Flaws in Cellphone Evidence Prompt Review of 10k Verdicts in Denmark | Hacker News Reader

Flaws in Cellphone Evidence Prompt Review of 10k Verdicts in Denmark

nytimes.com

137 pointsJetSpiegel33 comments

At least the authorities looking at them. In the states we have to rely on stuff like the Innocence Project, unfortunately.

And they're not perfect either.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...

- Innocence Project doesn't take on cases where DNA link was established

- Man served four years for sexual assault after his DNA was found to be “consistent” with samples from the victim

- Turns out the DNA testing failed to establish a match between two of his own samples

- This evidence was not presented to the jury

- Lab tech makes numerous errors but is cleared because their lawyer demonstrated that here errors "were a product of systemic failures that included inadequate supervision".

Are there any independent organizations which regularly audit these and other crime labs?

I was just thinking that - there would be no systematic review of people. We'd just let them sit out the jail sentence.

It is a tragedy that we have to rely on such things instead of just admitting mistakes.

>In the states we have to rely on stuff like the Innocence Project, unfortunately.

The American justice system is built upon the premise of retributive punishment and not rehabilitative punishment; so, they believe that whoever is in jail/prison must've earned that because, to them, the system is infallible - when, clearly, it is not.

To that end, the system in the states depends on bodies filling the cells. It doesn't really matter to the system which bodies fill the cells, as long as it's someone: The company operating the jails/prisons are going to be turning a profit and not dropping the jails/prisons back onto the system to be responsible for. So, to the system, what does it matter, yeah?

We should also mention that felony disenfranchisement[0] allows scenarios where people can lose the right to vote for life. In cases, such as in Florida, that right can only be restored at the whim of the governor[1,2].

Florida isn't alone in this, to be sure, but it demonstrates a problem that is based on a flaw in American society, overall.

In other words, if society gives zero fucks about its own citizens - even after they've paid their dues to society - why would anyone expect the system to care, when it's counter-productive to the system's own benefit?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#Unit...

[1] - http://www.npr.org/2015/12/11/459365215/ex-felons-fight-to-r...

[2] - https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/02/01/fed...

Didn’t Florida just pass an amendment to restore voting rights to felons?

https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/voting-rights-restora...

It's worth noting that the European Court of Justice has deemed this form of logging to be in violation of human rights, but the danish government continues to do it and our old minister of justice have said they need time to revise the law, there is a group that are fighting it and you can read more about it on their website : https://ulovliglogning.dk/en/

I thought this was really well articulated, goes for all mass surveillance:

> But why?

> You might not think that your secrets are worth keeping, but with enough data, everyone’s a suspect. Maybe you’ve sent a Merry Christmas text to the suspect of an ongoing investigation? Maybe you’ve googled “manure” the week before a homemade bomb is found?

> Maybe you’re the only person with a mobile phone that’s been near the scene of a crime, and maybe you’d just bought binliners. Mass surveillance flips the burden of proof. Your movements are recorded and can be used against you, but not in your defense. You might have left your phone at home on purpose.

> but not in your defense

why not in my defence? i mean, my smartphone already knows everything about me, so why not use it for my defence?

That’s not how mass surveillance works, you don’t have access to the same information, and you don’t even know what information there is to even request in the first place. It’s asymmetrical.

A non-New York Times discussion of the issues: https://www.enmnews.com/2019/08/20/flaws-in-cellphone-eviden...

Is there some issue with the NYT specifically? I'm out of the loop. Edit: Oh, pay/account wall, right.

> “We cannot live with incorrect information sending people to prison.”

Don't trust data given by third parties then.

> The authorities said that the problems stemmed partly from police I.T. systems and partly from the phone companies’ systems, although a telecom industry representative said he could not understand how phone companies could have caused the errors.

It appears data came from the telecom companies and straight to the police's IT department. I'm not sure what parties you're referring to?

Unless you're suggesting not to use data from telecom companies? In which case how would they get any records at all?

The telecom company is the third party.

Yes, I'm suggesting to not use data from telecom companies, unless they have a way to prove that said data is real.

The problem in this case wasn't the third party data, but an error in how that data was analysed and presented. By all accounts the raw data from the telecom companies was both complete and correct.

I'm talking about the general case.

Maybe in this specific case the telecom data was correct, but can you assure the same for every datum ever provided?

Trusting telecom data is essentially the same as trusting an eyewitness.

The eyewitness says the truth sometimes, but you can't trust them as an infallible source of truth.

If you only trust first and second parties, you can’t get enough evidence for anything ever. Especially if one of those parties denies it. Even the police themselves are a third party, so by your standards even the police lab reports can’t be trusted.

>so by your standards even the police lab reports can’t be trusted.

There's some evidence that this is the case. In Germany we had a very high profile case where the police used contaminated swabs for taking DNA samples. There's also evidence that both DNA and fingerprint attribution is not trustworthy (from a strictly scientific perspective).

This gets imho even worse with data. Even in good faith an ISP can't be trusted. There is no chain of custody for the location records, they are very likely faulty, not immutable and so forth. As an accused, I have no way of challenging the records, unlike other forensic evidence like DNA tests.

> contaminated swabs for taking DNA samples.

Not only contaminated, the swaps weren't even rated for lab use. They spend years looking for a phantom serial killer active in half the country because several police labs were cutting costs. The mysterious killer was working in a swab factory.

> There's also evidence that both DNA and fingerprint attribution is not trustworthy (from a strictly scientific perspective).

Isn't the issue that they use so few markers that you would be guaranteed collisions the moment you tried to build a large scale biometric database?

It seems the error here was not in the data received but in analysis by the police.

"The national police determined that the flaws applied to 10,700 court cases dating to 2012, but it is unclear whether the faulty data was a decisive factor in any verdicts."

What are their (privacy) laws like, and what types of illegalities would generate that many cases so quickly?

They're probably investigating all court cases that had phone evidence submitted, even if it wasn't crucial to the case or even used or which side used it. It might be that most of these are simply normal court cases where someone texted someone else or made a phone call, either proving their innocence or not.

That's a lot of cases involving cellphone tracking. In a country with only ~six million people.

Or am I just out of touch? Does every criminal case now involve cellphone tracking data?

It is, sadly, a lot. And it's trending upwards. As mentioned above it's a human rights violation but unfortunately we are relying on NGO's to try and stop it (they are raising money for trials against the government). The political will to stop this is sadly sorely missed

So is Denmark unusual? And if so, I wonder why.

Doesn't it simply take one convicted to bring this matter before the ECHR? Or is this what the collected funds will be used for?

We've been conditioned to believe that some evidence is infallible, such as technology based tracking and even DNA evidence. Whilst people might embellish, lie or simply have bad recall, we think technology is near perfect. The reality is that this can often be flawed or indicative, and not always a certain proof of guilt. A lot of this technology, or advances in it, is new and I imagine not everyone is keeping up with the full implications.

Exactly, here is the equivalent article for DNA : https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...

for sure, but you have to admit that technology does help immensely in crime solving.

Hmm, would have the people prosecuted by evidence of inaccurate gps coordinates, been effected if they had used an iOS jailbreak and or android device to constantly fake a GPS location? Or is the gps coordinates being logged from an external point of location and that's predicting the phone's whereabouts. Basically, not being received from the phone.

It's using tower based records, which determine what sector/site the customer is in

How many cases are there where "well the cell phone data said he was there" is what decided it?

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