A few years ago I remember reading reports of the FBI forensic labs doing much worse-- taking evidence from the crime scene and contaminating evidence taken from the accused with it so that it would produce a "match" and the like. It was a big scandal.
In fact over the past 20 years I've heard this story at least a dozen times-- where crime "labs" at different levels of government and in different states (eg: state labs, federal lagbs, etc) were caught doing this.
And when it happens, that isn't enough to get people to be able to appeal unless they have evidence the lab did it in their specific case.
One of the problems of our system is that the criminal system is lacks checks and balances. The judges, prosecutors, police all work for the government. They all have the same interests-- they all report to people who want to look "tough on crime".
Since the police immediately take over crime scenes and collect the evidence and then get the evidence analyzed, they have a lot of power to be corrupt in the interest of more convictions-- and the consequences are negligible for being caught.
Whose going to try a dirty cop? You can shoot a guy in the back on video and never get put on trial for it in this country. (I left Texas when a cop gunned down an unarmed black kid who was on his knees crawling away from him... shooting him multiple times in the back... on my college campus. The cop lost his job and then joined the police force in a suburb. No charges were filed. Apparently a black kid crawling away was "threatening" to the white cop. Alas, I moved to a liberal state and was then myself the victim state corruption- though fortunately, the damage was only $3k to a lawyer.)
This is why I think any evidence submitted in court needs to come from an independant lab, done in a double blind way, and with several audit cases sent to that lab regularly (eg: taking dna from people not involved in crimes and send it in as if it was part of an investigation and see if they are fabricating evidence.)
The idea that the government is independant and objective is to me, now that I'm older and have seen these scandals over the years, laughable.
Every time it happens everyone acts like its' a rare thing.
I think, the problem is similar to the trouble we have with judges in our country. One judge recently said something that really put a very shady light on many of his colleagues. I regret, that I don't remember it exactly, what he said.
The trouble in my opinion with some judges in my country and with the police in some countries is, that everybody just assumes, that because they work for law enforcement, they have a high level of integrity. But when you look how they are educated, the subject "integrity" is not even touched (I even don't think, that it is taught in law schools).
In my country, when somebody is already a judge, there is nearly no chance at all, that this person will be held accountable for misjudging. I think, not even the highest courts can replace a judge that repeatedly and knowingly is bending the law. At least I don't know of any case at all where a judge was punished or even replaced. And don't think, that all judgments are correct in my country.
In my opinion, when there is one thing to be learned from history, it is that any person can err and even the best meaning persons can change into dictators over time depending on situations.
Yes, and having travelled extensively and lived in Mexico and Chile, my experience tells me that while the USA has failed to have adequate checks and balances, other countries often have even less. I loved both of those countries, but I wouldn't really feel safe in Mexico, and I didn't feel fully safe in Chile. I think the Carabineros of chile are taught integrity and are mostly above reproach, however, and so I hold Chile out as a good example of doing it right. But even still, none of these countries have enough checks and balances.
I think the problem is there's a magical thing that happens to people when they think about government.
They somehow think it's ok for government to do things that individuals cannot. And once you give a group of people that magical power, it's easy to forget that they are people.
When I was younger, I thought that the western countries (US and Western Europe) are better (off) than other countries like South America or Asia, because they have much less corruption than those countries.
Today I am differentiating much more and I must admit that I am not knowing, why we are better of as for example South American countries. Of course, they have a high level of corruption, but when you look deeper, you will see, that we in Europe have also much corruption. The main difference: While in many South America countries everybody knows about the corruption, for example in Germany corruption is much much more covered -- but it exists, maybe even in the same degree as in South American countries. It is just covered much more. What makes me worry is, that while the normal police-men in Germany may have integrity, the normal top-politician seems to have none left. I can give no name of a top politician today, where I would assume, that he is not influenced or even bribed by some groups.
I think, that this gives a really bad signal to all the people in this nation. Many say: "Why should I pay taxes, for those crooked people?" And I must admit, that this is a strong argument in these times.
I think there is a big slice of perspective you're missing here.
Yes, at the higher levels of power everything is dirty.
However, you have to look at what the consequences of that are, how it manifests in a society, and how far it spreads.
And in Germany, it works pretty well. Yes, enormous government projects don't always go to the most capable or efficient. Yes, big business owners contribute to politicians, avoid taxes, and erect legal obstacles to competition that would benefit society. However, the society basically works. The corruption is not interfering with basic services to the people. A journalist can write what she wants without fear of physical reprisal. Individual property rights are by-and-large respected. School teachers actually benefit the children. Police officers don't operate as a tax force on their own behalf. Thats not the case in every country.
So while I agree with you that even the 'best' countries still have a very real battle to maintain integrity, there is absolutely a spectrum and largely, North America and Western Europe are near the top of it.
I think North America is corrupt beyond any help. Look at the deep state they do horrible things and no one cares. And there is no freedom of expression, even as i write this im afraid. The cia infects people with sifilis has torture concentration camps all over the world where they imprision people without a trial and inflict upon them all kinds of sick and perverted tortures. They traffic drugs and control criminal organizations in sveral countries, they are the top dogs in the underworld. They persecute journalists they hire some to decieve the public. They are really toxic and deceithfull. Not to mention the wars they go in foreign countries and kill thousands if not millions and destroy any trace of civilization. They a destructive force. =(
>North America and Western Europe are near the top of it.
When North America and Western Europe are near "the top of it" (I don't know, if I completely understand the sentence correctly, but I guess you mean, that they are best in integrity ...), than this is not a good sign in my opinion.
I see an enormous decline in democracy, freedom and integrity all over the world. And as I live in Europe, I see it very drastically here. Of course I am worried about developments in countries like Russia or China, but I am even more worried about the state in which the countries are, which should be role models of freedom and democracy.
The difference is that in the US and EU, stuff generally works. People are educated and there's some sense of doing things properly. This sense seems far more diminished in South America. And many people just come to expect this. So people that can do well, they (rightfully) look out for themselves. When everything sucks, there's just more important stuff than worrying about a state official stealing millions.
If things in the US started falling apart then I'm guessing folks would get upset and demand changes.
I think, partially you made a good point. We have a lot of talents and also a lot of sense for integrity in our countries. But when we look at history, even societies with good starting and a lot of sense for good and right things, can fail very, very fast! I say that because I am German and I know what happened in our past.
>If things in the US started falling apart ...
What exactly do you mean? Technically or society?
I think "falling apart" does not go by a click, but comes incremental. I see a lot of incremental decline in western societies at least from the 80s.
I also hoped, that people will go upset and demand changes. But I guess it is like the boiling frog. The frog feels comfortable in the lukewarm water and when it incrementally gets hotter, he does not recognize and when he does, it is just to late. We all are the boiling frog.
You're right, it's a slow decline. I suppose I mean that if fundamentally, water, electric, public safety, Internet, police response, etc. just didn't work, to the point where you didn't totally count on them, then people would be more upset in the US, to the point where they'd demand change.
>In fact over the past 20 years I've heard this story at least a dozen times-- where crime "labs" at different levels of government and in different states (eg: state labs, federal lagbs, etc) were caught doing this.
Yes, the problem is that those "crime labs" are not scientists, they are basically scientists-turned-cops.
As you propose, those should be independent labs, perhaps private, that live and die by their reputation for results (and could be hit with a huge lawsuit if they're not careful, unlike a government agency).
> The history of the FBI Lab hasn't been without controversy. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who joined the FBI in 1982 and served as a Supervisory Special Agent at the Lab from 1986 to 1998, blew the whistle on scientific misconduct at the Lab. In a subsequent investigation, it was found that evidence had been falsified, altered, or suppressed, or that FBI agents had testified falsely, in as many as 10,000 cases, resulting in many false convictions. More than a decade later, cases were still being overturned because of this massive fraud.
Looks like they are back on track. I foresee in 2025 somebody writing "massive scientific misconduct and fraud has been discovered in FBI labs from 2010 till 2020, but the major reforms implemented since should prevent if from reoccurring in the future".
Made all the worse by the federal government's digital data collection, to which the only falsification that needs be done is an insert statement into a record, and not even falsifications need to be done, as they can likely paint a picture of a myriad of suspects who happen to have been at a point a and a point b within x and y interval.
How does this not get all FBI testimony thrown out by judges? If there is an organisation who pays its employees to lie in court, and they are known to suffer no ill consequences for lying, all of those employees' testimony should be considered worthless.
I fear that even with this gross miscarriage of justice over decades, people may not be granted a retrial. It's the entire reason the Innocence Project exists.
I've never understood how the possibility of new evidence doesn't immediately reopen a case (in general). I thought we wanted real, actual, blind justice based only on facts and absolutely nothing else. It turns out it is rarely that simple.
All people have an agenda. Their agenda generally favors themselves in some way or another.
We, as the potential victims of injustice want a real, actual, scientific, blind justice system that presumes innocence and requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, checked by a jury that can nullify laws, and the like.
Politicians want to be "tough on crime" so they appoint judges and prosecutors who get convictions.
Judges want to be re-elected because they are "tough on crime" (in places where judges are elected)
Prosecutors want to have a successful career so they will do anything they can get away with to get a conviction.
The police want to have the case be off their hands and to be "closed" so that their stats look good because it's good for their career because the Mayor wants to be "tough on crime" and so the police find the first plausible suspect and try to build a case.
All these organizations are in cahoots, literally, and so no prosecutor is going to indict a judge or cop unless they absolutely have to.
So long as the public can be lead to believe they live in a society with the "rule of law" not the "rule of man" then nothing more needs to be done. And the public is very gullible! (Especially when you control the schools and you raise them to be gullible.)
IT's not that these people are evil. ITs that they are self interested.
The founding fathers attempted to put in checks and balances and they did a damn good job.
But over the past 200 years, they have been systematically eroded.
But there are far more potential victims of injustice than politicians, judges etc. Since we're talking about a democracy here, it should be possible for this majority to create an environment where the selfish interests of politicians and judges align with the need to protect innocents. Yet this same democracy creates an environment where protecting innocents puts officials at a disadvantage.
Conviction rates matter. Also the justice system "congestion" that judges and prosecutors are always pointing to as an excuse for their failure to uphold real justice.
They didn't lie, they believed that the hair really matched.
The problem was that the method they used, i.e. how they were taught, was incorrect.
So it's not so easy to throw it out as you might suspect - it's the job of jury to decide if the evidence is "good" (they hear lots of evidence, much of it conflicting). True, the jury relied on false information on what counts as good. But because the jury accepted the evidence undoing that is not as simple as you think unless there are specific laws about it.
Perhaps we are lacking in specific laws about reopening such cases (I do not claim to know). However, I think the lack of specific laws (and/or the difficulty in creating them) is one reason there exists a general law about it: clemency.
Doesn't seem like they lived up to the "beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt" standard in the methodology, whether they believed they were telling the truth or not. The methods could not support the level of certainty they were obligated to obtain.
I'm constantly amazed at how terrible criminal forensic science seems to be. Everything except DNA matching appears to be no better than voodoo, and even the DNA stuff is tricky. Is there something about this particular field that attracts charlatans and incompetents? Is it purely a motivational problem, wherein the people who pay for these results are more interested in a conviction and don't care if it's right?
Think about the hypothesis that all fingerprints are unique. That's voodoo. First off you would have to fingerprint everybody to check it. And secondly they don't actually match fingerprints, but match a description of the fingerprint that throws out most of the data (like taking a million books and reducing them all into one byte hashes of their text, and then claiming that Moby Dick is a plagiarized version of Henry V because they produce the same 8-bit hash!)
The problem is, these things were indicators, but they have been manipulated to be used as if they were proof.
If the suspect is a red head male, and the witness describes seeing a red head male, then the jury is inclined to think that's the same guy.
DNA testing may be theorethically sound, but in practice it's restricted to testing about 13 different loci, which is a miniscule porton of the actual information at hand.
Starting from that weak position, the FBI then ignores basic statistics:
Some time ago when I was reading about the accuracy of fingerprint analysis (similarly a horror show), the culprit seemed to be the professional association of analysts. IIRC their official line was that fingerprint analysis was 100% accurate(!), and they forbade members from taking part in research studies on the subject...
I think it's because it's a field that demands exact answer from fuzzy data. You can't do that unless you are willing to accept some wishful thinking as true.
I've worked a bit on fingerprint recognition devices (using various vendor SDKs) and people clearly overestimate the accuracy of these kind of devices. The majority can be fooled with a fingerprint made by melting gummy bear with some tape to gather the fingerprint. Creating fake fingerprints is really easy and cheap. I'm also not mentioning the crappy firmware these devices are generally equipped with, everything close to metal seems to have really low quality firmwares, most of the time, you need to compensate on your side for some unfixable problems in the firmware.
The main problem is TV I guess, for the average guy, these kind of technologies are completely infallible and people tend to forget that just like anything else, it's just an indicator that can be fooled / misinterpreted / badly gathered.
Yes it's a bit tinfoil-hat but when you look at shows like CSI and 24, you couldn't imagine a better propaganda campaign that "evidence is infallible and torture is OK".
I've been of the opinion that shows of that nature are a pretty transparent attempt at gas lighting the populous into feeling as though such behaviors and practices are acceptable, desirable & necessary.
It seems to me the 'tinfoil hat' thing has become the way of shaming people into not questioning the government, so now every time someone like you would like to say something critical about the government, you first have to excuse yourself from it. It almost seems like people have been brainwashed tinfoil hat on.
[replying with bogus account] I spent a few months myself working with a range of low to moderate cost OEM modules (<$200) from several manufacturers and their SDK's and I concur. Not all were easily tricked with a fake print but every device/SDK had some problem. We decided not to include fingerprint recognition as a primary means of authentication in our products. I've heard rumor of a competitor who did include it that actual field performance hasn't met expectations and they're retreating to use it as a secondary means.
It's well known that a large body of fire investigation knowledge is basically made up nonsense. On the plus side, the very fact that it is well known to be nonsense is effecting changes. There is a push towards actually having to use scientific methods, which is both gratifying and horrifying.
Abusing science for criminal justice. They're not necessarily incompetent. Just trying to apply science in a non-science related field is hard and somewhat futile.
Not being double-blind makes it cheaper. Hence takes less budget, lower taxes, everybody cheers.
Anybody proposing to make it double-blind is going to need to find the money, either from other departments or by raising taxes. Without a chorus of public support behind them, this is a very hard sell. And easily reversed after the next election.
They really oughta have a "blind" approach to testing forensic evidence where samples are prepared by other forensic professionals to be sufficiently similar but not matches and real matches, neither of which are from a real trial. The forensic examiners should never know when they have evidence from a real trial.
Legal arguments, like most things in life, reward narrative over truth. “Truth” is an unbelievably high bar to pass – even basic ideas like confidence level are beyond the understanding of the legal system.
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is actually a decent epistemic standard. The problem is that juries and judges are not exposed to the information that would lead to reasonable doubt in these cases.
So basic epistemology already makes bad outcomes likely. Add the incentives (political, organizational) in cases like these, and terrible things happen.
The problem is the incentives go to one side (winning the case) without a counterbalance incentive (being not punished for misconduct). If police misconduct such as perjury and fraud routinely led to grave consequences for the person doing it, the balance of the incentives would be closer to what it needs to be. But the Blue Wall[1] and general reluctance of the justice system to punish their own, prevents it from happening. Even when the fraud is discovered, the perpetrators frequently are not sanctioned in any way, the worst that happens is that convictions get thrown out, but that does not create counter-incentive. Thus, no balance.
Again we see that our law enforcement branch is overreaching, acting in error, and effectively breaking the law. What penalty is appropriate for this? How do we rebuild our country to stop this? I believe the answer is to hold the perpetrators responsible. Easy to say, but we need financial and jail times far beyond the pain these people cause. We need to root out this corruption, whether it's intentional or negligent.
This is an interesting perspective with which I am currently inclined to disagree. Could you provide more rationale to justify the idea that nonviolent crimes should be punished more severely than violent crimes?
I'm not that poster, but people with more power should be held to account more strictly for abusing it. While there are noteworthy exceptions, violent crimes are (generally speaking) low-leverage crimes that rarely impact more than a handful of people, whereas the ramifications of even something as "non-violent" as this sort of fraud can be significantly more harmful to much bigger groups of people.
(I am also of the opinion that corporate protections are largely bullshit and that executives and boards should be civilly and criminally liable for wrongdoings perpetuated by their companies. Probably the only way to make them act decently.)
These things are very hard to compare. If one steals $10 from every person in the US, he stole 3 bln. dollars. That's huge. However, mostly nobody's life has been seriously, permanently and unrecoverably affected - at least excepting some really untypical random occurrences. If one robs one family of all their possessions, or causes one person be permanently disabled, or dead, that is very grave permanent and unreparable consequences, even though it is for one or few persons only. Humanist morals dictates the latter is worse than the former, so should be punished harder. Of course, in real cases it all gets mixed and unclear, especially when also question of intent comes into discussion.
You're really sweeping under the rug a lot of people who would be impacted by having $10 taken away.
I am certain >0 people would have checks bounce, payments declined, fees imposed on them. For many people $10 can be the difference between being able to afford rent, payment of utilities or other items that could cascade into affecting their life significantly. The poor are really susceptible to these type of accidents
Also, about 60 million of the US population are below the age of 14 (which given you got 3 bln dollars from $10, I'm assuming you're taking the whole ~318 million population), that means many minors just lost $10 that to them would likely be more money than they ever had or be a significant amount of money.
And that doesn't even go into other aspects of the theft, like the effects nationwide on everyone having money taken away from them. The erosion of confidence in the safety of their money.
I posit to you a likely scenario of what you described. Imagine if everyone citizen in the US were issued a government mandated ID with an associated federally insured bank account. Now, the whole scenario becomes viable, where a hacker could steal $10 from every citizen in the U.S.
Now, that would first create a huge debacle. It would most likely cause an immediate loss of trust in the online marketplace, cost probably billions of dollars in getting it fixed. It would end many people's careers, most likely lead to companies getting fined, economic stagnation depending on a cascade effect from a loss of confidence in markets. It's hardly a victimless crime.
Sure, we could keep diminishing the amount to something ridiculous till we're maybe talking about stealing 1 cent. Which would still be a fairly juicy pay off of 3 million, and that would erase away many of my points or at least reduce their incidence significantly. I'm sure some people would miss payments or have other inconveniences affect them. Likewise, the theft would have repercussions on many people's lives.
Even if I were to take the magical scenario of someone who magically made 1 cent disappear from everyone's wallet/bank account. That would still cause great impact and damage. "Are there more people like him with such magical powers?"
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you have to look at the final magnitude not just the token value of the damage done per capita. And also look at the damage done by having affected so many people simultaneously.
I think you overestimating it - there are not a lot of people that have bank accounts with payments coming out of them that keep balances below $10. Most of people that are poor enough so that $10 is a real issue for them would not even have a bank account.
> $10 that to them would likely be more money than they ever had
I have hard time to believe for most 14-year-olds $10 would be "more money that they ever had", in this day and age. For 5 year old, sure. But typical 14 year old not ever having a price of two sandwiches in Subway (or one in a fancier place, or a meal in a relatively cheap restaurant)? I don't believe it.
> I'm sure some people would miss payments or have other inconveniences affect them.
Like lots of people that had the balance of exactly 1 cent and had their rent payment of exactly 1 cent coming in. That doesn't sound ridiculous at all :)
I think you're reaching here. That's not the point anyway - the point is that these things are not just numbers, and are not directly comparable and workable using simple arithmetics.
Sliding-scale fines (higher penalties for higher earners) is a good working model of this. E.g. if you make more money your speeding tickets cost more. I was suggesting that it could proven that white collar crimes are committed by higher earners, and therefore should carry heavier penalties.
Reminded me of George Carlin's last standup special, where he said "it's part of their [cops'] job to commit perjury whenever it helps the state's case":
The headline is inaccurate. The article says more than 20 years preceding the year 2000. They are not precise about what more than 20 years means, but I read that as late 1970s to 2000. From the headline and HN title it would seem like it starts from the beginning of time.
Edit: I see now that the hn title matches the wapo headline, changing to reflect that. Still a bad headline.
I'm thinking about how much their incentivization might have influenced them. One fundamental difference between German and Anglo-American law is the prosecuter's task, as mandated by law. In the US it is to get as many convictions as possible (guilty or not). In Germany, the law wants a prosecutor to "find out the truth and use all evidence against AND also for a defendant".
Methinks the former case is one of the driving forces behind the "Bazaar" mentality.
It's been done successfully many times in many countries. Look at Britain for example. Say what you will of the problems they have now, but they're undoubtedly better off than when they were under the thumb of the monarchy and the aristocracy. Gradual changes in the law punctuated by occasional serious strides forward led to a near complete abandonment of the previous system.
I'm very skeptical that any group capable of a violent revolution would be effective leaders. The founders were a rare group of brilliant men. The Constitution can be amended, that should be enough.
Supreme Court, Legislative and ultimately voting are all mechanisms that should moderate corruption.
The problem is all of these mechanisms are controlled by the government, which is the source of the corruption. Even voting-- I do believe that the voting machines are corrupted about 50/50- half for democrats and half for republicans. But that only serves to reinforce our one-party-with-two-wings system and exclude greens and libertarians.
I long for the day when all of the nationally televised presidential debates include the Libertarian and Green candidates. (At the 2004 & 2008 elections they put their differences aside and travelled to the debates and tried to get in, and got arrested attempting to do so as a protest of being excluded. And then had a libertarian-green presidential debate. Loved it.)
In fact over the past 20 years I've heard this story at least a dozen times-- where crime "labs" at different levels of government and in different states (eg: state labs, federal lagbs, etc) were caught doing this.
And when it happens, that isn't enough to get people to be able to appeal unless they have evidence the lab did it in their specific case.
One of the problems of our system is that the criminal system is lacks checks and balances. The judges, prosecutors, police all work for the government. They all have the same interests-- they all report to people who want to look "tough on crime".
Since the police immediately take over crime scenes and collect the evidence and then get the evidence analyzed, they have a lot of power to be corrupt in the interest of more convictions-- and the consequences are negligible for being caught.
Whose going to try a dirty cop? You can shoot a guy in the back on video and never get put on trial for it in this country. (I left Texas when a cop gunned down an unarmed black kid who was on his knees crawling away from him... shooting him multiple times in the back... on my college campus. The cop lost his job and then joined the police force in a suburb. No charges were filed. Apparently a black kid crawling away was "threatening" to the white cop. Alas, I moved to a liberal state and was then myself the victim state corruption- though fortunately, the damage was only $3k to a lawyer.)
This is why I think any evidence submitted in court needs to come from an independant lab, done in a double blind way, and with several audit cases sent to that lab regularly (eg: taking dna from people not involved in crimes and send it in as if it was part of an investigation and see if they are fabricating evidence.)
The idea that the government is independant and objective is to me, now that I'm older and have seen these scandals over the years, laughable.
Every time it happens everyone acts like its' a rare thing.
It's not.