New California e-voting measure uses hackers to test voting machine security

New voting machine review standards (PDF) proposed by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen would require independent code audits, extensive Red Team security testing, and support for paper records. Bowen's proposed standards, which have met with widespread approval from electronic voting reform advocates and computer security experts, could lead to the decertification of practically all the voting machines currently in use in the state of California.

FBI lost 160 laptops in last 44 months

How many laptops does the FBI lose? The Office of the Inspector General (or OIG; it's a part of the Department of Justice) sought to find out back in 2001, when it did an initial audit of the Bureau's losses of both weapons and laptops. The findings of that first audit were bad enough that the OIG began a follow-up on it, the results of which have just been released. The good news is that losses are dropping. The bad news is that they're still happening, and the FBI doesn't know if secure information is entering the wild.