Florida DUI Law and Open Source

pete314 writes "A Florida court this Friday will hear arguments in a case where the accuracy of a breathalyzer is being scrutinized because the manufacturer refuses to release the source code. A state court ruling last year said that accused drunk drivers are entitled to receive details about the inner workings of the "mystical machine" that determined their guilt, and defense attorneys are now using that ruling to open up the device's source code.Is this part of a larger trend? With software bugs being a fact of life, consumers and organizations could claim that they need to be able to verify an application's source code before they accept that their calculations are accurate. Think credit card transactions, speed detecting radar guns, electronic voting machines..." Here is our previous story when this first became an issue in Florida.

Comments

Calibration of Speed Traps

[Burning Plastic]

One of the easiest ways to get a speeding ticket overturned/dropped (at least in the UK) is to request all of the calibration reports for the particular camera/radar gun used to take your speed.

If the reports cannot be produced or are older/outside the statutory testing period, then the data produced by the machine will not hold up in court, and so the case will be dropped.

In some cases, the police simply cannot be bothered/do not have the time to do all of the necessary paperwork, and so the case may just be forgotten/ignored.

I don't know if this could be applied to a breathalyser, but it would be an interesting to see what would happen...