Edward Felton is in as the FTC’s first Chief Technologist and it seems like a damn good choice.
In the last decade alone, Felten and his students and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (where Ars alumnus Tim Lee currently hangs his hat) have broken the music industry’s SDMI encryption scheme, filed a lawsuit agains the RIAA, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation board, and showed us all how to break a badly secured e-voting machine in under one minute. They also manage to run the popular “Freedom to Tinker” blog.
Here is Felton discussing the issues with electronic voting machines. It’s geek talk, but it’s five minutes. Watch it. What he says about paper records for each voter is key. (You get a receipt at an ATM, you need one for your vote too.)