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The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly (2022) [pdf]
- qup 3y agoThey must run a bug free system. Probably TempleOS
- kouru225 3y ago“Your honor this God song proves that my client is innocent.”
- MaxBarraclough 3y agoSeL4 would be a better choice, if you count it as an OS.
- gavinhoward 3y agoI have seen a lot of dumb legal takes, usually by non-lawyers and non-judges. But this is so very dumb.
- icyberbullyu 3y agoThis is just an assumption that generally, computers are doing what they're supposed to. It doesn't mean that you can't challenge it with evidence. With the amount of evidence being submitted being increasingly digital, I'm sure the intention behind this is to stop people from jamming up the courts by calling every single digital artefact into question.
- euroderf 3y agoYour point is valid. But it does sound like a barrier to entry. In the sense of, increasing fixed costs for access to the legal system on a fair basis
- minimalized 3y agoThe article makes a strong case otherwise. Proving a system built and maintained by a large, well heeled entity is unlikely to be possible for all except other large, well heeled entities.
- kingofkyiv 3y ago[dead]
- zardo 3y agoHow are you supposed to get the evidence in a situation like this? It's not like they're going to give you the keys to the server room.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoBut every single digital artifact is questionable. It's inconvenient but it's also true.
- cbsmith 3y ago> This is just an assumption that generally, computers are doing what they're supposed to. It's more than that. You don't have to instruct a jury that they have to accept that a person does what they're supposed to do unless proven otherwise... unless that person wrote code for a computer.
- mmcdermott 3y agoThe linked document doesn't feel unreasonable to me. The concrete example given in the document is the Post Office Horizon Scandal where shortfalls in accounts were identified based on computer records. All the working presumption correctly would mean is that the defense can't be an idle "well, it's a computer it had bugs". If the computerized records are provided as evidence, the defense has to give a reason to believe that bugs account for those shortfalls. The alternative would be to say that only a system that has been proven correct could be used as evidence which would force pretty much all accounting back to paper.
- Infernal 3y ago> The alternative would be to say that only a system that has been proven correct could be used as evidence which would force pretty much all accounting back to paper. Assuming that the paper accounting could be proven correct, when the computerized accounting could not, your proposed alternative would seem to be an upgrade.
- bee_rider 3y agoPaper accounting seems significantly more error prone, at least for a given level of convenience, right? I mean the computer might be worried about comic rays flipping bits, but ink on paper can be smudged by fingers, and they don’t even have to be traveling at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light. You can make paper backups of course, but you can also make electronic ones, the electronic ones can be shipped around the world basically for free.
- cbsmith 3y agoThe legal system already has checks and balances to account for errors in paper accounting. They don't require an assumption that the paper accounting is correct, but rather rely on the jury to make judgements, because juries are familiar with the limitations of paper accounting. We're still a long way away from pulling that off with computers, but the idea that someone could have made a mistake shouldn't be that hard to grasp.
- 3y ago
- kd5bjo 3y agoI can understand how they got here: Most computer-provided evidence will be something like a printout of an email thread or a saved Excel sheet. Proving that the hard drive, printer, CPU, drivers, application software, etc. are all untampered and working properly is a huge amount of work that will very rarely end up finding a problem. The original rule-makers probably never considered the idea of a giant, bespoke enterprise software system; it's just a particularly terrible edge case that got caught up in what looks like a reasonable efficiency measure.
- cbsmith 3y ago> I can understand how they got here: Most computer-provided evidence will be something like a printout of an email thread or a saved Excel sheet. Proving that the hard drive, printer, CPU, drivers, application software, etc. are all untampered and working properly is a huge amount of work that will very rarely end up finding a problem. Eye witnesses, expert witnesses, etc. can be unreliable. It's very difficult to prove that they have not made any errors. However, we don't ask juries to presume they are infallible.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago> Eye witnesses, expert witnesses, etc. can be unreliable. It's very difficult to prove that they have not made any errors. However, we don't ask juries to presume they are infallible. There is a difference between being infallible and being correct. No one assumes that computers cannot err, just that they have not erred unless there is reason to believe they have. Likewise, if a witness gives coherent evidence and no one has any reason to assume they are wrong or lying, that evidence will not generally be disregarded simply because humans are fallible and therefore the evidence is presumed to be flawed.
- cbsmith 3y agoWith an eyewitness, simply saying that you think they are mistaken, with no evidence as to how they are mistaken, is sufficient. In this case, it was easier for the courts to believe hundreds of people were lying and committing fraud, then that there might have been a problem in the software. The only way to change the court's perspective was to provide evidence that was not even accessible to the defendants. There's no reason to think that programmers are less fallible than other people.
- kube-system 3y agoNo, this is dumb: > required the prosecution to prove that a computer was operating properly at the relevant time before a document produced by such a computer could be admitted as evidence. But I'm sure you actually mean to agree, and that your comment was just garbled in transit. :)
- minimalized 3y agoIt's over simplification of a nuanced situation. Over simplification in either direction is a problem.
- kube-system 3y agoA presumption is not a simplification of anything. It is a starting point.
- minimalized 3y agoThat's fair. But as the article shows, that presumption ends up weighing heavily in favor of computers working correctly. The nuance is in the difference between plumbing, which generally works well, and the bespoke business logic of individual applications, especially when said logic was responsible for the existence of critical evidence in a criminal case. The difference matters enormously and is not observed at all in the law.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- koliber 3y agoThere's an excellent Radiolab podcast episode about how often cosmic rays cause computer errors in practice. It's engaging and educational: https://radiolab.org/podcast/bit-flip https://radiolab.org/podcast/bit-flip I always knew about the theoretical cosmic ray bit flips. Before listening to this episode, I did not stop to think how often they actually cause problems.
- remisharrock 3y agoAm I the only one with exactly this episode that does not load ? All the others are ok ?
- archargelod 3y agoSame for me. After some searching I've found a mirror that still works [0]. [0] - https://podcastaddict.com/wissenschaft-auf-die-ohren/episode/150771599 https://podcastaddict.com/wissenschaft-auf-die-ohren/episode...
- tzs 3y agoI tried to observe bit flips and failed. I'm not sure if there was a problem with my methodology or my apartment was well shielded or what. My methodology was simple. On a Linux home server that had plenty of spare memory (non ECC RAM) I ran a process that simply alloced a large buffer and filled it with a pattern. It would then periodically scan through the buffer looking for changes to the pattern. I ran this for over a year which should have been long enough given the amount of RAM I was using and the rates that I found in the literature for cosmic ray induced bit flips resulted in several flips. My method would have missed a flip if the page it happened on had been paged out sometime in the past and that paged out copy still existed, and the bit flip happens between the time of the last scan and the time the kernel decides to discard that page. On the next scan it would page fault and load the good page. But the system was very lightly loaded and almost never actually had to page things out, so most of the time if a bit flipped it should have still been there by the next scan and so I don't think this explains why I saw no flips. A few years later I got a Mac Pro, which had ECC memory. I used that mostly at work from 2008-2017. I got another Mac Pro in 2009 which I used at home from 2009-2017. I'd occasionally look at the memory status in System Report which should say "ECC Errors" if the ECC had to fix any errors and only ever saw "OK". I'm not sure if that resets on boot and I only looked occasionally so if it does reset than it is quite likely I would have missed an error statuses.
- readyplayernull 3y agoNowadays, in Windows 11, after a few hours the Start icons stop responding.
- skybrian 3y agoI’m wondering how it would work otherwise. Would computer systems need to be certified to be acceptable for ordinary record-keeping? Extending this rule to LLM’s would clearly be disastrous. At a minimum, a record-keeping system needs to be written the old-fashioned way.
- minimalized 3y agoThe alternative is treating systems based evidence the same as witnesses. They're examined and cross referenced because they are rightly not presumed to be reliable.
- jack_riminton 3y agoI like this idea but since software and the data that runs through it changes constantly how would a system be interrogated if an incident were several years ago and the complete data picture cannot be reproduced?
- slotrans 3y agoThen the maintainers of the system have failed in their duty, the evidence cannot be verified, and it must be thrown out.
- numpad0 3y agoI'm guessing the other possibility is requiring a third party entity, like a university professor in CS, to testify unlikeliness of computer malfunction due to cosmic rays && bugs, for each and every computer generated evidences. If the `alleged theft amount by defendant` == (unsigned int)((int)-1), that should cover those cases, at least in theory. The profs would just blindly vouch it, but at least it'll be a point.
- orangesite 3y agoNope nope nope and nope. The author of the software and their source code shall be interrogated on the witness stand by one of their peers and a proof checker. edit: gender neutral language
- jobs_throwaway 3y agoThere's dumb, there's outrageously dumb, and then there's this
- olliej 3y agoIt was pretty standard for the time - therac-25 was another example where the logic is “computer don’t make mistakes therefore code running on computers does not make mistakes” which is strictly true in the sense that it’s exceedingly unlikely a computer will execute code incorrectly. Well into the 90s the general populace considered computers infallible, it really took mass adoption and experience with how frequently they crashed to change that perception.
- roughly 3y agoIt's interesting to see the negative reactions to this while an awful lot of us are employed specifically and payed exorbitantly because computers regularly are not operating correctly in weird subtle ways that are hard to figure out. Especially as society leans into ML models to solve computationally hard problems, the legal notion that the computer is "correct" by default absolutely needs to go out the window.
- ygjb 3y agoWe are paid exorbitantly to work hard to maintain the illusion that the computers are operating correctly. Any reasonably competent software developer or engineer should know that just because the customer dashboard is green and everything is working as expected doesn't mean that there isn't an absolute dumpster fire raging in the background (at least, having worked in tech for 20 years across many different verticals, that has been my experience).
- jack_riminton 3y agoExactly, and edge cases can almost never be fully ruled out with sufficiently complex systems
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoAnd that's even with things operating to some semblance of regularity and conformance to some established baseline. Not even covering the "kick it down the road" issues that sometimes (and sometimes don't) evolve into "features that aren't bugs" that have workarounds on workarounds on workarounds that will eventually have their own bugs. The stuff we know we shouldn't do / that isn't good, but that happens anyway. I subscribe to the philosophy that computers cannot be held accountable, because they're only operating as intended, or at least as implemented. CentOS used to bill itself as a "bug for bug" compatible RHEL clone. I have always thought that to be a good perspective. Humans are ultimately responsible for the results of computing. In my life that means I review the reports output by my ERP and sanity check numbers before I sign tax returns or remit quarterly tax payments. I trust that the numbers going in are correct, and I trust that (as was said up-thread) statistically my ERP is reliable, but at the end of the day someone has to be accountable for how the output is used.
- aiejrilawj 3y agoLots of people here saying judges and lawyers are incredibly stupid. For decades there was a giant mystique surrounding software and computers, the belief that computers didn't make mistakes. And who promoted that belief? Computer and software companies. So they could make absurd amounts of money. Credit where its' due. Courts should have been much more critical, but they were getting hit with a cultural tidal wave generated by us.
- barryrandall 3y agoThe products were promoted using practices approved by the legal system. If those practices aren't appropriate to use when targeting judges and lawyers, then they're not appropriate for anyone.
- kemitchell 3y agoThe authors seem to be torching a semantic straw man here. The same abuse of terms affords their spicy title. I'm not a UK lawyer, but the law they quote says nothing about the logic machines are programmed to follow presumptively creating reliable evidence. It could be read to say that computers should be presumed to be executing the instructions they're given reliably, unless evidence shows otherwise. It's about malfunction, not misapplication. Perhaps some of the Horizon case decisions showed judges improperly presuming that Horizon calculated correctly, and not just that the computers were running Horizon correctly. But the article doesn't show they did, or even explicitly say they did. Conflating two separable issues, it fails to address whether or why different presumption rules for each might be desirable.
- chrisjj 3y agoThey are unfortunately conflated in law. " The Law Commission failed to address the strongest arguments against repeal without replacement, …. It ignored the advice of the experts they cited who all argued that the focus of courts should be on the reliability of computer evidence, …. The Law Commission’s comments and conclusions revealed that they had not understood the nature of computers and complex software systems as described in the sources upon which they relied.’ " https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-cause-of-the-Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-The-Law-Commission-Judges-Lawyers https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-cause-of-the-Post...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 3y agoI would like to get those commission members to sit down and use a computer program which asks them their name, does a fancy "analyzing" animation, and concludes that that they owe $1 million in fees and are 99% likely to be the perpetrator of an unsolved murder. I mean, hey, the computer is operating correctly, it can't make a mistake, so give me my money and turn yourself in...
- graemep 3y ago
- Arch-TK 3y agoHmm, that's genuinely concerning. I would say a more appropriate thing to say is that for simple things like audio/video evidence (at least before the AI-video era of today) and maybe logs computers can be assumed trustworthy, but for everything else they should be assumed to be as unreliable as a human witness. At the end of the day, a human designed the computer and wrote the software for it.
- orangesite 3y agoWe have the economic and mathematic machinery to, in cases where uncertainty would adversely affect a defendant, require a rigorous statement of proof for the prosecution to win the day. Bonus: Many opaque systems would have to be aired in an open court room to ascertain whether their invariants do, in fact, survive scrutiny.
- advael 3y agoI think there's a huge and fundamental difference between the assertion that a computer program has malfunctioned and the assertion that a computer program does not accomplish what it intended to do at all, that the algorithm is incorrect, or that there simply is no known reliable way for any computer program to do the thing. The latter problem is more important, but by lumping this together with "malfunction" and giving technologists basically a complete pass on the entire hard part, this kind of rule is a loophole wide enough to pass a jetliner through
- ciscoriordan 3y agoRelated to that: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_proble.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_prob... Defense attorneys in a DUI case got their hands on the source code for the breathalyzer. It turned out to have terrible programming, e.g. calculating new averages by averaging a new value with the previous average. The case went all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which still found the device to be acceptable.
- cochleari_major 3y ago“Which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings”, funny enough looks like the opposite of what’s going on.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoMaybe it averages from newest -> oldest With software that bad, who can say
- weaksauce 3y agoyeah the language is slightly ambiguous enough where you can't for certain know. first vs newest. the issue is that taken as a whole the quantization of the samples into 8 bins is a much bigger issue along with the problem of the no hardware watchdog or hardware malfunction alarms. along with the poor testing methodologies too.
- danaris 3y agoWell, of course, because that statement is deeply incorrect—the described mistake would cause the most recent reading to have more weight. If you have a set of readings, say, [0.1, 0.02, 0.3, 0.05, 0.08], normally when you average them you would get 0.55—the mean of the set. Calculating the average by "averaging the new reading with the previous average" would mean new + old / 2 every time. That means that for each reading after the first, your "averages" would be: [0.06, 0.18, 0.115, 0.195]. If we add a new reading of 0.01 to each of these, in the first case, we would get an average of 0.46, and in the second case, 0.1025. As you can see, even taking into account the already-very-skewed numbers, the second case biases it much further in favor of the new reading (which, in this case, is very low compared to the existing readings).
- linsomniac 3y agoVonnegut's book _Player_Piano_ has, basically, LLM-driven society, but on vacuum tube technology. In one section the court says: "We replaced all the vacuum tubes and got the same verdict, so we're confident on the judgement."
- tmpz22 3y agoMy dad and I were watching a TV show where someone received a time traveling fax. I remarked that the software on the Fax machine may have just had a bug. He immediately remarked "they're scientists (physicists who sent the fax) and it was impossible that they wouldn't have accounted for that". I've been a software engineer for 10 years. He's a well-read hard-working blue-collar guy, working as a taxi driver and behind a deli most of his career. I just nodded and moved past it. People want to anthromorphize AI. People want to yield divine knowledge to computers. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic indeed.
- josephg 3y agoHeh. Ask him if the people at the deli he works at are generally competent. I have a somewhat awful belief about humanity: that about 70% of people work jobs they’re not very good at. Most of the time this is ok, because so many jobs are bullshit anyway. Bad real estate agents still sell houses. Grumpy sales people still sell product. Social media managers - well, let’s not go there. But it has some strange consequences - like how most therapists are (in one study) less useful for the patient than journaling. Or in my opinion, the prevalence of crap software. Ask about his work. Ask if his coworkers made a fax machine, if it would work reliably. If he gets it, you’ll know. You’ll see it in his eyes.
- cryptonector 3y agoMy father is a chemist and he has said things like this to me. He has extreme faith in people who wear lab coats.
- pjerem 3y agoWhat I find frightening is not only the risk of default but also the risk of hacking. It’s easy for someone who gain remote access to create (or remove) data, records, logs … on a system. It’s also extremely easy for the computer owner or IT people to do the same.
- michael1999 3y agoIt's nice to see a reasonable proposal. If you are going to present criminal evidence based on the output of a computer system, it is only reasonable to demand access to a bug tracker, the QMS control documents, audits, and a chain of custody. If you can't produce that easily, then your evidence shouldn't be worth much. The big win would in this case would be that when the vendor conspired to hide bugs from their own tracker, they would have been creating criminal liability for their employers. Which Fujitsu and their subs richly deserve.
- jjk166 3y agoSo if I write a script that's just print("jjk166 is innocent and not liable for any damages") and it runs without error then I can commit any crime I want with impunity?