Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit
theregister.com
theregister.com
First, the defence doesn't necessarily have to evaluate all 170,000 lines. They just need to find one buggy line which could potentially overturn the result.
Second, even if it did take a full 8 years, is that a good reason to deny the defendant due process?
No, but the person that wants to have it analyzed will have to either spend the time themselves, or pay the expert witness for their time; it could be a costly affair.
But I think it's warranted. An independent software review, and a double blind assertion with the exact version of the software used in the conviction to test the accuracy and reliability of the application.
The government should send a half a dozen to DefCon/CCC and let attendees loose trying to fool them.
Sure.
And the prosecution using the company claiming to have "totally reliable DNA evidence" should be totally on the hook for those costs (plus damages) when that analysis or expert witnesses show up "reasonable doubt" flaws in the software or the processes in which that software is used, including then risking retrials or mistrials of all other cases in which it was used.
If the prosecutors want to play high stakes games with defendants lives and liberty using "evidence" from proprietary software or devices, they need to be held to the consequences of losing their stakes.
[Edit: I wonder what the legal system would think of a CyberGenetics competitor funding the expert witness analysis of their software on behalf of the defence???]
Mathworks has broken some legacy support in the past, but they have slowed down on that practice. They used to threaten that dll loading would go away “in a future version of MATLAB” but have since backpedaled on that. My biggest issue is writing code that leverages cool new features (especially timetables) but some people I work with never update their IDE.
When writing Python (I don't have stats about reading), a 1.0 version of a small project took me 1.5 hours and consisted of 183 lines of code, so 2.2 lines per minute. That's much faster than this, but 183 lines is also a ton less complex than understanding the entirety of 180k lines and properly assessing whether it does exactly and only what it's supposed to.
10 lines per hour is probably taken as a lower bound to prove a point, especially because they argue about checking the whole thing (large parts can probably be skipped), but as a standalone statistic I would say it's probably within an order of magnitude from the true value. And for software time estimates that would be an amazing feat :p
I've run into 300-line programs that have taken me a month to figure out because the math was hard and I've run into 100,000 line programs that have taken me a few hours to tear apart.
My prediction: this firm will probably try to get removed from the case, rather than open source their shitty code.
Source: I've worked on MATLAB codebases for various genomics research projects in the past.
That isn't necessarily their choice. The prosecutors will make the decision about whether to withdraw the DNA evidence. They probably won't, given that they would need to give the defendant a new trial, which could lead to an accused murderer getting off. A bad look for any prosecutor.
More to the point, if the firm withdraws from any case where their credibility is questioned, what does that say to law enforcement agencies who are thinking about using their software?
Like I’m actually kinda shocked this is the reality. I would have assumed that DNA evidence would have some blessed methodologies and tools/algorithms, with a strict definition of what constitutes a match or partial match specifically so this wouldn’t happen.
In this case we are also dealing with probabilistic genotyping involving DNA Mixtures with DNA from several individual contributors, and most likely degraded DNA. It is the tool the police can use when other more traditional methods is not possible because of the mixture. That should mean the qualitative value of the DNA evidence is lower, requiring even stronger additional evidence from other sources.
What can happen in the U.S.A. is that one lone man says “I saw the defendant do it.”; the defence attorney can point out that the witness was drunk at the time, that he has motive to lie, that he initially reported another story to the police and only later settled on this story, and what ever else to render him completely unreliable.
The jury can nevertheless return a verdict of guilty, and there are no grounds for appeal then, as it is the power of the jury to decide who is “reliable”, and it is not required to explain it's thought process at all.
What a shocking development that such would result into a criminal justice system where a defendant's race and gender plays such a factor.
It takes only one person in the jury to hang the jury. It's not a majority vote it's a unanimous vote.
Methinks the U.S.A.-man often thinks that bench trials in other countries are done by a single juror; they are not and can range from three to twelve in how many professional jurors are required to reach a unanimous conclusion.
But this is not so much about lay fact finding vis-ǎ-vis trained fact-finding, but the rules of evidence.
Scotland also has jury trials, but does not permit that a man be convicted upon the word of a single witness; there must be further independent, corroborating evidence.
There are many other differences with, for instance, the Dutch system that guarantee a fairer trial. One very big one is that in the Netherlands both the defence and prosecution have one groundless appeal; either side if it not agree with the verdict can demand a fresh new trial with different jurors once. — this obviously reduces flukes of justice.
The other is far stronger rules of evidence and more consistent rulings. Juries are very fickle and legal experts rarely know what verdict they will return based on the evidence they saw before them; whereas with trained jurors, their verdict is often similar with the same evidence given to them.
Indeed, one might argue that the practice of plea bargains, which would be considered unconceivably unethical in most jurisdictions, are actually the saving grace, as they permit stability to this otherwise fickle system as the negotiations between both parties are more reproducible given the same evidence, than fickle juries.
Or of course, that the U.S.A. permits conviction based on the sworn testimony of a single eye witness, which is noteably unreliable.
All of these are black boxes that are routinely meant to convict. — it would not surprise me if such software were far more reliable than human eye witness accounts, but if there's one thing I noticed, it's that a man is seldom afraid of bad matters, he is only afraid of bad matters produced by new technology; far worse matters can stay, so long as they be ancient enough.
The prosecutor isn't unilaterally deciding whether the DNA evidence is valid. There will be a public hearing where both the prosecution and defense show evidence about the validity of the DNA evidence, and a court will rule based on that evidence.
- Not revealing all information they are required to.
- Parallel construction (see above)
- Overcharging, with the goal of making the plea more palatable than the cost/risk of defending multiple absurd charges.
- Lying to you while getting to throw you in jail if you lie to them.
As a result, only 5% of federal cases go to trial.
None of behaviors these are rare. If your understanding of the legal system is based on popular culture, as most people’s is, it is basically law enforcement propaganda that has little relationship to reality.
If you read the article and appellate decision which is linked, it says what I just said:
>On Wednesday, the appellate court sided with the defense [PDF] and sent the case back to a lower court directing the judge to compel Cybergenetics to make the TrueAllele code available to the defense team.
Never met a lawyer before huh?
Jokes aside, prosecutors pushing through cases they know to be unsound isn't exactly uncommon. Many prosecutors are more concerned with their conviction rates than they are in justice, because that's what they are measured and rewarded by.
It is just that some think the right thing for themself is to maximize their career progress.
And I would not know in general about state prosecutors, but what I know anecdotally second hand, does not sound good.
If a case seems unclear, and you could spend years working on a conviction that will ultimately fall through, that hurts your ability to do justice for more readily winnable cases. You have to spend the time building a case, do all the paperwork, go to trial, etc. That's opportunity cost. So spending that on a case you have 10% chance of winning just isn't a good use of time. Add that to the fact that conviction rate is a metric used to quantify skill, you're rewarded for serving justice successfully. And that then dictates how much money you can get which can help fund enforcing justice.
I believe you're looking at the moral right/wrong, and I don't believe that is the same right/wrong being discussed in terms of how lawyers often choose cases. At the end of the day, lawyers need work and they get that mostly through word of mouth and reputation. You don't really get either of those when you lose cases.
The right thing for them is to put as many criminals behind bars. They review cases and pick ones they can win. They will attack and find unrelated weak points in your character to win. They believe they are doing the right thing and will use whatever they can legally against you. You being innocent and going to court is means someone made a mistake. To confess to a mistake loses you credibility, to confess to an ongoing process mistake could open up other cases where dangerous people could be set free.
Is that your version of the right thing?
Most people want to do the right thing wherein right thing is almost entirely defined by norms and customs of their environment. If the norms and expectations are high ethical and correct standards people will follow them to the degree they are able.
To what degree are such standards broken or defective in America though?
Lest we forget the head lawyer of Texas a state home to aprox 27 million people or around 8% of the nation is a man whose own prosecution has for years only been stymied by the difficulty of prosecuting the man at the head of the states justice department. Either 8 or 9 (I've lost track) directly beneath him have resigned and accused him of corruption.
This isn't even an isolated instance corruption is found in fact all over the united states.
Even when in theory we would like to do the right thing we have a hard time establishing what standards are even real. Look at the fact. For proof of that look no further than the science of hair analysis which the FBI spent decades using to convict the accused before we realized that they were incapable of differentiating dog hair from human hair.
Think of entire people going in to work producing work product about imaginary science they were pretending to do competently and sending people to death row in part because of their fake work product.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
The justice system in America is a bad joke that is primarily differentiated from say Cuba in that bribes are paid to your lawyer instead of directly to government officials.
Presuming rational actors in this case is missing the general problem with the system: people very easily convince themselves they know the truth despite how the validity of the evidence changes. Whatever it said initially, that must be right - it's misinformation 101. Once a belief is established it is much harder to change.
You would prefer that they not be elected? That they would be appointed by some politician, with the public having no recourse?
The fact is that the public like prosecutors who convict people. That's deeply unfair. But it's also deeply democratic.
I very much agree with you: a government has a monopoly on violence and ultimately we all end up trusting it. Too many checks and balances lead to gridlock. Too few lead to oppression. Much of it ends up being decided on inertia. We do it both ways in different jurisdictions, with successes and failures in both.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/fbi-would-rather...
It's not like you review all scientific evidence and re-do the experiments that lead up to the discovery of <insert some evidence method> in the first place. Validating all that would also take years and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties. Similarly, there will be some trust involved with this source code as well. Getting the opportunity to look for bugs is essential in my opinion, but it needn't take multiple years. Focus on the parts you doubt, similar to what you'd do if you were reviewing the scientific method used in analog evidence.
Of course, the two aren't identical. Validating scientific methods and validating a program is different in that the program is proprietary and the science (usually) merely behind a paywall. The latter can then be replicated by others and becomes established. The former will only ever be seen by that company and doesn't become established. So scrutiny is necessary, but after a couple cases that used an identical version, requiring access without articulating particular doubts would unduly delay the case. It doesn't seem unreasonable to start trusting the program after a bunch of defendants had experts look at it and found no way to cast doubt on its result. If you don't think software of 180k lines can be used in court under such circumstances because it would take too long to review, we should throw out pretty much all software anywhere in the judicial system. (That's not what you said, but some of the replies including yours hint at that.)
There are a few important differences between a generally accepted method, and some Matlab black-box that you feed an input into, and it prints out 'guilty' and 'not guilty'.
1. The former is based on centuries of peer review, where the best ideas eventually get selected for. The latter is an externally un-reviewed application, which encapsulates the best of whatever we could ship by Thursday.
2. You can call an expert witness to the stand, and ask them questions about the state of the art of <some evidence based method>. You can ask them why. You can ask them about how certain one should be about their statements. You can't cross-examine a black box.
The actual solution to your quandary is to require that forensic analysis services must pass an annual, independent, double-blind analysis of the accuracy of their methods, before they are used in a courtroom - and that the results of those audits are made available to the defense.
It's one thing for a man in a lab coat to take the microphone and say that their methods are accurate 'to within one in a million'. It's quite another to see an audit, where 100 samples were sent in for analysis over six weeks, and only 92 of them were analysed correctly.
A jury might still convict on the basis of that 92% accuracy, but only if other meaningful evidence points against the defendant.
Unfortunately, the reality of forensic science in 2021 is that most of it is sloppy bunk, with no assurances of accuracy.
Bad stats, especially around DNA, has convicted many innocent people.
BTW, law and Order did an episode on bad DNA science convicting someone.
Agreed! But if that's the standard, it still doesn't involve letting the defendant see the source code.
Actually, it is. That's how science works and that's how convictions often get overturned.
> Validating all that would also take years
Are you suggesting that unvalidated data is being used to prosecute crimes?
> and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties.
The point here is that it isn't established as generally accepted by all parties.
> Similarly, there will be some trust involved with this source code as well.
"Trust but verify"
> If you don't think software of 180k lines can be used in court under such circumstances because it would take too long to review, we should throw out pretty much all software anywhere in the judicial system.
I firmly believe that if the source code isn't available to review by all parties, including the public, then it shouldn't be used in a criminal court.
Yes. Pseudoscience is the bread and butter of criminal forensics.
Or completely fictitious.
Have you heard the story about the FBI crime lab and the “science” of fiber analysis that they developed, and not only used in federal criminal trials but also provided as a service for state and local agencies for decades?
Or the phantom of Heilbronn, where dozens of crimes were linked to a single woman. Who turned out to be the lab technician that assembled the kits. Doubts started once they discovered the caucasian female DNA in cells of the charred remains of a black male.
I often wonder how prosecuters defend against the use of these cases to create doubt.
It’s such a high-level language it’s hard to imagine what the hell they’re doing with all that code. It’s probably mostly useless cruft from GUIDE.
PHB: Hey, how many lines of code do we have? CodeMonkey: You want a high estimate or a low estimate? PHB: High CodeMonkey: Well, including unit tests, comments, whitespace, build scripts, integration test harness... 170k
At least I hope they have enough testing code to be signficant...
If you want a terrible gui-based gui creation interface: labview awaits.
Also just because eval can be compiled doesn't mean it should. It will forever be a security risk and I will not write code that uses it in good conscious. Fortunately, Mathworks has provided good alternatives. My personal favorite has been variable field names. It really opens up a lot of elegant coding.
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/string-eva...
the company can always retract their product if they want to keep it a trade secret.
The real solution would obviously that the prosecutors cannot enter into evidence the conclusions of any closed source software.
Of course, this only displaces the issue, what of the black box c.p.u.'s whereupon this software ran?
I also don't think you should code anything mission critical like this in Matlab. It's a decent language for prototyping, not for production.
There should be a public reference implantation of these methods if they are going to be used in court.
There's nothing you just wrote that is any better in any other language, except that Matlab provides a huge suite of state of the art numeric routines that almost no everyday developer could come close to making as solid.
Writing a nicely illustrated manual on brain surgery with nice fonts and proper grammar based on 11th century medicine is of little use for doing actual brain surgery.
Writing clean code based on bad numerics is also of little use for producing good results. Especially if you then have to defend that codebase in court.
Bad developers will make bad decisions in any language. At least using solid numerics underlying the code provides a huge benefit to building the entire codebase instead of on crap numerics. Every nice clean codebase I have been part of has still had crap numerics. Good numerics is nearly completely orthogonal to clean code, and it's a highly technical skill set that almost no developer has even an inkling of how to do well, no matter how pretty their formatting and documentation. I have never in 30+ years of working on highly technical teams worked with someone who really gets the nuances and details of how to do solid numerical code. I routinely get codebases and developers that do the absolute worst things numerically. I have only really good people in conferences on such topics, or online from similar filtering. These people are extremely rare in software development, to the point I don't think I've ever met on on an actual project (and the numerics when needed have always fallen to me, and I've often been selected for technical projects because such people are terribly hard to find when needed).
Sounds really expensive.
Hell, if it seemed outrageous enough I'd probably do it for transportation costs alone.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with this outlook.
"It's just gonna take so long, plus the code is a bit messy. We're gonna be doing all that work just because the rest of someone's life teeters on the results of the inquiry? Maan, that's a bummer."
Six to nine months seems like enough to do a very good code review with some testing. There's a good chance that 75% of that Matlab code doesn't execute for his test.
We should either pay for multiple people to work on it so we can have the answer in less than 8 years or we shouldn't use it at all.
I don't want prosecutors sleeping on the job, bringing in fraudsters laymen and psychics to accuse people, etc.
The prosecutor should use a company that can present independent proof that their system actually works.
You need to establish reasonable timelines for this or any guilty person will claim any technology used will take 100 years to verify.
There is no reason you can’t analyze a DNA analysis codebase in 6 months. Unless you also need to verify the science.
The claim about the amount of time was not made by the defendant, it was from the company that produced the code.
>their own validation
That is not how things are proven.
“You don’t need to know how we came to this scientific conclusion.” An appeal to authority doesn’t fly in science and it certainly doesn’t in law.
(As always, XKCD beat me to this gag: https://xkcd.com/2347/ )
So, yeah - this number is bunk.
In the very next paragraph they say:
> The company offered the defense access under tightly controlled conditions outlined in a non-disclosure agreement, which included accepting a $1m liability fine in the event code details leaked. But the defense team objected to the conditions, which they argued would hinder their evaluation and would deter any expert witness from participating.
So it's a concern about IP protection for them.
I notice that they didn't say "here's the results of our last independency audit and verification of correctness", which I think would be a fantastic counter-argument... if they had one.
If its a multi million dollar affair like they claim its virtually impossible that every defendant will be able to fund such an affair.
In fact in the case that a disastrous flaw is found it may be advantageous to simply drop the case and hope that past and future defendants wont be able to each afford to press the point.
For that kind of product, source code is not actually that valuable in itself; it's the standards compliance, reliability and trustworthiness. Most charitable explanation is that the vendor is clueless about what their value really is, least charitable is that they know exactly how fucked up their code is.
AFAIR, the breathalyser was incorrectly averaging the readings, giving disproportional weight to the first reading.
I don't know if it was enough to rule in their favour, but I'm sure it called the data into question
Edit: Looks like it was a Draeger breathalyser https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_prob...
The reasons are manifold, including:
- Normalized values need to be averaged differently the absolute values.
- Floating point has limited precision, even just correctly summing/multiplying numbers need special care if you care about correctness. Results can, in the worst case, be of by a massive amount.
Often you don't need to care about it so it's not uncommon for especially junior programmers to be not so aware about it.
I mean in the last 3 years of working as a professional software engineer/developer I didn't need any of this at all, but once I do I know what to look out for.
As far as I know it is fairly easy to take a generic dna sequencer meant for healtcare diagnostics, and repurpose it for STR analysis. The only major difference between the healthcare versions and the forensic versions is the software i/o.
I don't see those particular issues make it biased, just inaccurate - it could go either way.
Complex tools are the product of many thousands of individual decisions taken by humans, humans aware of who's the paying client.
Take the store pricing example. Suppose the store's pricing & labeling process produce an equal number of bugs at checkout in favor of the store and in opposition to the store.
The store is heavily incentivized to detect the errors that are opposed to them. They are much less likely to detect the errors in their favor. Consider the manager that looks at the cash at the end of the day and notices they are $500 short. They likely dig hard to find the root cause of the issue, detect the pricing disparity and correct it. Now consider the manager that is $500 over at the end of the day. They are much more likely to say: "that's weird", shrug their shoulders and move on.
The same applies to forensic tools. Even if they originally produced bugs in both directions, their own internal QA and the market of police officers are likely to work hard to detect bugs that make them less likely to allow them to make an arrest.
The net result is that the tools end up with a bias in one direction, even if the original developers made an equal number of mistakes in both directions.
There are plenty of lazy managers who would sweep it under the rug once. But if it happens more than once, it can become their job on the line. They start looking for who's counting wrong. And if they can't figure that out, they get really worried.
I have no idea about police officers and prosecutors. But store managers care about accuracy of counts, not just profits.
What is this based on?
The somewhat-less-malicious interpretation is that the companies have a strong incentive to detect + fix errors that cost them money. Meanwhile, consumers are a) non-centralized, uncoordinated, and often unaware of errors, and b) have no way to fix systemic issues that impact them. And the companies therefore have no /real/ incentive to fix systemic problems. It is literally more profitable to fix the bills of the few people who complain, as they still make money on the remainder who don't notice the errors in the first place.
(on edit; exactly what the other comment one subthread over said. :P )
This could just as easily be selection bias: the errors in favour of the customer are less likely to get reported by customers.
i.e. The initial error may be randomly distributed. But the follow-up on the error will have a lot of bias.
I know, this is exceedingly cynical.
No, not really.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/toyota-agrees-to....
Also let's remember that a company in UK was selling fake bomb detectors to Israeli and other militaries, and it took them more than 10 years to notice!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896
There needs to be proper scrutiny into these things, I could start some random 'deep learning to find criminals' company tomorrow, and have less regulation than a car mechanic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration
Occam's razer points to people just hitting the wrong pedal or people's floor mats getting stuck.
The reason Toyota ate it in the press for this was competitive.
can you explain what you mean? I don't understand this sentence.
Most likely, this grew out of a research prototype that just worked too well to be reimplemented in a proper production environment.
There were 1,000,000 questions I wished had been asked.
The language certainly has some warts, but IMO, the bigger problem is that it's usually learned/used in contexts that focus on code quality: the goal is the resulting number or plot rather than the software that generates them.
All of these companies claim that their source code is valuable intellectual property and that disclosing it can hurt their business. Even if this were true, when you're providing something that can be a significant factor in someone being imprisoned or executed, when creating the business you should accept that you're providing a public service that needs to be publicly accountable.
If it's not open source, at the very least there should be a requirement that software code and hardware designs must be provided on-demand to experts in court cases (with a non-disclosure clause to mitigate leaks and corporate espionage etc.).
And there's an entire body of law based around IP which they can use to protect their business, just like everybody else.
Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism to protect IP that I can't think of.
It has been shown to us time and time again that no actual evidence is required to get people to believe what they want to believe.
And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.
It would have changed some peoples minds I don't know if the change would have been a few thousand or 10s of millions. I can't say if it would have a dent in the 1/3 of people or not. I can't predict that. It would have helped me with my own peace of mind. And frank I think it's overall the right thing for us to do.
>And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.
Disinformation is powerful, I'm not suggesting this alone would fix that. I disagree that more technical evidence is harmful. Global warming is benefiting from transparency and evidence. It takes generations to change political will not years. The evidence there has shifted our whole economy, just maybe not fast enough.
There will always, always be deniers. Global warming, flat earth, vaccinations, etc. Evidence _helps_ battle deniers in these areas, but it takes generations for these ideas to become mainstream and the deniers to go from 99% of people to 2% of people.
Also, 2% of people think the earth is flat? Holy crap. https://www.sciencealert.com/one-third-millennials-believe-f...
It's like saying that better proof of evolution would convince some portion of creationists. That's just not how misinformation works.
Misinformation works by targeting vulnerable parties with misinformation that aligns with their existing vulnerabilities and beliefs in order to power relevant action with long stored and fruitful sources of hate, bias, and scorn in a fashion that bypasses the brain and goes right for the gut.
Like 30% in America believe in a young earth that is thousands not billions of years old.
If Bob is a scientist of some sort and presenting interesting scientific work to the community and incidentally advising the government on environmental policy that will harm some business and you want to crush support for this by playing on existing biases with this group you advertise to the young earth crowd about how bob is anti God and see if you can tie bob to as many negative things they already dislike as you can.
You aren't fighting an intellectual battle to set their ideas on bob let alone deeper ideas you are fighting an emotional battle to galvanize existing deeply held beliefs to obtain useful action like calling up and yelling at their congressman or voting.
In that context asking Bob to present a better case is laughable. The relevant parties never engaged their brain in the first place.
The county can then verify the software by manually counting a random selection of paper votes to see if they match the software. If they do, then the software is correct, otherwise it is not. You then have a full by-hand recount and tell the vendor to fix their software.
Not because of the possibility of voting machines being hacked, but because it is important for the public to have trust in the system. It is difficult to trust a system you do not understand, and only a very small minority is ever going to be able to audit voting software.
(I'm not American, so this is in no way a comment on your current predicament.)
Yes, the system is stacked against the poor, but there are people fighting that. If they are fighting and failing then we need to know why.
If they aren’t fighting at all then (in part, but it’s still a significant part I’m afraid) it’s because of attitudes like this.
Without, at minimum, an independent review (and preferably open source code) the software and lab processes being used constitute an inscrutable "black box" process within which any judgment can be made, for any conceivable reason, with life-changing effects for the defendant (and for the victims of a crime if, for example, a rapist or murderer is set free by a non-match decision).
One could even say that unreviewable code here falls under the umbrella of "secret evidence", which much of the world already knows can be easily misused and/or misapplied at the whim of the court.
https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/general/maintenance-r...
I say “I want to be able to afford appeals court where my rights matter”
Infinite appeals court!
Most people plea out, cant make bail, dont have counsel buddy buddy with the judge enough to get you bail, and lose the ability to keep good counsel for more and more motions and appeals
I want that, there is almost no pride in American rights if you cant afford them. People tie their whole identity to a system they arent even part of
Just giving everyone a substantive right to trial would amount to a revolution.
So similar to how snitches are targeted, if criminals in jail start violently targeting people that didn't go to trial they might be able to tear down the system...maybe?
And to be clear this is a loose idea as I don't really know the system but it seems courts would be so flooded if everyone took this route. Prosecuters would have to stop with these rediculous threats of trial jail time vs plea deal as jails would become too full. And authorities would be forced to stop charging people for smaller crimes as they simply couldn't handle the case load in courts.
Even getting juries might be tough and start the rest of society pushing back if people were regularly being called for jury duty and disrupting their own lives.
...or something else but this would be an interesting 'fight back' by criminals.
There are still some gang-controlled areas, but they are an exception now rather than the rule. The nanny state is firmly in control of most of the prisons.
And the system works so that you’re either rich enough to be able to defend yourself and the money spent doesn’t affect you, you’re poor enough that you have nothing to lose, or you’re in the middle, busy trying to get from poor to rich, but you are vulnerable to losing it all because you don’t have enough to protect it, but you have enough that it’s worth for someone else to try and take it.
“One disaster and all that progress is gone.”
More terrifying than the bottom where you got nothing to loose? I doubt it. Otherwise, why be afraid of it?
At the bottom you don't have to pretend that the circumstances will improve, and there is some freedom associated with some approaches to that. Careers don't need to have continuity, I know many people in hospitality and service industry whose vacation policy is saving and quitting one restuarant, travelling, and getting another job at a different restuarant when they get back. Sure other approaches have lots of energy used on finding food and shelter that day, and service and hospitality work is not necessarily at the bottom, my post isn't about those approaches and dilemmas.
People in the distinct category of "professional" careers, not my term, don't feel like they have that freedom to have any timegaps and are resigned to earning small periods of time off, and often times that is true.
Ever wondered if you could afford to keep a pet from dying due to being able to afford the care?
Ever wondered if losing your home was going to stress your marriage so much that it might splinter?
The only people who think the bottom is less stressful have never been there.
Well, sorry, but I would also say, you don't know what you are talking about.
First of all, there is no bottom at the bottom - you can always fall deeper, until there is no more escape than suicide. I know people who did.
What you maybe mean, are people who don't care abobut materialism and live with little to no money by their choice. I lived with those people for quite some time and it was fun.
When you are young and healthy and on your own, you don't really have to worry about a lot of things. I worried about my backpack with my laptop and that was it. I slept in a tent or under the stars or wherever. When the money was gone, there were always places or ways to get food. Work a little, travel a little. Easygoing.
But now I have a family. Now I cannot not have money.
It's kind of a half-baked idea, and I'm sure it's not totally watertight but the existing problems you've mentioned really bother me.
This is hilarious. As if you need to read every damn line and you can’t skip blank lines? You can skip whole files that aren’t relevant. Weak excuse
It's a pretty interesting case.
At least the core nature of the algorithm should be made public if we're going to use it for public inquisition.
If there were a way to ensure that the test suite applied to these forensic labs was all-encompassing w.r.t. the genetic variables at play, then maybe. But that sounds impossible. What if there's a coding error that causes the software to operate differently/incorrectly only for people with a certain (rare) genetic abnormality?
For what it's worth, I'm totally unversed in genetics, though I have a great deal of experience writing software tests (and seeing them come up short in adequately modelling real-world data).
It's very common for software to work correctly a high percentage of the time, but fail on rare input data. If, say, the software works correctly 999,999 times out of a million, you're going to be very unlikely to discover that error by throwing random samples at it, especially if you need a physical process (ie, drawing blood) in order to generate a test case.
On the other hand, once you have a known failing case (as you would if the defendant knows the result must be in error because he didn't commit the crime), it's often fairly straightforward to identify the error by reviewing the source and/or using a debugger to examine the progress of the algorithm.
I kinda think that should be a violation. But deciding whether a particular piece of code is so bad is so subjective that I'm not sure on how you'd make a legal standard out of it. Maybe start with "the linter found a ratio of warnings to lines > X%" or some such.
Having a legal standard of code coherence/incoherence might help filter pull requests. "This PR cannot be merged to this project because it is configured to reject legally incoherent code."
As code becomes more complex it may become more meaningful to have access to the test suite, and to challenge the evidence if the tests are inadequate to demonstrate the correct code behavior.
We could also use formal verification based on well-established axioms. For example, maybe we could "prove" that the DNA kit reports accurate results as long as the samples it's given are processed correctly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/toyota-agrees-to....
The way it works is that if there is a sample from a crime scene, they send it to these guys and they analyze it with their software to detect "statistical" DNA from the sample. These samples are the ones that are too crappy to actually make a definitive match -- they are a statistical match. So you say "I think Jim, Bob, and Alice were on scene," and it says "10% likelihood Jim DNA, 5% likelihood Bob DNA, 45% Alice DNA." Do you think it ever says "99% no DNA" in the sample?
It's basically Theranos, except instead of wasting $50 on a shitty blood test you get life in prison.
Ostensibly, it searches the entire DNA database for matches, and only returns a positive result if there's a positive match.
But it's a statistical model, using inputs that are crappy at best (because if it was an actual DNA match, they would send it off to in house forensics who would be able to do PCR...) and which includes inputs from circumstantial evidence as priors. Like we believe Alice was at the scene therefore if you find any statistical likelihood that this is Alice's DNA boost that.
They often run the model multiple times in a row, and use the result that the DA likes the most to enter into evidence. This is because the models return different results each time -- of course they'd say, iTs StAtiStIcaL, so they can do that...
And the source code is completely impenetrable. They argue that it's a "trade secret" that jeopardizes their ability to make future profits, so it cannot be open-sourced. These guys could have a model that just says "what percentage should the thing read, Señor D.A.?" The entire product is a sham. And because it's 170k LOC, no one has the time or the qualifications (Judges/Attorneys reading source code? Yeah right!) to review it, even if it were open source.
Pure quackery, and often times, decades-long sentences or life in prison for the defendant. These companies are pure filth worthy of the lowest revulsion. It's a wonder any convictions happen at all because of this stuff, but jurors have very inaccurate conceptions of forensic science, thanks to shit like CSI, Law and Order, etc. These companies happily play into that image and people really believe this stuff works.
Yes, you could run different models and get different probabilities. For example, the likelihood that the sample is a mixture of the suspect, the victim, and some unknown person vs victim and two unknown people compared to saying the victim isn't in the sample. However, the specification of those models is part of the trial process.
And the output probabilities (at least when being used to determine guilt) are usually quite high, orders of magnitude higher than 90% or even 99.99%.
My point is that the science behind these calculations is well developed- validation studies get published all the time. Whether or not the specific software has errors (or isn't coded exactly as modeled) is an entirely different matter, but it still isn't all that likely. All of these cases rely on expert witnesses anyway- it's not the prosecutor pressing some buttons and printing a report.
There is far more concerning quackery that gets used in forensics- bite marks, hair matching, etc.
The cases are related to new speeding cameras which work with laser, where the defendants are complaining that these new devices are black boxes, and that they demand access to the raw data which these devices process. The problem is that these devices discard the raw data after having processed it and come to a conclusion that the driver was or was not speeding.
The devices in question are Traffistar S350 from Jenoptik and PoliScan SM1 from Vitronic.
There were discussions about a required software update which retains all this data, but apparently the devices lack the storage capability to do so. The National Metrology Institute of Germany (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB)) responded to this, that they would not re-certify these devices with updated software because from their point of view they work "as specified".
https://dna-explained.com/2017/01/19/concepts-segment-size-l...
In general I've been extremely frustrated how regularly & consistently this entire industry keeps everything secretive & trust-based despite consistent examples of how insufficient trust is for this field & how devastating the results are when that trust is violated.
So it’s definitely riddled with bugs. And I can’t imagine that much matlab code following rigorous software engineering practices.
Communication takes time, coordination takes time, there is an incremental cost to each news person added to a team. From experience, perhaps with 2-3 people who happen to gel well together you may get close to proportional scaling of output, but with 8 it’s really unlikely in the real world.
In short when someone tells me the stuff is too complicated because too clever and advanced I tend to disbelieve them.
that said I have of course written my too complicated stuff lots of times, but if asked I don't say it was because I'm clever.
names anonymized so as to not accidentally hurt anyone's feelings.
on edit: actually one time the code was clever but not especially difficult, they just used the algorithms line because they didn't want anyone messing with their stuff.
It's a cliche to have a "what idiot wrote this" outburst, then realise it's your own code, because most of us have written our fair share of "clever" code
My boss explicitly stated that he doesn't want to see any "clever" or "smart" code in our product - write code based on simple fundamentals, benchmark before deciding to optimise, and be respectful in your reviews
I like my boss a lot
More importantly, typical reviewer have only small partia area where he has good idea about which commit is bad idea. He however does not understand whole codebase.
Knowing what the whole does and knowing what my module does are two different things.
Looking back at my reply, I think I should have added a bit of background to clarify my comment
My master's degree is in bioinformatics and I worked in the biotech industry until about a year ago. I mainly worked as a consultant for top 20 pharma companies, but also did work on different in-house projects and in academia
From my experience in the industry, I find it very unlikely that the software mentioned in the article is structured in a modular way. I've yet to see good software practices outside one or two academic projects. Most pharma companies still use copying and renaming folders as version control. Naturally I'm sceptical of any code coming from the biotech industry
On top of that, it's written in MATLAB. I have only ever seen this used by statisticians and university researchers, never by software engineers
I'm therefore willing to bet, that when the reviewers open the source code, they'll find unstructured mess of spaghetti code, that has never been refactored, reviewed or tested
So yes - I agree in all your points, but I find it unlikely that they're being applied to this particular project
I got frustrated because my concerns that my team's development practices were causing issues on a regular basis, were ignored. I was continuously able to predict what issues we would run into, but no-one seemed to care - I even had a manager tell me, that it was good that our software was buggy, since the client would continue paying us to fix it
I've since left the biotech industry. There's a limit to how many times I want to run my head against that particular wall
I don't know how many job postings ask for a software engineer who knows MATLAB, but I can't recall any
- "a single 15k line C file that had been worked on for a decade" [0]
- code review of the model: [1]
- corresponding HN discussion: [2] (including sad appeals to authority: you're not an epidemiologist)
- other HN discussion [3] (including ridiculously blaming programmers for making C++ available to non-programmers)
[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1254872369556074496
[1] https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
This is a deep problem. Many scientists don't understand software engineering and more and more need to write bigger and bigger programs. And most of the time they don't open source their code.
Open source science.
In the USA, all sides can call and rely on their own forensics. There is no government mandated & approved single-source-of-truth (with some minor exceptions).
> Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession.
This statement is at minimum an extreme generalization. Forensic field is a very large field, with many government and private "forensicators".
There are no "black box processes". The very word "forensic" is based on presenting in full view, front of the fact finders (jury & judges usually).
How deep this gets dug into depends on the fact finders and attorneys.
In all court cases the forensic examiner can be called to demonstrate with extreme nuance how they performed the procedures. Any tools used are can be requested to be examined, including software. Vendors that I have worked with all have experts on staff specifically to appear in court and detail the inner workings of their tools.
Not only tools, processes, and environments, but the examiner can be drilled on their experience, education, degrees, previous cases, failures, etc. They do call it "voir dire" for a reason.
This does not negate the fact that there are some bad apples, bad prosecutors, and bad judges.
Out of curiosity, if this is a common occurrence that is willfully obeyed by all vendors and parties involved. Could you shed some light on why this vendor is resisting?
Bite mark was a big deal in the industry because it turns out, it is not so unique and the methodologies developed were weak.
My personal opinion why the are resisting? They are resisting because they are bottom dwellers. Forensicators whom I associate with, tool vendors, and I understand that we have to share knowledge. I dare say, we are the most open source scientific knowledge industry.
This is not because of some altruistic reason, but because tomorrow they can be called on to explain.
... to the extent their financial resources allow.
Do you know how much of the fingerprint match process is left up to the judgement of the examiner? You can't get much more "black box" than another person's brain. Last time I checked (several years ago), tool mark analysis was still without objective foundation. Also... bitemark analysis - that was a thing.
Potentially explainig why the given pareters were chosen.
You're wrong.
When the defendant can't afford an expert witness then the defendant is literally shut out from being able to understand the technology involved.
Good luck proving to a jury made up of non-technical people how thread timing problems cause math problems in DNA analysis without an expert witness.
Good luck getting an expert witness to testify to that when the source code is hidden behind a black box "company trade secret".
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/reversing-legacy-jun...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30447642/
[2] https://theconversation.com/how-corruption-in-forensic-scien...
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire
Ah, not quite.
More accurately: "all sides can call and rely on their own forensics _if they can afford it_"
In this country we _say_ that everyone has the right to an attorney, but that doesn't extend to expert witnesses.
This means forensic evidence becomes a _phenomenal_ tool for targeting the little guy, or the lower classes, while conveniently providing hooks for the more wealthy defendants to escape the system.
Either you are moving the goal post, or I am to donnish.
Let's agree that it is scientifically not a black box, but some may not be able to pay for such service.
There were suggestions of nationalizing, centralizing or governing forensics and just have one, unbiased working for the courts.
This diametrically opposed to the problem pointed out by many where prosecutors will use specific labs because they return more positives. If the prosecution and the forensicator work for the same employers, how is that prevent further erosion of this problem?
Well if that's not a line to make you feel awful on a Monday morning.
"Those arguing on behalf of the defense cited past problems with other genetic testing software such as STRmix and FST (Forensic Statistical Tool). Defense expert witnesses Mats Heimdahl and Jeanna Matthews, for example, said that STRmix had 13 coding errors that affected 60 criminal cases, errors not revealed until a source code review." "They also pointed out, as the appeals court ruling describes, how an FST source code review "uncovered that a 'secret function . . . was present in the software, tending to overestimate the likelihood of guilt.'"
An analogous situation with an alcohol and drug testing lab caused a scandal in Canada and called into question 16,000 child protective services cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherisk , and then at the same hospital(!), a forensic pathologist was giving fake prosecution evidence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Smith_(pathologist)
Maybe there's just something about Toronto and compromised processes, but defense challenges to the integrity of automated systems looks like a growth field.
I imagine they're also incentivised to favour a result indicating guilt.
Engineers have some notion that it can all be replaced with science. In so far as science can certify the reliability of tests, that is good. But in the end one has to trust the humans between those tests and the courtroom.
A lot of forensic science in itself is essentially phrenology (tooth prints, hair analysis - the non DNA kind, even fingerprinting is of exaggerated value). A lot of labs systematically turn out biased results with generally no expectation of risk, either personally to researchers and definitely not to higher ups.
Ultimately, forensic evidence should be seen as a signal, but not nearly as trustworthy as witness testimony (which in itself is not very trustworthy), despite what many believe.
And this is important for the general public to understand, the people who will participate in juries. The mystique that forensic experts have can make juries give extremely wrong decisions (even bad aquitalls on lack of forensic evidence).
And to emphasize again, I'm talking about the state of the art without the biases being discussed. The biases only compound this problem significantly.
And if it comes to light, acknowledge a one-time error and carry on.
It's not that the venn diagram of tech-literate and criminal-defense lawyers are entirely separate circles, but having been "that guy" in a public defender's office for even basic stuff like cell tower triangulation accuracy to finding proprietary surveillance video codecs to decode exculpatory evidence, you really need to start at square one while the prosecution have the whole police department's resources, expertise, and initiative at their disposal. You can afford the expert, it just won't do any good when you don't know what questions to ask that will actually be effective. And unsurprisingly those who do have experience in technical, specialized fields tend to get poached into the private sector or out of trial (really plea) practice all together, so the knowledge/bullshit gap will still exist and there's no real consistent way to bridge it.
Go figure.
On the other side a metric which says how many times no conclusive evidence was found with DNA testing sounds more like a metric of failure (but is not, if you don't have qualitative good enough evidence including "complete enough" DNA you should not make up results which simply don't exists, but then courts ruling without conclusive evidence isn't that rare and some would say even necessary to some degree. It's just that many believe DNA tests are somehow unfailable perfects ways to prove the presence of an specific person at a specific place, but they are often not).
Also related: we know that funding bias [0] is a real problem in science, despite that scientists' reputations should (ideally) motivate them to resist such biases.
I would argue that if prosecutors and/or cops get to pick the tool, false positives would result in more sales.
Just as false negatives would result in more sales if the defendant gets to make the pick.
That seems highly unlikely. Prosecutors, like all attorneys, talk. It wouldn’t take too many getting burned by a false positive before word would get out (regardless of any nda).
For example, once an expert gets Dauberted, you’ve got to think long and hard about being the next guy to use them.
Sure, in extreme cases it might be obvious, but if you just know that one test gives more matches than another, not knowing which one is the one giving false results?
Policing is driven by numbers. There was a whole season of The Wire about this.
Not arguing just trying to understand.
My rationale is: prosecutors have to weigh an “easy” conviction vs the possibility that labs that always guarantee results may be biased. In the event that they get caught up with a biased lab, wouldn’t it look bad for their reputation? As in, they can’t even perform due diligence on their sources, how can you trust them in a promoted role?
Or am I just naive on how the legal system works?
I am not a lawyer but as I understand the U.S. criminal justice system (which is adversarial between defense and prosecution with the judge officiating and the jury picking the winner) prosecutors are not experts in particular technical fields which is why courts allow expert witnesses. The defense is responsible for calling their own experts who can dispute other biased witnesses. If no one successfully disputes an expert witness over time the prosecutor's trust in them is very likely to grow.
A prosecutor will always claim they did due diligence by selecting a reputable expert witness up until it's proven that the witness was not in fact reliable, but claim (likely in good faith) that they had no way of knowing the expert witness was biased.
A better solution might be to mandate that expert witnesses get independently tested but again that's something a defense council could facilitate and bring into evidence. If no defense team finds it valuable to do this kind of work then it's unlikely a prosecutor will see it as useful either. Lack of challenges implies that the evidence is more or less indisputable from a legal perspective.
How can the truth-finding benefits of the adversarial system be preserved while leveling the playing field by equalizing resources?
My naive thought is that both parties pay into a common fund that is split equally between the prosecution and defense. But that seems like it has it's own set of pitfalls. Are there other models we can look to for ideas?
One idea is that whoever introduces an expert witness must also pay for the other side's expert witness, up to the cost of your expert. The defense doesn't need to prove anything due to the presumption of innocence, so the defense gets free counter-experts and only have to pay for the counter-expert if they want to bring up an expert about something the prosecution doesn't want to talk about.
The real issue is why are there so many cases?
That process happens very rarely. Federal criminal cases are resolved via plea bargain in ~97% of cases and state criminal cases are resolved via plea bargain in ~94% of cases[0].
This is a travesty of justice, especially since most defendants are severely over-charged and often face long prison sentences if they actually insist on (and can afford) a trial.
Those practices, along with cash bail, force even innocent people to plead guilty to avoid having their lives destroyed by bankruptcy, loss of employment, homes and even custody of their children.
And once they have a criminal conviction, they are stigmatized for life and are shut out of many jobs.
In most of these cases, the forensic evidence (if any) is never presented. For a discussion of this, as well as American forensic practices, see Blood, Powder and Residue[1], by Beth Bechky (Author discussion can be found here[2]).
While there are no required standards for forensics labs in the US (with some exceptions[4]), there are accreditation programs (example[3]), and not all forensic laboratories are for-profit companies.
I'm not defending the quality or independence of any particular forensic lab, but it's definitely more diverse than just a bunch of corrupt, rapacious scum sucking at the teat of prosecutors' budgets.
That said, most criminal defendants are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to performing/challening forensic research, as many state and federal labs provide such services for prosecutors, while defendants need to pay, often through the nose for them.
It's just another way the US "justice" system is stacked against criminal defendants.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691183589/bl...
[2] https://www.c-span.org/video/?508130-1/blood-powder-residue
[3] https://anab.ansi.org/en/forensic-accreditation
[4] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
Edit: Added notation for reference [1]
There are plenty of profit motives involved that have little to do with securing future contracts with police departments.
At the most basic - Source code reviews are expensive. They can often throw thousands of false flags that developers have to individually track down and verify are not problems.
Then there's the reputation hit of admitting a mistake - If you've had a bug for the last 5 years that makes you less reliable, that alone is likely to impact future contracts. So given the option of revealing this, admitting the mistake, and tackling the cases it impacted... OR... simply sweeping it under the rug and fixing it internally - some companies will take option number 2 (possibly most companies).
A fairly simple step is to certify equipment independently, and to do blind testing (one sample is provided from evidence; another by an independent unrelated source). Of course this costs more, but anything else is effectively an experiment without a control.
The ability for an expert witness to deliver more convictions, even if by lying, is a feature for prosecutors, not a bug.
Every incentive you have leads you to preferring convictions.
You have a choice between two labs to hire for your field test. Lab A and Lab B.
Lab A gives you conclusive evidence leading to a conviction 95% of the time. Lab B gives you conclusive evidence leading to a conviction 65% of the time. Price and speed are roughly comparable between the labs. Which lab do you select?
---
You are now a lab director. You are under pressure to improve the sales of the lab's forensic services. You have pretty much maxed out making changes to improve price and speed, and have been matched by other labs. You understand very well the decision making process prosecutors will use to hire your lab.
---
The incentives clearly lead prosecutors to pursuing labs that deliver better results. Labs know this, and so are under market pressure to delivery convictions for prosecutors.
Their goals are always to get plea bargain because that is automatic guilt or if they take it to court, they'd better win. That's a lot of state resources just to lose.
Overtime, you'll get people willing to bend the rules, turn a blind eye to 'weak evidence' or whatever.
You're only as good as your measurement/incentivisation.
Even innocent people with a good alibi are going to take the deal.
Their reputation doesn't matter as much as you think. Police procurement isn't based on the reputation of the vendor. It's based on whether or not the vendor delivers the results they want.
In fact, government procurement in general, isn't based on the reputation of the vendor. This is by design.
Society also no longer has tolerance for processes that are not fully auditable and transparent, especially when it comes to our already marred justice system.
Here's a look at two different Texas crime labs. Compare and contrast, and see if you can spot the differences.
https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2021/02/beyond-aid-to...
It starts with one pledging to:
aid law enforcement in the detection, suppression, and prosecution of crime
provide medical examiner and crime laboratory services of the highest quality in an unbiased manner with uncompromised integrity.
Exhibit A: Annie Dookhan of the Massachusetts State Crime Lab who is suspected of falsifying thousands of drug tests
[0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/massachusetts-lab-tech-arrested...
If field drug tests were actually accurate, they wouldn't be bought and used. Similarly, if an expert witness fails to give prosecutors the results and testimony that they want, they wouldn't be hired again.
[1] "How a $2 Roadside Drug Test Sends Innocent People to Jail": https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside...
In case any of you are interested, or completely flabbergasted as I was, by the idea that law enforcement's purpose and raison d'etre could ever become as distorted and contorted as this comment mentions, you should definitely read more on Walter "Johnny D." Macmillan [1] or watch the movie based on his story: Just Mercy[2].
Absolutely mind-blowing stuff.
The guilt I feel when I introduce a software bug that effects my corporate customers can sometimes burn my motivation for WEEKS. Who are these people?!
My agency used to rate our agents based on the amount of cases that led to convictions. Years back, we recognized that disproving an allegation was equally worthwhile, and settings promotions/evaluations based on "proving or disproving" the allegation was much more objectively reasonable than focusing strictly on convictions. There is still a reference to case completion speed, value of recovered money/property, and conviction results (providing a thorough enough investigation that the suspect is convicted for X years, for example), but disproving an allegation or proving that a different person committed the crime is far more appreciable to the agency.
We're fortunate in that we are a federal agency, instead of local/state level, where they can be significantly more busy with countless lesser offenses, while still running some extremely high-profile stuff, but I think it would be a huge boon to law enforcement if states mandated an approach focused on this objective metric that isn't strictly on "getting him".
The doctor handled thousands of cases in his career, and a well-funded inquiry found issues with less than 1% of them.
Sure we'd like that to be 0%, and society should spend time thinking of how much they rely on complicated processes of reasoning, but that's a really good accuracy.
It's all tradeoffs, but "his blood was found on the murder weapon" wouldn't be sufficient for me - some childhood enemy could easily have planted a bunch of forensic evidence next to a crime scene.
After all, if my next door neighbour barged into my house and beat me up, the only evidence would be my visible injuries and my statement that it was my neighbour.
I'm not sure if I'd prefer a society where he would be convicted, or where he wouldn't.
Considering that possibility, I don't want to put your neighbour in prison.
While I admire your devotion to Blackstone's Ratio, this doesn't seem like a recipe for stability and rule of law to me.
That is depending on your threshold of certainty. 1% is not that high considering that, according to the OJJDP, 5 milion people were arrested for serious charges in 2019 so with a 1% false positive rate that would be 100,000 people falsely imprisoned every year.
It does not have to be and really can't be 0% but 1% is unreasonably high in my opinion. If it can't be helped then it can't be helped but that isn't necessarily the case with these devices.
We, as a society, like to say this because it makes us feel good.
But a critical analysis of our actions reveals that we don't believe it for a second. We are happy to write overbroad laws that allow most behaviors to be criminalized, over police marginalized communities, and place those who have been convicted by this flawed system in deeply dysfunctional prisons that may well violate their human rights.
> In June 2005, the Chief Coroner of Ontario ordered a review of 44 autopsies carried out by Smith. Thirteen of these cases had resulted in criminal charges and convictions. The report was released in April 2007, indicating that there were substantial problems with 20 of the autopsies.
That sounds more like 45% to me.
Also this bit from the article about a baby that allegedly had a skull fracture:
> Later exhumation of the child and examination of the skull have shown that there was no skull fracture. It is thought Dr. Smith confused the normal gap between the baby's skull plates for an injury.
Holy shit that is bad. Even as a lay person I know about these gaps.
Between Baby skull plates, not adult ones ;-)
They grow together at some point.
Sure, but can you tell them apart from a fracture caused by injury? Presumably someone knowledgeable in medicine should be able to, but maybe it is one of those things that isn't as obvious as we, the uneducated outsider, might think.
"It just looks like it" is not a valid reason.
It's important for experts to use validated, tested equipment. That's clear. And by the sound of it that is happening (stories of how code was tested and found wanting confirm that; stories of double-blind testing).
Maybe what is needed is, an 'underwriters lab' certification for such devices. To forstal the inevitable gaming of the 'right to challenge'.
On one side were 6 impeccably dressed men in what I presumed were multi-thousand dollar suits. On the other side was single overwhelmed, overworked, and under-dressed defender who was steam-rolled at every sentence she spoke.
I ended up in traffic court last year for a parking ticket that I can only think must have been stolen from my car during a festival. After spending just a few hours waiting my turn, it was pretty clear who exactly the police target for traffic violations. But this is a tangent.
Anecdotally, if you replace 'paid' with 'incentivized' my understanding is the same.
And here's a totally unrelated Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Baden
I know expert witnesses. They are of impeccable character, and will seek to educate as well as they are allowed.
and how could anyone on hacker news claim there is 'no evidence' that unreviewed software may do something other than what people claim it does? especially if it 170,000 lines of matlab?
from the article:
> "Without scrutinizing its software's source code – a human-made set of instructions that may contain bugs, glitches, and defects – in the context of an adversarial system, no finding that it properly implements the underlying science could realistically be made," the ruling says.
>probabilistic genotyping [1]
and
>solves mixed DNA samples, low template DNA and kinship problems [1]
And the product sheet discusses
> models for PCR artifacts [2]
This sure feels like they go way beyond typical dna match technology into maximally extracting information via statistics, so their methods definitely should be open for review.
[1] https://www.cybgen.com/products/casework.shtml
[2] https://www.cybgen.com/solutions/brochures/unique_features.p...
Not to mention we have a constitutional right (6th amendment) to face and cross examine witnesses against us in the US, a black box should not void that right.
Any challenge is "allowed" in the sense that the parties can try to convince the judge there is a flaw.
The question is one of burden of proof: should the expert prove they have a trustworthy result, or should the expert testimony stand on their credibility alone, and the defense scramble to poke holes into it armed with incomplete information.
For a system that can put people into jail for life and that acts as a direct extension of state power, it's obvious the latter can have disastrous consequences. Effectively, any one who acquirers the "judicial expert" title can put people in jail at their whim.
What you call abuse, I call due process.
(And your proposed solution is already part of the expert certification and questioning process in criminal trials, so it isn't a solution. Experts must testify that the equipment they used was calibrated/certified/etc based on the standards applicable to the field.)
Responses to my comment are all around 'how it is now' which seems not to be very reliable. A responsible testing/certification process would address that.
You still need to allow the "independent certification" to be examined in court to validate both the independence and the certification. The means testimony on the applicable standards, and how the specific equipment used satisfied those standards. And right now, the expert witness already does the latter with respect to calibration, etc., for the equipment they used.
Of course self-certification is not the best. To bring up that straw man (as most of these posts do) is not advancing the conversation.
If you can't validate the equipment used to analyze the DNA, gunshot residue, or other scientific evidence, then that evidence should not be allowed in court, because that's prima facie reasonable doubt.
But let's not jump the gun here, and assume ill-intent.... to explain something that can be attributed to negligence, or simple human error.
What really pisses me off is how we fail again and again to ask the question of whether these entities should have been doing what they were doing in the first place, if it even can be done safely. Facebook, Equifax, police surveillance and misconduct, totally unaccountable “forensics” techniques—in all these cases where incalculable damage is done in totally predictable ways, we only address it reactively (if we address it at all) and completely fail to fix or even really consider the root cause(s). It’s like we have this huge blind spot where we take as a given that established entities doing thing(s) just have a right to keep doing them, regardless of any other factors.
In this case, forensics “experts” (essentially witch doctors) and fly-by-night black-box “labs” with unproven methodologies an undergrad intern might have developed in a week or two are institutionalized in our courts. This has happened because there is zero oversight and zero accountability for their claims, and lives are destroyed as a result.
It is insane not to pursue criminal charges for these indiscriminate arsonists of justice—if they can’t do what they claim to do fairly and accurately, they should not do it. They don’t have a right to “try” just because it will make them money, regardless of the consequences.
It’s like a hack to get around the whole “reasonable doubt” thing: just sequester all that pesky doubt in a black box so that people can’t see it, and if anyone asks just play dumb.
No software is perfect. It's unreasonable for any bug to be considered criminal negligence, or else the entire software development profession would be in prison.
Instead, software that can result in life or death or prison scenarios needs to have tested, documented, verified quality controls, just like we do for vehicles.
But that means courts or the legislature have to decide what those standards are.
I would like a thorough analysis of everything you've ever learned that led you to this conclusion, and if we find one mistake in your lifetime of learning then this is also criminal negligence on your part.
Sample contamination can be arranged before sent to the lab though.
If I was innocent, I'd be 100% certain that the system was screwed up, and if DNA evidence "proved" it, I'd want to look at the code too.
I remember reading about the husband who was falsely accused of murdering his wife, and it was very very sad.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-innocent-man-part-...
This wouldn’t be necessary if the expert on the stand was a geneticist who ran the test. But when the expert literally is the software you can’t really cross-examine the company’s sales rep.
Secret policing and secrecy in prosecution have no place in decent society.
Which may well be a win as open source already has that.
However, even open source has bugs that pass scrutiny as many CVE's can attest, so whilst a code review may find nothing wrong, that in itself could be used by a lawyer to create reasonable doubt, if the lawyer is good.
Presumably becquse that lab/software gave them the answer they were looking for.
Why pay for even more lab/software testing when you've already got what you want (especially when it's a possibility that the additional testing will contradict the first)?
Business incentives presumably reward all such companies for helping the police get convictions, so it doesn't seem a far-fetched concern.
One difficulty here is that the input is a real world effect. That means the answers are rarely exactly the same. The last time I looked, breathalyzers have a ~50% margin of error. So if you blow a 0.06, your BAC is really somewhere between 0.03 and 0.09. You could mod your breathalyzer to always assume that the reading was 25% higher than the reality without being noticed, as long as your breathalyzer doesn't return a result that's already 25+% higher during testing. Even if it does, your other results will be in range.
They need to just stop using breathalyzers. They're inaccurate pieces of machinery, operated by people without any medical knowledge to speak of, who have a vested interest in the readings being high. The whole thing, from top to bottom, is just a long chain of poorly aligned incentives. Field sobriety tests are even worse. The fact that your license can be revoked for refusing the test under the above grounds is nothing short of an end-run around the 4th amendment by declaring driving a "privilege, not a right" despite the fact that it is extremely hard to live in most of the US and not be able to drive. How the fuck do I survive in rural Oklahoma/Georgia/Kentucky/Texas/etc, 40 miles from the nearest bus stop, without a car? And all without any due process. It's never impacted me, but it bothers me nonetheless.
They need to force people to go in for a blood draw to establish BAC. It is an accurate test, administered by competent medical professionals, who have no vested interest in the outcome either way. Yes it does take longer. Yes, some people who were at 0.08 will be down to 0.07 by the time the test is administered. I still find that more comforting than the fact that some people at 0.06 will read at 0.09, and some people at 0.14 are going to read at 0.07.
There's also the fact that a cop who doesn't calibrate their breathalyzer is merely going to get a slap on the wrist, and a medical professional who does the same is probably going to end up with a huge malpractice suit and possibly lose their license if it was egregious in some way.
I agree and I wish I had a better solution.
>They need to force people to go in for a blood draw to establish BAC.
I know the intention is good, but that seems like a very scary proposition to me. I think the same poorly aligned incentives will line up here too.
"We are now partnered exclusively with X-clinic to do all the blood tests."
X-clinic just happens to tweak their procedure so that borderline samples end up showing under influence.
Btw here (Sweden) the breathalyzer is only used to help decide whether someone gets picked up for a blood draw or not. Only a blood test can be used to convict someone.
There are historical and current issues that cause this distrust, having an adversarial or multiple third parties is probably the best option for the US.
Source on this? I know the portable ones are like this, but I thought the actual court-admissible ones are more accurate, and the calibration procedures need to be followed to get a conviction. Also, FSTs are quite good for preliminary screening, a proper HGN test especially. And if you ask for a blood test, they are required to give you one and consider it in court.
Cops have no incentive to make people who aren't drinking take FSTs or the breathalyzer, its just a waste of their time. They don't want to be bothering normal people, they want to be taking real dangerous and irresponsible drivers off the road. You survive by not drinking before driving, or having a DD, its really not that hard.
Implied consent is the reason for the tests, and you agree to it when you sign for a license. And I think its a worthwhile tradeoff if it actually works to reduce DUI deaths.
That's the nice theory we all wish we lived in, but the reality all over the world is that police will extremely often do things for their own petty reasons, often systematically. Police departments often have quotas for tickets, they can often extract a bribe by threatening someone with a DUI, they can simply want to scare 'undesirables' out of a 'nice neighborhood'.
In general, there are good reasons to be extremely weary of the police and their motives.
I stand by that statement though, giving bullshit tickets and fines means that cop will likely just have to spend more time in court trying to defend hopeless cases and eventually get investigated for this kind of activity.
Maybe in the 'bad old days' it was worse. But today its been scrutinized in court so many times, it has to be bulletproof to get deployed.
Now, blood testing may differ from breath testing. Which is aligned with impaired driving? Breath testing may be the better measure. If state laws are often couched in terms of breath alcohol, then they are the only correct measure.
The internet lowers the barrier to certain forms of abuse substantially enough that I don't think you can so easily say you won't have made it any worse.
Right now you already give election officials your email for mail-in ballots and if there's a problem with your ballot they'll email you!
I think we could do a lot better than this when it comes to online voting but as a baseline optionally replacing the transport from physical mail to email I don't think would be the end of the world.
What an deplorably dishonest argument to present to laypeople.
If there is some weakness in it so the accused has a way to plausibly deny the DNA test, it will take a consultant who has relevant competence something like week or two to find it.
Finding a problem doesn't require looking at every line of 170,000.
Even during internal review of statistical inference code, committers argue correctness through a combination of readable code, readable tests, and statistical validation on a combination of synthetic and real data. While I agree the TrueAllele source should be provided, the "zero-defects" bar is neither sufficient nor necessary for correctness of the inferences made.
But it is a way to invalidate the inference, which is what the defense is interested in.
Well then the probability that it works correctly is zero.
On the other hand, there's always the more practical option of getting the dna testing done by a second, third or even a tenth different approved company if the defendants want to pursue this line of reasoning. From what I understand, dna testing is statistical which means even if they find some bug in the code there will have to be extended debates on whether or not a particular bug affected the credibility of this test result. This is just bullocks.
Having said that, the excuse the software company is giving is a bit lame.
Wow, the co-founder's argument to not disclose the source code to the defendant was that it's too many lines of code. Also... ten lines reviewed in an hour!?
It would seem the next logical step would be for every other lawyer to say they shouldn't hand over discovery because it would take to long for the otherside when they bury them in paperwork.
Say the defense finds the software in a very, very troubling state. Could that be telling enough to not trust the outcomes of the software? Assuming the DNA parts were correct, but the rest is junk, this is where the plaintiff would bring in their expert to counter the arguments?
Perhaps ^ is just a weak argument. I don't know how well versed courts are in these matters. (My guess is NOT that well versed because of the CFAA of the 80's up to Aaron Schwartz, and more).
My legal background is Law and Order, so I have no idea what I'm talking about, just curious.
They ought to ask for access to THAT in addition to the source code. One would imagine that it doesn't come with 170k lines of documentation or analysis and it would be orders of magnitude easier to review than the source code alone.
If you care, add your signature and vote for a party during the next elections that considers opensource at least somewhat important.
Buried right at the end, but an interesting thought. It would depend on the individual cases, but if there was a whole body of evidence vs. one DNA test, surely these cases would need to be retried?
The prosecution wouldn't be able to try again unless they made an appeal that there's a substantially different crime.
Should this be, in general, a disqualifying condition when something is to be used as evidence?
Something tells me that 170k of Matlab code is going to contain plenty of obvious bugs.
But if you look at e.g. the case against Toyota where they had expert witnesses from Carnegie Melon and NASA testifying that the code was a horrible mess, I think that was sufficient for a multi billion dollar fine. So I guess with the admission from the DNA company that their code is basically unreviewable, written in a language known for prototyping, if they get an expert witness to testify this it may be enough without showing how the software misbehaves exactly.
"TrueAllele uses a hierarchical Bayesian probability model that adds genotype alleles, accounts for artifacts, and determines variance to explain STR data and derive parameter values and their uncertainty. The computer employs Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) statistical sampling to solve the Bayesian equations. The resulting joint posterior probability provides marginal distributions for contributor genotypes, mixture weights, and other explanatory variables."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1556-4029.1...