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A series of bombs killed 35 children and seven adults Thursday as U.S. troops handed out candy at a government ceremony to inaugurate a new sewage treatment plant. Hours earlier, a suicide blast killed a U.S. soldier and two Iraqis on the capital’s outskirts.

The bombs in Baghdad’s al-Amel neighborhood caused the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the conflict in Iraq began 17 months ago.

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Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:41:53 +0200
From: Erling Kristiansen
Subject: Dutch Internet elections

The Netherlands is currently holding the election for the Regional Water Management Boards (my translation of “Waterschappen”). One can vote by mail or by Internet. The latter attracted my curiosity, and I poked around the ‘net a bit to see what people thought about the idea.

It appears that a test election was held in order to test the procedure and get some feedback from test voters. An often quoted feedback was that “Only 26% of the test voters expressed concern about the possibility of fraud”. ONLY 26%?? This response seems to be interpreted as a vote of confidence for the system.

Another nugget: “The secrecy of the vote is guaranteed. The relationship between the voter identity and his login code is removed from the file before the votes are counted”.

The FAQ also has an interesting statement. An independent body (TNO) has investigated the security of the voting method. They concluded that “Voting by Internet is not less safe than voting by mail or phone”. This formulation implies that the procedure is actually not very safe, and they know it.

I cast my vote today. And my wife’s! With her permission, but I could equally well have voted for her without her knowing about it. All you need in order to vote is a couple of codes contained in a letter delivered by post. Since I happened to be the one emptying the mailbox yesterday, I retrieved my own ballot, my wife’s and my daughter’s. And what about mail delivered to the wrong address, that happens quite regularly. But not today, so, sadly, I was unable to vote on behalf of any of my neighbours.

Slightly to my surprise, the voting web site worked well in Netscape, except that Netscape aborted just after I had completed the second vote.

At the end of the voting process, you get a code, consisting of a total of 40 hex digits in 3 sub-fields. Allegedly, this code can be used, after the election has closed, to “check whether the vote was counted”. If you do not take note of these codes here and now, they are lost for good, there seems to be no way to retrieve them later. The page displaying the codes posts the warning “Keep these codes secret, your vote can be derived from them”.

It seems to me that there is no way to guarantee that “the vote was counted”, only that it was registered somewhere. You have to take their word that this is actually the file that is counted, that nobody messed with it, and that counting is done correctly and honestly.

The Water Management Board election is not a very high-profile election, many show little interest in what these boards are doing. You vote for individuals, not for political parties, and the campaign preceding the election is not very intense, possibly because no party politics is involved. So it may not be very fraud-sensitive. But I am afraid that if this type of elections is declared a success, the technology may show up in more important elections.

(I hadn’t talked about this on the web, because I had dismissed the election as “totally bogus”, but this article nicely summarizes things)

A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said, “Can you spare a few minutes for cancer research?” I said, “All right, but we won’t get much done.”

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As the nation prepares to watch the presidential candidates debate foreign policy issues, a new PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans who plan to vote for President Bush have many incorrect assumptions about his foreign policy positions. Kerry supporters, on the other hand, are largely accurate in their assessments. The uncommitted also tend to misperceive Bush’s positions, though to a smaller extent than Bush supporters, and to perceive Kerry’s positions correctly. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments: “What is striking is that even after nearly four years President Bush’s foreign policy positions are so widely misread, while Senator Kerry, who is relatively new to the public and reputed to be unclear about his positions, is read correctly.�?

Majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the International Criminal Court (66%), the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto Treaty on global warming (51%). They were divided between those who knew that Bush favors building a new missile defense system now (44%) and those who incorrectly believe he wishes to do more research until its capabilities are proven (41%). However, majorities were correct that Bush favors increased defense spending (57%) and wants the US, not the UN, to take the stronger role in developing Iraq’s new government (70%).

Kerry supporters were much more accurate in assessing their candidate’s positions on all these issues. Majorities knew that Kerry favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (90%); the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (77%); the International Criminal Court (59%); the land mines treaty (79%); and the Kyoto Treaty on climate change (74%). They also knew that he favors continuing research on missile defense without deploying a system now (68%), and wants the UN, not the US, to take the stronger role in developing Iraq’s new government (80%). A plurality of 43% was correct that Kerry favors keeping defense spending the same, with 35% assuming he wants to cut it and 18% to expand it.

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This is an issue, of course, that was supposed to have been settled long ago. But 140 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 75 years after John Scopes taught natural selection to a biology class in Tennessee, and 15 years after the US Supreme Court ruled against a Louisiana law mandating equal time for creationism, the question of how to teach the theory of evolution was being reopened here in Ohio. The two-hour forum drew chanting protesters and a police escort for the school board members. Two scientists, biologist Ken Miller from Brown University and physicist Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University two hours north in Cleveland, defended evolution. On the other side of the dais were two representatives from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main sponsor and promoter of intelligent design: Stephen Meyer, a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s School of Ministry and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and Jonathan Wells, a biologist, Discovery fellow, and author of Icons of Evolution, a 2000 book castigating textbook treatments of evolution. Krauss and Miller methodically presented their case against ID. “By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science,” Krauss concluded, “and it’s a waste of our students’ time to subject them to it.”

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The evidence is compelling

John Kerry throws a football like a girl.

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From: [Wall Street Journal reporter] Farnaz Fassihi
Subject: From Baghdad

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under
virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to  and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people’s homes and never  walk in the streets. I can’t go grocery shopping any more, can’t eat in restaurants, can’t strike a conversation with strangers, can’t look for stories, can’t drive in any thing but a full armored car, can’t go to scenes of breaking news stories, can’t be stuck in traffic, can’t speak English outside, can’t take a road trip, can’t say I’m an American, can’t linger at checkpoints, can’t be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can’t and can’t. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the ‘turning point’ exactly began. Was it  April
when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when
Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began
spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a
foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess ‘the situation.’ When asked ‘how are thing?’ they reply: ‘the situation is very bad.”

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn’t  control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the
country’s roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of
landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation,  basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad  alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health — which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers — has now stopped disclosing them.

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After weeks of political wrangling, Sen. John Kerry and President Bush will square off for the first of three key presidential debates. Both camps have agreed to an elaborate, 32-page contract that spells out everything from the size of the dressing rooms to permitted camera angles.

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