We believe we speak not only for ourselves, but other similar firms, projects & researchers working toward verifiable, accurate, secure & transparent election administration technology, when we observe that @ShadowIncHQ crossed a line & damaged other important work... Thread/
2/ The line they crossed is between one type of tech: campaign, electioneering, or organizing Apps, and another type of tech: mission-critical, application-specific, fault tolerant software, firmware & hardware to manage voter data, ballot data, and election data when...
3/ ...they lack the training and experience in using security-centric engineering practices to develop, test, and deploy this class of technology. It's one thing to build Apps for political campaign messaging & outreach. It's quite another to engineer software to...
4/ ...increase security, lower costs, and improve usability of election administration technology. That is totally different from campaigns or electioneering, which is part of the important arena of "CivicTech", while election administration is the heavier lift of "GovTech"...
5/ ...and the 2 categories of tech must NOT be confused nor conflated. We've spent most of today explaining to the Media how GovTech needs to be engineered & developed, and how the amateur effort we all witnessed in Iowa for a needless App should never be compared.
6/ @ShadowIncHQ had no business trying to build an App on a shoestring in 2-3 months that handled ballot-type data (even if only caucus data w/ paper backup). That kind of work (if necessary at all) needs to be left to those w/ the capabilities to do so; in other words...
7/ ...deeply experienced software & computer science firms like: @free_and_fair, @galois, @voting_works, @MITREcorp, @DXCTechnology and others (humbly including ourselves @OSET & @TrustTheVote).
8/ What's also frustrating is that the Democrats initially made a great case for their understanding the importance of election security, innovating election technology and issues like keeping ballot data away from tcp/ip networks until researchers figure out the security...
9/ ...and then the DNC + IDP demolished those efforts in a single ill-advised project that was a solution in search of a problem. For what? To keep a software shop busy? To make an election feel so "21st century?" To engage more participants? To appease a donor?
11/ ...let those who've been educated, trained, and are experienced in this category of engineering for election administration build that class of technology. You'll find they believe just b/c something can be done doesn't mean it should & avoid solutions in search of problems.
12/ PS: That kind of high-assurance technology doesn't come at the basement bargain price of $68K, or take 8 weeks to build and launch without robust full-stack, system-, load- and pen- testing (let alone training + resiliency planning (i.e., scaling phone support)). /END
