COMPUTERGRAM INTERNATIONAL: SEPTEMBER 01 2000 SECTION: INTERNET Hackers Hijacking ICANN Elections? By Kevin Murphy A German hacker group looks set to win a seat on the board of domain name regulator ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, possibly confirming fears that the controversial election procedure could be hijacked by special interest groups. ICANN is currently conducting a nomination procedure among its At Large Membership to work out who to put on the ballot for five of the 18 seats on the organization�s board of directors. There are already 18 names on the ballot sheet, chosen by a special Nominating Committee, but any person over the age of 16 can also be elected by securing the backing of 2% of the membership in his or her continent. The five seats will ultimately be elected, one from each region, by the ALM. The Chaos Computer Club, a Hamburg-based hackers� web site run at ccc.de, currently has at least two of the top five nominations from the European constituency, and CCC spokesperson Andy Mueller-Maguhn has almost 1,000 more nominations than any other nominee in any of the five geographical constituencies. The group, which claims to be of the "white-hat" variety, has about 1,600 members and came to fame three years ago when members went on German TV to demonstrate in detail how Microsoft Corp�s ActiveX technology could be used to hack into international banking systems. The hack was never actually exploited by the CCC. As ComputerWire went to press last night, Mueller-Maguhn led the nominations with 1934 endorsements, followed by "political scientist" Jeanette Hofmann with 816 and Lutz Donnerhacke with 649. The aptly-named Donnerhacke is a member of the CCC and was closely involved in the banking hack expose of 1997. ICANN was criticized in March by democracy groups Common Cause and the Center for Democracy and Technology for being too easily rigged by special interest groups. Although ICANN has since modified the election procedure, it seems lack of visibility and interest in the world's first truly global election still leaves the system open to weighting by the technologically aware, as the CCC strength in the current nominations suggests. Germany has the third most members in the ALM of any other nation, with 20,475 compared to China�s 33,670 and Japan�s 38,931. The US, surprisingly, comes in fourth with 19,501. To become a member, a person must be over 16 with a valid email and snail-mail address. Germany is believed to have had such a strong turnout due to high-profile membership campaigns by national newspaper Der Spiegel.
