The United States and Russia disagree about the best way to shield computer systems and the Internet from the growing menace of cyberattacks, with Russia favoring an international pact akin to those negotiated for chemical weaponry and the United States preferring better cooperation between international law enforcement organizations. Russia’s proposed treaty would prohibit a country from clandestinely incorporating malicious codes or circuitry that could be later triggered remotely in the event of war. “We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” says an anonymous official of the U.S. State Department. “They want to constrain offense.” U.S. officials are particularly opposed to agreements that would permit governments to censor the Internet, arguing that they would provide cover for repressive regimes. They also are concerned that a treaty would be ineffective because determining if a cyberattack is perpetrated by a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or an independent rogue agent is nearly impossible. U.S. officials say the discord over the proper cyberdefense approach has impeded global law enforcement cooperation, especially since a substantial number of the assaults against U.S. government targets originate from China and Russia. The Russians, meanwhile, perceive the lack of an accord as encouraging a cyberarms race. The Pentagon intends to set up a military cybercommand to get ready for both offensive and defensive cyberwarfare.

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Enrollment in graduate science and engineering (S&E) programs has risen to new levels, including greater percentages of non-White ethnic groups and women, according to a new National Science Foundation (NSF) report. The report says the recent growth toward ethnic and racial diversity represents the largest change in the demographic composition of S&E graduate students in the United States. White, non-Hispanic students accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in these programs in 2000, according to the report, but only 66 percent in 2007. The NSF report also says that enrollment in U.S. S&E programs grew by about 3.3 percent in 2007, the largest annual growth rate since 2002, and almost double the 1.7 percent growth rate in 2006. The number of post-doctoral appointments at academic institutions also reached a new record, about 36,000, up from about 30,000 in 2001. The proportion of men to women among U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in U.S. S&E programs was divided 52 percent to 48 percent, and among foreign students men outnumbered women 66 percent to 34 percent. U.S. citizens and permanent residents represented the majority of graduate students, according to the report, but the majority of postdoctoral appoints, 58 percent, were given to temporary visa holders.

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New York University professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has developed a computer model that can forecast the outcomes of international conflicts, and the U.S. Defense Department has found the model very useful. De Mesquita says the model begins by assuming that everyone is interested in two dimensions on any policy issue–getting the outcome as close to what they desire as possible, and getting credited as playing an essential role in reaching or thwarting an agreement. “The model estimates the way in which individual decision-makers trade off between credit and policy outcomes,” he notes. De Mesquita says the model has been generally welcomed by people more oriented toward quantitative modeling, while those who tend to focus on area studies or historical case study analysis have been less receptive. “The problems I look at with my model typically involve many dozens of players, sometimes more than 200,” he says. “There is no way to construct biased data to produce a desired outcome except to make the data appear transparently wrong to anyone looking at the data.” The model is founded on game theory, and De Mesquita points out that advances in computing power have made this kind of modeling unrestrained by memory or processing limitations.

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New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt (D) recently reintroduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a bill that would create a national voting standard that would require paper-ballot voting systems and accessible ballot-marking devices coupled with routine random audits of electronic voting tallies. “Congress should pass a national standard ensuring that all voters can record their votes on paper and requiring that in every election, randomly selected precincts be audited,” Holt says. In every federal election since 2003, when the Help America Vote Act was enacted, citizen watchdog groups have collected information on voting machine failures. In 2004, the Election Incident Reporting System received more than 4,800 voting machine complaints from all but eight states, and in 2006 a sampling of voting machine problems gathered by election integrity groups and the media exposed more than 1,000 incidents in more than 300 counties in all but 14 states. In 2008, the Our Vote Live hotline received almost 2,000 voting machine problem reports in all but a dozen states, and 19 states conducted completely unauditable elections. Paperless electronic voting is preferred by many election officials, but it is unverifiable and unauditable, and computer scientists say that computers are unreliable without an independent audit mechanism. “The clear trend is towards paper ballots,” says Holt. “In fact, every jurisdiction that has chosen to change its voting system since 2006 has chosen to use paper ballots with optical scan counting. That should be the standard.”

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The Chinese government has postponed its mandate that manufacturers embed Web-filtering software in all new PCs sold in the country, in the wake of fervent opposition inside and outside China. The Xinhua news agency quoted a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology representative as saying that some PC makers claimed they did not have sufficient time to meet the July 1 deadline, in which case a delay was permissible. The postponement alleviates global PC companies’ worries that complying with the rules would make them susceptible to legal liability and allegations of aiding censorship, yet they also were reluctant to openly challenge China’s government, given the heavy concentration of both PC production and PC sales in the country. The Chinese government has said the purpose of implementing the Web-filtering software is to prevent youngsters from viewing online pornography and other “harmful content,” and it insists that the software “definitely has no capability for collecting users’ information or monitoring their Internet behavior.” Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) president Dean Garfield says the computer industry is in favor of enabling parents to block access to objectionable online material, but is against any requirement that specifies a particular company’s product. Isaac Mao with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society says the Chinese initiative “has lost legitimacy” and that the government’s enforcement of the rule would be impossible. There also are indications that the plan has broadened public interest in China regarding questions about government inquisitiveness and censorship. The postponement does not signal the end of the issue, and a Hewlett-Packard representative said the company is collaborating with the ITIC “to seek additional information, clarify open questions, and monitor developments on this matter.”

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