Schneier on Security

ianf • October 15, 2015 8:50 AM

@ HJohn,
        when you “decided to include the [TV show’s name(?)] here in case anyone wanted to look up the episode” you essentially informed us that we can find it on the Internet… like, look up at the sky at night, there’s that twinkling star. And when we find “it,” we can start reviewing the episodes until we come across the very one that you, and only you, had in mind. Well, THANK YOU for these incredibly precise leads to nowhere, Mr. Certified Fraud Examiner.

BONUS, regrettably with direct-access URL for a change: to find out how correct deployment of DNA testing combined with old-fashioned sleuthing can lead to results, read Tobias Jones’ account of the 2010 murder of Yara Gambirasio that has obsessed Italy in The Guardian.

ianf • October 15, 2015 4:21 PM

@ jayson

It took the German police 16 years, and presumably the same in DM & Euros, to start suspecting wholesale contamination of their own forensic-testing materials? What a bunch of woollies.

At a local hospital the electronic, computer-controlled lock to some wards’ medical supplies (not medicine!) store was discovered to be faulty. Nothing was missing, everything was accounted for, and no signs of tampering with sterile bandages etc were detected. Nevertheless, the entire ~€200k truck-worth contents of it were first sent to be irradiated, then donated to a charity as non-sterile, outdated material (boil before using). And yet I’m talking of a regional hospital merely calculating the cost of the alternative: potential of a contagious disease due to momentarily unsecured somehow contaminated items being far greater than the not inconsiderable outlay for restocking the supply store.

@Tatütata […] “They finally got their man, or rather their woman. Her job was packing cotton swabs of the sort that was used to collect samples at crime scenes…”

Please be precise: not A, but several WOMEN of a similar Eastern European mitochondrial-DNA profile. It was the gender of the alleged serial killer that piqued my interest, as it is well known that there are few such around (and then rather conforming to Charlize Theron’s “Monster” roadside-hooker role model).

ianf • October 15, 2015 8:25 PM

@ Steve “Justice is a myth perpetuated by our total immersion in television crime dramas and CSI, the real propaganda.”

One form or another of justice was there well before the advent of television, or, for that matter, even drama. If not the current (in the history of Mankind pretty mild) form of justice, what would you propose instead?

Wait!—I know: we’ll put Mr. Certified in charge, he’ll sort us out. ;-))

“Forensic “scientists” are never objective, but always witnesses for the prosesecution, ready to spin their testimony to aid a conviction.”

Looking over known miscarriages of justice, convictions based on prejudice and, usually, the local police’s “needs” to appease imaginary revengeful electorate, forensic science has also been used as a tool for exoneration of unjustly convicted. Clearly, it wasn’t needed to do the harm in the first place, but, once the methodology solidified, it can now be used to right some of the wrongs of the past.

“And of course Justice has never been blind to money and power.

Name one area of life where that doesn’t apply.

ianf • October 18, 2015 9:47 AM

@ Humberto

I wouldn’t put it in quite those words, but collection of crime scene forensic samples always needs to be first subjected to the same kind of elimination scrutiny, that the samples later will be examined under. True scientists (and intel analysts) always start by doubting the veracity of obvious and/or expected and/or easily extracted results of an investigation.

Unfortunately, in many cases and too many places, the forensic sciences are viewed as a tool for the prosecution, waved about when it fits the state’s narrative, suppressed when it doesn’t. Observe, however, that, even in the most stringent Western jurisprudences, forensic evidence per se is not needed for a conviction; other factors weight heavier than whether there were any fingerprints or blood and fibre traces.

Indeed, there are plenty of cases of later admitted miscarriages of justice where there was no, or next to none technical evidence, yet severe sentences were meted out anyway.

Forensic evidence is thus like a club used by that party which best can explain its importance in the criminal context. For that reason alone, any DNA evidence over which hangs a whiff of a suspicion that it might have been contaminated, should automagically be excluded. Just as, to take another known example from the now-exonerated Amanda Knox’ case, any prosecution during which the prosecutors’ own technical experts manage to irretrievably destroy ?HOW? all the accused’s hard drives ?HOW? with corroboration of her movements and mail history in the course of data-forensic examination of same, should automatically have been abolished.