7 ms·
Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial
- sosuke 15y agoShe was found not guilty wasn't she? Why does it matter now that his initial findings were faulty against her.
- gojomo 15y agoHuh? The outcome of any one trial matters very little. Accuracy and honesty in evidence collection matters in every trial.
- sesh00 15y agoSurely it matters that the prosecution had a responsibility to pass on the information and chose not to? That, and the fact that you've got to seriously worry when a report from a piece of software that can confuse the numbers 1 and 84 is being used as evidence in court.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoIt matters because the prosecution should have said something. The prosecutor's job is not to just put somebody in jail, but rather, to put the right somebody in jail. Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that in the US as part of the adversarial position between law enforcement and citizens.
- matwood 15y agoUnfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that in the US as part of the adversarial position between law enforcement and citizens. It's sad that our system has become more about winning and less about finding the truth and laying down justice. Here's a horrifying case where police and the prosecutor worked lied to convict a man who ended up in prison for 10 years before being release: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18385647 http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18385647 There was another story (not surprising in Denver again) where over 10% of the police force has been reprimanded for lying while on duty. This includes falsifying evidence, police reports and even lying on the stand. Most were still employed for some reason.
- bradleyland 15y agoMy girlfriend watched almost the entire trial. I sat in for some of it. After about 30 minutes, I literally said out loud, "Neither of these legal teams are interested in the truth; they're only interested in winning." Not only is your statement true, but it's become blatantly apparent.
- gjm11 15y agoThe aim of an adversarial court system is to get at the truth by having the people on each side working hard to expose those bits of the truth that suit their goals. The system is supposed to get at the truth, and that doesn't necessarily require that all the people involved are primarily trying to get at the truth. It may even work best when they aren't. Similarly: buyers and sellers in a market needn't individually be aiming to arrive at an efficient or socially beneficial outcome; voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who will be best for everyone's interests; employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's success. The trick is to design the system so that even when individual people are motivated by self-interest the aggregate effect is a good one. Of course, none of these systems works perfectly in practice, and sometimes that's because some individual's self-interest ends up having too much influence on the outcome. Some or all of the systems might want changing to encourage participants to act less self-interested somehow. But I think it's just an error to say "Ugh, those people are acting in their own interests and not pursuing the top-level goal of the system" when the system is designed to get individuals' pursuit of their own interests to work towards that top-level goal.
- matwood 15y agoYour right about the system being designed a certain way and that's how it should work. The problem is that the state has so many more resources, and if you add flat out lying to the mix, the system breaks down. I'm of the opinion that since the state has the burden of proof and virtually unlimited resources that they should also be striving for the truth above all else. When it becomes more about convictions and less about justice, the system will fail to the detriment of all of society. It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever. -John Adams
- masterzora 15y agoBecause said findings were found faulty while the case was still proceeding. It would be irresponsible to let the prosecution get away with illegal behaviour just because the defendant won.
- Nick_C 15y agoI took away the message that I would need to be quite careful about being called as an expert witness, viz what exactly my brief was. He thought it was about something, the prosecutor asked him about something else. Good on him for having the moral fortitude to correct his error.
- evan_ 15y agoMaybe one of the jurors found it unlikely that she visited the page about chloroform 84 times and that subtly affected his or her perception of the prosecution's case.
- bugsy 15y agoMany people still think she is guilty. It was a shared computer and her mother testified that she had done one search on chloroform. The prosecution countered that there were 84 searches, so the rest had to have been done by the daughter. But it turns out that they ran two different programs on the recovered cache data and one program said there was 1 hit total, the other program said there were 84 searches over several weeks. The company with the 1 hit wrote an analysis showing their competitor's results were wrong. The competitor, with the 84 hits, agreed, and contacted the prosecutors to let them know. The prosecutors decided not to mention that the testimony they were giving from expert witnesses was false, even though they were legally required to do so.
- foob 15y agoIt's terrifying that an analysis from software like CacheBack can be used as an important piece of evidence in a murder trial. An error of this magnitude could easily contribute to somebody wrongly losing his or her life and that is not alright in any way. I would feel a lot more comfortable if a piece of FOSS, which could be independently vetted, was used instead of some half-baked proprietary garbage with a $500 price tag. I'm all for finding a niche market and exploiting it, but to me there is something deeply wrong about hiding the logic behind a piece of software producing courtroom evidence.
- aaronbrethorst 15y agoOr we could just get rid of the death penalty altogether, because: a) It's cheaper to incarcerate people than it is to kill them: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/execute-or-not-question-cost/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_co... b) Sometimes, our judicial system gets it wrong. Wikipedia counts about 140 exonerated death row inmates over the past forty years in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_inmates#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_in...
- yummyfajitas 15y agoI prefer to keep the death penalty. When we lock someone away for the rest of their life, we don't devote much effort to getting things right. When we decide to execute someone, we are very careful about making sure we got the right guy. It's likely that at least some of your 140 exonerated death row inmates would still be in jail today if they were sentenced to life in prison. If the criminal justice system is broken, we need to fix it. Eliminating the death penalty won't fix it, it will just make the media talk about something else.
- apl 15y agoSo you're saying that the death penalty is justified because it functions as an incentive for law enforcement and DAs to work a little harder? Jesus.
- enjo 15y agoHere is his bio: http://www.siquest.ca/jbradley.asp http://www.siquest.ca/jbradley.asp He seems heavy on law enforcement credentials, but rather light on Computer Science. Not sure that is the right combo here.
- redthrowaway 15y agoTo be fair, the "heavy on the law enforcement" bit was doing exactly the kind of thing he's designing the software for. You don't need a CS degree to write a program to dig through a cache, and designing the in-house software for the RCMP is probably experience enough. We all make mistakes, but he went out of his way to make his known as soon as he learned about it. I'm happy to have people with that moral fiber heading forensics departments and designing software.
- theycallmemorty 15y agoAgreed. He went out of the way to cast doubt on the reliability of his product in the name of justice.
- georgemcbay 15y ago"He found both reports were inaccurate (although NetAnalysis came up with the correct result), in part because it appears both types of software had failed to fully decode the entire file, due to its complexity. His more thorough analysis showed that the Web site sci-spot.com was visited only once — not 84 times." How does that work? I mean, how do you examine what must basically be a log file (though perhaps in some binary format), come up with 84 hits but then realize it was only 1 hit and blame the problem on file complexity? Seems like such an issue would only result in underreporting, not overreporting. Where did the 84 number even come from?
- biot 15y ago$ grep 12.34.56.78 logfile | wc -l 84 Maybe the complexity comes from there being 1 CSS file, 3 javascript includes, 58 images, and a number of AJAX calls on that HTML page?
- colonelxc 15y agoHere is a explanation from a the maker of a competing tool[1]. It actually delves into the Mork file format with the data from the trial. There are a couple 84's in the format and in the data, but what I think what happened is because there is no "visitedcount" when you have only visited a site once, it took the data from a previous row (in this case, a myspace page) and repeated the value. If that is truly what happened, the fix is to simply re-initialize the visitedcount to 1 between rows in case there isn't a visitedcount listed. [1] http://wordpress.bladeforensics.com/?p=357 http://wordpress.bladeforensics.com/?p=357
- starwed 15y agoMork, as in what a netscape engineer once called ""...the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)
- georgemcbay 15y agoThanks for the link, the extra detail there is very helpful in understanding what the original newspaper article glossed over. However (from your link): "It is a plain text format which is not easily human readable and is not efficient in its storage structures. For example, a single Unicode character can take many bytes to store." My faith in the competency of "digital detectives" is not fully restored... Hopefully this is just another case of someone simplifying things to increase readability to a mainstream audience, but every time I read something like that related to CS/programming/IT I cringe in horror at all of the things I must have a horribly half-assed understanding of by not being an expert in that field and building what little knowledge I have on the subject from articles like these.
- georgieporgie 15y agoI'm surprised that nobody with access to the data stopped to ponder that those who know how to search would find what they need in < 84 searches, while those who don't know how to search would give up earlier. The fact everyone blindly trusted suspicious data from a 'magical' program is, to me, more disturbing than the flaw itself.
- colonelxc 15y agoIt's not just searches, but hits to a specific site with information about chloroform, which is even more crazy.
- roel_v 15y agoIsn't it strange that when somebody looks for something 84 times, that a prosecutor sees that as more important as someone looking for it only once? So a stupid person who needs to read something 84 times, or whose dog eats his printed version 83 times, is more likely to 'have done it' as the person who understands it on the first try or doesn't have a dog?
- Steko 15y agoIs it really that strange? I think the idea is to show a fixation or continuing interest. I've googled some terms dozens of times because I know it will return the wiki or imbd page.
- roel_v 15y agoIt depends on the timeline I guess. But the amount of added 'suspicion' is much bigger between 0 and 1 lookups than between 1 and 84 lookups. What I mean is, when somebody looks something up only once, that says a lot about what they think about or plan to do. When somebody looks it up multiple times, well that at most shows that they have a continuing interest as you say. It's not like everybody once in a while randomly decides 'hey, I'm going to look up how to make chloroform' and that only the people who do it several times over several months actually do it. My point was, why hammer on the '84 times'? Isn't just the one time just as much a 'smoking gun'?
- bradleyland 15y agoI guess it depends on an individual's perception. One time - I searched for something out of curiosity. Eighty-four times - I searched for the term on several occasions because I was using it as part of some process or had an ongoing need for the information. Or possibly I was going to use it in some process, but decided not to, then revisited it later when I considered it again. Inference is an important part of human cognition. We're pretty good at it. The subtle differences in the details influence the inferred outcome, and they should. ---------- Note that I am not suggesting this inference should be the basis for a conviction in trial by jury. The standard by which we judge evidence in a trial is not the same standard by which we develop opinions.
- dragmorp_ 15y agoThis was a major mistake by the witness in this case, and everyone who has been watching the case already knew about it. Do you know why? Because it was presented to the jury during the trial. The jury was told that the number of visits to that site was transposed with the number of visits to myspace. A prosecution witness cleared the record in open trial. In fact, defense attorney Jose Baez even brought up the fact during closing arguments and used it as a reason to have reasonable doubt of the entire case.
- lylejohnson 15y agoNo, it's not (or shouldn't be) news to those of us who watched that part of the trial. But I bet there are a lot of people whose main information sources were cable TV talking heads who may have failed to point out this correction.
- orenmazor 15y agoThat is one terrible written article. It's almost like the writer decided to collect 20 tweetable paragraphs and tie them together into one "article"