Clips September 11, 2003

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips September 11,
2003

House e-government provision falls $44M short of Bush request 
Apparent security hole highlights danger of e-voting
Simulations train firefighters with blaze but no burn 
FAA begins building oceanic air traffic system
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Government Executive
September 10, 2003 
House e-government provision falls $44M short of Bush request 
By Amelia Gruber
agruber@xxxxxxxxxxx 

The 2004 Transportation-Treasury appropriations bill passed by the House
Tuesday night allots $1 million to an interagency fund supporting
electronic government projectsan amount well below that requested by
President Bush and authorized in previous legislation. 


The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved $5 million for the
interagency fund, the same amount the fund received for fiscal 2003.


Both sums fall at least $40 million short of President Bush?s $45 million
request for the fund, and the amount authorized in an e-government bill
signed by President Bush on Dec. 17, 2002. That bill grants $345 million
to fund interagency technology initiatives over four years, allowing $45
million for fiscal 2003, $50 million for fiscal 2004, $100 million for
fiscal 2005 and $150 million for fiscal 2006. 


The Information Technology Association of America, an Arlington,
Va.-based trade group, is disappointed with the funding level approved by
the House, given the ?high priority the administration, many in Congress,
industry and citizens have placed on e-government, ? said ITAA President
Harris Miller. ?We hope there is still an opportunity to work with
congressional appropriators to increase the amount.? 


A lack of adequate funding for e-government projects is one of several
challenges that Karen Evans, Bush?s nominee to replace Mark Forman as the
federal government?s technology chief, will face in her new role,
according to George Molaski, president and chief executive officer of
E-Associates LLC, a technology consulting company in Falls Church, Va.


?I think she?s got a very tough job ahead of her,? Molaski said in an
interview last week. ?She?s going to spend a lot of time as a bill
collector.?
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USA Today
Apparent security hole highlights danger of e-voting
Posted 9/10/2003 5:23 PM     Updated 9/10/2003 10:25
PM

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP)  The strange case of an election tally that
appears to have popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed is
casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting
machines. 
During San Luis Obispo County's March 2002 primary, absentee vote tallies
were apparently sent to an Internet site operated by Diebold Election
Systems, the maker of the voting machines used in the election. 

At least that's what timestamps on digital records showed. 

County election officials say the unexplained gaffe probably didn't
influence the vote, and Diebold executives  who only recently
acknowledged the lapse  say voters should have confidence in the
election process. 

But computer programmers say the incident is further evidence that
electronic voting technology could allow a politically connected computer
hacker to monitor balloting and, if the vote was going the wrong way,
mobilize voters to swing the election. 

"If you're at the state party headquarters and you know how the vote
is going in a county, you can allocate scarce resources to the county
where you're losing by a close margin," said Jim March, a computer
system administrator from Milpitas who examined ballot results that ended
up on a Diebold site without password protection. "This data is
incredibly valuable to a campaign manager." 

Silicon Valley computer experts have long criticized touch-screen voting
machines, which do not normally provide a paper receipt and which send
digital votes directly to a computer server. Programmers say software
bugs, power outages or clever hackers could easily delete or alter
data  and recounts would prove impossible without paper backups.

San Luis Obispo County relies on the more popular "optical
scan" system used in 34 of California's 58 counties. 

Programmers say the March 2002 incident casts suspicion on any election
system that depends on computers  even the relatively low-tech
optical scan, which relies on paper ballots and uses computers only to
store and send data. 

Voters who cast optical scan ballots typically use a pencil to fill in a
bubble near their candidate's name on a sheet of paper, similar to
standardized tests. Poll workers feed the ballots into a scanner, which
records results on a precinct computer. 

After polls close, results are sent to a central server via modem.
Anytime modems are involved, hackers get an opportunity to intercept
data, computer security experts say. 

March said he found absentee ballot totals from 57 of 164 San Luis Obispo
County precincts in an easily accessible File Transfer Protocol site
operated by North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold. The votes were time-stamped
at 3:31 p.m. on March 5, 2002  more than four hours before polls
closed. 

By law, election officials cannot release tallies until voting is
finished  typically 8 p.m. on election day. Activists discovered the
data in January. 

Diebold, which won't say when the data showed up on the site,
acknowledged the incident and says it is investigating how the data ended
up on a public Internet site. 

Deborah Seiler, Diebold's West Coast sales representative, said Diebold
engineers may have published the results as part of a test  possibly
days, weeks or months after the county primary, regardless of the time
stamp. She said a system of checks and balances safeguards Diebold's
33,000 voting machines nationwide from fraud. 

"These activists don't understand what they're looking at,"
Seiler said. 

County election officials insist the primary was fair. No one has called
for a criminal investigation or recount. Most local supervisors were
running unopposed, and the winning candidates and proposals enjoyed large
margins. 

County clerk-recorder Julie L. Rodewald said she was
"concerned" about the results winding up online, but she has no
plans to get rid of Diebold equipment. 

March questioned why San Luis Obispo County's server connected to a
Diebold server at all  particularly if it dialed out while polls
were open. He said the "phone home" incident could have been
the work of an incompetent or malicious Diebold insider, or an outside
hacker. Any astute campaign manager could have profited, he said.

Kim Alexander, president of the Davis, Calif.-based nonprofit California
Voter Foundation, said computers have benefited the election process by
speeding vote counts. But technology has complicated poll workers' jobs,
and the San Luis Obispo County incident and other mysterious errors have
raised alarming security concerns. 

"In our quest to deliver faster, more accurate election results,
we've left the voting process wide open to new forms of attack and
mismanagement," Alexander said.
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Government Computer News
Simulations train firefighters with blaze but no burn 
By Vandana Sinha 
September 11, 2003

An advanced computer simulation program is under development at a
government research agency to let firefighters-in-training respond to a
blaze without the risk of burns. 

National Institute of Standards and Technology scientists are at work
converting years-old fire modeling software, Fire Dynamic Simulator, and
fire imaging software called Smokeview to display more quickly and
realistically the smoke, hot air and other gases that erupt from fires
and wind. 

They envision a virtual reality setup, where firefighters would wear head
gear that would display in 3-D the fire and smoke images originating from
an SGI computer and playing out on two eight-foot screens. 

?This is kind of a poor man?s holodeck,? said Glenn Forney, a computer
scientist at NIST?s Building and Fire Research Laboratory, referring to
the virtual reality environment in ?Star Trek.? 

While that scenario is still three to four years in development, Forney
said, the NIST team hopes to give firefighters CDs loaded with intuitive,
simulated role-playing software for computer training as early as next
year. 

?Someone asked me, ?Could you make your software more compatible with
[video games] Quake and Doom??? Forney said. ?So that?s what I did. I
made some keystrokes similar to what computer gamers were expecting.?

Through the visualization upgrades, the software package will be able to
render extremely complex, multistory fires, as well as scenarios of
potential outcomes of a firefighter?s decision, from opening a window to
pointing a hose in a certain direction. 

For instance, for depicting smoke beyond the 2-D swirl graphics, NIST
scientists have been investigating using parallel precomputed planes of
different shades. The graphics hardware would then combine those planes
to form one image in less than a seconda process that can create file
sizes of more than 2-G. 

Forney said his team is working with firefighter instructors from the
National Fire Academy to come up with scenarios, but the accuracy of the
fire?s behavior will be based on physics. He said programs like this
could minimize the training deaths of firefighters that occur each year.

?The images are based on science. They?re not going to be cartoons,? he
said. ?The thickness of smoke and where the fire will be located will be
based on what the physical equations say they should be.? 

NIST has used the open-source FDS since 1999 to investigate computer
simulations of fatal fires from the District of Columbia to Iowa, down to
the World Trade Center fires from the terrorist attacks two years ago
today. 

Smokeview, whose fourth version was released in April, is written mostly
in C and partially in Fortran 90, and can run on several platforms,
including Microsoft Windows, Linux and Unix.
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Government Computer News
FAA begins building oceanic air traffic system 
By Mary Mosquera 
September 11, 2003

The Federal Aviation Administration has accepted the initial hardware and
software for a new air traffic management system that will improve
separation of aircraft flying over U.S. oceanic airspace, FAA said
yesterday. 

Lockheed Martin Corp. is developing Advanced Technologies and Oceanic
Procedures to replace FAA's existing systems and procedures. 

ATOP will let controllers reduce the space between airborne aircraft
while preserving passenger safety and, in the process, improve fuel
efficiency and costs, the company said. 

ATOP will increase international air travel capacity and automate the
manual processes now used, a Lockheed Martin spokeswoman said. The
system, which FAA accepted July 31, will integrate flight data
processing, detect conflicts between aircraft and provide data link and
surveillance capabilities. 

FAA expects to begin using the system next June, said Charlie Keegan,
FAA?s associate administrator for research and acquisitions. Full system
operation is slated for 2005. By that time, the highest percentage
increase in air traffic is projected to occur across the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans, FAA said. 

FAA is installing the upgraded system at air route traffic control
centers in Oakland, Calif., New York and Anchorage, Alaska, as pilot
sites to test the system and to train controllers and technicians.
Oakland will begin using ATOPS in June 2004, said David Ford, leader,
FAA?s Oceanic and Offshore Integrated Product Team. 

Oceanic air traffic control has no radar tracking of aircraft and no
direct radio communication, as domestic air traffic does. Position
reports based on onboard aircraft navigational systems are radioed to the
controller. Due to the uncertainty in position report reliability,
planned overseas flight tracks must provide greater separation margins to
ensure safe flights, FAA said. 

The ATOP system will manage approximately 80 percent of the world's
controlled oceanic airspace, which includes about 24 million square miles
over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans. The system will be
integrated with the radar processing functions of the microprocessor en
route automated radar tracking system, which will support tracking of
aircraft using primary and secondary radar inputs and automatic dependent
surveillance broadcast.
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