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Comment by Tangaroa | Hacker News Reader

Wait a minute. We're supposed to be upset that the feds took a guy's computer after they matched his fingerprints to a bomb bag used in the Madrid train bombings that killed almost 200 people? And we're supposed to believe this was ethnic harassment because "he is a muslim"? If any police anywhere find near-conclusive proof that you killed 200 people, it doesn't matter if you believe in the flying spaghetti monster. They just might take your computer away from you.

It turns out the fingerprints belonged to somebody else. Blame it on faulty software and faultier human interpretation. This scaremongering about routine evidence-gathering is socially irresponsible.

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>It turns out the fingerprints belonged to somebody else...

It's more complex than that.

The problem was the fingerprints of the real bomber and Mayfield's prints were identical, each print was exact match to the other person. Exact at least to the satisfaction of the multiple fingerprint examiners each of those examiners followed a different procedure since there is no science of what's conclusive.

The problem was the FBI absolutely denied any two people could ever have the same prints although there was no way to prove that.

Even after the case was solved a test was done where the prints were sent for analysis again and the same examiners came to a different conclusion given the same prints!

Frontline on PBS covered this situation http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/rea...

> Blame it on faulty software and faultier human interpretation

So you mean blame it on no one but a man's life gets destroyed.

And you wonder why they get away with murder...

Something bad happens, and the first thing on your mind is, "We have to blame this on somebody!"

And you wonder why America is mocked as such a litigious country...

It is a common coping mechanism to find arbitrary things to blame in tragedies where there isn't one. It's part of our rational mind to find meaning and patterns in the natural world. We do this to understand. It's often wrong -- our eyes turn clouds into animals and mere static into design. This is not endemic to America.

Im always surprised by peoples aversion for trying to put blame on someone or some thing. Finding where the fault was is part of the process to make sure an error doesn't happen again.

I think there's confusion with the "blame game". As in, once you can blame someone, the problem is over and solved but that's just the start to solving the problem. I always want to know who did something wrong and how it happened so we could work to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Because as people state in this other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4176658) quite clearly:

"It's not about pointing the finger or otherwise apportioning blame. It's about learning from mistakes and preventing them from happening again."

Just assigning blame is a cop-out that doesn't do anything other than make people better by finding a scapegoat and punishing that scapegoat as a result.

Actually, I really don't care about blaming a person or a thing. What I am most concerned about is that the person who was most affected by the issue (the people who were incorrectly arrested) are made whole, as best as they can be.

This would include, to my mind, monetary compensation as well as having the offenders cover the cost of mental rehabilitation.

It's a traumatic experience and we should not be so heartless.

What you're talking about is "lets jail someone for no reason other than this computer said so and oops we weren't supposed to jail him. SO SORRY"

I am more concerned with the person who had his life destroyed, not so much the system. The system is guaranteed to muck up, by definition.

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