The Hill – With the recent introduction of the Restoration of America’s Wire Act in the U.S. House and Senate, the internet gambling issue has again returned to the forefront of policy discussion on Capitol Hill. The renewed focus has prompted well-funded legalization advocates to promote the demonstrably false idea that the many problems associated with internet gambling will disappear with a government stamp of approval.
Now that internet gambling is legal in Nevada, Delaware, and New Jersey, we needn’t rely on speculation to see the moral hazards associated with legal internet gambling.
Convincing evidence is found in the response by New Jersey gambling regulators to concerns raised by Bill Byers, a Florida-based professional poker player with nearly 40 years of experience with the game.
Byers is a volunteer who helped demonstrate my hacker technology on Capitol Hill and to various university computer science departments — the same technology capable of breaching every so-called protection claimed as effective by New Jersey (and Nevada).
My research is the origin of two letters to Congress from the FBI concerning internet gambling. In a November 2009 response to an inquiry from Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), the FBI’s Cyber Division confirmed that bad actors can breach identity and age verification and geo-location protections. The FBI confirmed in a September 2013 response to a letter from Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) that determined hackers can hide themselves from detection by poker websites and their regulators.
In a January 2014 letter to the director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, David Rebuck, Byers explained the very real weaknesses in New Jersey’s regulations, closing with an offer to conduct a real-money stress test of New Jersey’s age and identity verification, geo-location, and anti-money laundering protections.
Rebuck did not respond to Byers’s concerns or his offer of a stress test.
In March, Byers and another professional poker player and Poker Hall of Fame inductee, Dewey Tomko, co-wrote an op-ed which appeared in the Press of Atlantic City. They specifically addressed the vulnerability of novice players to cheating by teams of colluders as well as the curious lack of interest on the part of New Jersey regulators in the details of how cheaters might exploit system weaknesses.
