fraud. >> -- this what we call voter impersonation fraud, which is why that one candidate, dan, talked about, should really step up and give us evidence of what he's talking about. anyway, but these poll books, things can happen to them. and so, i'm confident, you know, because i've heard the election assistance commission and many elections officials in this cycle say we have contingency plans, we have paper copies of these.

because what i worry about is, and we saw this, if we have any congressional staffers that have been there for over ten years, you actually experienced this in the state of maryland, where you have this thing, the poll book crashing or not being able to work, so people can't sign in vote. so you get these lines. the polling place basically cannot open, and that may delay the opening of the polling place by a couple of hours. well, for those of you who have to commute long distance, that may be the only time you can vote. it may be that only certain people have the luxury of coming back later in the day as the parties will sue to keep the polling places open longer. so, those are another sort of critical element here that we've become worried about. but at least you can ask your election official, do you have a contingency plan? what are your contingency plans? and hopefully, they involve things like printing out the actual roster that you used to use. so, it may not be necessarily -- you may not be saving money anymore, which is often part of the impetus to move to these kinds of things, but you are

making sure that you can, even if those things don't work, you can start voting right then and there. you have a contingency plan. >> so, we're going to be opening up for questions in a minute, so have in mind if there are any questions that you want. i just want to elaborate on that a bit, because you talked about -- see, this is a way to disenfranchise voters, if you wanted to. we've had this problem. i remember in georgia it was a huge problem, e-poll books. county after county was reporting that the e-poll books were down. but it wasn't just that problem. a lot of voters were showing up to counties and their name wasn't in this electronic database. it may have been at the central database of the county officials, but they hadn't updated, so people were registering at the last minute. it didn't make it to the updated database that actually got on the poll book. so, a lot of voters were disenfranchised. usually the process is that you can vote on a provisional ballot, which means you get a paper ballot, and then that vote is sort of -- that ballot is set aside until they can verify that you are a registered voter, and then your vote will be counted. but oftentimes they don't have a

contingency plan. and if an e-poll book breaks down, you don't have enough provisional ballots for everyone that's going to show up at the polling place. so, and again, so, voters won't come back. if they've been there in the morning, they're not necessarily going to come back in the afternoon to recast a ballot. so, huge problems, not just with voting machines, the e-poll books, the databases, registration databases. >> so, we should mention briefly voter registration systems. >> yes. >> i respect the whole 2000s as academics and hackers worried about vote-flipping attacks, changing the vote. and now i think this year it's especially becoming sort of apparent how much we've neglected -- >> the voter registration. >> so not to sound like a broken record in talking about virginia, even though it is where i live, but the voter registration system in virginia crashed on tuesday, which i think it was tuesday -- monday? which was the last -- anyway, the last day that you could register. so now there's lawsuits about

extending the date for voter registration. there's no reason to believe that this was malicious. it was just an overload like what used to happen on e-commerce sites on the days before christmas, where everyone tried to place their orders and they couldn't handle it. now they've learned how to do that. for e-commerce. we haven't learned how to do it yet for voter registration, and so some people will be disenfranchised because they couldn't get their voter registration in because the system crashed. >> we're seeing amazing dynamics. like, facebook will nudge you and say, hey, where you live, the last day to register to vote is this day. and i have a feeling, i can't prove it, but i have this hunch that some of that stuff -- >> this is facebook. >> -- bleeds into these kinds of things. like geez, today's the last day -- >> everyone gets an alert at the same time and registers their computer. so blame facebook. >> on the contingency plan, it is one of the usual criteria, one of the usual questions used in assessing internationally elections. but it is not the only one.

having a plan is good but not enough. the other question, very important, is is there a training for the election management body offices to implement that plan? so, having a plan on paper, really good. not enough. >> but remember, the people manning those polling places are often volunteers who have just been recruited in the last maybe 24 hours to actually man those polling places. >> usually -- >> so, the contingent plans -- usually more earlier than that. but hey, i've been a poll worker and i find out that three people call in in the morning sick and you're the only poll worker that day. >> can i tell a story -- >> yeah -- >> this is a really good emphasis of things we do in the larger realm of cybersecurity that we don't do as much in election cybersecurity, which is, you know, for data breach type of scenarios, if you're an enterprise that doesn't, you know, actually sort of have a fire drill around what you do when you've had a data breach, you're not doing it right.

so this is exactly the point, is that we want to see election officials and bodies actually running drills, as if, oh, hey, it's election day, this happened. what do you do? and put people right then and there in that situation. sorry. >> it's okay. so, a number of years ago, i was giving a guest lecture at an university and asked how old is the average poll worker? this is a group of undergraduates and one person finally said old. i said how old? he said really old. and i said, like how old? and he said, like 35. so, the actual average age of a poll worker in the united states, according to the election assistance commission, is 73. and think about that when we ask them to -- and i'm getting there, i'm not there yet, but i'm getting there -- when we ask folks to set up complex technical systems on election day and run them securely. we're asking -- >> and troubleshoot them. >> and troubleshoot them. we're asking a bunch of folks who are not i.t. specialists, who grew up before they had computers and networks and all that sort of stuff, and we're

asking them to be our i.t. experts for the most important thing that happens in our country. so, we have to recognize that these things are hard to do. >> yeah. really good point. >> volunteer to be a poll worker. i'm one. >> yeah, so, let's take questions. do we need a mike for them, or -- >> there's one right there. >> go ahead. >> you pick. >> oh, i'm picking? sorry. oh, you've got a mike there. >> thank you. irv chapman. the congress, as you said, passed an appropriation in 2002 to update voting equipment. i don't think there's anybody in this room that has a computer or smartphone dating from 2002. >> that's old, exactly. >> so, what's our dysfunctional congress derelict in not putting more money into updating. and if i may, you mentioned the ukraine experience. does putin's hacking crew have

the ability on election night in this country to put a finger -- a thumb on the scale in favor of either donald trump or just general disconcerting the american public? and for that matter, there are elections in european countries with significance to us in the next couple of years. could he do the same for a right-wing candidate in france, germany, wherever? thank you. >> well, i'll address the first part of it about the finances, which is that there have been proposals in front of congress. there's actually a bill that was just introduced recently to provide federal-level funding. johnsonville? >> johnson. >> and it -- historically, prior to the help america vote act, it was a state responsibility from a financial perspective to purchase voting machines. and so, in a way, it's not really surprising that after

that one shot, we're done, and the congress isn't inclined to put more funding in. in virginia, there was a proposal by the governor to provide funding to localities to replace machines like this, and that did not pass the legislature. there's just no incentive. nobody got elected, whether to congress or the presidency or even the city council by saying i'm going to spend more money on better voting machines. so, it's the perennial stepchild when it comes to money. elections just don't have a con sti constituency, as we've seen. >> when any government official has a choice between like filling a pothole or putting money in elections, they're going to fill the pothole, because you hear about elections maybe every two, four years. you hear about the pothole every day, if the person's hitting the pothole, which is unfortunate. i think we do need more federal funding of elections.

it'd probably have to be structured like highway funds, which means you're going to have all the shenanigans that happen in terms of things that you have to agree to do to accept those funds, but you know, that's just how politics works. as for your question about putin having a thumb on the scale, to be very honest, the technical answer is we're not sure. and i say that meaning that you can think of elections as a meadow that hasn't seen a lot of predators. and so, we have a lot of entities, beings, elections officials, that are sort of optimized for a place that hasn't seen a lot of predators. i actually think it's not a bad thing that we have predators now, because we have to sort of adapt to work in this environment. and you know, something we didn't talk about is the u.s.'s history, the cia, of directly influencing elections. 1948 with the christian democrats in italy, the chilean elections in 1964, 1970 that resulted in the yen decoup, so

it's strange we're crying foul when we've done it for over 100 years. [ inaudible question ] >> i hear you, absolutely. but i would say that the technical thing about putin is, you know, hacking the presidential election is probably the hardest thing to do in this election. i think you're much more likely to see your proverbial tony soprano hacking one county to ensure that a waste management bond was passed, right? i think that's where you're going to see sort of the first detectable, undeniable evidence in the u.s. of a vote hack. i don't think something that crosses that many states is as attractive. but then again, if you can get suburban philadelphia, and if it's close enough, there may be places that don't have paper trails that are, like for example, dauphin county. i tweeted about this. and sorry to be so snarky, but dauphin county in philadelphia uses a machine from like 1945. yes, none of obvious computers from 2002, but you can guarantee

none of us have computers from 1985. i remember them, they were a lot of fun, monochrome, oh, boy. but that's the kind of thing where that elections official said i could drop this off in red square and the russians couldn't hack it. and the only response i've seen so far that was close to correct was depends on how high you drop it. >> i'd like to add one thing to this very interesting question, which is about a recent bill that has been introduced, sent to the committee on september 20th. on election infrastructure and security promotion. and this aims at designate iing electronic infrastructures as infrastructures of critical strategic importance to the nation. now, these would allow a response that could even be

military response, in the worst scenario, including by engaging in this response allies in the nato. and my comment on this is that cybersecurity has not only to do with cyber defense. cybersecurity is about striking the balance between cyber defense and cyber offense. so, is there enough consistency in our intelligence systems between the two? because the weaknesses of the systems that should be addressed in order to protect, to make our electoral environments safer, are also potential entry points for attacking other systems. so, is there consistency in our societies when they deal with intelligence and cybersecurity between the defense and the offense? and i think there is not enough

clarity on that. it would be interesting to see whether this bill could actually imply imposing some restrictions on the cyber attack side of these conundrum of cybersecurity. >> so, i just want to -- i'll come to your question in one second. so, this has been a very frustrating thing for me and probably for all of you as well, is that you see one story in the news that says that putin could hack the presidential election, and then you see another story that says, no, it's not going to happen, and that's where you're falling. so, we are really -- it's really an unknown, and we won't know until we know, essentially. >> we may not know, which is the scariest part. >> we may not know. we may not know. >> something i say a lot, these systems are not designed to keep the kind of evidence you would want to detect those kind of attacks. they're not designed to be resistant against the nation state kinds of attacks or any -- and even then, you know, if you were going to attack one of these machines, if it didn't

work, you would make that fail to look like a garden-variety computer error, like -- >> a glitch. >> like the proverbial blue screen of death you used to see on the windows screen. you kind of see it actually now, too. but those kinds of things, that's something i'd keep an eye out for. if we see market uptick in errors and strange kinds of things, that could be evidence -- that could be the only evidence we see of misch f mischief, but we'll never know, so it's hard to really bound that kind of stuff. >> go ahead. >> of course, the machines are specifically designed so it doesn't say who you voted for, kim, and who you voted for, joe, and who i voted for. >> to give you privacy, right. >> to give you privacy, but the side effect of that is, if there's a problem, it's like, hmm, i'm kind of surprised. if i knew who you voted for, then maybe i could say, hmm, i could have sworn you told me blah, blah, blah. but because we can't do that, it's very hard to detect strange

things. it's like in 2012, there were comments, there were precincts in philadelphia where obama got 100% of the votes, and was that tampering? there were allegations it was, but if you actually look at history, you see that's a precinct that's really reliably democratic. so, similarly, there were precincts that went 100% or nearly 100% for mitt romney in other places. so, something that looks strange isn't necessarily wrong. it's very hard to tell the difference between something that looks strange and something that is strange. >> good point, okay. yeah, question here? >> and is that an "i voted" sticker, sir? >> yes. >> way to go. >> i voted this morning in virginia, and it's a little bit disconcerting now learning that even though i asked about whether there was a paper track kept of my vote, to learn that

they can't audit the system, even if they do keep a record of it. so, but my question relates to -- your discussion has been primarily as to the capability of hacking. and taking into account what you just said about detecting hacking in the past, other than in chicago in the 20th century, which had a reputation for fraud, is there much evidence or any evidence as to how much fraud or hacking has been done in the 21st century up to this point? >> there's a lot of evidence of accidental bugs, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a bug and a hack, because the symptoms are the same. pottawatomie county, iowa, which i love saying because it's so fun to say pottawatomie, had a case where their voting machine was misprogrammed.

i think you wrote an article about this. i'm not positive. >> probably did. >> probably did. and it turned out, they used what's called ballot rotation, where if you and i are living in the same precinct, the order of the candidates -- >> changes. >> -- on your ballot and my ballot will be different so that no one has an inherent advantage of being first. turned out, they misprogrammed the ballot rotation, and so the totals came out wrong. it was a bug. and so, we have lots of evidence of things like that going wrong. we don't have evidence of hacks. >> miscalibrated machines. also a problem with touch screen machines. >> there are terrestrial, like noncyber hacks. i don't even know what -- maybe that's not the right word. whatever. we have evidence, for example -- i believe this wasn't in chicago, but was someplace in illinois, where we had a bunch of poll workers running the same ballot through an optical scan machine like a couple hundred times and didn't think they'd compare the total number of votes on memory to what's in the basket, the actual number of ballots.

so people were like, hey, these don't match, we'll actually count the ballots over again. so, we have seen things like that. there's a whole bunch of absentee ballot fraud, where, this is kind of sad, someone will go to a nursing home, have everyone sign the blank ballots and go fill them up on out and do things with them. so, there are examples of that. there are little, if, maybe four instances? i can get a paper that cites all this stuff. voter impersonation fraud, which one candidate seems to be concerned with, although it's hard to tell, which is coming to a polling place and representing that you're a different individual and doing that a number of times in other places. we just don't see a lot of that. >> in terms of voting machines, we have problems where after the election they find memory cards from voting machines that haven't been accounted for, and they're in the trunk of someone's car, a poll worker's car, something like that, or you have -- i mean, again, is it intentional or not? it's hard to say. did someone just forget to take in the tallies?

>> right. there's a known bug in the debold system, the system that tab late, where under certain circumstances, even when you put the memory cards into it to say give me the grand total for the whole county or whatever, it loses certain ones. and i don't know exactly when it loses it, and it's only certain versions of the software. this happened in california a number of years ago and it actually happened last year, or maybe it was this year, in tennessee in a local election where three precincts out of 100 or five predicts out of 100 weren't counted until they actually went back and did the canvass that joe was talking about, got the final results. and as they were doing this, they discovered, oh, we don't have the results for the xyz church and the abc elementary school. and so, they went and found them. >> right. it's always hard to know what's a glitch and what's intentional. something similar, i'm not sure

this was a debold machine, but there was a superintendents of school race where every 1 out of 100 votes for this one particular candidate got dropped by the machine. it ended up being -- >> that was in virginia on windows. >> was it? was it? oh, that's right it was. then the candidate lost the race by 2% of the vote. 2% of the votes was about 1,600, and she lost by 1,600 votes, and 2% was 1,540. so, again, intentional for a school superintendent? probably not, but maybe it was a test run it see if it actually works, right, and to see if anyone notices before you do it in a more serious election. who knows. >> we had organized crime in our school districts. >> yeah, maybe that was a really -- maybe that was our tony soprano moment. any more questions? okay, in the back. >> thank you. john nicholson at the british embassy. so -- >> i can't hear you. >> john nicholson at the british

embassy. the system we use is very different from what's been described by the panel. it is paper and pencil, hand-counting, and sort of the equivalent voter books are sort of printed out and scored off when you vote, standardization across the country. now, clearly, that doesn't eliminate the all possibility of voter fraud, and there are historical examples, but i wonder -- >> how many contests are on your ballot? >> sorry? >> how many choices does a voter have to make? >> in a general election, it's one choice. >> okay. >> now, i wonder if you are designing a system from scratch, you had a free hand, what you would design at this point, given what you've been talk being? >> that opens up my question about the los angeles county vote system, if you want to talk about that. >> absolutely. so, there are a couple of counties in the u.s. that have been so fed up with -- and the united states is the only country that seems to think it can buy voting machines on a free market, and that's going to work out. everyone else puts out specifications and a request for

bids and you buy it as a country. we're huge, and our federal government can't tell our states what to do in elections. but two counties, l.a. county, california, los angeles county, california, and travis county, texas, have decided that they're so fed up with what's available on the market that they're going to build their own. and so, travis, it's mostly on paper. it's a bunch of -- it's a design concept smand software and stuff that works. in l.a. county, they've actually spent the past five years working with a design firm, ido, with about $15 million to produce a new voting machine. and they have five prototypes now. and this is essentially what we call a ballot marking device. it's a big pen. you essentially walk up to it with a blank ballot, it sucks it in. you interact on a touch screen to cast a vote and it fills out your ballot for you. so, it doesn't actually keep any information, like it doesn't know how many votes are what or anything like that. it shouldn't. but it will pull the data off of it to make the count. you take that ballot, put it in

a ballot box. those are later scanned en masse at a central facility, so you have to keep the chain of custody very, very security. but then it's the most secure voting system i have seen that seems to be at the state of development that it's in right now, and it uses a dual-chip trusted computing architecture, which is a way of saying that each piece of software for each device is cryptographically designed so the county is the only one given the software for the machines. so to stick around the back with a usb stick, that wouldn't work here unless you've done some complicated stuff. that's sort of -- you know, they had two goals there. one was redesigning the interaction of the voter so it's as smooth as possible. there's a whole bunch of neat things they've done with accessibility and things like that, but it also is trying its best to replicate the security of like an optical scan system with a touch screen system, so it's basically, you can think of it as a very expensive -- it's like $1 million right now,

because there's only five of them, right? there's a very expensive pin that fills out the ballot for you. and not only that, it's open source, meaning all the hardware, all the software, you can take the metal cat files to your metal bender and they'll stamp out a bunch of those things and stuff like that. so, the idea is to have a system that anywhere in the u.s. or the world could build off of. and if you don't like the hardware, you can change that stuff, too, and things like that. i'm hopeful that this sort of effort to, you know, have a more open way of designing things would deliver, you know, one an increased usability, but also the kind of security that we really expect. and something like linux and other kinds of things, which aren't by their nature open-source systems we use elsewhere, aren't by their nature innately secure but can be more secure if they're used in certain ways and with certain kinds of tools used to analyze them. >> just one small correction. i believe travis county, texas, put out their rfp -- >> oh, cool! >> -- this week?

last week? last week. >> joe would know. >> joe would know. >> do you have a question back here? did that answer your question? i'm sorry. >> hi, david -- >> i wish we had -- just one very small comment. so, in los angeles, the average election has 100 things on the ballot to vote on. >> yeah, dozens of languages. >> that's why, as much as i love the simple, hand-counted paper ballot concept, and there are people in the united states who think we should do that, i don't think it's workable unless -- >> for a large county. >> for a large county, unless we completely rethink how we elect our government. it's not just the voting machines. the voting machines are a side effect of these complex elections. >> can we borrow a parliament? >> okay, where you've got a 25-page ballot. >> david toretski. isn't a big part of the problem that we try to set this up in a way that is calculated to

magnify problems, rather than minimize them, by trying to do this in one day, between 7:00 a.m. -- you know, between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. -- so that any problem causes the most chaos possible? you were talking about electronic poll books. you were talking about what in cyber world we talk about as an incident response plan. you know, there is so little time to react. and what happens at a polling place is if the electronic poll books start working and you're starting to check people in on those and then they stop working, even if you had paper poll books, you don't know who's already voted in the electronic poll books, so you're in an extremely chaotic situation. they're going to try to fix the electronic poll books first. what happens as they try to do that is the lines grow longer if it's near a peak part of the day. what happens when the lines grow longer is people don't move

their cars, and so, there's no parking and there's utter chaos on the roads. and by trying to jam all of these voters into such a short window, which means the problems are harder to prepare for, solve, and resolve quickly, isn't that the biggest risk to the credibility of our elections, more so than the outcome being challenged through -- changed through hacking? >> i just want to point out that the trend now is towards a longer election cycle. i mean, we now -- it used to be, in order to do absentee ballots, right, you had to be out of the country and you had to prove that you were going to be out of the country. years ago, this is the only way that you could vote outside of the actual election day and you could vote on a paper ballot. and states have relaxed those rules, and i don't know the percentage, but the number of voters that vote from home using a paper ballot. >> it depends on the state -- >> you have to be willing to give away the privacy of your

vote, because it's on a paper ballot, it comes in with your name on and t and they verify your ballot. so no longer a private vote -- >> there are significant processes in place in the elections offices so they check the envelope, make sure you're registered, and then there's an inner envelope, and then they put the unopened inner envelope in a ballot box and don't open that until later. so -- >> it's separate. >> so, there's a very strong process security to ensure that your ballot is secret. however, it doesn't always work. if you're the only absentee voter in your precinct, and that, actually someone was telling me recently about a story like that. >> it happens. >> then we would know how many absentee ballots voted for whomever, we know who it was. >> but a lot of jurisdictions have been moving towards vote centers, so having -- you know, you can vote over this two-week period at five different facilities around the city or the county or whatever. for example, i think colorado and maybe washington? one of those two is doing something now where they send everyone a ballot in the mail.

and you can return them, you can surrender it and vote in person somewhere else if you want to. i could go on forever about those because there are some things that actually are not so good about those kinds of models, but that tends to alleviate this, what we call the load or the scaling problem with having everything on one day. and it's like a tuesday when everyone has to work, even though you should be able to get time off work. >> do we know, actually, how many voters are actually voting prior to the election these days as opposed to on election day? >> i don't have that with me, but it's considerable. some places, like in california, one county is like 60%, 70% of all voters. >> and it's going to differ a lot by state. some states still require excuses. you know, you can only do it if you have one of these eight different reasons. so, you can't generalize from one state to another. >> okay. >> there is also the aspect, if i may, of getting the immediate

results, getting results immediately, the rush towards having -- >> right. >> -- the results as soon as possible. that is also interesting. i had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to meet with a high-level delegation from a country that had elections recently, and they used the e-voting to a larger extent. and he said that the results were accepted, but he also added, they were immediate, just a few minutes after the closing of the polling stations. and then his comment was also, they were all well accepted, but because we hadn't a close election. so, if you have a close election, that is the political ri risk. in a highly polarized political context, when you have a close election, irrespective of the technology, eventually there will be room for disputes, and possibly, also, in some cases

even violence for not accepting the results. and that is irrespective of when you get them. >> so, i voted on yom kippur. don't tell my rabbi. and what if something exciting happens in tonight's debate and i say, oh, i really wish i hadn't done that? so, this is the down side of having an extended polling time, is it's hard for candidates to decide when to do their advertising, the logistics and the strategy of advertising and when to drop those bombshells and so on changes. so, it's not just the mechanics of voting that changes, it changes everything about our elections. >> how many more questions do we have? we have five. >> we can go for a couple hours. >> people behind you, too. >> i completely missed that side over there. okay, let's go with this question first and then -- >> that's the west wing. >> all right, thank you. i'm dave. i live in oregon, which has had

totally vote-by-mail for years. and basically, you get your ballot in advance. you can fill it out any time you want. you can mail it in, as long as it's going to arrive by election day, or you can drop it in dropboxes. and it has the secrecy envelopes, so your vote is still secret. you seemed to indicate problems with that. so i'm wondering -- >> so, i use vote by mail. i can't do my job without -- i can't go to the polling place, just the nature of what i do. so, i'm a big fan in terms of convenience. it is sort of one of the deep, dark secrets in terms of voter security. to put it another way, before about 1900, election day was a pay day for most americans. 80%, 85% turnout. they could actually observe you putting a ballot in a ballot box, and there are very distinctive colors, right? it was easy to figure out how it went. that's why we adopted the australian ballot, which is a secret ballot printed by the government where all the candidates look the same and no

one has, you know, big letters and stuff like that. when we adopted that uniformly in the u.s., voter turnout went down to 20%, and that was because there was no longer this incentive push or pull. they actually had to have civic reasons to want to go and vote, not, you know, competennsatory monetary reasons for going to vote. and so, that's the thing that concerns me, is that you know, you can have coercion, you can have buy-in, you can say, hey, i know a person who does the opposite, which is really strange, where they will sign their ballot and give their ballot to their lawyer with about 500 bucks and say vote how you think i should vote, which is very strange and is totally illegal, by the way, at least where this person lives. in west virginia, it wouldn't be illegal, because the constitution of west virginia allows you to show anyone your ballot before you cast it after you've marked it, which is the only state that allows you to do that. so, the reason i'm down on vote-by-mail is because it reduces the secrecy element or

the privacy element. so, privacy is protecting your ballot against others. secrecy is that i'd really like you not to tell anyone else how you voted. but unfortunately, vote-by-mail's not going anywhere, and in fact, it does have -- the level of enfranchisement in highly rural areas is unparalleled. and it's better than internet voting and all sorts of other things, because you do have a permanent paper record and it can be audited. >> i have two quick things to that one. for people with disabilities, vote by mail makes it much harder for them. they have to have someone else fill it out for them. they can't -- unless they have a marking device on their computer, it just reduces someone who has motor impairments or visual disabilities. and the other thing is it increases the level of under votes because there's no machine to check, did you correctly color in the circles or did you put a checkmark? or people do amazing things. they circle the name of the candidate people like --

>> or circle, instead of filling out the circle. >> the machine can't read those. >> i had an election official tell me just the other day that he had someone who came in who said i don't need your instructions, i'm a ph.d and proceeded to circle the circles and it got kicked out by the voting machine and this voter was, i'm a ph.d, but i can't follow instructions. so, i circle. >> they really can. there was a question back here? then i'll come to you guys. sorry. >> thank you. you all have mentioned a couple different scenarios that have happened. one was -- >> hold it closer. >> is this better? >> yeah. >> you mentioned in ohio, was there a third party that had access to the network, i believe? >> it's very typical. >> right. >> the third-party company that was sort of monitoring the aggregation of votes from different counties and then reporting them to the county website. >> got it. then there was also some discussion of hacks of voter registration rolls.

could you just illustrate what outcomes could result from that access or compromised networks or databases that would result from these activities? >> sure. so, for example, in ohio, in 2004 we had a machine that -- and this is when we were using modem -- telephone modem-based transmission of results from the polling place to the central facility. we had a machine that phoned in to the central facility and basically reported twice as many votes as it had actually recorded. and this is at a time where they weren't using encryption on the connection. they were using something called a crc, which is not appropriate for this kind of a thing. and we don't know what happened. it could have been a cosmic ray that came in and flipped that stuff. but you can imagine, with access to the network itself, you can fiddle with the bits in realtime because this isn't hard to change stuff that flies by.

unfortunately, there are a lot of -- i mean, i guess -- instead of saying unfortunately, i should say, there is something like anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 election jurisdictions in the country. most of those don't even have a full fte, don't have a full-time staffer for their elections operations because that person has to do titling, clerking, all sorts of other stuff, too. so, you'd better believe they're going to write a contract that says, hey, you take care of as much of this as you can. that's why, you know, i think there's a great opportunity for some sort of, like, cloud provision for these kinds of folks, something they can at least -- i don't know who should do that, so i don't have all the answers, but that's the kind of thing you can imagine trying to abstract a way that, either way you don't need to trust the third party, which is what i prefer, using end-to-end cryptography and other fancy things that will ensure that, i think we're a little far away from that. but you know, having maybe someone else run infrastructure for folks so that they don't have to sort of either, you

know, pay someone out of their pocket to do it who may not do it very well. anyway, so, that's a not very satisfying answer. >> was that sufficient? [ inaudible question ] >> oh, sorry. so, it's easy to management this. voter registration data is the most useful data for reidentification attacks. so, if you've heard of that in health or other kinds of things where they remove identifiers to be able to share that data more widely. voter registration data, because many people are in it, it has very specific types of key data, like the last four of your social, your date of birth, your home, your phone number, in some southern states your easy nicety and things like that. there's already sort of a motive to get access to that kind of data and to have that kind of stuff. so, the illinois voter registration hack, where 90,000 individual records were ex-fill

traited, so to speak, from their staging system, that's a good example of something you do, but that's just pulling stuff off. in terms of actually influencing the vote, you can imagine an attack that would remove 5% of the voters from the registration rolls from one particular party. and given how close our elections are, check out wikipedia. duveng's law, the only law in political science, basically says that if you have a system that's first past the post, a system where the majority wins, you regress to a two-party system with very, very close margins. and because we have such close margins, removing 5% of the voters from one party or the other could be a perfect attack for actually influencing the vote. >> we're actually out of time, but i promised you guys that you would get your questions in. so, if you can ask them keeply and keep your answers brief. >> yes. >> okay, so, i will try and be brief. i'm concerned mostly about the perception thing, because we have this copy of the report that i know joe is here at the

atlantic council two years ago on this stage with my boss. i work for the congressman who was actually skyping in to talk about that. so, i think that, you know, it's really great to see all this focus on election cybersecurity, but a lot of it is tied to the dnc hacking. i mean, there were voter registration databases that were getting dumped online, and people were finding them for years before arizona and illinois. so, how do -- you know, i think the focus is good, but i think the biggest concern is the perception that people will have that the election is illegitimate. so how do we build resiliency, i mean, in the electorate to deal with that fact? i mean, one of the great threats to our voting system from where i sit is rain. that drives down turnout like nothing else. i mean, you can disenfranchise 5% of the population that would

show up, or the voters that would have shown up, but it was raining. and we try and build resiliency to counter that and say, even though it's raining, it's worth it, it's your civic duty, it's whatever else. so, how can we build resiliency in the american populous, particularly because we know that the "ap" has been hacked, the dnc has been hacked? even if we don't have the specific examples and it's hard to figure out in terms of the voting system itself, the idea that the dissemination methods or something like that is going to be hacked is -- we have past evidence that these things have been hacked, so how can we build resiliency in the american populous to deal with that fact? >> evidence-based elections. so, being able to demonstrate to folks this is how it's supposed to operate, this is how it operated, don't worry. any mischief, you know, it's extremely complicated how you do that, but to the extent we can base trust on actual evidence that these systems are resilient, that's as good as we can do. and people can still worry and

that's their problem. >> i would agree and also say for today, part of the answer is diversity or complexity, depending on what you want to look at. it can be our friend and i think is our friend. it's just too damn hard because every state does things differently, every county does things differently. it's awfully hard to have a large-scale impact, as joe says. it's easy to fix the wastewater treatment bond, but it's really hard to change big things because there's just so many different things that get cross-checked against each other. and our election officials do a fabulous job with not nearly enough resources. >> absolutely. >> so, we need to not blame them when things don't go the way we always hope, because they're doing a fabulous job, given their limitations they have. >> i also agree, the technology

is just a fragment of a mosaic that has to be consistent. and that is the system the people should build confidence in. >> quickly? no, no, no, please. i promised you. i promised you, shawn. >> thanks so much, kim. i appreciate it. you referred to election as as kind of a meadow with very few predators. i was curious, other than nation states, what some of the other malicious actors sort of look like, and if there's any intelligence that sort of leads you to believe that, you know, tony soprano is trying to hack an election in suburban philadelphia? >> yes, so, i don't have any evidence that there's any organized criminal -- it's actually trying to do this. i do think that we see nation state influences in the guccifer kinds of stuff, but i'm a little wary of attributing that direct directly, whatever. it seems reasonable.

i do think that there are folks who just recognize how valuable some of the data is and that there are people who are, you know, like, as i forgot your name, i'm sorry, but as he was stating, there have been -- security researchers have found databases that campaigns have not decommissioned of, like, all voters that include not only the list of their names but appended commercial data. so, even if you've had the addresses removed for all the federal judges on a voter registration list, if the campaign goes and adds the addresses back on, all of a sudden, that federal judge's address is now publicly available and is a very sensitive piece of information. so, there are people who that -- and there is also sort of the, i don't know what to call them, the lulls, the folks who just think, oh, man, there's fun to be had here. and i think some of that you've seen, for example, people, like yesterday poking out all the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities on donald trump's infrastructure, which is

apparently legion. most folks are sitting around, hey, there's a website, hey, i can play around with it. [ inaudible question ] >> i think the second we put a candidate that's attractive to anonymous or lullsick on a ballot that will be feasibility with internet votvoting, they w be elected. >> i think it's worth mentioning, it's hard to predict. the one election that i know of that was fixed was the u.s. rowing association. why would someone fix an election for the u.s. rowing association? i don't know, but somebody did. i don't remember if that was an insider or outsider attack. i don't remember. but it sometimes boggles the mind what people think is worth their effort. and so, i'm not going to presume who is or isn't, whether it's lulsick or a nation state or a campaign that has gone off the rails and is willing to try whatever they want, whatever they can, you know, in a neighborhood election. there was a case in one of the colleges in southern california

where a student put key loggers on the machines in the student union building because they really wanted to be elected to the student council. and it's like, you know, come on, it's not that important to have that on your resume, but -- >> how many federal crimes did you just commit? >> and the fbi caught him and locked him up for trying to hack the student council election. >> so, we need to wrap up. but before we go, i do want to sort of throw this out there as a public service announcement about calling in on election day if you discover problems. there is a group run by a legal coalition, and i'll let joe talk about it. but it's very helpful. it's been in existence for i don't know how many elections at this point. >> since 2002, i believe. >> so, people can report in problems. long lines, voting machines not -- touching machines not recording what they're intending to record, e-poll books not being up and running, any problems you can report to any legal group and they can provide assistance.

>> yeah, so, there are partisan efforts, but this is a non-partisan effort by the lawyers committee for civil rights under law. check out 866hourvote.org or call 1-866-our-vote on election day and you can ask questions or get help. they'll even send a lawyer out if you require legal intervention. >> multiple jurisdictions? >> nationwide. >> nationwide. >> every place you can vote in the united states of america, they will be on the ground and available. >> okay, so, thank you. join me, please, in thanking all of the panelists here for a great discussion. [ inaudible ]

here's a quick check on some of our live programming coming up today on c-span networks. beginning at noon eastern, it's a look at gun violence, mental health and law enforcement issues. it's hosted by the university of california's irvine school of law. live coverage on our companion network c-span. also today, a discussion on the 2008 financial crisis and housing policy. george washington university law school is the host. live coverage starts at 4:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. and looking at the road to the white house, both major party candidates are on the campaign trail today.

we'll have live coverage at 8:00 p.m. eastern of donald trump and mike pence. they'll be in the battleground state of wisconsin, and you can see that on c-span again starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern. about 45 minutes later, democrats' nominee, hillary clinton, will be in florida, another battleground state, and you can see her remarks live at 8:45 eastern on c-span2. both campaigns have released new ads. here's a look. >> i'm hillary clinton, and i approve this message. this was me in 1964. the fear of nuclear war that we had as children, i never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. tuned see that coming forward in this election is really scary. >> trump asked three times -- >> three times, why can't we use nuclear weapons? >> i want to be unpredictable. >> what safeguards are there to stop any president who may not be stable from launching a nuclear attack? >> the commander in chief is the commander in chief. >> bomb the [ bleep ] out of

them. >> our next president faces daunting challenges in a dangerous world. iran promoting terrorism, north korea threatening, isis on the rise, libya and north africa in chaos. hillary clinton failed every single time as secretary of state. now she wants to be president. hillary clinton doesn't have the fortitude, strength or stamina to lead in our world. she failed as secretary of state. don't let her fail us again. >> i'm donald trump, and i approve this message. >> on election day, november 8th, the nation decides our next president and which party controls the house and senate. stay with c-span for coverage of the presidential race, including campaign stops with hillary clinton, donald trump and their surrogates, and follow key house and senate races with our coverage of their candidate debates and speeches. c-span, where history unfolds daily.

after i came up with this idea, first of all, i did research information, because -- and this is definitely the case with a lot of pieces that will be done for this competition, but mental illness especially. it's a complicated issue. it's not black and white. and it's so multifaceted that i had to research to get a base knowledge of what i wanted to talk about in this piece. and obviously, there was a lot of -- it's so complicated that i can't talk about it all in five to seven minutes. so, first i needed to decide what i was going to talk about. >> this is a really broad topic and i thought it would be nice to have a focal point that i wanted to focus on. so, before i even started interviewing my parents, before i went and got clips from the internet, before i started shooting, i researched this topic extensively. >> i visited my dad's pharmacy and kind of talked to the pharmacist there. i talked to my mom and her colleagues and co-workers. and of course, i did a lot of internet research. and actually, i went to the library. >> a lot of internet research to find more, like, facts and data and statistics about employment

of those with developmental disabilities to see really what was going on. most of the information that i got off of the internet came from government-founded websites, so that's how i knew that most of the information that i was getting was legitimate. >> this year's theme -- your message to washington, d.c. tell us, what is the most urgent issue for the new president and congress to address in 2017? our competition is open to all middle school or high school students grades 6 through 12 with $100,000 awarded in cash prizes. students can work alone or in a group of up to three to produce a five to seven-minute documentary on the issue selected. include some c-span programming and also explore opposing opinions. the $100,000 in cash prizes will be awarded and shared between 150 students and 53 teachers, and the grand prize of $5,000 will go to the student or team with the best overall entry.

this year's deadline is january 20th, 2017, so mark your calendars and help us spread the word to student filmmakers. for more information, go to our website, studentcam.org. officials from the united nations gathered at the u.s. state department recently to discuss the process for developing roles, guidelines, and sustainable goals among countries for the long-term, peaceful use of outer space activities. in june of 2016, a u.n. committee issued the first set of agreed-upon guidelines. a full compendium will be sent to the general assembly in 2018. this forum was hosted by the security world foundation. >> good morning. welcome to the state department. my name is jonathan margolis. i'm deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of oceans, international environmental and scientific affairs. my specific portfolio is

science, space and health issues. in the oes bureau, that's oceans, environment and science, we advance u.s. foreign policy goals in critical areas of environment, oceans, health and oceans health and science. we work on climate change including the paris agreement and the agreement in kigali under the montreal protocol. we work on oceans and fisheries issues including the our ocean conversation conducted in the state department under the leadership of secretary kerry. we work on health issues on zika out break and global health security which seeks to enhance global preparedness and response and of course today we're here to talk about space us is sanabilisan sustainability. this will be your first introduction to tissue of sustaining the outer space environment and for others it will be an opportunity to learn more about the on going efforts by the united states, by other

countries and by the united nations to preserve the outer space environment. by the end of today we hope one thing will be clear. with the increased use of and reliance on space preserving the outer space environment for current and future generation is in everyone's best interest. that's true whether you're representing a government, a business, an ngo or just yourself one of the places we work on these issues are through the u.n. commission on outer space and we're thankful that mr. peter martinez who chairs the committee's working group on long-term sustainability is traveling from cape town, south africa, to share further insights with us on this important work. and like wise we're grateful we have simonetta de pep poe, tpo

mr. david kendall from canada, the chair on the united nations committee on peaceful uses of outer space. in june of this bast year the u.n. committee on peaceful uses of outer space agreed to 12 long-term sustainability goodlines. we call them the lts guidelines and they represent the first-ever agreed best practices for safe and responsible use of space. the united states believe this is agreement is a significant accomplishment and major step forward in international cooperation on preserving outer space environment. the guidelines set global norms that will maintain the space environment so that future generations can get benefit from transformative technologies for climate modeling, navigation, communications and health as well as strength and security.

additionally, with the increase of private investment in space it's become even more important to provide a stable, predictable, long-term framework for space operations, these guidelines incorporate a range of best practices including sharing information for space flight safety, expanded cooperation in space weather monitoring and investigating new measures to manage long-term space debris. we appreciate the constructive efforts within the committee to ensure this set of guidelines were completed prior to the expiration of the working group's work plan in 2016. we look forward to creating additional lts guidelines over the next two years. on the national level, many countries have started looking at how they can implement these first sets of guidelines and we believe this action taken by nation states, by member state, is an important benefit of the

lts guidelines. i can provide a firsthand report on how this is going just yesterday. we held our second-ever bilateral civil space dialogue with china and discussed these issues rand some of our colleagues from that discussion are here today with us. we'll hear more from governmental officials, private sector space experts on how these lts guidelines were developed and their importance moving forward. one of the main themes you will hear is the importance of international cooperation in ensuring the outer space environment when we set out to develop the lts guidelines, the member states acknowledged the importance of a global approach to tacking the challenge of preserving the outer space environment and today we've assembled an outstanding group of people to speak to you. in our first panel united nations experts will discuss the process by which the first set of lts guidelines were developed and next steps in developing additional guidelines.

in our second panel we will hear from government experts from a cross sector of regional groups on their efforts to implement the first set of guidelines and commitment to developing additional guidelines. the third panel consists of private sector stakeholders. we look forward to hearing more about their experience in contributing to the development of the first set of guidelines and how they intend to advance and engage as we move forward. and finally today, we will hear from a number of individuals regarding next steps in developing a second set of guidelines with the goal of creating a compendium of lts guidelines to be endorsed by the general assembly, by the u.n. general assembly in 2018. so let me thank you for coming here today. your presence is essential in conveying the understanding and importance of space sustainability for the benefit of all mankind and the reasons why we should work together to

address this challenge. before i close, let me personally thank michael simpson and victoria sam son both of the secure world foundation. what you're seeing today the work of not only the state department but ngos and others in a have brought this discussion format in an open forum and we absolutely rely on organizations like the secure world foundation to make this possible. so let me welcome michael simpson the executive director of the secure world foundation. thank you. [ applause ] >> well, there are many familiar faces who are working in consultation and collaboration in the filed of space sustainability.

secure world foundation probably doesn't need much introduction. for the rest, simply be aware that we have for years described our work as seeking cooperative soluti solutions for space sustainability so here we are celebrating space sustainability, advocating increased cooperation and enjoying the presence of so many people with whom we have cooperated along the way to make this day possible. in some ways, i'm welcoming you to a celebration six yard years of work has brought us 12 guidelines to support the long-term sustainability. guidelines that have been adopted among countries who have not always found consensus easy to achieve.

to foundational guidance on the sharing of critical data about satellites, debris, and weather we have folksed progress out of what looked at times like barren soil. we are also hearing that the working group on long-term sustainability of space activity has been undertaking since its success last june. these reports fuel hopes that further consensus will bring more agreed guidelines to the table next year. but i also welcome you to an event that includes lunch.

it's those of us who were thrust by great writers like arthur c. clark that careers in the space sect orono all too well. there is no such thing roas a fe lunch. in fact, today's program will attest there is much work to be done. whether you see the guidelines as soft law or no law at all, they will still have to stand the same test as hard law or sound policy. they will need to impact behavior. as we review the track that brought us here and chart the course to come, i hope we can bear in mind that the way forward will work with unispace plus 50 and will carry the

weight and aspiration of other broad agreements like the sustainable development goals, the sendai accord, and kopp -- cop21. so as we get back to the hard work that so many of us are used to sharing together, i invite you to think of that work as a celebration knowing that having kept alive the principle of having used space for peaceful purpos purposes, we now get to show how together we can focus those purposes on meeting the greatest challenges of the one planet we all share. so to paraphrase our late-departed mr. spock, celebrate, work hard and prosper. thank you. [ applause ]

good morning, everyone, my name is victoria sam son, i'm the washington office director of the secure world foundation and i'd like to add my thanks and appreciation for everyone in the audience for coming and to our speakers for sharing their expertise. so enough of the welcomes, let's get the speakers up on the podium and have you guys come up. could the first panelist come up, please?

you should have everyone's bios in front of you so we'll start request our first speaker. >> >> good morning, everyone, distinguished participants, guests, and colleagues. i'm very pleased to be here with you today. allow know thank the organizers for arranging this timely event on the important topics of space sustainability. i would like also to take this opportunity to acknowledge a recent success story about the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. as has already been stated, in june, 2016, the committee on the peaceful uses of outer space reached the multilateral milestone when it agreed to a first set of guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities.

this concrete out put demonstrates a collective recognition by states that space is a key resource for the benefit of humankind and the measures in a will enhance sustainability and protect the space environments for current and future generations are in the common interest. the first set of guidelines was not, however, developed without genuine effort on the part of many stakeholders. in this regard, i would like to express my admiration for all delegations who participated in the process so far and i would especially like to acknowledge the chair of the working group, peter martinez, for his outstanding role in bringing delegations together in this complex process and the chair, david kendall, for his skillful handing of the adoption procedures at the session in

june. continued collaboration between all interested parties would be of key importance as the working group on the long-term sustainability of outer space activities develops a second set of guidelines and finally a full company y'all guidelines including the preamble text to be preferred to the general assembly in 2018 "dear colleagues, let me now address some aspects of the interconnection between the long-term sustainability of outer space activities and the strategic work to be undertaken under the 50th anniversary of the first unispace conference, unispace plus 50 to take place in june, 2018. together we included common space. number one, global partnership in space exploration and innovation. number two, legal regime of

outer space and global space government, current and future perspectives, number three, enhanced the formational change on space objects and event. international framework for space weather services. number five, strengthen space cooperation for global health. number six, international cooperation towards low emission and capacity building for 21st century. those priorities have been selected based on an assessment of the cross cutting areas of governance, resiliency, interoperability, capacity building and sustainable development. they are designed to create an approach for the upcoming member states. included in this is the fostering of dialogue between governments and ngos, industry,

private sector and civil society. the the the priorities are intended to help us identify where supporting structures are required to protect the space environment and secure the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. they also help us ensure the benefits of space support missions in implementing the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and reaching these goals. the interlinkages between them reflect the need for stronger coordination, mechanisms on governance, interoperability and resiliency. as an example, space exploration and innovation covered by thematic priority number one is an essential driver for opening up new domains in space science and technology triggering new partnerships and developing capabilities that create new opportunities for addressing global challenges.

there is a strong aim to foster dialogue with space industry and the private sector in this regard. dear colleagues, you will likely have noticed the close connections between the guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities and the unispace plus 50 thematic priorities. the guideline on the safety of space operations, to highlight an example, are fundamentally linked to the thematic priorities on enhanced information exchange on space objects an on an international framework for space weather services. the fact that guidelines on sharing orbital information on space objects, debris monitoring and space weather forecasts have already been -- reached consensus demonstrates a clear acknowledgment and international community of the importance of enhancing information exchange on space objects and events and on building up an international