What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> Similarly, if you make an emergency 911 call, your company will use three towers to triangulate your location; if you’re using a smartphone, it will use G.P.S. to pinpoint where you are. If you’re the target of an ongoing investigation and law-enforcement agencies want to track you, they can ask a phone company to “ping” your phone in real time.
The “ping” part caught my attention: this sounds like a method that actively queries the phone in a way that could be detected by the end user. Does anyone know if this is possible to detect? Would, for example, an Android phone allow a developer to write an app that could detect this and notify the user?
I wonder what other type of crap is putting innocent people in jail? Maybe more interesting question: how can a jury of average citizens be expected to weigh this evidence when even FBI task forces can't completely figure it out?
Rhetorical question? It's polygraph, drug sniffing dogs and breathalyzer. There was a court case a while back about drug sniffing dogs that presented the empirically demonstrated fact that the dogs present false positives all the time; but the judges concluded that it resulted in so many convictions that it would be a disaster to prevent their being evidence in court (analogous to witch dunkings, I suppose.) And breathalyzers are electronic devices whose source code is not auditable because the it is a "trade secret." Convicted by breathalyzer result? Can't challenge the black box's findings.
Also, how could sniffer dogs provide evidence for court? Surely they couldn't convict without actually finding drugs?
Probably DNA. If you suspect someone for various reasons, and then get a DNA match, it's almost certain that you have the right person. If, on the other hand, you have a DNA profile, and you search the 10,000,000 entry FBI CODIS database, there's somewhere between a 1 in 10k to 1 in 3m chance that you'll get a hit on someone other than the person who left the sample.
This seems to be rather understudied. Prosecutors like to talk about the probability that two people chosen at random would match. But that's not the correct value when you use DNA to locate the suspect.
One thing that would be useful would be for the FBI to report on collisions and near-collisions between known profiles added to the database.
Which is why they're all so untrustworthy. Take your example: If what actually happened is that you were sitting next to your friend having a beer when a madman came in and shot your friend, and then you wrestled the gun away from the madman and barely escaped with your life, you would get all that same "evidence."
The underlying problem is that we're making decisions that change the course of lives based on weak evidence of any type. Nobody wants to actually follow "beyond a reasonable doubt" because it would mean too low a conviction rate, so instead we suffer too high a false conviction rate.
But you're also confusing what classifies as one type of evidence or the other. The seventeen people who swear you were somewhere else are eyewitnesses to your alibi. In addition, circumstantial evidence is extremely useful to acquit, because although proof that you could have committed the crime doesn't prove that you did, proof that you could not have committed the crime does prove that you didn't. The prosecutor has a tough job, and they're supposed to, because they're proposing to lock a citizen in a cage for a number of years. That's a thing that should happen a lot less often than it does.
You would call me an idiot of I was adamant about the sun rotating around the Earth, but that wasn't always so. Similarly, triangulation has been used for a long time to pinpoint locations, but only now do we know that passive cellular triangulation is actually a singular approximation and so the idea that a deterministic location can be derived from the observation of transmissions is flawed.