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

Should all government software be open source?

[MacFury]

If, ideally, the government exists soley for it's citizens. Would it be in our best interest to be able to view the source code of non classified projects? If the government is in fact using our tax dollars to pay programmers, should we be entitled to view the outcome of their work and does it become public domain if paid for by public funds?

Re:Should all government software be open source?

[dwandy]

No it doesn't.
Maybe I'm wrong, but imho, every free citizen has the right to personally verify any evidence used against them in a court of law. Whether or not that citizen is able to comprehend the arguments/details/whatever is not relevant - only that they be allowed to review it.
If they are personally unable to comprehend this, then this affords them the opportunity to consult with the experts of their choosing as they see fit - not as the gvt sees fit.

For due process to be transparent, the defendant needs to be afforded every opportunity to review and question every element that is being used to convict him/her. No matter how "independant" any group/company/organisation/person might be on paper, they are still not "my guy" if they have to sign "their papers" in order to see the evidence.

While this doesn't exlcude non-OSS, it does (and imho should) exclude anything where the mechanism is a trade secret. (that doesn't mean it's OSS, just not a trade secret)

Re:Should all government software be open source?

[Stone Pony]

This is a common misconception on slashdot. It surfaces in just about every discussion concerning speed cameras, traffic signal cameras, radar guns etc. The black box is not the accuser. The accuser is some functionary; the black box record/reading/whatever is evidence.

So the scenario is not "I was accused by (e.g.) the speed camera", but "I was accused by [name of minor civic dignitary responsible for this sort of thing]". You can confront him (or her) and ask "on what grounds do you claim that I was speeding/drunk etc." and they will respond that they have the reading from their machine as evidence. The evidential value of the reading is still up for discussion or dispute, but you're not being accused by the machine itself.

FWIW (and IANAL), I suspect that in the UK, at least, you could challenge the accuracy of the machine (in fact, it's been done successfully with some radar guns, at least) but I think that your chances of having the machine pulled apart to demonstrate that every last component worked would be pretty low. I think it would be enough for the prosecution to show that (i) the machine was accurate when properly calibrated; and (ii) it had been properly maintained, calibrated and tested.

Re:Should all government software be open source?

[AdamWeeden]

Aren't there Trade Secrets?

Of course there are, but the algorithm that determines whether I get a criminal record or not should NOT be one of them. It's the equivalent of a cop getting to go into a courtroom and say "Trust us he's guilty, but the method we used to determine that is a trade secret."

Should be more than just source code

[Osty]

The larger problem here is that a lot of these tools (breathalyzers, RADAR and LIDAR guns, etc) are dealing with ambiguous data in the first place. For example, the algorithm used to determine BAC in a breathalyzer may be implemented correctly, but what if the algorithm itself is wrong? You're dealing with many variables (a person's mass, their metabolism, etc), and those variables have different values for different people. It's well-known, for example, that women will blow higher on a breathalyzer than a man simply because they're generally smaller.

Similarly for LIDAR (laser speed detection), the underlying principle is using distance and time to determine rate. Sounds straightforward, as d = r * t, but how do you know you've got the right values for d? It's been shown that rapid movement of a LIDAR gun can cause even inanimate objects to register a rate. How do we know the LIDAR gun measured the distance your car traveled over a period of time, rather than the distance of your car at one point in time and the distance of some other reflective object (say, a much closer stop sign) at a different point in time? At the distances in question, we're talking sharpshooter skills as a requirement for using a LIDAR gun, but it seems that every cop on the force has one. Can they expect us to believe that every cop is a sharpshooter, or that several cups of coffee won't induce shaking in the cop's hands that could cause false readings?

It's a good precedent, forcing the breathalyzer source to be opened to inspection, but the assumption is still that the underlying algorithm is accurate when it's not. I don't understand why courts continue to rely on technology such as the breathalyzer or the LIDAR gun when there are better, proven tests that could be used instead (blood tests, RADAR or pacing with a calibrated speedometer). Worse, once a court has chosen to allow such evidence (this is not arbitrary, but once the admissability of such a test is challenged and lost it's almost impossible to re-challenge), you can no longer argue that the underlying tool is bad (without extenuating circumstances that would bring the acceptability of such tools back into question). You can argue that the machine wasn't properly calibrated or maintained or that the officer using it was untrained or unqualified or out of practice, but you can't argue that the tool itself is inadmissable as evidence even if the facts are on your side.

Re:Should be more than just source code

[NanoGator]

"The larger problem here is that a lot of these tools (breathalyzers, RADAR and LIDAR guns, etc) are dealing with ambiguous data in the first place. For example, the algorithm used to determine BAC in a breathalyzer may be implemented correctly, but what if the algorithm itself is wrong?"

Heh. I remember reading a story once where a dude challenged a speeding ticket he recieved. He wanted proof that the machine was properly reading the speed of his vehicle. The company that made the radar gun refused to go into detail about how it worked, afterall that's proprietary information they don't want their competitors having. Ultimately the case was thrown out because they brought the radar gun into the court room and clocked a wall travelling at 4mph.

Do you think their testing is 100% foolproof?

[DocSavage64109]

If the software is complex enough to require "numerous software upgrades", then it is complex enough to have bugs. And it seems to me that not all bugs would necessarily show up under testing.

Let me get this straight

[commodoresloat]

You go to a bar. Someone buys you ten beers. So your intoxication was free as in beer. Then you get pulled over and get a breathalyzer test which gets thrown out of court because the software was not free as in speech. So then you walk out of court, free as in Willy!

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...

Re:Remember, ...

[Dorothy 86]

But the catch-22 is that people who code don't normally have friends.

(calm down, mods... it's a joke!)