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Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

theregister.com

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Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#81

Post by kortilla »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #67
tantalor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The risk to their reputation & livelihood for a false positive should temper that.

The hands-off reputation-based approach isn't enough to regulate food and drugs, or aviation. I don't see why for-profit forensics companies should be trusted implicitly. Also related: we know that funding bias [0] is a real problem in science, despite that scientists' reputations should (ideally) motivate them to resist such biases. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias

No, the question is what is the incentive for lying and claiming guilty? Do prosecutors choose different labs?

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#82

Post by pvitz »

I have worked with MATLAB code with 20,000 lines of code. Only over the past years, OOP and unit-testing has become properly available and usable. My guess is that this 170,000 lines are written in the old procedural way (also for performance reasons) and are full of bugs, also thanks to the lack of supporting tools.

Most likely, this grew out of a research prototype that just worked too well to be reimplemented in a proper production environment.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#83

Post by criddell »

zupreme wrote: post #60

What is unfortunate is that it took going to appeal to force the judge to allow the code review at all. Without, at minimum, an independent review (and preferably open source code) the software and lab processes being used constitute an inscrutable "black box" process within which any judgment can be made, for any conceivable reason, with life-changing effects for the defendant (and for the victims of a crime if, for…

In Canada you can't even get the breathalyzer maintenance records:

https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/general/maintenance-r...

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#84

Post by Scandiravian »

watwut wrote: post #66
Scandiravian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of makes me wonder: if the argument is that the code is too complex to review and understand, does that mean the company is not doing code reviews themselves?

You can do code review on every single commit while not being able to make overall analysis of the massive codebase.

I completely agree, but if the reviewer isn't able to (with some amount of accuracy) predict the impact the committed code will have on overall behaviour, then there's very limited value on doing the review in the first place

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#86

Post by yarcob »

dathinab wrote: post #71
yarcob wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Wikipedia page > In June 2005, the Chief Coroner of Ontario ordered a review of 44 autopsies carried out by Smith. Thirteen of these cases had resulted in criminal charges and convictions. The report was released in April 2007, indicating that there were substantial problems with 20 of the autopsies. That sounds more like 45% to me. Also this bit from the article about a baby that allegedly had a skull fract…

> there are gaps between skull plates. Between Baby skull plates, not adult ones ;-) They grow together at some point.

I edited my post to make it clear I don't think skulls have gaps in general.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#87

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

yarcob wrote: post #48
AS37 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a forensic pathologist was giving fake prosecution evidence The doctor handled thousands of cases in his career, and a well-funded inquiry found issues with less than 1% of them. Sure we'd like that to be 0%, and society should spend time thinking of how much they rely on complicated processes of reasoning, but that's a really good accuracy.

From the Wikipedia page > In June 2005, the Chief Coroner of Ontario ordered a review of 44 autopsies carried out by Smith. Thirteen of these cases had resulted in criminal charges and convictions. The report was released in April 2007, indicating that there were substantial problems with 20 of the autopsies. That sounds more like 45% to me. Also this bit from the article about a baby that allegedly had a skull fract…

> Holy shit that is bad. Even as a lay person I know that there are gaps between skull plates.

Sure, but can you tell them apart from a fracture caused by injury? Presumably someone knowledgeable in medicine should be able to, but maybe it is one of those things that isn't as obvious as we, the uneducated outsider, might think.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#88

Post by geocar »

kortilla wrote: post #81
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hands-off reputation-based approach isn't enough to regulate food and drugs, or aviation. I don't see why for-profit forensics companies should be trusted implicitly. Also related: we know that funding bias [0] is a real problem in science, despite that scientists' reputations should (ideally) motivate them to resist such biases. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias

No, the question is what is the incentive for lying and claiming guilty? Do prosecutors choose different labs?

If you knew someone was guilty, because of a preponderance of other evidence you have the utmost faith in, such as a professional law enforcement officers’ eyewitness account, and the DNA testing vendor you were evaluating said “not guilty”, what exactly would you expect to happen?

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#89

Post by chadlavi »

While this may lead to more transparent technology use in the justice system, a more realistic outcome is that everyone accused of any crime where a technology was used in the process of determining guilt (which could get quite picayune; did the prosecutor's office use Excel? Is that something the defendant could demand to check the source code on?) will use this as a way to slow-roll the process indefinitely.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#90

Post by text70 »

ChrisRR wrote: post #12

This is similar to a case a few years back where someone asked to see the source code of a breathalyser that had found them guilty. AFAIR, the breathalyser was incorrectly averaging the readings, giving disproportional weight to the first reading. I don't know if it was enough to rule in their favour, but I'm sure it called the data into question Edit: Looks like it was a Draeger breathalyser https://www.schneier.com…

A tool designed to find people guilty is biased to find people guilty.

As far as I know it is fairly easy to take a generic dna sequencer meant for healtcare diagnostics, and repurpose it for STR analysis. The only major difference between the healthcare versions and the forensic versions is the software i/o.

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