T215B

Communication and
information technologies (II)

Arab Open University - Spring 2021

Session 1
Block 4
Protecting and prying 1
What T215B is about
• This course is a continuation of T215A.
• This module will help you to learn more about the new
developments and some of the issues arising from their use,
and will equip you with the understanding and skills to
continue learning about them in the future.

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• You will study the core principles on which the new
technologies are built and, investigate new topics and
technologies.
• The main technical topics covered in the module are:
• Privacy and surveillance
• Encryption
• Biometric identification 2
• Digital representation of sound and images
Assessment
▪ Tutor-marked assignment (TMA) ➔ 20%

▪ Attendance and participation➔ 5 %

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▪ Online activities/Quizzes➔ 25%

▪ Final Examination ➔ 50%

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 Online activities
Online activity no. Material covered Suggested time Marks awarded

1 Sessions 1, 2 and 3 week 3 5 marks

2 Sessions 4 and 5 week 5 5 marks

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3 Sessions 6 and 7 week 8 5 marks

4 Sessions 9 and 10 week 10 5 marks

5 Sessions 11 and 12 week 12 5 marks

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Block 4: Protecting and prying
• This block aims to raise your awareness of some of the
technologies and issues associated with safeguarding the
privacy of digital information and the people who are
affected by its use – hence the themes ‘protecting’ and
‘prying’.

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• We will use analytical framework that uses five themes to
examine the technologies and issues: convenience, identity,
reliability, acceptability and consequences.

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Session Outline

• Part 1: Introduction to the block

• Introduction
• Personal digital data
• A thematic framework

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• Part 2: Electronic voting
• Introduction
• Convenience: the Irish machines
• Acceptability: the Dutch machines
• Reliability: UK, US and other parallels
• Identity, authorization and authentication

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A thematic framework
• We will be encountering five recurring themes,
which together provide a framework that can be
used for analyzing the technologies:
• Convenience

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• Identity
• Reliability
• Acceptability
• Consequences

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3.1 Convenience
• Activity 1.2
• Think about your own experience of systems that provide online
access to information or services. Make some notes about them
in terms of convenience.
• Sol.: Online banking: paying bills and manage account online

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• It enables to transfer funds between accounts and view the
account balance at any time.
• It also provides with access to other services, such as setting up
and cancelling direct debits and opening new accounts.
• Previously, we had to visit bank’s branch office during its opening
hours.

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3.2 Identity
• When interacting with online services of the kinds, we cannot
offer birth certificate or driving license as evidence that “We
are who we are”!
• So, one aspect of identity is the means by which online
systems verify the identity.

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• Another aspect is whether there are safeguards in place to
ensure that someone else won’t be able to impersonate – an
act known as identity theft.
• Yet another aspect is the choice of personal data that is
required and whether this is appropriate for the purpose.

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3.3 Reliability

• Will the system function as expected (and as claimed) and are

there effective safeguards in place to monitor its performance?

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3.4 Acceptability [1]
• At 2009, the UK government started the process of
introducing a national identity card
• The proposed identity card will show some basic biographical
information (name, gender, place and date of birth and
nationality), and some basic biometric information (a facial

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photograph and a copy of the holder’s signature).
• The same information, plus fingerprint information, will also
be digitally encoded and stored both in the card’s chip and in a
national identity register.
• In this way, the planned identity card will combine analogue
identity data with digital identity data and will firmly tie
together biographical data with biometric data. 11
3.4 Acceptability [2]
• Since the government’s proposals were announced, there has been
much public debate on the issue and various benefits and
drawbacks of its introduction have been claimed
➔ Debate:
• Supporters:

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• This will make it much harder to create false identities
• This will reduce the gains to be had from stolen identities
• Will offer protection against terrorism, and will help to prevent fraud
and illegal immigration
• Against:
• Loss of privacy
• Cost (both to the individual and to the state)
• ‘function creep’ (that is, that the cards might at some time in the
future be used for other purposes) 12
• who will be able to have access to the data?
3.4 Acceptability [3]
• An important point to bear in mind when
considering acceptability is that it is not
constant over time:
• It can be changed positively through use and practice,

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as experience of the system is built up, and through
shifts in public perception as its use becomes familiar.
• However, it can also be changed negatively due to such
things as security breaches and system failures and a
consequent loss of public trust.

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3.5 Consequences [1]
• The introduction of new systems frequently leads to
unforeseen results – both good and bad.
• When they fail (or fail to behave as expected) the effects can
fall anywhere on the continuum between inconvenience and
catastrophe.

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• So the adoption of big information systems needs careful
thought and planning.

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3.5 Consequences [2]
• One of the obvious questions to consider is ‘what might be
the consequences when things go wrong?’

• One less obvious question is ‘what effect will the introduction

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of this system have on other systems?’ For example, the shift
to online services will reduce traditional service provision,
such as door-to-door postal deliveries.

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 Part 2

Electronic voting

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1. Introduction [1]
• In this part of the block, we consider some
attempts to incorporate modern digital
technologies into the electoral process, under
the general themes of:

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• convenience (ease of use)
• acceptability (willingness to use)
• reliability (and accuracy)
• identity
• consequences (harm/benefit).
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1. Introduction [2]
• Activity 2.1 (exploratory): Do you think using computers
instead of paper ballots in elections is a good idea? Why?
• Computers are good at counting. They are modern, high-tech
and their use is indicative of a progressive society.
• The UK government is convinced that the use of electronic

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voting machines and internet voting will encourage more
people to vote.
• On the other hand, paper is also pretty good for recording
votes. It is simple to use and easy to see how the paper ballots
are counted. It is a fundamental tenet of the liberal
democratic process that elections should be transparent:
votes are counted in public in a way that ordinary people can
easily observe and understand. The computer will be quicker at
counting the votes but we can’t see how it counts the votes. 18
1. Introduction [3]
• So:
• Who would supply the voting computers?
• Who would program and maintain them?
• How would we check they are programmed fairly and

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without errors?
• What would we do if they break down during an
election?
• How can they be kept secure and how can we be sure
they have not been compromised?
• How can we check they have provided the correct
result?
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• Will people be prepared to use them?
1. Introduction [4]
• The fact of introducing computers into the
system means we introduce quite significant
extra complications.
• That should not necessarily stop us using

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computers but maybe we should postpone our
views about whether eVoting is a good idea or
not until we have thought about it a bit more
and examined whether it has worked in practice.

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2. Convenience: the Irish machines
• A report by the Commission in July 2006 concluded that the
machines recording the votes would be acceptable with some
modifications but the election management software, used to
set up the system for elections and count the votes, ‘was not of
the required standard’.

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3. Acceptability: the Dutch machines [1]

• The eVoting system was used in the Netherlands for

more than 15 years, despite the campaigning of a
number of computer scientists who claimed the system
was insecure.

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3. Acceptability: the Dutch machines [2]

• Why did the Dutch

government,
electorate and media

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lose confidence in the
acceptability of the
“Nedap” voting
computers in the
wake of this
programme? 23
3. Acceptability: the Dutch machines [3]
• The machines were very old and insecure.
• They demonstrated it was possible to re-program the
computer to swap votes between parties and to inflate the
number of votes recorded in favor of the hypothetical Fraud
party.

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• The programme makers also claimed that, although access to
the computers was needed to perpetrate such fraud, the
warehouse housing 400 of these machines in Rotterdam had
very little physical security. This contravened Dutch election
law.

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3. Acceptability: the Dutch machines [4]
• So the machines were vulnerable to such re-programming.
• transportation of the machines was not subject to any special
security.
• The keys used to unlock the machines were all the same – one

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key would open all 8000.
• The security company responsible for testing the computers,
allegedly only tested one every four years and their reports on
these tests were confidential; that is, there is no public access
to the reports.
• The tests checked if the machines were waterproof and robust
against thermal or electric shocks, but allegedly did not
examine the possibilities for electoral fraud. 25
4. Reliability: UK, US and other parallels
4.1 London [1]
• In the year 2000 electronic counting was introduced for the
London Assembly and the London Mayoral elections.
• Electronic counting was used in these elections in 2000, 2004
and 2008.

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4.1 London [2]
• Partial audits of some of security and the software that runs the
machines were made by management consultants Deloitte and
KPMG before the election:
• Several presiding officers at polling stations were unhappy with
the ballot boxes.

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• Election candidates and party agents were also unhappy with the
ballot boxes and their poor quality seals, which they considered
fragile and insecure.
• ‘Family voting’ was observed where more than one person was
allowed to enter the polling booth thereby breaching voter
privacy.

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4.1 London [3]
• There were quite a lot of problems with scanners getting
jammed, particularly with postal ballots and other ballots which
had been folded by voters before being deposited in the ballot
boxes.

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• There was variation in how scanner jams were dealt with ➔
Sometimes when it was fixed the operator would re-scan the
whole batch of ballots and sometimes they would start from
where they left off.

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4.1 London [4]
• Broken scanners were observed being replaced by others which
had been previously stored insecurely.
• Some faulty scanners marked ballot papers.
• Some of the information on the observer screens was obscure;
• Observers were unable to say with any confidence whether the

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scanners were checking the paper fed into them to ensure they
were genuine ballots.

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4.1 London [5]
• Inconsistency was found between the number of ballots
recorded going into a ballot box at the polling station and the
number registered as counted from the same box at the
counting centre
➔ It all adds up to a problematic picture for electronic

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ballot counting, at least in London.
• The central concerns of both The Electoral Commission and ORG
reports are on the issue of ‘transparency’.
• Introducing computers to the election process, even if it is just for
counting, leads to an often unanticipated increase in complexity
in the electoral system.

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4.1 London [7]
• The Electoral Commission recommended that electronic
counting should not be used in UK elections until the
government introduces significant changes to the
process and to electoral law that would significantly

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improve the integrity and reliability of the process.
• The Electoral Commission concluded by recommending
that London elections in 2012 should be paper-based,
unless a huge amount of work is done

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4.2 United States (with a detour to Italy) [1]

• There were problems in Florida during the 2000 Bush v. Gore

presidential election ➔ The vote count was very close and
was eventually decided in favour of George W. Bush by the
US Supreme Court.
• Most of the media accounts at the time focused on the

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problems with the lever and punch card voting machines.
• Blaming the machines led to the erroneous belief that simply
replacing them with more modern machinery would solve the
problem.

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4.2 United States (with a detour to Italy) [2]
• In the context of voting machines, computers are complex,
prone to programming errors, crashing and mischievous or
malicious interference.
• They do what they are programmed to do.
• Any software that has over 200 000 lines of programming

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instructions, as the Irish eVoting system had for example, will
contain errors.
• So the electronic voting scenario is not as simple as it first
appears.

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4.2 United States (with a detour to Italy) [3]
• Conclusion: eVoting and e-counting can, with
some reservations, meet the tests of
convenience (ease of use) and acceptability
(willingness to use).

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• It may be difficult to conclude with any degree of
confidence, however, that they can pass the
reliability (and accuracy) test, at least in the case
of the systems we have taken as previous
examples.
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5. Identity, authorization and authentication
• Identity is about who you are; the means through which this is
typically detected or verified can be broken down into:
• something you are (including physical characteristics like gender and
biometrics)
• something you know (e.g. professional skills or a password)

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• something you have (e.g. an ID card, name or job)
• Authentication is (usually) about proving who you are (but can be
just about proving you are permitted to do something, without
having to prove your identity)
• Authorization is about what you are permitted to do.

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6. Conclusion [1]
• The voting system, with or without computers, should ensure
that each vote, as intended by the voter, is recorded and
counted with integrity.
• Also the final certified result must clearly represent the intent
of the voters at the time they cast their votes. It needs to be

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robust in the face of tests of:
• convenience (ease of use)
• acceptability (willingness to use)
• reliability (and accuracy)
• identity.
• It should be maintained, evolved, operated and used – by
voters as well as election officials – with an awareness of the
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consequences of getting it right or wrong.