

Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial - carterac
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/us/19casey.html

======
foob
It'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
Or 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_co...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-
crime_and_courts/t/execute-or-not-question-cost/)

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_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_inmates#United_States)

~~~
yummyfajitas
I 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
So 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._

~~~
yummyfajitas
Let me clarify my position, since you seem to wish to misinterpret.

I think life imprisonment is a really bad thing to have happen to you, only
marginally better than death. I'm honestly not sure I'd prefer life
imprisonment to death at all, in fact. I also don't object to either one as
punishment for the worst criminals.

That's my moral stance.

On to practicalities: lots of people hate the death penalty and will devote
effort to making certain the wrong person is not executed. These people will
not devote the same effort to preventing wrongful life imprisonment.
Similarly, a wrongful execution is an outrage, whereas wrongful life
imprisonment barely makes the news.

Thus, I see the choice as the following: some number of wrongful executions,
or some larger number of wrongful life imprisonments. I prefer the smaller
number of people who wrongfully lose their life.

~~~
Steko
You have a crazy idea of prosecutor priorities. They don't give a shit about
the defendant.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm not referring to prosecutors, I'm referring to folks like Project
Innocent, reporters, etc.

------
georgemcbay
"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?

~~~
colonelxc
Here 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>

~~~
georgemcbay
Thanks 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.

~~~
starwed
What is wrong with that quote? When discussing common criticisms of Mork,
wikipedia states that: "The conflicting requirements gave Mork several
suboptimal qualities. For example, despite the aim of efficiency, storing
Unicode text takes three or six bytes per character."

------
dragmorp_
This 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
No, 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
That is one terrible written article. It's almost like the writer decided to
collect 20 tweetable paragraphs and tie them together into one "article"

------
enjo
Here is his bio:

<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
To 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
Agreed. He went out of the way to cast doubt on the reliability of his product
in the name of justice.

------
roel_v
Isn'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
Is 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
It 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'?

~~~
sili
You've never googled chloroform just out of curiosity?

~~~
roel_v
I just now did for the first time ;)

------
georgieporgie
I'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
It's not just searches, but hits to a specific site with information about
chloroform, which is even more crazy.

------
sosuke
She was found not guilty wasn't she? Why does it matter now that his initial
findings were faulty against her.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It 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
_Unfortunately, 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>

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
My 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
The 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.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
_buyers and sellers in a market needn't individually be aiming to arrive at an
efficient or socially beneficial outcome_

Yet we have regulation because we've seen sellers destroy the environment and
take advantage of buyers left and right.

 _voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who
will be best for everyone's interests_

Yet Congress has shone time and again that corruption and cronyism are at it's
heart, even if it sacrifices what is good for the people, the economy, or the
government. (I don't think the system is even working right now, but that
doesn't mean it won't in the future; the US has gone through times lime this
before.)

 _employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's
success_

But what happens when employees only focus on their own reward? Companies like
that become intolerable places to work at that are hugely inefficient,
generally surviving only by cannibalizing itself or by simply leveraging its
mass in a pseudo-illegal way). The corporate system is designed for everybody
to be doing what is best for the company (which might not always be profits),
but that breaks down, too, when everybody starts pursuing their own agenda to
the exclusion of anything else.

Systems can take a certain amount of perturbation and survive, but, just like
Stuxnet and the centrifuges, if you introduce too much disorder in a system,
_it will break down_. In human society, it seems selfishness, that drive to
take care of myself regardless of what it means to anybody else, is often the
root cause of that (it certainly is in all the above cases).

It's too bad we can't be a little more communally-oriented (without needing to
live in the forest in a VW and not take baths ;). Who wants to do a sun-dance
with me to find some extra pollen for the hive?

~~~
gjm11
Did you perhaps miss the bit where I said "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." ?

I wasn't saying "there's never anything wrong with selfishness" or "systems
that try to make selfishness produce results that benefit everyone never get
exploited" or anything of the kind. Just pointing out that "look, people are
being self-interested rather than aiming to serve the greater good" isn't _on
its own_ a good objection.

I also wasn't arguing that there should (in any of these domains) be no
regulation. There should be, and as it happens there is. Perhaps there should
be more. That's an entirely separate question from whether a basically-
adversarial system in which all the lawyers are out to win is a good thing.

So far as I know, it's an open question whether justice is best served by a
purely adversarial system in which everyone argues for a particular outcome,
or a purely investigative system in which no one is supposed to be on one side
rather than another, or a basically adversarial system with a bunch of rules
that aim to take some of the edge off (which is what we have now), or some
other intermediate thing. It's not the sort of question you can resolve by
saying "You can't do that -- it means everyone just cares about winning!" or
"You can't do that -- it relies on people ignoring their own interests!".

