Government Election data on a commercial site?

Election fever has hit Trinidad and Tobago. One good thing is that all sorts of people have been working on a registration drive - make sure you're registered, only a few more days left to register, etc. That's great. The Election and Boundaries Commission set up a telephone hotline and has been putting ads in every media outlet to get people to make sure they're registered to vote.

BUT

Recently there have been a lot of emails along the lines of the following:

Please have all persons check the following site to check their registration
http://www.votett.com/

Now - I have a problem with this. This is not an official Government website. When I registered to vote, I gave my information to the Government. Not to a commercial website. The EBC has publicly indicated that they don't know anything about this site. So HOW did they get the ENTIRE election database?

And more disturbingly, why is no-one asking this question? Why are Trinidad and Tobago nationals blithely logging on to a website that has their national identification information without asking them - hey - whoo are you and how did you get MY INFO?

If the Govt gave it to them, then we need to know under what law are they allowed to hand over something as important as the election database, how do they determine who gets it, and what information do they get? The EBC has my ID number, my address, my age, my date of birth. In other words, more than enough information for anyone to open a bank account in my name, take out a credit card, even a loan or a mortgage.

Who are the people behind this website and what precautions are they taking with my data? What do they intend to do with it besides allow me to find out if I am registered to vote? Will they use it later on to spam me? To steal my identity? To interfere with my life?

Do our laws allow the Government to had this information over to just anyone? Dry so?

Has anyone heard of identity theft? This website and the process that allowed this data to fall into commercial hands needs to be investigated, and precautions put into place to prevent such access to sensitive data and posting it online!

The site is currently offline and I hope it stays that way. It's important for people to have an easy way to check their electoral status, but not at the risk that this poses.

10 Future Web Trends

10 Future Web Trends
From read/Write Web, one of the standard annual (or more frequent) prediction lists - but this one does have some interesting stuff.

Microsoft + Facebook = Trouble for Google

Interesting take on the MS/Google/Facebook wars that are coming? Who's really buying whom? Both Google and MS have indicated interest in buying FB. But then Google may out-open the FB API with thier own? All that's sure is that interesting times lie ahead. And lots and lots of advertising revenue is at stake.

read more | digg story

An educated and informed electorate? In Trinidad and Tobago? Not seeing it!

A friend wrote this recently in response to a mailing list thread about development and national wealth building.
Trinidad and Tobago Government has indicated that their goal is for us to attain developed nation status by 2020.

"Please be aware that we have raised a bunch of politicians, the majority of which are only interested in the prestige and money without handling the responsibility.

We have let them get away with it for so long that it is WE who are to blame. We have been lazy in choosing representatives. We need to make the younger generation understand that voting is essentially hiring a group of SERVANTS to run the country.

Prime Minister is not KING. He is HEAD SERVANT.

When the politicians understand that, we may actually have a stab at building a "developed country".

/mike/"

and this is what I wrote in response (I have been thinking on this for a while)

In any democracy , it is the RESPONSIBILITY of the electorate to:

1) Educate themselves abouthte issues

2) Debate in a REASONED manner

3) Decide based on REASON who we are going to put to run the country the way we want them to

4) Hold them to certain standards, and

5) REMOVE them if they do not uphold the standards we set

Unfortunately we have not got 1 or 2, and hence the rest simply cannot follow.

What we have is a mass of people who consistently look for a paternalistic government to “give them this and that” and “take care of them” – totally missing the point that the Government has NOTHING to give. It is OUR patrimony, and we determine who we put as TRUSTEE of the national assets. It is not for Manning or Panday or Dookeran or any one of them to give us anything. It is already ours.

We have grossly abdicated our responsibility as citizens. We have handed over our assets, without any checking on who is managing it and what they intend to do with it. WHenn they unilaterally change the terms of the contract under which we allow them to manage our stuff, we do not complain (Draft constitution anyone? Systematic ignoring of Parliament? Defacto passing of laws by Cabinet instead of Parliament? Postponing of local government elections illegally for 2 years? – the 1 year postponement was legal, the extension wasn’t .)

If we allow people to push the line, the line goes further and further each time. We do not stand up and say – this is enough, we don’t like what you are doing.

Of course, they ALL do the same thing, and now people see Government as being a big bran tub, so anyone going into politics, I tend to assume (until they show me otherwise) that they only going to get their chance to dip.

The only solution to this is rational debate and discussion by the population, but with the total lack of literacy and critical thought that exists in this nation - I have serious doubts that this will happen.

For example – the last generation of thinkers are dying out. Who is there to take the place of Lloyd Best in the national discourse? We have stopped creating the intellectual class, who are so necessary to debate and create these ideas.

UWI is hugely responsible – it has been a training college and not a UNIVERSITY. UWI no longer teaches people to think, to exercise intellectual curiosity, and mental honesty. It teaches people to pass the exams, get the paper and get a wuk.

Getting a wuk is not conducive to development or national wealth building.

And as to how it encompasses computers – ICT is vital for development, but it needs to be understood and deployed in a sensible and rational manner by people who UNDERSTAND. If we cannot manage basic literacy for a large proportion of the population, imagine the level of technical illiteracy.

There are many people I encounter who STILL look at a computer as if it were a strange and wonderful thing dropped from the heavens by a beneficial god.

So – when Dookeran says things like – we will give the people 100,000 computers – they are more likely to go - OOOH! How wonderful. And not to think about the HOW, the WHY , the OUTCOMES of such a move. And then say – that’s crap because 1,2,3 or – that could work because a,b,c…

We ignore the BECAUSE. We make statements with no reference to fact or logic to distract from the beauty of the words forming the argument, the malapropisms, the sheer joy of hearing one’s own voice (green verbs, mispronunciations, and all)

AND WE DO NOT CALL PEOPLE ON IT. Where is the back story, where are the facts on which you based this opinion? Are those “facts” even really facts, or are they more opinion, rumour and hearsay dressed up in beads and feathers like Carnival Tuesday and masquerading as “fact”?

Women not participating in IG processes?

This is an update on the 2007 ICANN Nominating Committee (Nom Com).
The Nom Com received 93 Statements of Interest from candidates worldwide during an open nomination period that ran from 1 February 2007 to 18 May 2007. 12 candidates are female, 81 are male.

That is a ratio of 0.14 female applicant to every 1 male applicant in the technical governing body for the Internet.

This is a serious problem. The Internet is a vital part of the infrastructure for development. We cannot afford to have such a large gender gap - it will result in policies and processes that are not adequate and relevant to 50% of the world's population.

I know that women are grossly underrepresented in the technical community, and in the international internet governance arena as well. In IG, we tend to cluster in the ICT4D space, and not involve ourselves in the technical areas. But these areas are where policies that will shape the future Internet re being debated and implemented RIGHT NOW! We need to participate in these areas.

The NomCom this year had many issues getting candidates. Vint Cerf even posted a plea on YouTube and discussed it in the International Herald Tribune. Despite this, we get 81 male and only 12 female applicants for 9 open positions.

What can we do to get more women involved? I am out of ideas.

GoDaddy.com Reaches Agreement to Help RegisterFly Customers

GoDaddy.com Reaches Agreement to Help RegisterFly Customers

Finally! In a week or so the domains will be sorted. And hopefully ICANN can work on the process to improve the handling of any similar situations.

Good News from ICANN

Larry Seltzer at eWeek in this article finally shows ICANN some good press. ICANN has been doing good stuff, but seems as if the nay-sayers were much louder in public.
Finally some good news may get out.