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Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Don't put extremely sensitive information on the internet.

On the other hand, we want digital public services, to be able to pay taxes electronically, to be able to vote electronically etc.

I don't think the "don't put sensitive information on the Internet" idea really holds any water unless we expect our public services to be done with pen and paper for evermore, while everything else goes digital. (Yes, machines could be disconnected from the network and so on... but that's arguably just saying "an airgap is all you need")

But those things can be done without putting sensitive information on the internet. Crypto currency transactions can keep everything sensitive off the network. A one way airgap is indeed all you need (your device should be able to push data to the network but never receive any data from the network). The same scheme works for voting.

> A one way airgap is indeed all you need

This is an oxymoron. If something can communicate, even only in 1 direction, its not airgapped.

Furthermore, theres no such thing as 1-way communication. Any DB that houses info can only provide it in response to a query.

> theres no such thing as 1-way communication

It's called a data diode.

https://www.opswat.com/blog/why-data-diodes-are-essential-is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network

> to be able to vote electronically

That's one thing we definitely shouldn't want. This case is just the latest proving what a bad idea that is.

I want to be able to vote electronically.

Then you don't understand why it is a terrible idea.

Instead of such general and frankly unhelpful statements, would you mind explaining to the previous poster why electronic voting is such a bad idea? It may even generate further discussion instead of just downvotes.

Well, I would prefer it, but at least at the scale of towns and small cities, I simply don't trust them.

Furthermore, if they do so many things that they need a public-facing website to manage all of the sensitive information they keep on me, I probably don't want to live there.

It's all well and good wanting to access a municipal government's private records through the internet, but try to think of how likely they are to get that right, and adjust your desires accordingly.

> "we want [...] to be able to vote electronically etc."

Speak for yourself. I see no upsides.

Wouldn't increasing voter turnout be an upside? Reducing the loss of productivity of those participating? Voting electronically is dangerous today, but I still see it as something to work towards. However, I imagine that would require incredible innovation towards multiple layers of robust identity verification protocols.

> "Wouldn't increasing voter turnout be an upside?"

There are better, less drastic, ways of making voting more accessible. Washington state's system of mailing everybody a ballot works pretty well. I usually don't even remember when elections are coming up until I get a ballot in the mail, without ever asking for it. In Washington, people who care to vote don't have any trouble finding the time. (Of course many people just don't give a shit, and electronic voting won't change that.)

This is more of a "don't let various government agencies neglect their infrastructure while hosting extremely sensitive information about you" sort of situation. Really the bigger concern is that a ton of infrastructure is at risk of getting held hostage.

Stop building the infrastructure, it is worse than nothing. They clearly don't have any interest in taking responsibility for securing these systems, which is why the friendly headline is "U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers" and not "U.S. Cities divulge sensitive information to criminals through a pattern of routine incompetence.".

Unfortunately this information was expected to be divulged and collected before the internet was widely used. Policies and infrastructures were not put in place (or ignored, as I've personally witnessed) to protect this information once it was digitized.

At the same time, there should be a real discussion over why so much information is being demanded, why SSN's are being overused as they are, etc.

This is like abstinence for STD prevention. Simultaneously true and irrelevant to the problem at hand.

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