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No to Online Voting in Virginia Experts agree: Internet voting would be an information security disaster. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth of Virginia is considering a pair of bills to experiment with online voting. Pilot programs will do nothing to contradict the years of unanimous empirical research showing that online voting is inherently vulnerable to a variety of threats from malicious hackers, including foreign nations. EFF strongly opposes Virginia H.B. 2588 and S.J.R. 291, and all online voting. Instead, EFF recommends that absentee voting, like all voting, be conducted with paper records and risk-limiting audits , the current state-of-the art in election security. xkcd.com The first problem with Internet voting is the most basic: If citizens vote with their own phones and laptops, and those phones and laptops have malware on them, that malware can manipulate the vote. Consider all the spam in your inbox every day. Lots of it comes from compromised machines....

Highest Court in Indiana Set to Decide If You Can Be Forced to Unlock Your Phone When EFF preaches about the benefits of using device encryption on smartphones, one of the most frequent questions we get is whether the police can force you to turn over your passcode or unlock the device . This week, we filed a brief  in the Indiana Supreme Court arguing that the answer is no, thanks to the Fifth Amendment’s statement that no one can be forced to be a “witness against himself.”  The case began when Katelin Eunjoo Seo reported to law enforcement outside of Indianapolis that she had been the victim of a rape and allowed a detective to examine her iPhone for evidence. But the state never filed charges against Seo’s alleged rapist, identified by the court as “D.S.” (Courts often refer to minors using their initials.) Instead, the detective suspected that Seo was harassing D.S. with spoofed calls and texts, and she was ultimately arrested and charged with felony stalking. Along ...

The year 2018 has been a critical one for the global energy transition agenda with global consensus finally emerging for an All Electric world. Consider these key developments in 2018: The “Future is Electric” was one of the new topics of the World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency. Shell unveiled a new scenario (“Sky”) towards an All Electric and decarbonized future. The European Commission updated its climate policy agenda with key proposals towards a much larger electric and renewable mix of the energy system. The EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) in the United States built around the critical benefits of an All Electric world. Finally, the subject was deliberated upon at the World Economic Forum which concluded recently. The rationale for an All Electric world is clear and I explained it in a previous blog . Clean electrification and energy efficiency, combined, enable faster decarbonization. It also improves overall system efficiency. The All Elec...