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This is an audio surveillance company which sells itself to cities as a gunshot detection system. Based on how they appear to be acting in court, it would be re

This is an audio surveillance company which sells itself to cities as a gunshot detection system. Based on how they appear to be acting in court, it would be reasonable to assume that either: (1) Their methodology is about to be debunked, or; (2) It's about to be revealed that they were working with police to allow them to manufacture reasons to arrest people.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
What is the likely outcome of this? Can ShotSpotter be compelled to disclose?
- public_defender 4y ago
  They are being ordered to disclose and they are refusing to do it. The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It would probably be more accurate to say that the lawyer conceded the company was in contempt (i.e. they were refusing the order to produce and maybe even conceding it was legal) and was requesting a light sanction. The strategy seems rather bold. I am not versed in Illinois contempt law, but judges have very broad constitutional authority to sanction people or companies for intentional failure to comply with a lawful order. In this case, you could expect the judge to do something like order the company to pay five thousand dollars per day until they disclose the records. There could be an argument that the judge could legally order the sheriff to seize their servers or throw the CEO in jail until the company complies, but for some reason stuff like that doesn't seem to ever happen in the corporate context.
  - thereare5lights 4y ago
    > The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It's a thing https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_v26-27/27.2.30.pdf https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_... > This procedure is often called “friendly contempt,” a recognition that the contemnor has not acted “with contumacious disregard for the court’s authority,” but requires a contempt finding and sanction for the purpose of obtaining appellate review. See Klaine v. S. Ill. Hosp. Servs., 2016 IL 118217, ¶ 6; Zagorski v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2016 IL App (5th) 140056, ¶¶ 16-17. In many cases, the contemnor has even requested the finding and sanction for that purpose. See Ctr. Partners, Ltd. v. Growth Head GP, LLC, 2012 IL 113107, ¶ 20.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      The main reason to ask for "friendly contempt" (as per your article) is to get a contempt order in place so it can be appealed. Until then, there is no reason for an appeals court to look at the decision. So this is the lawyer asking to appeal the original judge's order of disclosure, and this is the obscure process that makes that happen.
    - public_defender 4y ago
      Oh interesting, thanks. I'm a criminal lawyer and contempt in my domain has been contumacious or not at all.
  - jfoutz 4y ago
    My expertise goes as far as drama TV - but uh since this is a corporation, wouldn't the fine be more like average daily revenue /2 ? A night in the pokey seems pretty common, and that's kinda as close as you can get for the company. Maybe a night in jail isn't all that common though. Sure seems reasonable and effective.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      On TV they need the “getting back at the man” narrative to get viewers juices going.
      - jfoutz 4y ago
        Ha! I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are a few where the evil journalist or priest is held in contempt hindering finding the bad guy.
pseudo0 4y ago
Would results of discovery be public record? If so, I could also see: 3) They don't want their "secret sauce" made publicly available. That would both open them up to commercial competition, and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology. In general I think technology like this should have to be fully transparent if it is used as the basis for public entities' decisions, but so far the arguments against that practice seem to have won out. For example, good luck getting source code or design documents to contest an automated red light or speeding ticket.
- tomrod 4y ago
  For real. I wonder how active phone microphones and geolocation are generally -- I know there are a host of location tracking (marketing) companies that use app geolocated data as their sources.
- solardev 4y ago
  Please report to the nearest processing center for your attempted libel against the police-industrial complex.
- flaviut 4y ago
  This is a reasonable argument, but I'm not sure you're aware of allegations of this company altering evidence to better fit a police narrative: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-shotspotter-to-alter-evidence-from-gunshot-detecting-ai https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh... I sincerely doubt there's any secret sauce to protect when they have "analysts" sitting around regularly "correcting" evidence.
  - pseudo0 4y ago
    I agree that there is definitely moral hazard when it comes to after the fact "corrections", particularly if the analyst knows the outcome desired by police. The company's track record looks pretty poor in this respect. In general though, I think there are legitimate reasons for manual analysis. Any machine learning approach to a problem like this is going to have to balance false positives and false negatives, and there is necessarily going to be a somewhat arbitrary cutoff. Detecting bang-like noises in a large city is likely going to have a pretty conservative cutoff to avoid DDOSing the police with calls. For example say the company sets their cutoff for automatic reporting at 90% confidence, but when the police ask them to review a specific time period, it turns out there was a shot detected with 89% confidence, and manual analysis indicates a false negative. That is probably still useful information, and it would definitely be useful to include this data point with the correct classification in future iterations of the model.
kevinmgranger 4y ago
2 has already been revealed: https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter
clarkmoody 4y ago
Why not both? Waving a scientific magic wand from a crony-connected company is a great asset to would-be abusers in the justice system.
Spooky23 4y ago
It could mean a lot of things. I was on a jury where we were forced to acquit a guy of vehicular manslaughter because a vendor representative couldn’t properly explain how NTP works on a red light camera under cross examination. It was gross.
esoterica 4y ago
Very funny to see HN upvote a comment that boils down to "if they did nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide".
- hiptobecubic 4y ago
  The difference is that 1) they sell it based on their claims about it and 2) it is admitted as evidence in a court of law. It's pretty different from "Let's just search everyone's houses. Probably someone is committing a crime."

toomuchtodo 4y ago

What is the likely outcome of this? Can ShotSpotter be compelled to disclose?

public_defender 4y ago
They are being ordered to disclose and they are refusing to do it. The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It would probably be more accurate to say that the lawyer conceded the company was in contempt (i.e. they were refusing the order to produce and maybe even conceding it was legal) and was requesting a light sanction. The strategy seems rather bold. I am not versed in Illinois contempt law, but judges have very broad constitutional authority to sanction people or companies for intentional failure to comply with a lawful order. In this case, you could expect the judge to do something like order the company to pay five thousand dollars per day until they disclose the records. There could be an argument that the judge could legally order the sheriff to seize their servers or throw the CEO in jail until the company complies, but for some reason stuff like that doesn't seem to ever happen in the corporate context.
- thereare5lights 4y ago
  > The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It's a thing https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_v26-27/27.2.30.pdf https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_... > This procedure is often called “friendly contempt,” a recognition that the contemnor has not acted “with contumacious disregard for the court’s authority,” but requires a contempt finding and sanction for the purpose of obtaining appellate review. See Klaine v. S. Ill. Hosp. Servs., 2016 IL 118217, ¶ 6; Zagorski v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2016 IL App (5th) 140056, ¶¶ 16-17. In many cases, the contemnor has even requested the finding and sanction for that purpose. See Ctr. Partners, Ltd. v. Growth Head GP, LLC, 2012 IL 113107, ¶ 20.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    The main reason to ask for "friendly contempt" (as per your article) is to get a contempt order in place so it can be appealed. Until then, there is no reason for an appeals court to look at the decision. So this is the lawyer asking to appeal the original judge's order of disclosure, and this is the obscure process that makes that happen.
  - public_defender 4y ago
    Oh interesting, thanks. I'm a criminal lawyer and contempt in my domain has been contumacious or not at all.
- jfoutz 4y ago
  My expertise goes as far as drama TV - but uh since this is a corporation, wouldn't the fine be more like average daily revenue /2 ? A night in the pokey seems pretty common, and that's kinda as close as you can get for the company. Maybe a night in jail isn't all that common though. Sure seems reasonable and effective.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    On TV they need the “getting back at the man” narrative to get viewers juices going.
    - jfoutz 4y ago
      Ha! I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are a few where the evil journalist or priest is held in contempt hindering finding the bad guy.

pseudo0 4y ago

Would results of discovery be public record? If so, I could also see: 3) They don't want their "secret sauce" made publicly available. That would both open them up to commercial competition, and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology. In general I think technology like this should have to be fully transparent if it is used as the basis for public entities' decisions, but so far the arguments against that practice seem to have won out. For example, good luck getting source code or design documents to contest an automated red light or speeding ticket.

tomrod 4y ago
For real. I wonder how active phone microphones and geolocation are generally -- I know there are a host of location tracking (marketing) companies that use app geolocated data as their sources.
solardev 4y ago
Please report to the nearest processing center for your attempted libel against the police-industrial complex.
flaviut 4y ago
This is a reasonable argument, but I'm not sure you're aware of allegations of this company altering evidence to better fit a police narrative: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-shotspotter-to-alter-evidence-from-gunshot-detecting-ai https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh... I sincerely doubt there's any secret sauce to protect when they have "analysts" sitting around regularly "correcting" evidence.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  I agree that there is definitely moral hazard when it comes to after the fact "corrections", particularly if the analyst knows the outcome desired by police. The company's track record looks pretty poor in this respect. In general though, I think there are legitimate reasons for manual analysis. Any machine learning approach to a problem like this is going to have to balance false positives and false negatives, and there is necessarily going to be a somewhat arbitrary cutoff. Detecting bang-like noises in a large city is likely going to have a pretty conservative cutoff to avoid DDOSing the police with calls. For example say the company sets their cutoff for automatic reporting at 90% confidence, but when the police ask them to review a specific time period, it turns out there was a shot detected with 89% confidence, and manual analysis indicates a false negative. That is probably still useful information, and it would definitely be useful to include this data point with the correct classification in future iterations of the model.

kevinmgranger 4y ago

2 has already been revealed: https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter

clarkmoody 4y ago

Why not both? Waving a scientific magic wand from a crony-connected company is a great asset to would-be abusers in the justice system.

Spooky23 4y ago

It could mean a lot of things. I was on a jury where we were forced to acquit a guy of vehicular manslaughter because a vendor representative couldn’t properly explain how NTP works on a red light camera under cross examination. It was gross.

esoterica 4y ago

Very funny to see HN upvote a comment that boils down to "if they did nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide".

hiptobecubic 4y ago
The difference is that 1) they sell it based on their claims about it and 2) it is admitted as evidence in a court of law. It's pretty different from "Let's just search everyone's houses. Probably someone is committing a crime."