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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

#351

Post by vkou »

Aachen wrote: post #210
breck wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. If it would take 8.5 yrs to review, it's probably god awful, and should never ever ever be used to convict someone of such a crime. My prediction: this firm will probably try to get removed from the case, rather than open source their shitty code. Source: I've worked on MATLAB codebases for various genomics research projects in the past.

> If it would take 8.5 yrs to review, it's probably god awful, and should never ever ever be used to convict someone of such a crime. It's not like you review all scientific evidence and re-do the experiments that lead up to the discovery of in the first place. Validating all that would also take years and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties. Similarly, there will be some trust involved…

> It's not like you review all scientific evidence and re-do the experiments that lead up to the discovery of in the first place. Validating all that would also take years and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties. Similarly, there will be some trust involved with this source code as well

There are a few important differences between a generally accepted method, and some Matlab black-box that you feed an input into, and it prints out 'guilty' and 'not guilty'.

1. The former is based on centuries of peer review, where the best ideas eventually get selected for. The latter is an externally un-reviewed application, which encapsulates the best of whatever we could ship by Thursday.

2. You can call an expert witness to the stand, and ask them questions about the state of the art of . You can ask them why. You can ask them about how certain one should be about their statements. You can't cross-examine a black box.

The actual solution to your quandary is to require that forensic analysis services must pass an annual, independent, double-blind analysis of the accuracy of their methods, before they are used in a courtroom - and that the results of those audits are made available to the defense.

It's one thing for a man in a lab coat to take the microphone and say that their methods are accurate 'to within one in a million'. It's quite another to see an audit, where 100 samples were sent in for analysis over six weeks, and only 92 of them were analysed correctly.

A jury might still convict on the basis of that 92% accuracy, but only if other meaningful evidence points against the defendant.

Unfortunately, the reality of forensic science in 2021 is that most of it is sloppy bunk, with no assurances of accuracy.

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

#352

Post by inetknght »

Aachen wrote: post #210
breck wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. If it would take 8.5 yrs to review, it's probably god awful, and should never ever ever be used to convict someone of such a crime. My prediction: this firm will probably try to get removed from the case, rather than open source their shitty code. Source: I've worked on MATLAB codebases for various genomics research projects in the past.

> If it would take 8.5 yrs to review, it's probably god awful, and should never ever ever be used to convict someone of such a crime. It's not like you review all scientific evidence and re-do the experiments that lead up to the discovery of in the first place. Validating all that would also take years and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties. Similarly, there will be some trust involved…

> It's not like you review all scientific evidence and re-do the experiments that lead up to the discovery of in the first place.

Actually, it is. That's how science works and that's how convictions often get overturned.

> Validating all that would also take years

Are you suggesting that unvalidated data is being used to prosecute crimes?

> and much of it can be established as generally accepted by all parties.

The point here is that it isn't established as generally accepted by all parties.

> Similarly, there will be some trust involved with this source code as well.

"Trust but verify"

> If you don't think software of 180k lines can be used in court under such circumstances because it would take too long to review, we should throw out pretty much all software anywhere in the judicial system.

I firmly believe that if the source code isn't available to review by all parties, including the public, then it shouldn't be used in a criminal court.

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

#353

Post by jstanley »

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.

This could just as easily be selection bias: the errors in favour of the customer are less likely to get reported by customers.

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

#354

Post by vkou »

rtx wrote: post #340
melq wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making the prosecutor kind of a criminal. Never met a lawyer before huh? Jokes aside, prosecutors pushing through cases they know to be unsound isn't exactly uncommon. Many prosecutors are more concerned with their conviction rates than they are in justice, because that's what they are measured and rewarded by.

I often hear this, who is rewarding them for high conviction rate.

Voters, because when it comes to issues of criminal justice, crowds are rarely paragons of sober temperance and restraint.

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

#355

Post by hutzlibu »

jabits wrote: post #334
melq wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making the prosecutor kind of a criminal. Never met a lawyer before huh? Jokes aside, prosecutors pushing through cases they know to be unsound isn't exactly uncommon. Many prosecutors are more concerned with their conviction rates than they are in justice, because that's what they are measured and rewarded by.

I think you are wrong and that most prosecutors want to do the right thing, like most working people

Everyone wants to do the right thing.

It is just that some think the right thing for themself is to maximize their career progress.

And I would not know in general about state prosecutors, but what I know anecdotally second hand, does not sound good.

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

#356

Post by ehwhyreally »

abfan1127 wrote: post #120
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.…

10 lines per hour? doesn't that seem painfully slow?

Yes, You also dont read programs like a book, You generally follow the methods being used, Reading line to line would be like reading a a book with all its pages re arranged.

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

#357

Post by bargl »

meowface wrote: post #326
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…

Without jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon, I'd also like to see this applied to voting software. I know it's a hot topic, and I'm honestly not trying to get political.

Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism to protect IP that I can't think of.

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

#358

Post by dang »

AS37 wrote: post #153
[deleted] wrote: post #127

[deleted]

I'd like to encourage you, 5 minutes after you learn about someone's existence, not to wish for their death, execution, imprisonment, and /or disenfranchisement. The real world is too complicated to judge correctly in that time. As well, please remember that the comment guidelines exist at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for pointing this out! We've deleted that comment by the commenter's request.

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

#359

Post by [deleted] »

zymhan wrote: post #349
owl57 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they be? I went to university with people from all over Russia. They don't tend to return to their home towns after getting educated. Does this work differently in America?

> Does this work differently in America? No, not really.

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by jimnotgym »

marcodiego wrote: post #23

Wouldn't this set a precedent to eventually force any forensic software to become open source?

I guess open-source implementations of various algorithms that had been demonstrated effective, if produced by a not-for-profit maybe, could be very disruptive to this 'industry'.
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