Marco Aurélio Mello, the Supreme Court justice who presides over Brazil’s TSE meets president of congressional subcommittee on e-voting security earlier in May. See E-Vote: “Only In Brazil.”
Mr. Brunazo of Brazil’s Voto Seguro e-voting forum notes:
Ontem, dia 23 de maio, o secretário de Informática do TSE, Sr. Guiseppe Janino concedeu audiência pública aos membros da Subcomissão do Voto-E da Câmara Federal.
Yesterday, May 23, the head of the IT division of the federal elections tribunal, Giuseppe Janino, gave a public hearing to members of the E-Vote subcommittee of the lower house of Congress.
There is some background on Mr. Janino in my Alagoas E-Elections: A Mini-Mexico?
Ainda não ouvi tudo, mas o que ouvi já deu para ver porque os representantes do TSE não compareceram na primeira audiência da Câmara no dia 29 de março, quando prof. Clóvis Fernandes e eu fomos convidados para um debate com eles.
I have not listened to the whole thing, but what I heard was enough to indicate why representatives of the TSE did not appear at the first hearing in the House on March 29, when Prof. Fernandes and I were invited to debate them.
See Brazil: E-Voting Issues Get An Airing and Brazil’s E-Vote: Fernandes on Founding Faith.
Just about the only way to avoid a summons to testify before our gringo Congress is to plead the Fifth Amendment — the right not to be compelled to incriminate oneself — like Ms. Goodling of the Dept. of Justice.
Simplesmente continuam precisando afirmar inverdades, como: “todos os programas fontes usados nas urnas são apresentados aos partidos” ou “os partidos podem usar seus próprios recursos para verificarem as assinaturas digitais”, para sustentarem as aparências.
They continue to state flat-out untruths, such as: “All of the source code used in the voting machines are presented to the parties” or “The parties can use their own resources to verify the digital signatures.” [They use the statements] to maintain appearances.
Se afirmassem estas coisas na minha frente, seriam desmentidos no ato.
If they stated these things in my presence, they would be corrected on the spot.
Por isto preferem falar sozinhos. Sempre recusam convite para debate quando sabem que alguem que conhece os problemas reais de falta de segurança do sistema estará presente.
That is why they prefer to speak alone. They refused every invitation to debate when they know that someone who understands the real problems of security is going to be present.
Também acabo de assistir à propaganda institucional do TSE que a TV Cultura transmitiu em horário nobre por 30 mim. Me surpreendi.
I have also just watched the institutional propaganda by the TSE that TV Cultura broadcast in primetime, 30 minutes in length. It surprised me.
See “The People Have Faith in E-Voting, II”: Fake News in Prime Time, Brazilian Style.
Como a TV Cultura chegou a este ponto?
How did TV Culture get to this point?
A TV Cultura já foi um marco de produção de video de alto nivel cultual, agora parece que virou mera agência de divulgação de propaganda in[s]titucional do governo.
TV Cultura used to be a benchmark for TV programming of high quality, now it seems it has become a mere advertising agency for government “fake news.”
Me dá arrepio e tristeza ver esta decadência… brrrrrrr… toc toc toc…. xô alma penada….
Here, Mr. Brunazo expresses comical disgust and woe.
Toc toc toc — variant top top top — is the sound of the flat palm of the right hand rhythmically beating the hollow cylinder of a rolled-up left hand, producing the hollow sound, as we would put it in Brooklynese, of being “totally hosed.”
Lefties can reverse the configuration, of course.
The gesture was made popular by a character of the cartoonist Henfil: Fradim Baixim, an evil, grinning little monk. (I have a copy of Henfil’s “Memoirs of a Cucaracha,” about his sojourn in New York in the late 1960s, right here, in fact.)
The TSE makes the program available on its Web site. Click to zoom.
It certainly is amazing to see engineers refusing to take part in open debate on technical issues.
If I had a billion dollars, I would produce 50 million Portuguese translations of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies and hand them out at bus stations.
I would commission cordel poets to produce verse summaries of Popper’s ideas for performance by repentistas in the market squares of all the grotões.
(See my translation in The Horse That Shit Money for a popular literary treatment of magical thinking in the field of economics, for example.)
Unlike George Soros, I would attach no strings and support no political parties and candidates.
This, meantime, is quite literally a textbook case of “faith-based engineering.”
If the laws of physics are adverse to our political agenda, we outlaw the laws of physics.
You can see why São Paulo, for example, suffers from the sudden appearance of vast smoking holes. See also “In Hell, The Engineers Are Brazilan and the Musicians Are German.”
Brazil’s federal lotteries, meanwhile, have adopted open-source software for their systems. See Brazil: Penguin Calculates the Jackpot.
You can only hope that this is a sign of political will to push further into the shadowy realm of black-box computing on matters of great public moment.
In the Park Slope, Brooklyn, free paper, picked up on April 3: “Brooklyn says no to invisible electronic ballots.” We do not cotton to Tammany men on this side of the East River. Brooklyn solidarity, therefore, with rational beings do lado de baixo do Equador.
The New Market Machines 