we will cut to the representative and then we will come back to audience question and answer. on?m i >> yes sir. >> first of all, it's great to be with you today and thank you for the invitation to join you remotely. i especially want to thank david councilnd the atlantic for making this possible. i would rather be with you there in person. somehow fitting i guess in this discussion about the promise of happening over the process of skype.

before i begin, let me just say i have great interest in increasing voter participation in our democracy and i always look for innovative ways to do that. i have a long history of being involved with the electoral process with the legislature. i served for three terms and have a great interest in election reform in making voting easier. number of horror stories in rhode island where we had people waiting in line for , and and hours to vote sometimes we actually had the oldest voting machines in the country. sometimes we had to get on our hands and needs -- cantonese to

read the bottom of the ballots. not to mention the fact that , i wasisabled myself never really able to vote on my own independently going into the machine. i had to have someone with me and assist me. it wasn't until i became secretary of state and i actually overhauled the states there wastem that accessible voting for people with the build -- bit with disabilities. i actually chaired the special legislative commission looking at alternative voting technologies in the legislature and implemented the findings of that report when i was elected secretary of state. future excited about the and about technology.

we have to proceed of course with caution as we work to ensure the integrity of the elections process. enjoying i really am -- this is an issue that means a lot to me personally. it really is a marriage of two tosions of mine, going back 1994 when i became secretary of state in rhode island, i really had the impurity to confront electing anges of transparent government. i've seen firsthand those areas trust andcan have faith in government. also many very passionate about the accessibility of the voting process which is really so fundamental to our democracy. incredible has promise, specially to the population of disabled voters

of require diversity interfaces to the voting process. interestedriginally me in the field but my time in congress has given me a complementary perspective on the topic. 2008, i founded the congressional cyber security caucus with my friend mike mccall because i was concerned that congress was paying far too little attention to the potential of the cyber and could cause great harm to our country. chief among my concerns is that critical infrastructure could be vulnerable in this new domain. of course our voting infrastructure is central to our country's existence as a

democracy, and just like any other sector, there are vulnerabilities in expanding the use of this technology. electoral system comprises two fundamental principles. each person should be entitled to cast one and only one phot and then his or her ballot should be kept secret. unfortunately, because these principles can clash with our be fair,at elections that a voter should have confidence that his or her vote is counted. the traditional system does the next one job of ensuring anonymity and there are very few instances of actual voter fraud or intimidation. hundreds of thousands of ballots are spoiled each election cycle

preventing voters from being heard. additionally, the ballots and cells are vulnerable to tampering. to reduce the risk we rely on -- eibuting oversight -voting systems have the same goals but must achieve them in very different ways. for instance, in traditional systems, double voting is prevented by retiring that a citizen vote only in his or her precinct, preventing double voting remotely while retaining as winter prom because the scale can be orders of magnitude larger. challenges of scale manifest

themselves in other ways, the ability of a single bad actor to compromise multiple services. it turns out that cryptographic systems allow one to do all sorts of counterintuitive things. but here is the rub, channel communication between our brilliant photographers and policymakers, into in , it allows archers to confirm that ballots have been counted correctly without relying on the integrity of accounts. policymakers understand than a matter how corrupt elections are , if a camper with results, it will be noticed. but they definitely do not

understand how it is implemented in different systems. often viewed as borderline magical. once the system uses a property for security and one relies on the ,ntegrity of election officials it's not necessarily going to be evident how it will work without the concerted effort to educate politicians. there's a real risk that they come to view it as different versions of the same product. the security of the competitors may be wildly different. it's difficult to overemphasize

at this point, so let me put it another way. politicians are used to shades , and that is a good thing. policymakers need to compromise. ambiguityility to see can be dangerous when confronted with the facts that can be , and it is theories imperative that the properties that we would like to see in a system such as the into in , or policymakers -- holocene makers -- policymakers are not the only fallible humans involved.

even a cryptographically sound system relies on people to code it, deploy it, and people to maintain it. might causeor denial of service attacks that halt an election. it could allow an adversary to steal voting potential's and cast a ballot during routine maintenance. could be deleted resulting in a huge loss of voter privacy. these vulnerabilities are real and the haldeman group analysis of estonia's voting system showed problems across all three of these phases. realize important to that our present voting system has numerous points of failure.

-voting complexity of e against sets it apart. clerka checker or ballot in a traditional system require specialized skills. being an administrator requires significant training and experience. experienced cyber security professionals right now are in short supply. it's something i've been talking about for years, we don't enough people going into these fields. we could change that in a number of ways, starting at the high school level, to encourage young people to go into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. especially in the field of cyber security.

ciber is a relatively new domain that is still ramping up, cyber training capacity, but part of it is also tied to the inherent difference between cyberspace and me space, you might say. defending against an adversary has always been difficult. attacker needs to find only a while point of getting in the defendant must defend against all possible breaches. is exponentially more challenging and cyberspace. it's just as easy to attack someone across the planet as it is to attack someone across the room. so the attack space is much larger.

attackmost as easy to everyone's vulnerability as it is to attack one entity with a vulnerability. as a result, attack is more lucrative, which draws off important talent even as more defendants are needed. government agencies have been particularly hard hit. part of this is due to the problem that i highlighted and we can also blame the lack of coordination with the government in the corresponding duplication of effort. securityem of homeland -- it was patched almost immediately. to ask, because it had other agencies to scan their networks for the flaw, it took

days in which hackers were robbed gating in the wild. these are challenges were propagating in the wild. these are challenges that will have to be addressed if this is to be deployed in the united states. it would allow for top level budgetary review of a cyber budget. i have strongly advocated for increased funding for security research to help grow our academic infrastructure to meet demand. i've offered alternative practices that allow programmers with nontraditional educational background the chance to protect their country. i think we can make use of their talents and we should. all congress continues to i believe it will

help raise the standards across critical infrastructure domains that a company like target that could be hacked through its vendors shows exactly why we need to raise the bar. ,et me just say before i close i hope you allow me a brief digression into hindsight security. -- government talks about the focus is always on the service side. we can maintain the integrity, the question should be can we maintain the integrity of the ballots cast, but if the ballots , relying onromised a voters smartphone to honestly represent his or her intention is simply naïve with malware as

prevalent as it is. it cannot be limited to the edge of the government network. so to say that e-voting is a challenging prospect is really an understatement, but just as there are many security concerns in the cryptosystems with the humans that run them and the devices, there are many potential benefits as well. so i reject the notion that e-voting is a solution in search of a problem, just as i reject the notion that it is ready today. changing something as essential to our identity as the way we

choose our leaders ought to be a deliberative process, and an inclusive one, and i hope i have impressed upon you the importance of engaging with policymakers about eve voting and as a corollary, i hope you will join me in advocating for better training of cyber security professionals to defend our country from harm nation'sr advised our policymakers at the same time. with that, i thank you for the work you are all doing, thanks for the opportunity to weigh in on this issue. i thank you for allowing me to join you remotely. i would rather be there in anson but this is appropriate way to communicate

with you today as well. i look forward to working with you to address these challenges. i'm a big fan of technology myself, i use it every day as we all do. but not without risk and challenges. so thank you very much, and enjoy your conference. [applause] >> thank you, congressman. that was a wonderful description of the balances that we are theing about here, and congressman is from my home district in rhode island. he covered a lot of things we have not even talked about here, about waiting lines and the amount of convenience, about this able than others that might have difficulty getting to the

polls. he covered a lot of interesting things. that disagree with him on there are not enough cyber professionals. we do have plenty of cyber professionals, they are not just all working on the correct side. before we start taking questions, any additional thoughts? >> i thought it was great that he raised the issue of how policymakers are involved and need to be involved and at the same time, it's really difficult. expecting them to have a deep and broad understanding of something like cryptography, which the very word makes my eyes glaze over, i'm going to go ahead and say that. it's really very difficult. balancethat finding the , lawmakers do make compromises. and potentialks

benefits. it's hard to really even understand what the risks are, and that makes it a little more challenging. and then sometimes policy will get made that may not be taking everything into consideration, just because it is so complicated. he did weigh in on the framework for cyber security and urged in elections be considered part of critical infrastructure. the other thing he mentioned about enough cyber security administrators, how do you compensate them enough to work at a small elections office and accounting where it it's only part time of the work that they do? >> most of my job is translation of policy makers, but also explaining how and why technology impacts their life. one of the things he mentioned

we did not talk about much at all is the promise for accessible, independent interaction with the system spirit a lot of people disabilities have to use very specialized equipment to allow them to interact in digital online forums. they often get used to the one thing they know how to use and how to navigate using a head stick for people who are advanced water pleadings, or certain kinds of screen readers. oregon has something called an online ballot marking system. you can interact via a normal computer. you can use all your own accessible technology. that has a lot of rom us and we involvedee as many with that.

we really do have to look at this as a problem itself, not trying to see smeal it together. is, heimportant thing was talking about the importance of the security of the infrastructure. not only on internet voting, anything -- a lot of information related to the election is managed by computers. and using i.t. on the electoral process should also be considered and other processes, not just internet voting.

the hacker is going to use it , he will try this first in stead of trying to -- it is important that as for questions, i have 1, 2, and three. the microphone will be coming to you. >> rank you. -- thank you. heard a lot, which is great. hadg the first country that national elections online.

there have been several questions about the militant so on. emphasize, want to the word that hurts here is trust. everyonians are used to interaction with the government for the internet. the government has really tried to make the systems as reliable as possible. people have expect haitians towards the government provide different services, and the online vote is natural for us. had several expert teams come to a study and assess that. geeks, the online voting, it is open.

i have no idea what to do with that. that they can join everything. i basic question is about the trust. if we do have the trust towards governments, and we put that into the context of the united istes, any kind of system inherently not trusted i. is there any possibility that also here this technical solutions could have more transparency? quickly will pick you point as -- as we eve all. the internet has some core, not trusted aspects to it.

there is a distrust of our government in the united states. there has been a combination of both parts, trust in both areas. it sounds like you have that in estonia. you have much more -- you have some foundational pieces that are solving the problems. like your national id card. that provides an identity that we don't have here in the united states. we need to get some of these building blocks in place. move security down below the operating systems so that we can solve the problem with a trusted platform. that would take years for those class -- those platforms to be out -- throughout the home and consumer markets. plex i was recently in particular.

some of the smaller countries think that there at a this advantage. discerning that shown that it will allow you to be much more agile, much more responsive to the numerous passion of her technologies that come out. plex it is one election jurisdiction, not 7000. >> i like to say that trust, for prosperity. to the extent that these systems it's hard to compare coca-cola to an increase, this , the valid,ct thing ,ou know, the data structure

that is an extremely important part. for verification aspect. next tesla had one of their cars there. that is a different relationship between manufacturers. you.let me congratulate ask the panel. the issue that strikes me is the insecure and for structure, hardware and software, we can over to rely upon it. we have a convergence of activities. they are trying to look at international trade and what we do. it is virtually the same type of concerns expressed to. national security council staff is meeting up on transportation safety, administration.

a vehicle to vehicle proposals, because you know him to -- because security is not filled in. this could play a useful role in calling out for a heavy investment, internationally possibly, specifically in the united states is problem, to help us, to give a little plug to intel. make the investment across the board that speeds the softwareion of safe systems. without fact, none of the systems are trustworthy. we will not be able to put a layer on top that will ever get away from the invented threat that reads the key to your encryption. it is an impossible task. mckenzie put out in june history recommendation. it is making its way around

courtrooms. we are the thinking about endorsing it. thank you. >> first, i think that government and to help speed this along, the trustworthiness. it has been a key question here. are there other things that to helpnts can be doing , to shortenis place this 30 years to 40 years. ? example, the gentlemen raise the question of the national transportation security , there are proposals for vehicle to vehicle communication. you are hearing too far off the road, and there is a radio broadcast that says,

hey, man, you are running opera. -- you are running off the road. people care about the privacy of their location. that if it ising done in the open, then people -- we are seeing nonprofits with heats on staff. people like can say, i don't think you need a thin number two through this. number to do this. it is starting to happen in the hacker community.

they have developed this effort called "i am the calvary." these are efforts -- the hacker that wey is saying often break stuff, but we have to step up. tore is no calvary coming save us. we have a responsibility to help save the world, so to speak. it is berry ambitious. i think you will see a lot of wonderful things. to build things, while we break things. >> i think the government is doing some things, with respect to the national institute for standards and technology. working onrding -- voting technology. they have done research reports what thehelp on pack issues are.

ways forribed that in anyone can reagan understand. thathave written reports are geared towards someone who works in an election office. as of yet, we have not developed standards for an internet voting system. we are a little ways from that. there are some nongovernmental efforts. what specifications might be needed. that is a little ways off. i think what -- joe said something that is important, getting all the stakeholders the opportunity to provide input. that is why i appreciate something like cyber security. one thing that struck me in

the conversations that i have to over the past week was have a machine involved in voting, or technology involved in voting, there is a certification process. further,s us even because when you want to update it for security reasons, you might have to recertify it. it is one of those things -- what we can do to help security a long might the ways to speed that process up so that we can get the more secure technologies. you can tell at the backend if it worked right during the election to help you a limit -- eliminate some of those certifications. torequires the ability audit. on thes not focusing

trust of the government. is to address the critics that things are happening in the proper way. we are talking about specific hardware. it should be a combination of things. we will make the security more difficult to happen. in case this protection fails, it is possible that this happens. it should be a combination of both. since maybe there are people who trust the computer or they have authorityfied by an -- they want to jack any time during the voting process.

we need to combine both things. the certification will and sure -- will in short that security practice has been taken into account when this computer has been developed. responsibility is to the voting process. we are going to do ron, and it will come over to this site. >> thank you. network security analyst with the carnegie mellon university. knowledge,mpressive it may make me change my mind about congress. [laughter] i am a new england are, originally.

you stole my thunder a little bit, jo. the difference between trust and trustworthiness. the government to be what is trustworthy, but the systems to be trustworthy. just yesterday at a secured conference here in washington, d.c., general alexander, the head of nsa, said the current architecture of the internet is indefensible. what we need for trustworthiness is, number one, not mathematical proofs that ballots can be verified. is transparent systems that all voters can understand. the main way we know to do that is with durable paper records. they have the additional benefit the voters intent to be re-examined and provide meaningful recounts and audits.

that is my question. isn't the trustworthiness in the systems what matters? the supervised voting, which is an insurmountable problem. >> i think you are right on the transparency and what voters can understand. i would say you are the point technology, interacting with voters all the time. how is that trustworthiness in the system? do they come out of it and feel that it was a great experience? >> it is more or less what i said before. the majority of voter trust is with the system. who do not trust the systems.

people need to say that it does not matter. it is important that the system can be audited. aboutare talking unsupervised voting, it can work. when we are talking about remote voting, which would be the maybeon, for instance, the voter can print the paper at home, but what will happen with this paper. is it enough or not? it is an important part of using to understand what is happening inside the voting process, when we are using only a computer. some of the phrases we talked , for thoseer involved in security, we see that people have a ton of

confidence in the internet. if they only knew what we knew. >> i will throw another blog in your ear. this. that was put forth, a good friend of ours, a standard .ky -- guy they have a the recalled software independence. an undetectable change in the outcome. is that youdo that do have some sort of durable, physical media that the voter can verify and recount later. that if youing

don't have something to audit, recount, independent from the software, you may be in a world of hurt. on the notion of statistical recount, wrist limiting audits. the whole point being if you compare a subset of the ballots with the data structures, and you don't find enough errors that disagree speaking that would show you that the outcome would change if you actually recounted it, then you don't have to do a recount. you know there is no error that would have been possible. californians change their law recently -- you can do the traditional way of certifying the machine on the front or you .an skip all that

you can do one of these audits that show that no one else would have won. the trick is what happens if you find errors. then you have a recount. >> we know this guy. >> sri international. the point of internet voting is to make it easier for voters to cast their votes in a way that gets counted accurately. the next generation is the cryptographic voting systems. two recent studies that have come out that cost some concern. that voters could not figure out how to do the verification with the -- three of the most commonly used systems.

it was too complicated for them to understand how. in another study, which is about to be released, even if they can figure out how, they are not motivated. they do not understand why. is, how do we get to systems that are -- have the desired capability, but also offer the voter what they need. another piece of this is the castn of being able to voters do not understand why they should want to use the technology. if the voters don't understand -- how do we, it get to the cyber-human parts of the voting issue. ? >> i will be really clicked. quick.ll be really

describe some of these cryptographic ideas in normal i can teach you the high level notion of what that is -- we need to be able to do things like that that don't cover only little components, but talk about the role of the technology in accomplishing the integrity we need. >> they want to go in and make ,heir decision, push the button and they are done. the vote is counted. that is the extent. that is the challenge we have to get over. that weto make sure have means that allow for a system that helps them do that in a versatile way. >> in this project, the voters

verify that their selections have been made. of the problems that we have in this project is how to balance the verifier to ability -- the verifiability and the usability. most people don't care about this. this is for the people who do not trust the system. how can weis, so thate this in a way the system can distinguish between somebody who is going to who makes somebody any kind of trick.

so, the problem is how can we , butde this as an option does not jeopardize the voting process for the voters. at the same time, to make verification efficient. we put this as on option in some cases. -- they that is not codes are arty sent by the voters. happens in norway voters check their return codes. it has not been based on a real

study. it was based on a problem they had when they were trying to print some voting cards. the people that called made a stipulation that means that 70% of the people who received wrong voting cards detect the error. the more data we have for the studies, the better. >> the norwegian system has not been studied here in the united states. 2011, andstem since also it has been shown in different conferences. that -- it is is important to design a

verification process that is easy for the voters. it is also important that the critics understand. if the voters understand, it is fine for them. is that thet part system can make a distinguishing decision. >> the voters do not always care what kind of voting system they will face. what is more compelling to them is who they want to vote for an this election is important. once they get there, i think it is the responsibility of the stakeholders to care about elections. we need to make sure that it is available, function, and that it will work. you said something that caught -- you hear about all these breaches.

where the sometimes idea of sending a something as votes over the internet -- how did that get to be a good idea? we have this natural inclination and can do spirit. we have come to admire when people make light of challenges and obstacles or minimize them. they are lesse if daunting, we can do this. we can overcome it. we can apply ourselves. i think that is one of the voting in theis country today. the unfortunate part of it is if there are shades of bad, it is the worst of the worst. the ballot is being sent in an unencrypted e-mail attachment to election offices.

i told somebody about this one time. somebody who was doing security consulting for large firms. his eyes got large and he wanted to cover his ears and not hear what i was saying. it is true. i think there is a lot of bridging that needs to happen for people to understand what the key challenges are, what we need, and work on those kinds of research problems. i think it is they can do front your spirit of rhode island that is carrying us through. [laughter] >> final round of comments here. joe said it would take 30 years to 40 years. that is kind of a long time. the digital natives using this now will be in their 40's or 50's.

that means i will be in my young 60's. [laughter] that is a long way. i am curious if the other panelist agreed with that timeframe. maybe, if there is one kind of thing that we can do, that one thing, what would that be? that may be a little long because of the whole process on how fast technology is advancing, but there does need to be an effort, a focused effort, on trying to deal with the problems today. we have to do a better job. someone mentioned earlier that identity is a big one. reasonable amount of things that you can do to provide a more secure environment, no you're talking with. you still have those underlying that the devices to be secure.

i don't think it would take white that long. if we want to really push this, we need to look at -- looking at the concerted effort to design a national environment that standards-based, that's going to be able to scale. --we are solving a rock local issue, find food we can do that without a lot of work in 30 years or 40 years. if we are solving a national issue, we have a real problems that need to be addressed, real design considerations. we need to discern whether or not we are going to do this on top of a trusted or on trusted environment. those decisions need to be made. intel we can get to a national focus, we were not solve the problem. this estimateith

of 30 years or 40 years? whof you talk to folks evaluate these kinds of , protocol stacks for the next generation internet -- what might replace what we have now -- their most optimistic projection to have a coherent internet is 40 years. this is something that no one knows anything about. right now, you have folks doing adversarial routing attacks. suddenly a route is rerouted for an hour.hstan what the heck. there are things like that i don't think you can solve until we have a fully deployed piecemeal path to the internet.

>> i am going to shout out to missouri. we are also a show me people. i think we need to ask what is the floor beneath which we are .ot willing to sink systemswe owe ourselves that do produce the evidence you to know that was the correct outcome. i think joe is on the money with the timeframe. that is my take. >> i don't think we need to wait

30 or 40 years. risk in a way that is acceptable. ultimately there are people thinking about how to use technology in the elections. risks are evolving. we have different parties like my company. to see if they are acceptable to use for an election only for certain groups. we need to move. we cannot wait. if we wait we will find other risks in the future.

i think we have the technology for introducing internet voting. wewe want to limit the risk we think abouin can think about using certain people. also present. i think it is not the solution. >> some things we might be able to do to shorten that is to let these elections, part where we can get our heads around this and figure out how to use it. we can lay the sidewalks but we really won't know how people want to use this technology. howoncern is we can imagine long it is going to take to solve these problem's. we are on this slope. unfortunately the attackers are

on this slope. my concern is that hackers might get much better than the defenders. mcafee has been trying to get that. gainswant to unlock these , we have got to start getting security right. to us that is the important message. it is not just talking about the downside and the risk but also the benefits we can unlock if we get this right. i want to thank mcafee and my panelists. paul and robbie, who are doing our tweets. the volunteers are interns. , national cyber security awareness month will be here to talk about updates, so

we will have tom cornman from the house committee on intelligence. risk.l talk about -- ie fifth of november am sorry. on the fourth of november we will have an event on nato talking about the new cyber strategy. that is going to be with the assistant secretary-general, so the top nato official probably the fourth ofon november. keep your eyes open for the next taper we are doing with mcafee. -- next paper we are doing with mcafee.

one of these places if we don't get security right we are not going to be able to unlock the amazing potential we can find. .hank you to our panelists thank you for being here and making us smart on the issue. thank you for being here. [applause]

>> the supreme court has yet to did decide by the way, as part of c-span coverage of campaign 2014, live coverage of two be debates tonight. go to our web site for more information. with the death of that man in texas that contract the ebola and with the federal government putting procedures in place.