In celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science on the 11th of February, Electronic Frontiers Australia is proud to feature A/Prof Vanessa Teague, a leading voice in Australian cryptography and is a former EFA board member.
Her work is at the forefront of protecting our digital rights, including uncovering vulnerabilities in e-voting systems and co-designing protocols for improved election integrity. She was also part of the research team which uncovered that supposedly de-identified personal information in the Medicare/PBS open dataset could be re-identified by cross-referencing it to publicly available data.
She is currently Chairperson of Democracy Developers, CEO of Thinking Cybersecurity, and an Associate Professor (Adjunct) at ANU’s College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics.
Image: A/Prof Vanessa Teague, supplied.
EFA: You began your journey with a bachelor of science degree at Melbourne and then a PhD in computer science at Stanford. What drew you to science? What was it about the logic of cryptography and game theory that first captured your interest?
VT: I loved maths and I just mucked around with a lot of things: logic, algebra, game theory, cryptography. I eventually settled on cryptography because the maths is really fun and it has tremendous practical applications for human rights: properly implemented strong crypto is a broadly available, very powerful tool for everyone to control and protect their own communications.
EFA: You’ve often cited the 2000 US Election as a pivotal moment in your career. Looking back, what made you realise that computer science could be the missing piece of the democratic puzzle?
VT: The extraordinary and instant trust that was placed in a voting computer for no reason other than that it had a comforting message on a shiny screen. The full implications of this mistake still poison American democracy, even though the paperless touchscreen voting machines are mostly gone.
There’s a really important lesson here for Australian election administration: trust that is based on nothing but slick PR can disappear overnight. When we use computers for voting or counting, they absolutely must come with a transparent trail of publicly-verifiable evidence that they got the right answer. If voters and scrutineers can’t verify the process, it’s not the right way to run the election.
So when the Victorian Electoral Commission says that they want a “meaningful and informed debate” on universal Internet voting for local government elections, it’s up to us technologists to inform them how easy it might be to fiddle the results without detection.
EFA: Your research into the re-identification of “anonymous” medical data was a wake-up call for Australian health policy. What drove you to move from verifying democracy to the privacy of medical records?
VT: Again, the need to call b.s. on something that a lot of people mistakenly believed – specifically, that highly sensitive medical data can be easily ‘de-identified’ and safely published on the Internet without consent.
Although the Australian government stopped publishing it on the Internet where pesky scientists can examine it, both government and private enterprise continue to engage in sharing of weakly de-identified data without consent. Your easily linkable [de-identified] personal information has probably been shared numerous times without your consent already this year.
EFA: The theme of this year’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science is “Building Inclusive Futures for Women and Girls”. Are there any current digital rights or privacy issues that you believe uniquely or disproportionately impact women or girls?
VT: Non-consensual surveillance. I don’t just mean sticking a secret camera in the bathroom (though that’s a problem too); I mean the total normalisation of the idea that the apps on your phone and the operating systems of your computer and your car constantly report to third parties where you are, who you’re with and what you’re doing.
EFA: How does Democracy Developers and the use of open-source software contribute to a more democratic and inclusive technological future for all?
VT: Democracy Developers is building privacy-preserving open source tools to encourage Australians to learn about Australian democracy and engage with their parliamentary representatives. We have an overview at Democracy Developers website.
We’re currently alpha-testing (at Democracy Developers), which helps you find out who your MPs are, and send them an email about a bill currently before the Australian parliament. Give it a try and send us feedback.
– Kirsten Frederiksen, EFA Board Member, for Electronic Frontiers Australia.
Image: A/Prof Vanessa Teague, supplied.