http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2004.php
Electronic Frontier Foundation Honors Pioneer Award Winners
EFF to Honor Kim Alexander, David Dill, and Aviel Rubin at the Thirteenth
Annual Pioneer Awards Ceremony
Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release
San Francisco, CA - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will hold
its 13th Annual Pioneer Awards presentation at 6:30 p.m. on April 22nd
at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California, in
conjunction with the 2004 Computers, Freedom & Privacy (CFP)
conference. The online civil liberties group chose to honor Kim
Alexander, David Dill, and Aviel Rubin for spearheading and nurturing
the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern
elections.
Since 1991, the EFF Pioneer Awards have recognized individuals who
have made significant and influential contributions to the development
of computer-mediated communications or to the empowerment of
individuals in using computers and the Internet.
"I'm so pleased to be able to give this recognition to Kim, David, and
Avi. Like many others who often go unrecognized, they have been doing
incredibly important work to protect our democracy while using
technology," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "I'm proud that
EFF is able to honor a few of these generally unsung heroes with our
yearly Pioneer Awards."
Kim Alexander
Kim Alexander is president of the California Voter Foundation (CVF), a
nonprofit, nonpartisan organization she started in 1994 to advance new
technologies to improve democracy.
Over the past decade, Alexander has led pioneering efforts to develop
the Internet into an effective tool for voter education and campaign
finance disclosure in California and beyond. Her interest in democracy
and technology led her to become involved with voting technology, and
she has since become one of the nation's leading voices for secure and
verifiable computerized voting systems.
In 1999 she served on California's Internet Voting Task Force, which
in 2000 issued the first comprehensive study of Internet voting
security and concluded that the Internet was not yet a safe place for
securely transacting ballots. In 2003, she served on the California
Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Touch Screen Voting Task Force. The task
force report included a minority opinion of which Alexander was a
co-author. The California Secretary of State adopted the opinion, and
as a result, California is the first state in the nation to require
that electronic voting machines provide a voter-verified paper trail.
David Dill
David Dill is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
with a primary research focus on the theory and application of formal
verification techniques to system designs, including hardware,
protocols, and software.
In 2003, he turned a critical eye to electronic voting systems,
founding VerifiedVoting.org to champion transparent and publicly
verifiable elections. The VerifiedVoting.org website educates the
public about the problem with relying upon electronic voting machines
to record and count our votes without the backup of a voter-verifiable
audit trail; points to reasonable solutions that are within reach; and
provides a list of actions voters can take, encouraging them to act on
their own behalf to ensure that their votes are counted in future
elections.
Dill served on the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Committee on
Touch Screen Voting, and joined Kim Alexander in successfully
advocating for voter-verified paper audit trails. He also serves on
the IEEE P1583 voting standards committee, and is a member of the DRE
Citizen's Oversight Committee for Santa Clara County, California.
Aviel Rubin
Aviel Rubin is Professor of Computer Science and Technical Director of
the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Rubin led the effort to expose security flaws in Diebold
computer-based voting systems, combining technical skill and
articulation to the public in such a way that his solid technical work
could not be ignored by those who would prefer an insecure status quo.
In 2003, Rubin co-authored a report on Diebold that focused a national
spotlight on the integrity of electronic voting machines. He also
co-authored an analysis of the government's planned SERVE system for
Internet voting for military and overseas civilians, which led to the
cancellation of that dangerous project.
Rubin is author and co-author of several books on information
security, serves as Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Internet
Technology, and is a member of the advisory board of Springer's
Information Security and Cryptography Book Series. He is also a member
of the board of directors of the USENIX Association and serves on the
DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group.
The judges for this year's EFF Pioneer Awards were: Herb Brody (Senior
Editor, Technology Review), Beth Givens (Founder and Director of the
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse), Moira Gunn (Host, "Tech Nation,"
National Public Radio), Donna Hoffman (Associate Professor of
Management, Vanderbilt University), Peter Neumann (Principal
Scientist, SRI Intl.; Moderator, ACM Risks Forum), Drazen Pantic
(Media & Tech. Director, NYU Center for War, Peace & the News Media),
Barbara Simons (past President, Association for Computing Machinery &
U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Alumnus), and Karen Schneider (Director,
Librarians' Index to the Internet).
Prior Pioneer Award recipients include Tim Berners-Lee, Linus
Torvalds, and Vinton Cerf, among many others.
For this advisory:
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2004.php
For more information about the EFF Pioneer Awards:
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/
For details about the 2004 CFP conference:
http://www.cfp2004.org/
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