Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru
NEW YORK: Indian E-voting researcher Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, who was recently released on bail after being imprisoned for his security work in India, has been conferred the Pioneer Award by the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Vemuru is one of the four individuals who will be honored with the award this year at a San Francisco ceremony on Nov 8.
The other award recipients include transparency activist Steven Aftergood; public domain scholar James Boyle; and legal blogger Pamela Jones and the website Groklaw.
“These winners have all worked tirelessly to give critical insight and context to the tough questions that arise in our evolving digital world,” said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. “We need strong advocates, educators, and researchers like these to protect our digital rights, and we’re proud to honor these four Pioneer Award winners for their important contributions.”
Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru is a security researcher in India who recently revealed security flaws in India’s paperless electronic voting machines. He has endured jail time, repeated interrogations, and ongoing political harassment to protect an anonymous source that enabled him to conduct the first independent security review of India’s electronic voting system.
Prasad spent a year trying to convince election officials in India to complete such a review, but they insisted that the government-made machines were “perfect” and “tamperproof”.
Instead of blindly accepting the government’s claims, Prasad’s international team discovered serious flaws that could alter national election results. Months of hot debate have produced a growing consensus that India’s electronic voting machines should be scrapped, and Prasad hopes to help his country build a transparent and verifiable voting system.
Steven Aftergood directs the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Project on Government Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of official secrecy and to promote public access to government information. He writes and edits Secrecy News, an email newsletter and blog that reports on new developments in secrecy and disclosure policy. Secrecy News also provides direct public access to various official records that have been suppressed, withdrawn, or that are simply hard to find. In 1997, Aftergood was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency that successfully led to the declassification and publication of the total intelligence budget for the first time in 50 years.
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. Professor Boyle is recognized for his exceptional scholarship on the “second enclosure movement” – the worldwide expansion of intellectual property rights – and its threat to the rich public domain of cultural and scientific materials that the Internet might otherwise make available. An original board member of Creative Commons and co-founder of Science Commons, Professor Boyle has worked for over 20 years as both an academic and institution builder to celebrate and protect the values of cultural and scientific openness.
When Pamela Jones created Groklaw in 2003, she envisioned a new kind of participatory journalism and distributed discovery – a place where programmers and engineers could educate lawyers on technology relevant to legal cases of significance to the Free and Open Source community, and where technologists could learn about how the legal system works. Groklaw quickly became an essential resource for understanding such important legal debates as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the European Union antitrust case against Microsoft, and whether software should qualify for patent protection.
Awarded every year since 1992, EFF’s Pioneer Awards recognize leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. Past honorees include World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, security expert Bruce Schneier, and the Mozilla Foundation and its chairman Mitchell Baker, among many others. Pioneer Award candidates are nominated by the public.
India Post News Service
