Responsibilities of Technologists

Around the world, our lives are increasingly dependent on technology. What should be the responsibilities of technologists regarding technological and nontechnological issues?

• Solving real-world problems often requires technological expertise as well as sufficient understanding of a range of economic, social, political, national, and international implications. Although it may be natural to want to decouple technology from the other issues, such problems typically cannot be solved fully by technology alone. They must be considered in the broader context.
• Although experts in one area may not be qualified to evaluate detailed would-be solutions in other areas, their own experience may be sufficient to judge the conceptual merits of such solutions. For example, demonstrable practical impossibility or fundamental limitations of the concept, the existence of serious conflicts of interest of the participants, or an obvious lack of personal and systemwide integrity might be considered causes for concern.
• Ideally, we need more open and interdisciplinary examinations of the underlying problems and their proposed solutions.

The challenge of ensuring election system integrity illustrates these points. The election process is an end-to-end phenomenon whose integrity depends on the integrity of every step in the process. Unfortunately, each of those steps represents various potential weak links that can be compromised in many ways, accidentally and intentionally, technologically or otherwise; each step must be safeguarded from the outset and auditable throughout the entire process.

Irregularities reported in the 2004 U.S. national election span the entire process, concerning voter registration, disenfranchisement and harassment of legitimate voters, absence of provisional ballots, mishandling of absentee ballots, extensive delays in certain precincts, and problems in casting and counting ballots for e-voting as well as other modes of casting and counting votes. Some machines could not be booted. Some machines lost votes because of programming problems, or recorded more votes than voters. Some touch-screen machines reportedly altered the intended vote from one candidate to another. The integrity of the voting technologies themselves is limited by weak evaluation standards, secret evaluations that are paid for by the vendors, all-electronic systems that lack voter-verified audit trails and meaningful recountability, unaudited post-certification software changes, even runtime system or data alterations, and human error and misuse. Other risks arise from partisan vendors and election officials. Furthermore, unusually wide divergences between exit polls and unaudited results created question in certain states. All of these concerns add to uncertainties about the integrity of the overall election processes.

Some of you may wonder why, with modern technology, the voting process cannot be more robust. Whether the potential weak links are mostly technological or not, the process can certainly be made significantly more trustworthy. Indeed, it seems to be better in many other countries than in the U.S.; for example, Ireland, India, and the Netherlands seem to be taking integrity challenges seriously. As technologists, we should be helping to ensure that is the case, for example, by participating in the standards process or perhaps by aiding the cause of the Open Voting Consortium. However, the end-to-end nature of the problems includes many people whose accidental or intentional behavior can alter the integrity of the overall process, and thus portends many nontechnological risks.

Similar concerns also arise in many other computer-related application areas, such as aviation, health care, defense, homeland security, law enforcement, intelligence, and so on—with similar conclusions. In each case, a relevant challenge is that of developing and operating end-to-end trustworthy environments capable of satisfying stringent requirements for human safety, reliability, system integrity, information security, and privacy, in which many technological and nontechnological issues must be addressed throughout the computer systems and operational practices. Overall, technologists need to provide adequate trustworthiness in our socially important information systems, by technological and other means. Research and development communities internationally have much to offer in achieving trustworthy computer-communication systems. However, they also have serious responsibilities to be aware of the other implications of the use of these systems.

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