An Actual Example of the "Black Box" Risk

Boing Boing covers an example of one of the risks I mention in the materials--that a court might not allow evidence of an electronic process to be used in court if the proponent won't (or can't) produce evidence of the process itself.

In this case, a court prohibited a prosecutor from using breathalyzer evidence because the State of Florida couldn't produce the source code on which the system operated.

Read BoingBoing's post.

Read the source story.

It doesn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to see this same strategy at work in a civil case.