
Idaho legislators approve law requiring transparency for risk assessment tools - danso
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/mar/26/algorithms-idaho-bill-update/
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sandworm101
This is lawyer trickery. Do not think that this transparency law is meant to
ensure fair justice, expect the opposite. This is the equivalent of the common
"open file" rule of prosecutors. Rather than sift through and release relevant
material to defendants (aka Brady material) most prosecutors just declare
their files open for inspection. It is then on the defense to do the sifting,
to slog through the growing pile of irrelevant material. So too with this law.
Rather than properly manage the system, this is the legislature throwing its
hands in the air. The burden will now be on defendants to become AI experts
prior to making challenges to this system. The poor defendant seeking bail
will have to point our the flaws in the code.

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delinka
You make a valid point that this places additional burdens on defense.
However, I feel like such openness is still better than allowing prosecutors
to cherry-pick information to provide, or "accidentally" leave out a chunk of
data, or require repeated specific motions to request each detail as the
defense becomes aware of it.

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mikeyouse
One benefit of the "old" way is that if the prosecution omits evidence, it can
be grounds for an appeal. If the defense skips something, there's no grounds
and they're just out of luck.

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danso
Note: the law was passed by both legislative chambers in March, and was then
signed by the governor on March 28th, to go into effect in July 2019:

[https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2019/legislation/h...](https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2019/legislation/h0118/)

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bilbo0s
> _It is also the first to set requirements for public access to the design
> and data used to build the tool’s predictions, requiring that records
> created during a risk assessment tool’s development, validation, and use to
> “be open to public inspection, auditing, and testing.”..._

Now these are the kinds of laws we need! This is the sort of thing we should
be doing all across the US for a lot of software being used, allegedly, "in
the public interest".

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linuxlizard
I'm surprised this didn't make any local news here in Idaho. And such an
openness requirement seems at odds for Idaho's usual politics (cf. Idaho's Ag
Gag laws).

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Splendor
The only coverage I saw was from Nathan Brown at the Idaho Press.

[https://www.idahopress.com/eyeonboise/bill-to-regulate-
bail-...](https://www.idahopress.com/eyeonboise/bill-to-regulate-bail-
algorithms-survives-but-likely-to-
be/article_cc42a1ff-8c8f-5e2c-abb5-3905be3b4626.html)

~~~
snuxoll
This is why they happily get my subscription dollars every month.

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thedrake
this is the exact thing that Rule Lists can do as proven by Cynthia Rudin and
her team show
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjxcwKN2dXs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjxcwKN2dXs)
and [https://today.duke.edu/2017/07/opening-lid-criminal-
sentenci...](https://today.duke.edu/2017/07/opening-lid-criminal-sentencing-
software) She also has an open source code for the rule lists here
[https://users.cs.duke.edu/~cynthia/code.html](https://users.cs.duke.edu/~cynthia/code.html)

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ineedasername
Isn't this rather difficult? I thought tracking back an output of something
like a neural net to the salient input features was a non-trivial process.

