We try to post very little that our allies over at BoingBoing have already gotten to, 'cause, hey, after it gets BB'ed, a good chunk of worldchangers have already heard it.

This is worth making an exception for: Cindy Cohn, Legal Director at the invaluable Electronic Frontier Foundation, has posted a talk in which she summarizes why we need independent geeks with the legal right to fool around in the code running the systems (like voting machines) upon which we rely. This talk made sense to me and taught me a bunch, and I'm not a lawyer and only play a geek on TV. And while the specific laws she's addressing are U.S. laws, the points she's making are pretty universal.

Here's the slideshow. Here's the MP3.