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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

#321

Post by raldi »

maceurt wrote: post #315
phire wrote: post #93

> The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour. First, the defence doesn't necessarily have to evaluate all 170,000 lines. They just need to find one buggy line which could potentially overturn the result.…

It shouldn't take 10 lines an hour should it? I don't have experience reviewing professional code of this size, so please correct me if my assumption is wrong, but that number doesn't seem right.

I'd say more like ten lines a second, if you're skimming it to look for something. And of course, the work can be parallelized.

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

#322

Post by [deleted] »

phire wrote: post #93

> The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour. First, the defence doesn't necessarily have to evaluate all 170,000 lines. They just need to find one buggy line which could potentially overturn the result.…

[deleted]

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

#323

Post by novembermike »

maceurt wrote: post #315
phire wrote: post #93

> The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour. First, the defence doesn't necessarily have to evaluate all 170,000 lines. They just need to find one buggy line which could potentially overturn the result.…

It shouldn't take 10 lines an hour should it? I don't have experience reviewing professional code of this size, so please correct me if my assumption is wrong, but that number doesn't seem right.

It really isn't. Most of the code is probably going to be uninteresting and you can do 10 lines a minute or more. Some of the code will be more relevant and might take a day for 10 lines. This would just be checking for accuracy though so you could probably just ignore a huge chunk of it.

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

#324

Post by ineedasername »

If ever there was something that should be fully transparent it is the mechanisms by which a person might be found guilty of a crime. The defendant shouldn't even have had to fight for this. It should be a fundamental cornerstone of criminal prosecutions.

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

#325

Post by ncallaway »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #288

The tone of this thread is leaning to "forensics evil, government lackeys out to get the little guy". In the USA, all sides can call and rely on their own forensics. There is no government mandated & approved single-source-of-truth (with some minor exceptions). > Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession. This statement is…

> In the USA, all sides can call and rely on their own forensics

Ah, not quite.

More accurately: "all sides can call and rely on their own forensics _if they can afford it_"

In this country we _say_ that everyone has the right to an attorney, but that doesn't extend to expert witnesses.

This means forensic evidence becomes a _phenomenal_ tool for targeting the little guy, or the lower classes, while conveniently providing hooks for the more wealthy defendants to escape the system.

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

#326

Post by meowface »

ineedasername wrote: post #324

If ever there was something that should be fully transparent it is the mechanisms by which a person might be found guilty of a crime. The defendant shouldn't even have had to fight for this. It should be a fundamental cornerstone of criminal prosecutions.

These cases also often come up with drug and alcohol detection tests, and as John Oliver points out in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f2iawp0y5Y, software used to select jurors.

All of these companies claim that their source code is valuable intellectual property and that disclosing it can hurt their business. Even if this were true, when you're providing something that can be a significant factor in someone being imprisoned or executed, when creating the business you should accept that you're providing a public service that needs to be publicly accountable.

If it's not open source, at the very least there should be a requirement that software code and hardware designs must be provided on-demand to experts in court cases (with a non-disclosure clause to mitigate leaks and corporate espionage etc.).

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

#327

Post by ineedasername »

vmception wrote: post #134
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…

People sometimes ask me what my “number” is, like how much net worth or “money” I want, what would I do with it I say “I want to be able to afford appeals court where my rights matter” Infinite appeals court! Most people plea out, cant make bail, dont have counsel buddy buddy with the judge enough to get you bail, and lose the ability to keep good counsel for more and more motions and appeals I want that, there is al…

Or just make the entire system based on a sort of "public defender" model. As it stands, a person accused of a crime and then found innocent has still been punished without even being found guilty due to enormous legal bills. It is a highly asymmetric power structure for anyone who isn't wealth: the prosecutors have massively more resources than the average person to call upon. Alternatively, when prosecuting the wealthy, that asymmetry is reversed, which might be equally problematic.

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

#328

Post by klyrs »

lwigo wrote: post #178
jdironman wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temps vary throughout the day.

A rural small town judge probably doesn't have the best insight into that, just that Corporal Bubba said he calibrated it so it must've been right. I know, this is exceedingly cynical.

Your "Corporal Bubba" isn't just cynical, it leans heavily upon a harmful stereotype that folks in small towns are uneducated simpletons. Stop the polarization, please

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

#329

Post by boyesm »

radu_floricica wrote: post #197
sdflhasjd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tool designed to find people guilty is biased to find people guilty. I don't see those particular issues make it biased, just inaccurate - it could go either way.

And yet somehow whenever you take a closer look at mislabeled product prices, the average is always in favor of the store. And that's far from the only industry. Complex tools are the product of many thousands of individual decisions taken by humans, humans aware of who's the paying client.

> And yet somehow whenever you take a closer look at mislabeled product prices, the average is always in favor of the store.

What is this based on?

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

#330

Post by Jakobeha »

hirundo wrote: post #55

If an accused person has the right to see the source code that produced evidence against them, is it a violation of their rights for the source code to be obfuscated, or even just so spaghettified that not even an expert can understand it? I kinda think that should be a violation. But deciding whether a particular piece of code is so bad is so subjective that I'm not sure on how you'd make a legal standard out of it.…

In the case where code is used to convict or acquit someone, I think it should be a well-tested and established program: generally something with the software quality of Linux, or in this case, whatever DNA testing kit is being used by scientists in top-ranking universities.

We could also use formal verification based on well-established axioms. For example, maybe we could "prove" that the DNA kit reports accurate results as long as the samples it's given are processed correctly.

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