[E-voting] The risks of confidential commercial code contracts

[Patrick OBeirne]

James Oberg wrote a great piece on the Cassini-Huygens mission that
reminds us: it's the things we DON'T test that can really bite us.
   http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/oct04/1004titan.html

   [This is a rather remarkable story of Boris Smeds, whose discovery
   of a flaw in Cassini's receiver and subsequent persistent apparently
   has saved the mission.  PGN]

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Alenia Spazio's insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in 
this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver. 
As JPL's Mitchell explained to Spectrum, "Alenia Spazio considered JPL to 
be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data."
JPL's Horttor admitted that NASA probably could have insisted on seeing the 
design if it had agreed to sign standard nondisclosure agreements, but NASA 
didn't consider the effort worthwhile, automatically assuming Alenia Spazio 
would compensate for the changing data rate.

  Patrick O'Beirne, Systems Modelling Ltd.
  http://www.sysmod.com/