Thursday, August 03, 2006

The Hunt by Teodoro Petkoff Deputy Albornoz made lots of noise about Sumate today, but in essence all he was saying is that Sumate did not commit the illegalities that he had accused them of last week. Indeed, all the Deputy did today was say that Sumate received funds via local banks, not in US$ and most of them before the new law was approved anyway. So it did not matter if Sumate wss not registered in CADIVI, bringing in dollars has nothing to do with CADIVI. But Shrelock Albornoz, as Petkoff calls him, continues screaming about Sumate, but fails to point out what it is that is illegal about that instituitions funding. In fact, we may ask: Where does PPT, Albornoz' party gets its funds? We simply have no idea, in contrast with Sumate that keeps and submits audited financial statements. How about Chavez' MVR? Where does it get its funding? Well, as Petkoff points out, in the only well known case of ILLEGAL campaign funding in Venzuela's history, Spain's Juez Garzon determined that Hugo Chavez received MILLIONS of dollars illegally from two Spanish banks. Of course, this was never investigated. Such are the ways of autocratic and dictatorial regimes. It is simply all about hunting and persecuting your enemies as Petkoff points out in his Editorial today: The Hunt by Teodoro Petkoff Nothing has happened in this country Using a phrase from that personality named Jose Vicente Rangel we could qualify the situation as “normal”. All Venezuelans have a dignified home, all Venezuelans old enough to work have a job, there are no kids in the streets, nor old people in the streets, nor indigenous citizens in the streets. All Venezuelan study and students no longer have to repeat the school year. Security is the norm in the barrios and residential areas, hamlets and cities. Newspapers are thinking of eliminating the sections on crime, because only natural deaths occur these days. However, such a disproportionate normality worries the dominant political circles. Revolution and calm do not go along well. They are diametrically the opposite from each other. The calm, drowsiness, demobilizes, makes you feel lightheaded, makes the masses that need heroics sleepy so that, even if it is unlikely that the socialist paradise will arrive in the next few days, months of years, at least they can live the drunkard illusion of confronting the empire and make it bite the dust. The main exponent of the empire in Venezuela, with Mister Brownfield’s permission is Sumate. José Sherlock Albornoz, a bloodhound who does not miss a thing, is following the trail of the mysterious funds that feed the organization. In charge of the mixed committee of the National Assembly he has proposed himself to summons (yesterday was the first) the Superintendent of Banks, the Tax Superintendent and the President of the Venezuelan Central Bank, organism to which the Constitution assigns the task of formulating and executing monetary policy, design and execute foreign exchange policy, regulate the currency, credit, interest rates and administer international reserves. Can there be a relationship between these tasks and Sumate? Sherlock Albornoz clarifies this mystery. Elementary Alejandro, the President of Sumate qualified the investigation as “political persecution”. And, indeed it is. The National Assemblies oversteps its attributions and misspends public funds in useless hors of republican life, in this surrealist circus which lacks any grace. Nothing happens except for these diminished hours for the country. What was public and notable was that a bank of Spanish origin contributed to the financing of the campaign of Hugo Chavez in a sort of deal that Chavez’ MVR shuts up about and that the Deputies of the regime forget with remarkable quickness. While the CNE asks the candidates to RESPECT institutions, these in turn laugh at the country and its members who actually elected them. Because the true objective of this non-Government is not only to control institutions, but also to convert them in old worthless objects, in docile instruments of their political whims, in weapons for hunting, today against Sumate, tomorrow against any organization or individual that bothers or dissents from this unhinged regime. 10:45:00 PM    comment []

Chavez breaks realtions with Israel Chavez breaks relations with Israel over the attack on Lebanon... Of course, he is a man of principles: 8:14:35 PM    comment []

The Devil is in the details, Chapter IV. One voter, one vote: indelible ink or fingerprint machines? This was too good not to translate. Bruni performs an analysis of the fingerprint machines, as applied in the Venezuelan election and gets an answer that I have always suspected was the reason why we never heard any evaluation of the performance of this very expensive fingerprint capturing system in our elections: The Devil is in the details, Chapter IV. One voter, one vote: indelible ink or fingerprint machines? The first time I heard about the fingerprint capturing machines I was surprised at the large number of technical and logistical challenges that would have to be overcome in order to install such a system and I asked myself if the possibility of multiple votes in Venezuela, justified the purchase and installation of such an expensive and complicated system. In fact, in a pamphlet by COGENT systems, the winner of the bidding process, it is specified that never before had such a system been implemented, with so many technical challenges, as the one that was installed in Venezuela[1]. But, independently of whether it is, or not, technically feasible to put such a system in practice with success, the question that has been going around in my head is if the Directors of the CNE [2] that defend the fingerprint machines are right, if, effectively, the fingerprint machines guarantee the premise of One voter, one vote I decided then to investigate a little bit about systems for the recognition of fingerprints I found that such systems are used specially for criminal identification and that there are two types of problems that an be tackled. The first one is called “1:1” or “one-to-one”,. In this one, the fingerprint is compared with another one that is believed to be that of the same person. For example the fingerprint of Pedro Perez is compared with that which the authorities have of Pedro Perez and it is determined whether it happens to be the same fingerprint or not. The second problem is the “1:N” or “one to many”. In this case you want to know if the fingerprint of Pedro Perez is found among a set of fingerprints stored by the authorities. It is obvious that the second case is more complicated and that it can yield a higher percentage of errors than the first. Logically, in an election, I told myself, both types of recognitions have to be performed to determine if Pedro Perez is who he says he is and later determine if he already voted. I could not obtain official information about this, but I have been told that in the Venezuelan elections only the second type of verification was performed, that is, the “one to many”, while the determination if the person was Pedro Perez was done with the National ID card, called cedula. Following this, I tried to learn more about the ways to verify such systems. I found that the then National Institute for Standards (NIST) of the US Government, performs tests to determine the precision of various commercial systems, including among them, the systems made by Cogent Systems. The evaluation is made following two complementary criteria, the TAR and the FAR. According to one of the NIST reports [3], the TAR (True Accept Rate) is defined as the fraction of correct identifications by the identity algorithm, while the FAR (False Accept Rate) is defined as the fraction of false positives in recognizing an identity. Now, even thought the Cogent systems received excellent reviews in the independent tests that were performed, the accuracy rates were not 100% Let’s see, for example, the results relative to the identification systems of individuals presented by NIST at the Biometrics Congress in 2004 [4] (see page 16). According to the presentation, it was found that in the tests for the identification of visitors, Cogent’s technology had a TAR of 98% when databases of high quality fingerprints were used and it could go down as low as 47% when databases with low quality fingerprints were used. In both cases, a value of FAR (false positives) of 0.01% was found. Let’s set aside these numbers in our minds for the moment and let’s make an analysis of the possible results of the application of fingerprint capturing machines in the Venezuelan elections. When a vote arrives at the fingerprint machine, there are two possibilities: that he is an honest voter (He has not voted yet) or he is a voter that cheats (He already voted and wants to vote again). On the other hand, the verification system for the fingerprint capturing system can respond correctly or erroneously if the voter already voted or not or even may not find the fingerprint or take longer than the time required to do it. We then have the following possibilities: True state of the voter System Response Interpretation f the result What does the law say in this case? [5] Case1 Did not vote Did not vote correct Allows vote Case2 Did not Vote Voted error Does not allow vote Case3 Did not vote Can’t find it error Allows vote Case4 Voted Voted correct Does not allow vote Case5 Voted Did not vote error Allows vote Case6 Voted Can’t find it error Allows vote As you can see, it is a system much more complex than a simple system to identify Pedro Perez whether individually or with a database of many fingerprints. Thus if you were to design tests to evaluate the trustworthiness of the answers of such systems, the levels of precision have to be much tighter than those found in identification systems. Now, suppose for a moment that we can apply the TAR given above for our system. That is, let’s say that the TAR is 98% for excellent fingerprint databases and goes down to 47% for low quality fingerprints. The TAR gives the rate for a good performance which, in our system, consists of cases 1 and 4. Let’s say also that only 25% of the fingerprints stored in the database of the CNE are of low quality and finally, let’s say that there are 10 million voters. In this case, we would obtain that only 8.52 million voters are in the category of “One Person, one vote”, the other 1.48 million missing would fall under the category of errors. According to the law, in cases 3,5 and 6 they are allowed to vote and, among them, we don’t know if there are any cases of multiple votes. Of course, if the CNE were a serious organization, it would have already informed us of how many cases there were of multiple votes and false positive recognitions by the little machines. After spending so many millions on them, Venezuelans deserve to know what are the TAR and other statistical errors of such an onerous system. No? One thing is certain. The CNE is NOT right: the fingerprint machines DO NOT GUARANTEE the principle of “One Voter, one vote” ….and the indelible ink is much cheaper and much faster…. References [1] COGENT document, “One Voter one Vote”. [2] El Nacional, 30 de Julio, page A2. Reference to CNE Directors Lucena y Hernández. [3] Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation 2003, Análisis Report. National Institute of Standards and Technology. [4] Wilson, C.L., “NIST Patriot Act Biometric Testing”, Biometrics Conference, 2004. [5] CNE, Resolución N° 041022-1621, “Normas sobre el procedimiento de captación de huellas dactilares y garantía del principio de un elector un voto en las elecciones regionales 2004”. Note: after publishing this post, a reader indicated that my sentences about the CNE not publishing the data was not accurate since the information on the number of  "cheaters" in the elections have been published in a table of an Ultimas Noticias article of July 30, 2006 (page30). According to that table, between the Revocatory Referendum and the governors elections there has been a total of 53 cheaters. Such a value shows that not only the system is not 100% reliable and produces mistrust among the voters, but its cost and the political anxiety it has created cannot be justified by the abysmally low cheating statistics. In the same table, I discovered some data called "grey zones" that show the number of  voters that could not be properly identified by the system. The numbers shown are quite high and seem to confirm even more strongly that the "one voter, one vote" principle cannot be guaranteed. Another reader indicated that in the CAPEL report there was information about the digital fingerprints. A quick review made me realize that my hypothesis of 25% of bad quality fingerprints was optimistic. Therefore, the errors produced due to the imprecision of the fingerprints is even higher. In other words, the more I learn details about this system, the more I like the indelible ink. That is why I say that the Devil is always in the details. 12:17:12 AM    comment []