Were I such an attorney, I’d campaign to taint the reputation of Cellebrite and make the evidence it generates completely untrustworthy.
You'd be surprised. The courts are not scientific debate arenas. Burn forensics? Pseudoscience. Bite mark forensics? Pseudoscience. Lots of DNA-based forensics? Totally unreliable. Firearms ballistics forensics? Laughable pseudoscience. Polygraph tests? Laughable pseudoscience. Field sobriety tests / "drug recognition expert" certifications? Lol, lmao even.
All of this nonsense has been successfully used to convict people in court. Turns out, putting someone with PhD after their name or a white lab coat or a phony certification on the stand tends to work for prosecutors.
The only legitimate analysis they’re doing is ammo brand matching. “Hey, there was a Sellier & Bellot 380 Auto casing at the murder scene. The suspect had S&B 380 in his gun safe. We got him.”
Find some 1 in 1000 match. Find another 1 in 1000 match. Claim they're independent, so the chances of both of these are 1 in a million.
What they don't say is that there are 5000 things you can test that each have a 1 in 1000 chance, so you should expect to find ~5 at random if you test them all. The 1 in a million chance is if you choose 2 of the 5000 at random, test only those and they both match; not if you systematically run tests that only notify you when they find one of the matches.
[1]: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-...
Seems like markings can be exculpatory at best, for instance that casings or bullets clearly don’t match, but that the “unique markings” of an individual barrel is complete BS, especially with precision mass production of modern firearms. But in practice, it seems to rarely exonerate suspects, even if the evidence exists.
Most criminals subject to this are probably caught because they loaded the magazine without gloves and left a fingerprint on the casing that gets completely etched into it on firing. Or, you know, police do actual police work and pressure the right people into narc'ing on the suspect.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-polygraph-indicted-alle...
Clearly our government and legal system think highly enough of the technique to include it in interview processes. The NSA even has an entire production video rebuking the criticisms of polygraph. It’s not just a tool (in the eyes of the government) used to trick dumb criminals into spilling the beans.
Perhaps its being used as a tool to evaluate a person in other ways. For example, you're generally not arrested for admitting to crimes like smoking weed or stealing candy bars from a gas station. But admitting to crimes, or morality divergence (such as adultery), can mean with enough effort a smart intelligence organization could manipulate you.
Au contraire
It has nothing to do with "maintaining the shroud of 'this works'" because it does work for the purpose they have. It doesn't need to be 100% accurate or admissible in court.
Did that case against polygraph.com ever go to trial? Sounds like a slam-dunk free speech case, but I imagine the DOJ was willing to settle for anything to avoid that being fought in open court.
They know it's just part of the system, and the routine.
These folks have a slightly different mindset, and, I think, view procedures as important to weed out people who might cut corners, lean into their ego (how dare they make ME take a polygraph), or be careless with information. A nice side effect of this process is it selects for humility, openness, and conscientiousness.
And they view the work they do as hugely important for the security of their nation. Including those who laugh at them for their chosen profession.
They were some of the most professional, conscientious, diligent, and excellent technologists I've ever worked with. Definitely on par with anyone at FAANGs or startups that I've work in.
Or perhaps it selects for submissive, controllable automata that will go along with anything, with no limit on absurdity. Your rationalization of this stupidity is embarrassing.
But I do want to dispell the idea that people are less intelligent, less capable, or somehow mindless just because they disagree with you about this (Or OP), and choose to be part of it.
> They were some of the most professional, conscientious, diligent, and excellent technologists I've ever worked with. Definitely on par with anyone at FAANGs or startups that I've work in.
such a shame they choose the most absolute evil actor to use those qualities for. which brings me to
> conscientious
yeah.... I think its pretty much impossible not to know what evil lives openly in those places
You can get false confessions on a polygraph interview but you can also get them in a normal police interview eg with the Reid Technique.
Thousands of people are in prison right now over failed polygraphs.
In places with strong courts that won't put up with this, probation officers simply tell the therapist to write up the probationer for some other, vague non-compliance issue should they fail enough polygraphs
What kind of justice system do we have where whether or not people have had lunch is the biggest factor in outcomes?
2. Whether or not people have had lunch is not the biggest factor in outcomes. The most important thing you can read about this study is Daniel Lakens' commentary:
> I appreciate that people have tried to think about which mechanism could cause this effect, and if you are interested, highly recommend reading the commentaries (and perhaps even the response by the authors).
> But I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. As psychologists, we shouldn’t teach or cite this finding, nor use it in policy decisions as an example of psychological bias in decision making.
> If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal. If a psychological effect is this big, we don’t need to discover it and publish it in a scientific journal - you would already know it exists.
> I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is.
( https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-... )
If you do read the other commentary, it is clear that the reason the rate drops to zero before breaks is that cases are scheduled with an eye toward not running into the break. The 0% grant rate causes the just-before-the-break timing, not the other way around.
Once again, I’m skeptical of many supposed sciences as well, but I’m just as skeptical of internet commenters that claim entire fields of expertise and science are all pseudoscience and made up.
For all the other claims (e.g. polygraph), you can easily search for more information online.
The point is that authority or lack there of should not be a part of your evaluation of the claims, on either side.
The point I’m making is I’m definitely not qualified to analyze all these claims that you’re making in support of these being pseudoscience. Sure your claims sound reasonable, but people also thought the earth being the center of the universe sounded reasonable. The thing I like about hacker news is people usually don’t just make unsubstantiated claims, and when they do they usually get gut checked by opposing views, which is a good thing.
And OP didn’t really make any claims, they just listed a bunch of fields and said they were all pseudoscience. I appreciate the fact that you’re at least giving an explanation as to why it’s not considered science.
Why put the onus of the work to quote a bunch of articles on the OP when these are all very easily verifiable with a tiny bit of effort
Law enforcement does all sorts of sketchy things in order to get a conviction. Why is it a surprise that they use pseudoscience that juries eat up because they've seen it used in their favorite police procedural TV show hundreds of times?
Drug metabolites are measured repeatedly and precisely, assuming no one mislabeled anything and the machine is well-calibrated and the technicians are honest even though they know who chooses which lab to use and the sample was collected fastidiously and not contaminated with anything.
But drug metabolites aren't drugs. Eat a bagel with poppy seeds and you can test positive for opioids. Take certain decongestants and you can test positive for meth.
New York's main crime lab completely blew DNA testing, and thus rendered all of their results worthless. This went on for many years. Instead of rectifying their mistakes, they swept it under the rug and forgot about it. To this day, thousands of people are in jail based upon wildly incorrect "science".
It is rather unsettling to know that nearly everything the criminal justice system uses is no better than voodoo, and you are not far away from getting thrown behind bars for little more than the whimsy of people who are empowered to do so.
I suspect that the real issue is the lack of incentive; it doesn't matter whether they know (or are capable of figuring out) that their science is bunk if there's no consequences for the status quo to continue.
Yeah, that should be a crime. Their fraud led to false imprisonment
But Cellebrite is unambiguously a private, for profit enterprise. They haven't established themselves as a "science" like authority in the average person's eyes, they actively avoid explaining the processes. They're just a company paid by a customer to deliver what the customer wants. So in the average person's eyes the difference should be obvious: this isn't science, it's not for everyone (just for the Police), and the people are not allowed to peer behind the curtain. And like authorities like to say "honest people don't need to hide things".
So as far as jury trials go there may still be a fighting chance.
There's really no incentive for forensic science to be a science at all, at the end of the day. You're either working for cops, and paid for evidence to convict their suspect, or working for the defense, and paid to convince us the cops are wrong. There's no one paid to tell us what reality we're in.
Even today, Large scale experimental science seldom get review from outside their lab. (Because the lab literally hire every expert in that sub-field)
Calling something "not science" because it is not peer reviewed is just ignorant
Still there is certainly problems relating to the fact that people without money cannot easily produce counterargument and let "real" scientists present counterhypotheses. Further there are incentives to sell products to law enforcement that produce simple truth (I would by a product from a critical scientist). Also I think it is human rights problem, if states do not have to fully compensate the damages produced by applying known faulty technology as many other actors would have to.
https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-o...
yes that was a very colorful person.
Plenty of Signal users live in totalitarian dictatorships, where the law doesn't care if you're actually guilty. Even in democracies you can't always rely on the courts. "We're planting incriminating evidence on your phone" should lead to mass uninstall of Signal.
Except nobody really believes they did that. Signal would be banned from all App Stores, and moxie would go to jail on so many charges. It's one of those nerd law ideas where 'you can't 100% prove it' is the golden defence except it isn't really - the law can call a bluff, especially when millions of users and multiple app stores already did. It says reasonable doubt, not any doubt.
I was on a jury where the defense counsel eviscerated an expert witness from a red light camera company. The police used the cellular/gps time on the camera to splice together 10-12 videos from various camera whose times weren’t in sync.
Having impeached the time; the whole case fell apart and her client’s manslaughter charge was dismissed.
In fairness, the guy was there to talk about a camera, not to describe how NTP on the cellular network works. The defense had the judge questioning the nature of time and space!
1. most cases are about sms text contents and timestamps. these can be externally validated from the phones themselves, other software, or from having both sides of the conversation
2. other data, like location, is less certain, needs to be validated, and there are debates about what the evidence means,
3. Cellebrite software is available to people who pay for it on both sides and their training videos encourage LEO to actually go out and validate the results they see. the constantly changing cat and mouse nature of cellphone extraction and parsing requires double checking and validation. this is the big issue. LEO generally have no tech skills and are just armchair phone extractors. they do not validate the data. that is a problem, but not the tool itself.
The prosecution would present the Cellebrite 'evidence' to the judge and (in our scenario) it would move the needle towards the prosecution. Then the defence will (always) try to doubt the evidence and move the needle back, but it would take a lot more than 'something might have happened, dunno how' to do that fully. When the needle is tilted enough, the prosecution has their conviction. Note that in our reality, judges have a lot of trust in prosecutors, and the needle always starts tilted...
Science also works probabilistically, like most of it, but the law works "probabilistically", as in eyeballing a rough estimate using folk theories kind of probability.
* Such a conspiracy would have to include Cellebrite, the police and Apple/Google. After all, hacking the phone likely means you have the iCloud keys and can download the backups to verify. Furthermore, the conspiracy would always be at risk from the accused choosing to restore the backups to show some evidence wasn't there. So someone at Apple/Google would have to be complicit as well to modify the backups.
They seize your phone and pull photographs, text messages, messenger logs, maps data, etc. The messages are inculpatory.
What do you want to say? That the extraction method is unreliable, that the Police have incorrect logs? Imply that the text messages have been extracted with errors, somehow?
That simply isn't the case. The data extracted is both reliable and probative. This is a copy and paste.
Debatable.
Also, I couldn't help but be amused by cheekiness:
"By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters."
But normally people just look at the reality and go "oh yes, this tool extracts the stuff on a phone and turns it into a pdf/html, how convenient". 99.99% of the time, the time a drug dealer alleging he has no knowledge of the 100's of deals on his phone is about as realistic as your 5 year old nephew with cake smeared on his face denying he ate the last bit of cake... and is treated as such. Should the act of selling drugs be a crime?- completely different topic.
You cannot assume a random company's tech works reliably without any proof, if someone's life is at stake. If yhry have cloud upload shenanighans they could be mixing up records of different people.
Evidence from a network probider is a completely different matter, but if SMS records are enough you would not need this crap.
And I believe that's what the argument against secrecy with these systems is. How can you know whether legal lines have been crossed if the system is shrouded in secrecy?
In theory, a CP felon would have reason to generically hack some another computer (since CSAM storage itself is illegal), and desktop OSs are less secure. In the phone case, you likely need to assume a specific criminal conspiracy entirely meant to convict the defendant, one that must involve the police*, and that's an extremely high bar to meet.
* The police are the ones using the tool; the only way to effectively plant non-generic evidence is to have the corroborating data first and that requires police assistance.