The Fallibility of DNA Evidence
This is a good summary article on the fallibility of DNA evidence. Most interesting to me are the parts on the proprietary algorithms used in DNA matching:
William Thompson points out that Perlin has declined to make public the algorithm that drives the program. “You do have a black-box situation happening here,” Thompson told me. “The data go in, and out comes the solution, and we’re not fully informed of what happened in between.”
Last year, at a murder trial in Pennsylvania where TrueAllele evidence had been introduced, defense attorneys demanded that Perlin turn over the source code for his software, noting that “without it, [the defendant] will be unable to determine if TrueAllele does what Dr. Perlin claims it does.” The judge denied the request.
[…]
When I interviewed Perlin at Cybergenetics headquarters, I raised the matter of transparency. He was visibly annoyed. He noted that he’d published detailed papers on the theory behind TrueAllele, and filed patent applications, too: “We have disclosed not the trade secrets of the source code or the engineering details, but the basic math.”
It’s the same problem as any biometric: we need to know the rates of both false positives and false negatives. And if these algorithms are being used to determine guilt, we have a right to examine them.
Ross Snider • May 31, 2016 1:13 PM
Indeed, there is much determined by algorithms that are black box, including US citizen’s “threat scores” used in ‘real time law enforcement’ [1] and the algorithms used to determine Credit Score from social media posts. [2]
Furthermore, a large number of media organizations block content according to algorithms – some of which are also hooked into Federal systems. I remember being blocked from posting Snowden disclosures on Facebook (and watching others not able to post political messages and the May Day protest organizing blocked by Facebook).
Maybe to a sort of Richard Stallman thesis: if the user doesn’t control the code, the code controls the user. And if a special interest controls the code: the special interest controls the user.
[1] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-way-police-are-surveilling-you-calculating-your-threat-score/2016/01/10/e42bccac-8e15-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html)
[2] (http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2015/10/23/your-social-media-posts-may-soon-affect-your-credit-score-2/)