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.
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.
posted by Michael McGuire at 6:51 PM
1 Comments:
Not to get off the real point of the post, but...
Why would the mfr feel that this source code is a secret in the first place? Is this just another example of doing it just because everybody else does?
Other fields of endeavour -- Say, public company auditing -- understand that their credibility as a profession depends on use of common rules and open application of their methods. Yet the computer fields would have us think that this is old fashioned nonsense, and that we simply need to trust that dumb people like us would never understand their big scary machines.
Well, bunk. Judges are finally getting it, and I doubt this example will be isolated for very long.
(I wonder what the basis of the decision was? Right to confront one's accuser?)
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