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Comment by treetalker | Hacker News Reader

I question the wisdom of setting the judge up as a superjury / gatekeeper for this kind of situation. This seems like a reliability / weight of the evidence scenario, not a reliability / qualification of the witness scenario (as with an expert witness).

Why would the judge be better qualified to determine whether the voice was authentic, as opposed to the witness? And why should the judge effectively determine the witness's credibility or ability to discern, when that's what juries are for?

All that said, emulated voices do pose big problems for litigation.

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You mean like expert witness polygraphers that were treated as fact by the courts for years and still used to re-incarcerate people on parole/probation?

Or gun matching (ballistics) that are no longer considered conclusive but subjective? https://www.mdcourts.gov/data/opinions/coa/2023/10a22.pdf

Hair and Fiber expert analysis that was wrong? https://innocenceproject.org/fbi-agents-gave-erroneous-testi...

Or do you mean bite mark analysis that was again wrong?

Many of these forensic methods were used for decades and presented/treated as conclusive evidence before being challenged leading to wrongful convictions. But yes, let's have 'certified' voice experts whose living is based on being hired by the government and giving testimony to convict people. Surely this time it will be altruistic and scientific.

What always worried me is that nobody ever challenged these methods. We just accepted it as fact. Endless crime tv shows reenforce that these methods are infallible. People that watch these shows then become jurors. Scary.

Cops looking at blurry 240p video frame. "Enhance!" and suddenly it's 4k.

I don't know what the latest is, but often judges are supposed to not allow "expert testimony" without checking that the person is an expert. However this is a really complex area. Judges don't want to be the one deciding a case, but not allowing some "expert" is in a way deciding the case.

Isn't it up to the opposing party, and not the judge, to impeach an expert?

If it was solely up to the opposing party, then they'd strike down every single expert. The judge still is the ultimate decider on what evidence (including expert testimony) is admissible.

It's the jury that ultimately decides whether the evidence is convincing, even if the judge allows it. The defense will try to cast doubt on the evidence when they make their arguments.

This also reminds me of one of Norm Macdonald's bits. He says (very seriously) that if he were on a jury he would not convict someone on the basis of DNA evidence. "What do I know about DNA?" he says.

There’s a built-in design paradox. How does a judge assess an expert in a field where he is not one? There’s probably some improvement that comes from experience but it’s not perfect.

Qualifications=academics usually & career experience. No way to know if they actually learned something and aren’t a fraud. Even corporations that do thousands of interviews get duped

Some thought

- perhaps the judge make less experts interviews than the corporations, leading to less experience in that but also takes each of them more seriously.

- one way to remove/add some credit to someone claim is to ask some of their peers opinion and see if there’s a strong majority.

- the judge personal expertise may help him forge a precise opinion but that wouldn’t clear him of making a mistake. For important matters it’s always a good idea to ask for peers reviews. Academics knows that too.

Opposing lawyers have an incentive to help the judge. Of course the lawyers will lie, but they still will point out important details for the judge to look at.

But I think the argument here is less about judges making definitive calls on authenticity and more about ensuring that clearly questionable evidence isn't automatically admitted just because a witness vouches for it.

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect comes to mind.

Excluding fake evidence is very much a responsibility of the judge. In the age of Fox News, letting the jury decide for themselves whether or not made-up bullshit is actual evidence seems like a recipe for disaster, and not necessarily one that errs on the side of caution.

To the contrary, in US courts the jury determines whether evidence (documentary, testimonial) is credible or not, and what weight (if any) to assign it. (Experts, à la Daubert etc., are a different matter because they give expert opinions, not factual evidence based on personal witnessing of the events in the case, so the judge does perform a gatekeeping function, essentially to ensure the underlying field/science is reliable.)

While certainly Fox News headlines would not reach the jury in most instances, that is on account of hearsay, lack of qualification, materiality, relevance, and similar rules. It is not a prior credibility or weight determination by the judge, as I understand TFA to be advocating. So: did the witness hear a voice that he believed to be the one in question? If so, jury gets to decide (unless unfairly prejudicial or some other overriding rule comes into play).

IANAL, and I am assuming you are a lawyer - I interpreted @NoMoreNicksLeft as saying that it's a judge's responsibility to determine whether or not evidence is admissible - before it gets to a jury. And that's also what the article is talking about - "The examples should illustrate circumstances that may satisfy the authentication requirement while still leaving judges discretion to exclude an item of evidence if there is other proof that it is a fake. "

Judges have a role in excluding evidence which is more prejudicial than probative. In the case of a fake voice recording, hearing someone who sounds like the accused participating in a crime may prejudice the jury even if they later hear evidence that the recording is fake. (This is probably even more true for faked videos.)

>While certainly Fox News headlines would not reach the jury in most instances, that is on account of hearsay,

Nor should obviously fake evidence reach the jury. They can judge for themselves whether testimony is credible, but this is far different than admitting faked evidence. And if you can't see the difference, I'm not sure I'm qualified to explain it to you.

Exactly how is one supposed to determine what evidence is faked versus what evidence is not? Especially in the case where high technology has been used to mask that it is a fake?

>Exactly how is one supposed to determine what evidence is faked versus what evidence is not?

It's pretty simple. If the "evidence" can be created by software, it's not evidence. Perhaps some specially designed recording hardware might digitally sign a voice recording, and one might be inclined to trust that it was a real recording if the design of that hardware/software system was vetted.

But just for a recording? There's no point. Allowing a jury to decide that this recording is bad, but this other one is okay when they have no expertise to be able to determine if it is fake or not and none of the technical details either is just asking for prejudicial and even superstitious deliberation.

We are at the point where audio (and probably video) recordings no longer count as evidence of real world events. It's been this way for photographs for a long time already.

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