Recent studies suggest that the 2008 Presidential campaign will cost in excess of a billion dollars, many times more expensive than the 2004 campaign. Because of these numbers, most of the front runners will refuse the limits put on them by the federal presidential campaign fund (did you check that box on your 2006 return?). At least one former candidate, Gov. Tom Vilsack, agrees with the pundits, retrieving his hat from the ring after being the first to place it in there.
My prediction is that the 2008 Presidential campaign will be the most expensive ever. How do I know this, you ask? I know this because I believe the expenses of the more successful people in this and future campaigns will be reduced by the emergence of on-line content in the national presidential "vetting" process. As our collective national attention is drawn away from traditional media (newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) advertising, I believe that running for any office will become less expensive. It doesn't cost much to get a campaign domain name, set up a blog, record a few podcasts at your campaign stops, and put up a video or two on YouTube.
As "The Millennials" become more involved in politics, they will expect to read a candidate's blog, to find out her position on any topic at any time of the day. Rather than watching FoxNews's or CNN's spin on a campaign stop, they will just pull it up on YouTube. They don't need the morning paper to see what the local outlets said about the candidate'slatest gaffe, they will look at what 150 papers thought about it on Google News. If they like what they hear in an interview, they can "tag it" and share it with others using del.icio.us, Digg, or reddit. "Citizen Journalists" can post their impressions on Blogger or pictures on flickr. As the primary season devolves into a national primary, it will be important for each candidate to reach out more to the virtual world, cyberspace, or the blogosphere.
Sounds great! Democracy replaces plutocracy! Without all those lobbyist dollars swelling campaign coffers, "Joe Citizen" will be heard again!
BUT WAIT...
Didn't I see a YouTube video featuring Senator Clinton addressing drone workers in a "mashup" of the famous Apple 1984 video with her on-line video address? Didn't that video tell us to vote for Senator Obama? I'm outraged! Shouldn't Senator Obama have to apologize to Senator Clinton and pull out of the race in disgrace? He didn't do it you say? How do you know? It turns out that it was done by someone who worked for a company that the Obama campaign hired, but the company assures us that this person was working on his own and neither they nor the Obama campaign endorse the ad. How do I know?
So, get to the point already!
Remember all those annoying, "I'm CANDIDATE'S NAME HERE, and I approve of this message..." at the end or beginning of all the ads in the 2006 race? In the on-line world, it is no longer sufficient to use this to "authenticate" campaign messages. Just as Senator Clinton's image was "lifted" from her video and placed on the "Big Brother" screen in the Apple ad, her "approval" message could be "lifted" and placed at the end of an ad for which she doesn't approve. How would we know?
Well, it turns out that there's a pretty easy way to tell and it's legally valid. A law signed in 2000 by President Clinton established the validity of digital and electronic signatures. I can "digitally sign" a file, and through the mathmagic of public key cryptography prove that I was the only one who could have signed it. In fact, and more importantly, you or any other "Joe Citizen" can prove that I signed the file. By digitally signing it (if I practice public key cryptography correctly), I can demonstrate that I was the only one who could have signed it (authenticity), the file is the same size with the same content as when I signed it (integrity) and I can't alter the content after I sign it (non-repudiation). When it comes to politics, the last one is more important than you might think.
Without giving a course on public key cryptography and message authentication codes (MACs), I think it's worth spending a sentence or two on each of the three factors ensured by a digital signature. The first factor, message authenticity, comes from the fact that I "sign" the file using a secret key that only I know. My public key, which anyone can obtain, works with my secret key to demonstrate that I was the only one who could possibly have signed it, provided that I don't share my secret key with anyone else.
Once signed, altering the file will invalidate the signature on the file even if only one bit (a 1 or 0) is changed in the file. Because of this the file's integrity is ensured. There's a scene in the movie "Primary Colors" where Governor Jack Stanton's (the barely disguised Clinton character played marvelously by John Travolta) staff realizes that a message that appears to be damning to the Governor's campaign is really a series of spliced together cell phone conversations. Taking my digitally signed videos and splicing together a new one, won't work, because altering the content of the file, invalidates the digital signature. This factor is known as the integrity of the file. It turns out this is also useful to determine that I received the whole file (without errors) and more innocent problems like network outages or memory errors didn't alter the contents of the file.
The final factor which a digital signature ensures is known as non-repudiation. What this means in non-geekspeak is that I can't "take something back." Once I put a signed file out there, I can't alter the file or else the digital signature is invalid. In a political campaign this may be more important than anything. If "I promise to give everyone a $100 tax credit" becomes "I promise to give everyone a $10 tax credit", the digital signature is no longer valid and "Joe Citizen" knows the file has been altered. Not only is the integrity of the digital file compromised, so is the candidate's.
Couldn't the candidate just pull the file down, create a new one and sign the new one and no one would be the wiser? Tell that to the New York Times. Last week they altered a story about soy milk and republished the altered article back-dated to the same time as the original. Who was the wiser? Only several hundred bloggers, and those who "tagged" those blogs in del.icio.us, boingboing, Digg, and reddit. Several hours after the New York Times altered their story, millions of ordinary "Joe Citizens" knew about their deception (All the news that fits, we print?).
Candidates and campaigns be on notice, even if the ordinary person is fooled by a deception like this, the digerati will set them straight and put you straight out of the race.
I'm Jim Leous and I digitally sign this message...
Of course, this assumes that we have a reliable way of mapping keys onto individuals (we don't), and that we have a working way of revoking compromised keys (we don't).
Given the shoddy state of PKI, I'm shocked that Clinton's bill hasn't been revoked. With our current level of technology, it's unsafe to have such legislation on the books.