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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

arstechnica.com

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Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#241

Post by crazygringo »

nl wrote: post #57
crazygringo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is an atrocious article. It makes no sense as presented. The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. But even if the messages no longer existed, there was no actual evidence. Truly, what on earth did the defense argue? How on earth was the jury convinced he was guilty? Everything important about this story is…

> The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. I think the point is that the message history would show incriminating messages. He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.

No, the message history wouldn't.

Because the message history was for his actual account, not the criminal's account.

The whole point is that they looked up the wrong username. And when they looked it up, they found an innocent man's identity, but didn't bother to look at the message history, which would not have had any of the messages.

Which is super-weird, because if he'd been messaging this one child, you'd think they'd be looking at all of his messages to find potential messages with other children. And then immediately noticing the lack of the messages that started the investigation in the first place.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#243

Post by dredmorbius »

srdjanr wrote: post #148
lefra wrote: post #121

This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

Only if non-ASCII characters are allowed in usernames, and generally I don't think they often are

I don't know what's most common these days, but quite to the contrary there's often a great deal of agitation for full i18n of name fields, such that people can specify their preferred name / spelling, in their native language. This is often pitched as a rights/respect issue.

I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack>

By contrast, Unicode has something on the order of 160,000 distinct characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode>

This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker.

https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-...>

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#244

Post by dredmorbius »

notorandit wrote: post #193

This is not the first time I see people copy-typing text by hand instead of copy-pasting it. I am not sure why they do that, but when I see a DevOps engineer doing it I have a chilling feel.

Depends on the context.

If running code samples from a remote (untrusted) site, re-typing may spare you some grief.

I've addressed the homoglyph issue in my immediate prior comment. Other transcription errors are also of course possible with identifiers.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#245

Post by DoctorOetker »

anigbrowl wrote: post #101
jojobas wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A judge that has no reasonable doubt with this sort of evidence has no business being a judge. We don't know what defense did in this trial but not picking up on the username mismatch and the assumed non-challenge of the evidence is telling as well.

In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality. That's the job of the defense lawyer. In civil law systems the roles of the judge and prosecutor are combined and responsility for bad decisions is distributed differently.

a simple law could mandate that attribution chains presented as evidence (by either party) MUST recursively include a header reminding everyone about this law (so that ALL defendant, plaintif, their lawyers and the judge & jury if applicable), the law being for example:

1) the username must be introduced as " the -character user name at the -character online platform ..." along with a cryptographic hash of the concatenation, of user name, service name, ... so that any alteration is easily noticed.

2) a histogram of usernames binned by Damerau-Levenstein edit distance, along with a tabular cumulative count so that everyone can comfortably read off how many other but similar user names this platform has less than 1 edit away, less than 2 edits away, less than 3 edits away etc...

3) the law should introduce a bet between law enforcement and corporations: upon being requested for the other half of a forensic link (say an IP address, or an email address, ...), it must demand the exact number of characters, it must provide a list or at least a cumulative count of user names less than N edits away. if they are ever caught violating user privacy they owe money to the state, the individual, ... even if law enforcement demanded out of band cooperation. The corporation should financially feel the risk of prosecution / police making invalid requests, so they have an incentive to technologically think ahead of the police and their sloppy work.

> In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality.

So regardless of common law vs civil law systems, one could devise laws such that this type of errors could be made glaringly clear to anyone involved, by law.

It's not like the first time humanity is confronted with misattribution. If a phenomenon has a word, its typically been happening for a long time. If the laws haven't been adjusted to learn from mistakes, it's not because they don't want to learn, but because they want to not learn.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#246

Post by DoctorOetker »

mothballed wrote: post #203
sirsinsalot wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and...? Just because many things can do something doesn't negate a discussion about one of the things. Your point (which it barely is one) isn't really interesting or useful.

It effectively does for the average person person. You think you have a tiny ability to change or influence it, when in fact you do not, at least not while exercising the range of options and risk you find acceptable*. It is not of much different design today than during the Salem Witch Trials, 300 years ago, and sits in the one branch of government with next to zero democratic levers of control. The justice system i…

> You think you have a tiny ability to change or influence it, when in fact you do not, at least not while exercising the range of options and risk you find acceptable.

Perhaps I am atypical for HN, but I see a clear distinction between corrupted legal systems or layers in society (most lawyers in general), and force majeure* from natural disasters: the average person isn't paying taxes to make sure natural disaster continues happening, and history has shown that system collapse is often preceded by intolerable taxation used in offensive ways. Average persons holding pitchforks...

Keep in mind that Klayme wasn't the only victim of this shoddy prosecutor: while he had to navigate the prison bitch brothels, the real perpetrator might continue the abuse with same and possibly many other victims!

Can we please discuss how misattributions like this can be prevented, and think of ways to align the interests of all parties?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#247

Post by helpfulfrond »

nightowlnetwork wrote: post #196
expedition32 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird in my country we have a culture were scientists love going after eachother- its what they live for! Nothing gives you more fame than destroying other people's reputation. And overturning convictions gets you straight into the history books. It gets so ridiculous that people make their life work out of redoing cases from the 90s.

If you dont mind, which country is that?

"Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" is a French game, (the user's name is expedition 32) and this sounds like something the French would love, so I'm thinking France, but I'm only hypothesizing.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#248

Post by DoctorOetker »

SZJX wrote: post #155
Aurornis wrote: post #15

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to…

The crusade and strong Western societal taboo/moral panic on this topic clearly massively cloud people’s judgments (e.g. Chat Control in the EU), unfortunately.

I believe its orthogonal to what you refer to as moral panic:

Every day the legal process dragged on, every day this defendant sat in prison, was a day the real perpetrator wasn't recognized, wasn't prevented from harming more victims. Now what you refer to as a moral panic turns out to have interests aligned with the falsely convicted defendant.

Any further harm suffered by victims of the perpetrator should be entitled to sue the police / prosecution, suppose such further harm happened:

as I understood, for a person / entity to be co-liable theoretically requires:

* the person / entity having faulted

* a causal connection between the fault and resulting damages

Please don't push on the basis of what position you consider yourself more or less likely to find yourself in, but push on the basis of what you believe may help prevent false positives and false negatives.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#249

Post by thephyber »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #129
qingcharles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the Canadian justice system, but it's very hard in the USA for defendants to get expert witnesses. The state is supposed to pay, but it's almost never done, and when it is they pay bottom rate for the defendant while having unlimited funds for their own experts.

Oh something I can comment on! A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied. I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they foun…

Interesting.

I was actually dismissed from a jury panel partially because I said I don't know if I could trust the experts because my perception is that individual experts either repeatedly testify for only the prosecution or only the defense.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#250

Post by jibal »

ralferoo wrote: post #160
jibal wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had the exchange with a minor from an account that everyone -- including the defense -- believed to be Klayme's. His only counterargument was that his email had been hacked, which was not true and not the correct explanation. But what they didn't have is any independent evidence that Klayme had sent the messages or even that he had access to the account that sent them. If they had looked at the IP address from w…

Residential proxies exist. Even if they had picked up that the IP was from somewhere else, a decent lawyer could probably have been able to convince a jury that just showed intent because he was trying to conceal his IP.

You're talking nonsense. Among other things, had either the prosecution or the defense seen that the IP addresses didn't match, they would have pursued it further. "The IP addresses don't match but that just proves that the defendant tried to hide their IP address" is a ridiculous corrupt argument, one that a decent prosecutor would never make ... please do not ever serve on a jury.
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