[TeMPOraL]

I intuitively agree on transparency being important for democracies, but then I see "lower complexity" and "transparency" as both being opposed to "higher security". Taking for example the secure enclave you mention, its whole point is to bolster security through removing transparency via a complex hardware and software system.

[Dalewyn]

You (and probably a lot of tech nerds) need to remember democracy is a social challenge, not a technological challenge. What applies to technology does not necessarily apply to society.

The more opaque and complicated you make so-called "democracy", the less the electorate have faith that it is fair and representative. Simplicity and transparency is security, security that democracy is working in a way everyone can and must agree with even if they don't necessarily like it.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't think it's technology vs society issue (and I do honestly maintain that social problems are supposed to be solved by technology, because that's literally what technology is for by definition). It's an issue of framing security.

Cybersecurity mostly assumes the vendor is the trusted party - the users are the sheep the vendor is shepherding[0]. Security is designed to pretend first and foremost the vendor, and secondly its flock of users, against attacks from outside parties and other users. The users are untrusted parties here.

Democracy, in contrast, is an unusual relationship in which it's the organization - the government - that's the untrusted party. Transparency is crucial to security of this system, because the very party that organizes it is the one most incentivized to subvert it. It's a special case where opaqueness is not accepted. This is why it's hard to port ideas from cybersecurity to democracy - the assumptions underpinning the two are opposite to each other. Most of what infosec considers good practice would immediately violate the electorate's faith you refer to.

Exercise for the reader: how would our computer systems look if the security field emphasized end users as trusted, and vendors as malicious parties?

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[0] - I love how the ubiquitous analogies to good shepherds, including biblical ones, conveniently omit the fact that the very reason shepherd cares for their sheep is so they can be fleeced for wool and/or slaughtered for meat.