Cheaters can delay poll result transmission

Prospective cheaters in the May elections can delay the transmission of voting results through cellphone signal jammers but they will be unable to send fake data to manipulate election results. Officials of telecommunication companies and Smartmatic-TIM – the firm that will supply poll machines – made the assurance Thursday during a hearing of the House oversight committee. The House was prompted to hold the hearing after 5,000 signal jammers were reported to have been shipped to the Philippines to disrupt the country's first ever fully-automated elections. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) will be transmitting election results from precincts to its servers through GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) network radio signals. GSM is the standard used by cellular mobile phone companies Globe Telecommunications Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. for its voice call and text-messaging services. “It would be very difficult for another transmitter to transmit [election results] if the entire area at that point being serviced by any service provider would be jammed," said Roy C. Ibay, Smart Communications Inc. senior manager for regulatory affairs. Froilan Castelo, regulatory division chief of Globe Telecom Inc., said transmitting fake election data to servers using their networks “in essence, in theory...cannot be done." “Virtually we will be establishing a private network for this purpose, and it has a special SIM, a special transmission link," Castelo said during the hearing. Adequate security measures will also be established in coordination with Smartmatic-TIM, the telecommunications officials said. This was affirmed by Cesar Flores, president of Smartmatic Asia, who said transmitting fake election data to manipulate the results is virtually impossible. Besides citing the use of SIM cards, Flores said that “a special network" will be used during the elections. “On the server side, there are [measures] to reject a false transmission," Flores said during the hearing. Every piece of data to be transmitted by the machines uses 128-bit encryption – the same security system used by banks around the world – and that the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines will only accept the digital signature of board of election inspectors. "Only the PCOS can do the transmission. I cannot transmit a different package. First I would have to crack the private network, which is not possible, and then I will have to crack the encryption and also the digital signature," said Flores. Smartmatic officials said "the only real damage these [signal-jamming] devices can do is they bring down the network in that specific precinct" which would lead to a delay. "The data cannot be emulated or falsified," he added. Earlier field tests showed PCOS machines having difficulties transmitting election data, even without signal jammers. - GMANews.TV