Introduction
Though Computers were used for limited activities during the Second World War, their potential to decisively change the course of wars was realized as evidenced in the cracking of Nazi Ciphers by Britain’s Colossus Computer. This led to a sustained funding for scientific research of military interest during the Cold War. This Research was mainly conducted by Civilian and Industrial Laboratories in association with the military. The Main reason for this technophilic trend essentially boils down to the conflicts which existed on the economic, political front between Communist Nations and the Western countries. This led to fears of another War like WWII and led to the amassing of weapons of Mass Destruction and the drive to further the development of the computer. This kind of a justification for scientific research based on possibility of a war i.e. a threat to national security, though fruitful had its own risks and a set of associated responsibilities which were needed in order to avert accidental disasters or oversights. I would like to discuss this aspect with a relevant example from the present time.
A Modern Day Example
The Electronic Voting System was started as a means to counter possible corruption and manipulation of Votes through the Ballot system in India. For the success of a Democratic nation, a safe and secure method of conducting voting is essential and technological research aimed at solving these problems in light of its importance to national security, has some possible risks and inherent responsibilities associated with it. For instance, the System has to be foolproof and be backed up so as to prevent any power outage from affecting it – which was realized and done so. Also, it should be ideally tamperproof, but as can be seen with the current EVMs in India, they are far from tamper proof. These Machines can be manipulated in various ways as shown by Hari Prasad and Group. While normal ballot system involved criminals cheating by manipulating the votes afterward during storage phase, no safe guard was developed in the Electronic system against a similar attack by more tech savvy criminals. Then how come EVMs have been claimed to be better than the normal system?
The Justification from officials is that it is “safer” than the human controlled system which can be tampered easily but this view has remained legitimate and largely unquestioned due to the fact that common folk (which includes these officials who are not trained professionally in these technologies) while very well understanding the concept of human error, are not familiar with the concept of computer error, and this has been the key then and now for the perceived safety in these systems. For example, the SAGE defense system which was made in America had one goal in mind – to show the citizens of the US that they were ready to react to the threat of Nuclear Weapons. However, in hindsight it has been shown that the SAGE system while inspiring and advancing Technology was not capable of handling the threat - it was little more than a stunt. In fact, in the past, a major Nuclear Incident was averted because of the correct handling by the human operator in charge of overseeing the system who on seeing that SAGE showed the US being attacked by a multitude of Missiles realized that it was actually a glitch in the system that had caused this and did not report it to his higher officers thus saving the world from M.A.D.
In Conclusion
While safeguards were taken in both cases, these were not enough in the sense that they did not anticipate certain key ways the system would fail. The sense of threat to national security which was perceived to be greater before the usage of Electronic systems, led to these machines not being tested adequately before going live. Thus, a key responsibility that the developers of these systems have is to test the reliability of these systems as this is the very reason they are replacing the current system. The system developed have to be made accountable to professionally capable people who can access the real value of these systems and not be distorted in their judgment due to a one sided knowledge based on a unreal idea of the safety in using Electronic systems against a perceived threat to security of the nation.
Bibliography
1) 1)From Impact to Social Process :Computer in Society and Culture , Paul Edwards
2) 2)The Risks Digest, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks
3) 3)http://indiaevm.org/
Barath A
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