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DUI Defendant Wins Source Code to Breathalyzer
MyrddinBach writes "CNet's Police Blotter column looks into a Minnesota drunk driving defendant case with a twist. The defendant says he needs the source code to the Intoxilyzer 5000EN to fight the charges in court. Apparently the company has agreed to turn over the code to the defense. 'A judge granted the defendant's request, but Michael Campion, Minnesota's commissioner in charge of public safety, opposed it. Minnesota quickly asked an appeals court to intervene, which it declined to do. Then the state appealed a second time. What became central to the dispute was whether the source code was owned by the state or CMI, the maker of the Intoxilyzer.'"
grep it for "Boris Yeltsin"
the fact that he's a piece of shit for driving drunk in the first place?
If it's owned by the state isn't it public domain?
Thus if the state's call to block it was predicated on their claim to ownership, it would fall through.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
What a bitch. Just take the punishment - no matter how sober you think you are, those things are damn near never wrong. If it's above .08, just pony up for the fines already...
Intoxilyzer? Really? That sounds like the name of a Judas Priest album or something...Painkiller, Turbo Lover, Juggulator, Intoxilyzer...
It's not like you can cheat the device when you saw the source.
Does the defendant work for SCO?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
How about the hardware schematics? You'd think he'd need those even more. He's just being an ass.
10 print "U R DRUNK!!!"
20 GOTO 10
...if they completely refused the defense access to the source code. There's more reasonable doubt to be had when there are "ominous secrets" from which to draw doubt. But now their only hope is to find reasonable doubt in the form of bugs in the source... a lot less likely.
I should try this defense with everything. "Sorry officer, but unless you can produce the source code for all those kittens I drowned in my cousin tim's baby pool, I haven't done anything wrong."
The code is owned by the company that makes the equipment. So what? Information which matters in a court case gets subpoenaed all the time. What makes software any different then private mail, bank account records, or anything else?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Not to question his motives in this case but what the hell do you need the source code for a breathalizer for.
if ($input > $limit)
{
execute(arrest);
}
else
{
execute(warning);
}
I guess maybe there is more to it but does he really think he is going to get his case dismissed because he finds a unrelated flaw in the code.
(his attorney, Jeffrey Sheridan, as saying) the source code was necessary because otherwise "for all we know, it's a random number generator."
What's it written in? Double Visional Basic? Lishp?
Brainf**k maybe...
Now, I understand that it is just default to keep source code for no good reason, and it also seems like the default for the state to fight defense evidence gathering even though that is wholly unethical, but this seems ridiculous. If he thinks he's going to prove something, let him try. Fighting it makes it look like he will, which means you'll just look stupid when he doesn't. Because he can't, because that makes no fucking sense.
/. editor of course, but it's not going to fly in the court, and the prosecution is going to look retarded for trying to stop him.
I mean seriously, what the fuck is the source code going to show? There is not going to be shit in there for intentional false positives. There wouldn't be any reason for that on the part of the maker. I also don't see how there could be accidental false positives related to the source as opposed to mechanical failure. I mean, it's a simple num>X check. He probably thinks he can technobabble his way out of it, but that shit is not going to work. There's a chance it could fool the average
The defendant would have been even better off if he had refused to take the breathalyzer test altogether.
You lose your license for a year under the dubious assertion that driving is a "privilege", despite the protection of the 5th Amendment, but you do NOT get a criminal conviction on your record and your insurance does not balloon.
The toxylizer that was used to mark him needs to be confiscated and reverse-engineered to see if the code running on it, is effectively produced by the source code in question (It could be modded, youknow). If it can't be found, then we can safely assume that the evidence has been altered.
Voila, reasonable doubt.
What a bitch. Just take the punishment - no matter how sober you think you are, those things are damn near never wrong. If it's above .08, just pony up for the fines already...
I agree. He is hoping they don't want to give up the code. Give it to him. After a week, give him the maximum sentence. Drunks kill people. And I would bet he was drunk.
Before you hang the guy, perhaps we should consider he may be on a low-carbohydrate diet and the unit fails to distinguish acetone from alcohol.
Just four months ago a Virgin Atlantic pilot was arrested and taken off the aircraft he was the pilot of for a flight from Heathrow to JFK. Several days later, all charges were dropped when the results of the blood tests proved him innocent.
Pilot arrested on drink charge
Diet clears drinking-arrest pilot
If all breathalyzers work in the same manner it would throw DUI law enforcement for a loop.
C'mon. We shouldn't rely on such devices as evidence anyway. IMO devices are useful for detection, but not conclusive. In my country electronic devices are used to detect alcamahol all the time, but these are not used as evidence. The defendant must immediately give a blood sample - or be prosecuted for not supplying blood.
When early electronic breathalizers first came out here years ago they either didn't detect the alcohol at all, or they false alarmed by detecting toothpaste and aftershave. The blood test is conclusive. Why should we trust these new tech devices? I mean people here successfully challenged the accuracy of speedcameras and other such devices. We want to be sure.
is two terms... what part makes it "reasonable"?
Don't get me wrong, but if "the possibility, however remote, that a device, at the time at which it was used, did not operate according to specification" makes for 'reasonable doubt', then you would never see another speeding ticket, DUI ticket, etc.
Back on-topic.. don't people who get caught with a breathalyzer (is what they're more known as over here) get taken to the station for a more thorough and accurate, possibly blood, test to determine the blood alcohol level, before going through the steps of fining? As far as I know, the breathalyzers for that exact reason are set up to be moderately lax, as false positives would just be a giant waste of time + money on both the part of the government -and- the person who got tested, causing collateral damages everywhere.
"Wetzel was arrested at his home on Feb. 25 after allegedly rear-ending a car with his pickup truck and then driving off. He faces five gross misdemeanor charges, including causing bodily harm and driving while intoxicated." FREDERICK MELO Pioneer Press
If some "testimony" of a machine can be used to take away my freedom, I would need access to any mechanical plans or source code that forms that testimony.
Seems only fair even if it feels like a technicality to some and the source code will reveal nothing exculpatory.
Seems to me this will be more common as this sensor technology becomes more ubiquitous and used for drugs, explosives, performance enhancers, etc.
The argument he is making come from the contract that the breathalyser company made with the state. The contract says that (from the article:) "all right, title, and interest in all copyrightable material" that CMI creates as part of the contract "will be the property of the state." => The state owns the source code, and the company needs a better contract manager, so ha ha to the company for losing it's source code due to dumb legal mistakes! Muhahahaha
To get drunk, get caught, demand the breathalyser source, so he can rip off it and create his own competing product! Muhaha! It's genius!
..has nothing to do with this case, and little to do with who holds the copyright. What if he does find flaws, and others have already been convicted using output from the same machine? Suddenly, all those past cases come back up.
I guess the lesson here is: the source should already have been public and heavily scrutinized. I don't want my government spending my tax money and wasting time in court, to get convictions based on evidence from mysterious unaudited machines. Why? Because sooner or later, some defendant is going to want the mystery peeled back. Some defendant is eventually going to want a fair trial. Might as well give that fair trial to the first one, so that a bunch of expensive shit doesn't have to get re-done (or so that a bunch of guilty people don't end up walking free, simply because the cops used a defective machine that ended up collecting untrustworthy "evidence").
Keep mysteries out of court, from the start. Don't let a big list of convictions that depend on them, build up. The chances of the device being defective are probably pretty low, but you know there's gotta be some prosecutors with pits in their stomachs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The previous machine, the Breathalyzer, went out of use when it was proven (by defense attorneys) that it was susceptible to RFI. The "new" machine, the Intoxilyzer5000 (and this was 25 years ago) was microprocessor based. It had an RFI detection circuit which was supposed to invalidate results if RFI was present. Other known issues are burping and chewing tobacco. Trouble is, the RFI detector was a comparator driving a login input. Without the software, you can't prove the box's performance from a white box perspective. That's trouble when you're relying on a machine vs. videotaped evidence of impairment.
I wonder if he had his own 'buffer overflow' right in front of the officer? Maybe some wayward output streams?
The lowest legal limit I know of is .08. That's enough to impair. Honestly, I think it should be, one strike and lose your license for a year. More than once and you never drive again. Drunk driving is one of the most dangerously irresponsible things anyone can do. I can't understand why anyone would try to defend it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A low-carb diet (e.g. Atkins diet) can indeed make you "ketotic" and raise your breath acetone level.
e vels_produce_inaccurate_Breathalyzer_results
From your college chemistry course acetone has a C=O bond, while alcohol is a C-OH bond.
Cheap breathalyzers will use a chemical reaction to detect the alcohol in your breath -- often potassium dichromate (these are the ones that go from red to green with alcohol).
More advanced models (such as the ones the police would use, would use essentially spectroscopy to try to measure the resonant absorbance of the C-OH bond. This would not be fooled by acetone, which has a much different absorbance of the C=O (approximately 1700 cm-1 IIRC). There are also variants of this method.
If you are ever innocent and accused, get a blood test, which really is a quantitative direct measurement and can be confirmed, with very little chance of being fooled.
If you are not innocent, **IN THEORY** the easiest way to lower your reading is to silently hyperventilate prior to blowing. This would prevent equilibration of the alcohol in your bloodstream with the air in your lungs that you just breathed in and out. It is far from perfect, and I would strongly advise to never drive drunk, nor rely on this method.
Additional references: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Could_elevated_ketone_l
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
You're way overgeneralizing. There are good and bad devices. Just because "early electronic breathalizers" were supposedly faulty, or speed cameras have been successfully challenged, does not impugn all other technology. That's just absurd.
Each device and/or technology has to be evaluated on a case by case basis to determine its accuracy and reliability. I would guess that even within the "breathalizers" category, there is a wide range of devices with varying accuracy. There are probably a few stinkers that are habitually inaccurate and/or constantly breaking, and there are probably a few that are absolutely rock solid and dead-on accurate.
To suggest that "we shouldn't rely on such devices" just because others have failed in the past is just being a Luddite.
I just can't understand what is so bad about alcohol testers and why so called old fashioned sobriety test would be better than that. At least here in Finland, and other parts of Europe too that I know, police use only alcohol testers and they are widely accepted and seen as the best way to get the job done. To me sobriety test seems just so very random way to measure is the driver under too much alcohol or not, I would image that with that kind of test a cop can use his/her judgment and either let the driver of the hook or book him, at least in the borderline cases. With testers its easy, you just blow and the tester will tell what your score is, and the score is what it is. And if for some instance you don't want to blow or you think that there is some wrong with the device or there are some other things to be noted, you can always demand to be taken to a local hospital for a blood test.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
We need responsibility in DUI Laws. Drunk driving is a terrible problem, but the way the states are dealing with it is not good. The BAC limits have been creeping ever so lower, as to raise the revenue from someone having a glass of wine after dinner when stopped at a roadblock. This is not actually helpful in impacting road safety.
.02 BAC margin of error, so they are set to legal_limit - 0.02, so in a 0.05BAC state, they are set to 0.03. Go on a date and take the girl home on a bus. This is why you should not support mandatory ignition interlocks.
Also, breathalyzers have a +/- 20% error, which is rather unfortunate.
Ignition interlocks have a
We need to deal with the drunk driving problem responsibly: provide good public transportation options (Boston, extend trains until after 2am, you listening?), encourage designated drivers, and provide massive roaming police enforcement, looking for erratic driving and dangerous behavior (substantially more effective than roadblocks).
We're already seeing a ton of people with absolutely no legal background commenting on legal things. Here's a tip: the law doesn't work like you probably think it does. The law is rational or reasonable. It's a jumbled mess of subjective orders and expressions that lawyers can mold into defense or complaint.
Looking at the source code could very well be the basis for a very solid defense that beats whatever state statues and ordinances the defendant is suspected of violating. We have no idea what's in the code so why not? Crappy programmers probably wrote the software and it probably wouldn't be hard to find something that doesn't function right or doesn't map just right to a state issued requirement for the system.
If this gun reading is the states main piece of leverage it's because this device conforms to some strict requirements defined by the state. So maybe looking at the code will show that it doesn't and that the machine is in fact illegal.
Lastly, if you ever get pulled over for something like this, don't talk. That is when they ask if you've been drinking, always say no. What does "drinking" mean? Well, it's not up to you to define this at that time. Let your lawyer handle it. Never tell a cop you might be breaking the law. Because once you've admitted that you have been drinking, they can ask you a whole bunch of other questions that can only hurt you. How much? For how long? Where at? Where are you going? With who?
Here's a sample:
Officer: Have you been drinking?
You: No.
Officer: I smell alcohol.
You: I haven't been drinking, officer.
He'll still ask you to get out and do his little tests. But you've never admitted to anything. This can help a lot down the road. In short, never say anything you don't have to.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I had to attend driving school thanks to a speeding ticket (they forgive your first ticket if you take a class, making the class a really good idea) and they told us that they could get a subpoena for your blood.
In other words, yes, they can forcibly take a blood sample from you although they have to have a judge approve it.
I work as a law clerk for a judge in Minnesota, and have written opinions regarding this very matter. Luckily, my judge agrees with me that people's liberty's should not be dependent on the financial interests of private businesses, and we have forced the state to disclose the source code when we get the motions. Of course, the state has not yet done so. As the Asst. Attorney General said in court just a couple days ago, "CMI simply will not give the source code to us. We're supposed to own it, but they just won't give it to us. I'm not sure what to do at this point."
This will probably lead to hundreds of implied consent motions being decided in favor of the driver (which means he gets his license back, and doesn't relate to the criminal charges) and it remains to be seen how courts will hold in criminal matters, but I'm guessing many of them will follow the Underdahl court in forcing the state to disclose it.
As I've explained to my judge: essentially, states needs to learn that it is a very bad idea to sign contracts to acquire closed source devices to which they will have no access or ability to test. The same goes for voting machines.
Personally, I'm VERY conservative when it comes to DUI cases, and I very, very rarely side with the driver. But in this case, I've decided it's worth it to throw out a few of them if it means fixing "the system", not just for the intoxilyzer code, but for more important things like the voting machines.
On another note, I'll be writing a more thorough order requiring the use of the source code, and as one of the few law clerks around that has a CS degree, it'll get used by plenty of other judges. So if anyone has any suggestions on good, succinct public-policy based rationale, I would certainly like to read them.
As someone who has been railroaded through the DUI "presumption of guilt" gulag, I had mentioned this to my attorney. However, I didn't have the money to pay a software engineer (code monkey) to grep the code looking for flaws. When I blew into the machine it printed out the results along with the last firmware update done in 1999! I had questioned the reliability of the results but the state just blew it off and said they were satisfied the results were forensically accurate.
As far as the DOL is concerned, you are GUILTY based on some arbitrary number the machine spits out. Your right to "due process" is bypassed at that point, a person who works for the DOL then becomes prosecutor and judge and inevitably suspends your license. When you have little or no money, you just flat out get fucked in the ass with a un-lubricated utility pole. DUI law today has NOTHING to do with curbing drunk driving, it has everything to with nothing but raking in revenue. duiblog
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Get the radar gun code and their hardware specs, too. :-)
Those things definitely have a large error margin.
Maybe we can get money back from unlawful tickets issued by cops.
I haven't seen anyone point this out yet, but there is a very interesting piece of information that matters here that he can get from the code. That is the assumptions about the blood-gas partition constant in use. What the machine is measuring is alcohol content in his breath (actually, content of a number of organics, but alcohol is usually the only relevant one). What it is reporting is the alcohol content of his blood. To get from one to the other requires a number of assumptions, most importantly about a number called the blood-gas partition coefficient -- which relates to how much of the alcohol evaporates out of blood in the lungs. The problem is that this number varies significantly from person to person, and even in one person over time. It is entirely possible he has a reasonable argument to make that the machine's assumptions about his partition constant are not correct. IIRC, the constant can ary over a factor of 2, occasionally more. So the question is, how conservative are the assumptions? How well do they match him?
It's a question of measurement accuracy, not just software bugs, and the software can inform greatly about how the measurement is taken.
There may be uncertified code, bug fixes (which may or may not have been installed by the time the defendant took the test), etc. You may be right that there could be little exonerating the defendant, but it's not right to withhold the information. Secret machines that can declare you guilty of a serious offense are not good things, because false positives are unacceptable. After all, a guilty man who gets the source code will still be found guilty. But an innocent man denied the opportunity to prove it may well be found guilty.
Besides, did you know that you can be found guilty of a DUI without ever actually driving? My instructor told me about a drunk, sitting in the passenger's seat of the car who was cited for DUI. His friend, the designated driver, had left the AC on while he went back for his other drunk friend. The guy in the passenger's seat, who never attempted or intended to drive was charged with DUI because he "could" have taken control of the car by scooting over a seat. He'd have been okay if his friend hadn't left the AC on for him.
So don't be too quick to assume that people are guilty without hearing the whole story.
To avoid these kind of discussions, there is something called "TÜV" http://www.tuev-sued.de/technical_installations and "Eichamt" http://www.eichamt.de/ in Germany.
.01 g!) - and you are not at the chemist's shop.
Have you ever seen someone from a good old german "Eichamt" turn up in your grocery store and check alle the balances? It's really fun, when he pulls out all those gauged weights and then tells you your balance is wrong (by
Are you sure you buy 500g of strawberries, if that's what it says on the sticker? - Really?
Yes, but then theres the little detail that
no driving == no working == no money == no food == your dead.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
XXX#######
When I say this, I know Im not a lawyer. I dont know how accurate my point of view is, this is just my interpretation of what Im seeing of this case.
Ignoring the reason for the case, drunk driving, Im looking at what they wish to use as evidence. In this case the testing equipment used, IE the breath tester. If a test, breath test, blood test, etc, is to be used in a court case, the equipment used for said teast could also be called into question and itself be on trial. How the equipment is handled or mishandled, manufactured, operates, used, etc, can all be called into question, in whole or part.
What if this turned out to be a physical component that was in question? Would the state have the same objections to the defence wanting to review the product in question?
For an example, say this was a car, not a breath tester, that was in question, and this car was known to have a faulty gas tank. Would the state say "No you can not get this information from the manufacturer, becase the state owns that car and it is all ours now." or would they let it through?
The way I see it, the software a device runs on is just as much a part of said device as a bolt or a battery. If they can give legal reasons for questioning a screw that holds something together, or a gear that turns a part, then they can question the software that runs it also. Copyright does not factor into this at all, which is what the state is trying to say.
This is not being done to illegaly reproduce the code, this is not being done to copy the work done into another product, this is being done to anaylise its effectiveness, see where bugs are, etc, for a case already in a court of law. If they were trying to copy the code, resell it illegaly, or use it as part of another product, I could see copyright applying. Not in this case.
Just my point of view in this case.
Belunar
What does it have to do with anything? Even if he is wrong, I still think someone should have a right to see and contest (if they can) _all_ the evidence and logic used against him. That's the whole point of a trial by a jury of your peers.
Was he drunk? Maybe. Probably. But that doesn't change the fact that you can't sentence someone based on a complete black box, where noone knows what went inside and exactly what data it used and how.
The point is that if I (or the state) accuse you of a wrongdoing, you're entitled to see what I base that on. Witnesses, evidence, how I measured and calculated if any numbers are involved, etc. And if it's in front of a jury, those should see the complete picture too, and use their own brains. I shouldn't be able to just come and say "ok, this program on my laptop says he's wrong and I'm right, but you're not allowed to know what the program does and exactly what data it used."
Plus, frankly, as a programmer and a consultant, I find the notion outright laughable that _any_ program can be taken a priori to be 100% correct and more infaillible than the Pope. And that the humanly entered data is a priori 100% correct and beyond any questioning, before even knowing what it is.
Even software modules for more critical stuff like avionics, space exploration or banking are known to occasionally fail. And that's stuff that's reviewed and tested beyond what you'd ever dream of in a more mundane job. But shit happens.
E.g., take the infamous Ariane V control module on its first flight. Now that was one of the most expensive computer bugs ever. And the funny thing is, it's the same module that worked before in the Ariane IV rockets. Just someone didn't realize that, tested and reviewed as it was already, it was originally designed for a less powerful rocket. A type conversion to 16 bit was OK on the old rocket, but it caused an overflow on the new one. Good algorith, but used cluelessly on data outside the domain it was supposed to work on.
How can you be so sure that a breath analyzer gizmo can't possibly run into a problem like that?
Plus, proclaiming any gadget a priori 100% infaillible, is proclaiming that (A) the science behind it is 100% rock solid, (B) that the guys who made the mathematical model are 100% world-class experts, and (C) that the sensors were 100% accurate and infaillible, and (D) there's absolutely no room for user error in using it. Not only that is against common sense, it's against experience. Plenty of other devices (e.g., hand-held laser speed meters) were faulty in more than one of those categories.
At any rate, until you see what's going on in there, how would you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Almost everybody here knows the issues involved with closed source e-voting machines. How is this any different? It should be a fundamental right that you or your attorney should have access to any and all evidence used against you, which in this case includes schematics and source code of the device in question. Think about it - is it really any different to say that candidate X won the election because the magic black box said so, versus you being convicted of something because the magic black box said you are guilty - never mind how it works?
BTW, I develop embedded systems software for a living, I have run across strange and subtle bugs before, and I have no objection to having somebody reviewing my work for correctness.
My rights don't need management.
Source Code == Money!
Source Code == $$$!
No Money == No Source Code!!!
The source code of the intoxilyzer in the market costs 1 billion of $$$!!!
Has not money judge? No Source Code!!!
Judge, the reason is that Microsoft never did release its source code.
Thanks to my friend that did work there.
Lowering the limit is an example of going at the problem from the wrong side. If you lower the limit to .05 for example, suddenly you'll be prosecuting people who blow between .05 and .08, you'll be nabbing no more drivers at .08 and up (in fact maybe fewer due to the time spend bringing mr .06 down to the station). How does this get any more of the real dangerous drivers behind bars? I think during relevant hours, cops on the beat should be looking for drunks, period, sure they can pull over someone going 100, but sitting around and pulling over someone doing 80 in a 65 is really going after the low-hanging fruit. You're only going to see someone weaving in and out of lanes if your out looking for it. You might even stop some tired/destracted drivers while you're at it (a traffic stop will wake you right up)
All those people who got tickets for doing 80 arent going to kill anyone, the one guy who crosses that centerline will, that's the side of the problem that should be worked on, not the threshold number (especially when devices aren't perfect)
Suppose that a breathalyser was subjected to lots and lots of testing, and was shown that 99.999% of the time, it got a correct answer within +/-20% of the person's actual blood alcohol level.
Then do we really need to know whether it's filled with good source code, bad source code, or yarn? I mean, we accept this kind of opacity for lots of kinds of machine learning systems that can be trained to be very good predictors for their data sets.
The only real argument against what I'm saying is some other poster's point about acetone registering as alcohol. That kind of thing might be hard to notice unless you can review the design and assumptions built into such a device.
The 'Interview" is nothing but a delaying tactic to allow more alcohol to enter the blood.
That will give higher test results. Perhaps you were shitfaced, but still able to drive
the mile to your house at the time you got into your car, but after a 30 minute 'interview'
you would not be able to negotiate the trip.
Say the alphabet backwards is a ruse used to detect drunkeness, to that I say "You first officer"
or "which alphabet?".
90 percent og the officers themselves cannot say the alphabet backwards, even with a printed card.
How can you verify that the source code supplied is exactly the same code that was used to create the actual device that was used to test the defendant ?
If the manufacturer is unable to produce a log of the files that were used to manufacture the product in question, then they have no case any longer.
I also suspect that if the electronics used in this device has not been carefully designed to deal with component tolerances there is another cause for dispute. You would need to track the manufacturing of the circuitry and device calibration logs.
Unless the manufacturer has done a very careful monitoring and logging of the manufacturing process, I doubt that I can stand up in a court of law and say there is no reasonable doubt.
LOL.........you think THESE B.A. machines are "bad", you should have been around in the 70's and early 80's with the old Smith & Wesson model 900 Breathalyzer machines. We use to call them "dial a drunk" machines because they were so inaccurate. But, back then, lawyers were not as "sharp" as they are now. We could dial in a drunk, just by screwing around with the needle. Check out a picture of them on the web, then you will see. They had two vials of a light yellow acid. You break the top off of one, set it in the machine with a tube in the top. You purge the cylinder and then light shines between each tube of liquid, a sensor picks up the light between the two. You have a drunk (ok, an "aledged" drunk) blow into the tube filling the cylinder. You turn a knob and the breath sample is bubbled into the liquid with the tube in it. After a few minutes, you hit the button and the light comes on. The alcohol turns the yellow liquid a lighter color, depending on the alcohol in the sample. This causes the needle to unbalance. You run a knob up until the needle is centered and the scale was "calibrated" to show the alcohol amount. Now, if you were not standing dead center over the needle, you could "fudge" the reading one way or the other. Hence the name "dial a drunk".
What gripes me is that if this guys does get acquitted, all the court costs will get passed onto the taxpayers (and they'll also get another DUI offender back on the road).
That's going to happen anyway if you blow over the ludicrously low number of 0.08, so what's your point.
When in doubt, do as the cops do. Spend a few minutes googling, and you'll find that cops ALWAYS refuse the test.
[citation needed]
I don't drink. I have a driver's license but don't drive regularly. But I have a part-time job. Did you forget bicycles and buses where appropriate?
Even though the source code has been released to the defense he still has to be very careful with copyright. If he gets some experts to look at it without getting appropriate nondisclosure agreements signed /first/ he'll get screwed for copyright violation.
I'm just an ignorant non-lawyer type, but if you have a contract that says that you own the code and they won't turn it over, can't you simply sue them and make them do it? They're the government, and it's hard to believe they're just that helpless.
SCO's influence has spread to regular Joe's. I'm sure a few bugs could be found in the code, which just may be enough to introduce FUD to the jury, regardless of whether they are significant. One could argue that it would be hard to know whether or not a given bug was triggered in a particular road run without a CPU trace. Veeeery clever.
Table-ized A.I.
I would put this on about the same level as challanging the arresting officer's ability to discern impaired behavior because he has not received sufficient training in physiology and other disciplines to be able to accurately determine the level of impairment.
Couple that with the inability to determine precisely the amount of alcohol consumed by the defendant. Without knowing to the mililiter the amount consumed it would be very easy to dispute the findings of blood alcohol level - such levels could be normal for the individual and the state would be incapable of proving otherwise.
What happens when you go down this road is very simple. If you have a stupid and greedy attorney, he will take your case and present your defense all the while spending your money like it is water. A slightly smarter and less greedy attorney will tell you up front that all of these points are irrelevent to the case.
I suspect this guy is grabbing at straws and this isn't the first offense.
"Do you feel happy that you may have helped this murdering swine smile and walk away?"
Stop the emotional garbage and face the facts. MADD is completely out of control; it's time for them to be disbanded. The laws in place already take care of the bulk of drunk drivers.
And anyway, life is full of risks. Deal with it.
That said, if you have a machine that can put somebody in jail, the public has a right to know how it functions. You might extend that idea to include voting machines.
If the guy was arrested in his home for DUI, why does he even need the source code? ..."yes officer, I've been drinking. I was so upset about rear ending that car I went right to the bottle of vodka in my fridge and started chugging it when I got home." It provides reasonable doubt and the state cannot prove the alcohol was consumed prior to the accident.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
IANAL, but I believe the problem with this issue is that in the US of A, I do not think they can put you in jail for not giving up blood.
I'm not sure which law this would fall under, but I believe at the VERY least it would be under the 5th amendment of not giving evidence against yourself. Maybe there's an exception. If anyone knows i'd love to be corrected, as with all the privacy laws, and antilaws, that we have, it's hard telling what's illegal nowadays, and if a cop says do something, most people assume it's a crime not to, such as car searches.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
So who here thinks that the US 0.08 limit is even accurate for "drunk driving"
According to the weight charts, if I drink 4 beers in an hour, I'm over the limit. Sorry, but 4 beers doesn't make me drunk or even really buzzed. If they decide I'm drunk, it should be because I can't walk a straight line or because I can't stand on one leg for more than 10 seconds or so, not because some percentage of the population that weighs 150 can't drive after less than a 6 pack!
>and this does differ in many states, but, if I got pulled over, and knew I'd blow more than the ridiculously low 0.08, I'd do what a lawyer told me. Not say a word, not take any field tests, just hold my hands out for the cuffs and refuse to take any tests.
In California, you're cool with that strategy since they will process you very fast and efficienctly into jail, but look for them to take your license for an extra year and give you a strike (or life in prison if it's your third strike).
But in Nevada they would verbally asault you and then physically restrain you while they forcibly extact your blood, by Law, but you could try bleeding out your nose alot and tell them they need to "get gloves quick 'cuz you don't want anyone else to die", or giving them a great deal of cash (not promises of cash) and compliment them on the size of their genitals relative to California cops, or just downshift and floor it if you can take a Chevy Comaro being driven by an idiot (their fastest car) and are far from their radio tower and traffic jams (ie, out in the boonies). You know last year they actually shot a guy to death for having his stereo up too loud in traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and their kangaroo court ruled it justifiable homicide because they said the black California evil-doer resisted being pulled out of his running car by the bicycle cop.
The thing is; people that get into accidents because they're drunk are DRUNK. There's almost never an accident because someone had two beers, and might be over the legal limit, but still NOT DRUNK. Not more then normal accidents, anyways.
Setting the legal limit so that you can't breath in the fumes from Hair Spray without being over the legal limit does nothing to prevent drunk driving - all it does is get more people to pay fines and promote the careers of politicians.
The things that always comes to mind about these types of things are: Some people are bad drivers anyways, some people are slow to respond without any alcohol, and the vast majority of car accidents don't have alcohol involved.
It's not the same thing with Cell Phones - you can put down the phone in a crisis; you can't stop being drunk. Unfortunately, people abuse cell phones so much on the road that even though I hate more regulations and laws, I'm not against a law banning cell phones on the road completely. I wouldn't actively support such a law, but if it passed, I wouldn't be upset.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Sure you can, just as long as the car is sitting perfectly still in the parking lot.
For my weight I can legally drink around 7 beers/drinks before I hit the .08 limit.
According to this chart you weigh, oh, about 600 pounds. Or you drink very slowly and don't seem to do much else besides hang around in bars and post on slashdot. Either way, I'd suggest professional help.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article says that if a DUI is brought up in court using Breathalyzer evidence, the source code must be disclosed. When elections are brought up in court, the source code for any electronic balloting software can remain closed. What am I missing?
For all the inconvenience shitfaces like you cause the rest of us who want to have a good time, it's good to see that karma got you. You ruin our good time, your little kiddie friends get whacked so you can be miserable too. Just like you don't give a damn about whether other people are allowed to have fun, I don't give a damn about your dead "friends."
wahhhhhh i got hit by a drunk driver
This could be really huge, the source should be public. I hope he knows what to do with it.
It would only make it better.
Interesting. So how about finger prints and DNA samples? In the US is one ever required to allow samples to be taken if they are going to incriminate one's self? In my country, when arrested by the police, fingerprints are taken. No choice given. These can be used to pin you to the crime if there's a match. They can also be put through a database of historic crimes see find a match. If you were initially falsely arrested on a charge (i.e innocent), but guilty of a historical charge where they obtained fingerprint samples and stored them - you are pretty much screwed I guess when there's a match.
I think so ... you mentioned some people are slow to respond sober. The problem with cell phones -- even hands-free devices with voice dialing -- is that the conversation is a proven distraction which affects reaction time. So by the time your brain recognizes the crisis, it may be too late.
Me, I'm all in favor of stringent reaction-time testing for drivers. I'm also in favor of some kind of test to determine a potential driver's ability to look ahead to avoid accidents. I'm tired of dealing with morons who swoop across three lanes to fill an opening, then jam on their brakes to avoid rear-ending someone.
My mom was a juror for a drunk driving case. The defendant (who had only came into town that day) met someone who invited him to a party. He went, and after he drank some alcohol, the others there assaulted him. He went outside, but they followed him.
Being in immediate physical danger, and there not being anyone sober around who wasn't threatening him, he had no choice but to drive.
Was he foolish? Yes. Criminally so? No. He could not have anticipated the urgent need to drive by himself, and the risk of causing death or injury by driving wasn't nearly as high as the risk would have been if he had stayed and let them pummel him.
BTW, I've never drunk alcohol and never will, so don't write me off as someone carelessly excusing his own foolish hobbies.
This is not a signature.
... In Whitespace.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
It's intellectual, and therefore NOT property. :)
Defendant: In order to defend myself from the prosecutions alleged evidence, I need the source code to the breathalizer. If I can't defend myself from it, you would have to dismiss that evidence.
Judge: OK. Here's the source code.
Defendant: Crap!
* I wasn't actually there. But I imagine it went something like that.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
In the UK, things are a little different. We already know that a handheld breathalyser isn't foolproof - what it provides is enough evidence to arrest someone and take them down to the police station.
Once there, a number of other, more accurate testing systems are available - be it urine, blood or a more sophisticated breath test. It's the evidence taken at the police station which gets you convicted - and to ensure that you can't get clever with "I refuse to let you take a urine sample", we've made it illegal to refuse, with penalties identical to if you had given a sample and it showed you to be over the limit. I don't know if anyone's ever demanded the source code, but even if they did get it they'd then have to prove that there was a problem with both the breathalyser and the more sophisticated test at the police station.
I'm surprised that the US - the "land of the free" - will take someone to court over a simple handheld breathalyser.
We encountered this on campus when we tried to buy campus wide firewalls. Finding a firewall that on paper did what we needed was easy. After all there were firewalls rated to a GIGABIT of traffic, when at the time we only had like 200mbps of total bandwidth to the Internet. Ok no problem right? Wrong. We'd put them in the network (or rather a mirror of the network they got to play with) and they'd fall flat on their face. We are talking lagging out at best, and just crashing at worst. But how could that be? They'd been tested in labs and shown to work! Well, the kind of traffic you generate on a network simulator isn't nearly as tough as the traffic of a bunch of undergraduates screwing around on the Internet. So while these worked fine for many companies, they couldn't take a situation like ours (Cisco blade firewalls for their 6500s worked in the end, if you are wondering).
Testing it great and all but the real proof is when the shit is actually in the field. Doesn't always work like you planned.
For more on this phenomena, see Mythbusters and the number of times they've had something that should work perfectly that didn't.
Do we ban all other impairments, and to what point? For example driving while tired is a severe problem that has a lot of the same effects as driving drunk: Your reaction time is slower, you don't pay attention as well, you have trouble focusing, etc. So do we make it illegal to drive while tired? If so do we take the same hardline attitude and say "There's no compelling reason why anyone should have to drive with any fatigue, if you haven't gotten a minimum of 8 hours of sleep not less than 10 hours before hitting the road, you've got no business driving."
I mean hell, all you have to do is play twitch video games to know the significance of sleep on accuracy and reaction time. Back when I played Team Fortress and then Action Quake 2 competitively online I'd actually make sure to nap before important matches, be well fed, etc. Reason is I showed a measurable increase in performance. When I was really exhausted I didn't do so well.
Significant isn't a weasel word, it's an important term. Your driving WILL be impaired by a number of different things at any given time. It is rare that you are in peek condition to drive. So the question becomes what amount of impairment is acceptable? You can't say "none" or you essentially ban almost all driving all of the time. You have to be reasonable about what amount of what kinds of impairment really make it more dangerous to drive.
1) It's more expensive (and slower). With a blood test they have to send the sample to a qualified lab (could be their own) and have a technician do the work on it. With a breathalyzer you just blow in it, it gives results. Not hard to see which is cheaper.
2) You'd have problems making it mandatory. A blood test is highly invasive, and in fact is against some religions. Thus generally to get a blood test the state requires either the consent of the person giving it, or a court order. The whole "implied consent" probably wouldn't cut it for a blood test. You'd get people who would sue for a violation of civil rights of various kinds and probably win.
What if the device had a hardware bug or malfunction ?
What sort of implication does this have on other automated system in the legal system?
My neck of the woods often have cameras that snap shots of people who run red lights, there's an automated toll highway, etc.
This could get interesting.
To all those good ole boys posting about how they are completely OK to drive after a few beers and what's all the fuss... Would you be happy to have your surgeon operate on you after necking a few? "I'm fine!!! Really! (hic) Where that bonesaw?"
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Remove all the bugs.
It's not like there's a general-purpose script here: it has to do only a few things.
A well specified, simple task is PROVABLY bug free. How many bugs are in the "hello world" program? This is the basis of the UNIX philosophy. Do one thing and do it well.
It is certainly no flight-control system, and they are provably bug free in most of their operations.
People can drive with any dose of coughsyrup in their system. We're making arbitrary differentiations between different intoxicants when we make DUI laws so punative.
The law is broken and biased so I lobby against them. It's an uphill climb, but I'm game.
I hope that you, for cowardly suggesting that we give up even more rights in the name of 'safety', get hit by a drunk driver.
Ta-ta asshole!
Blar.
shared amongst two people = 3 units. Legal limit = 4 units
(3>>4) = FALSE.
You are an idiot.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 17 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
What exactly does this guy need from the source code? I'm having a hard time believing that this kind of thing can help him get out of this charge.
The job of the court, the judicial system, and society in general is order.
Not Justice, not truth, not fact.
Consistently defining "Justice" is about as feasible as defining "Fair"--both depends on who you ask. So, any expectation that a court might manufacture some of it is delusion.
Justice is whatever the guys with the most guns say it is.
If they say the intoxilizer is infallible, it is.
We have order, and some of us call it justice if that helps us sleep.
We don't care about the guy in jail, though; we've defined what happened to him as just.
Defendant got busted for drunk driving; throw him in jail, end of story.
His search for "justice" is likely motivated by the fact he doesn't want to go to jail.
Nothing to do with "justice" per se. Where was he when the rest of the drunks were getting busted?
So he gets the source code? Great. Now he screws with the order in the system.
Distraction. Loss of productivity. Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensue.
The rest of us go to work satisfied we are safe from drunks and dictators.
Jobs get done, and society functions.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
This whole thing begs the question. What if the Intoxilyzer is created to the same quality as the Diebold voting machines? As far as I'm concerned there's no reason that those machines shouldn't be open to the public. If people can find a way to cheat the system, then the problem isn't the cheaters. You just fix the system. I want to know for certain that my crime was legit if I was brought in and a black box read out the answer guilty.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
When I turned 18, Minnesota had just made 18 the legal drinking age. When my bud and me went a bar-hopping, we always chose one designated driver. No booze for you! That way, the rest of us could get plastered in safety. If a bunch of high school seniors can figure that out in 1974 (I'm OLD), I see no reason to have sympathy for idiots who can't today.
Urban planning which forces higher population density so mass transit makes sense? Please. While we're at it, why not force everyone to wear see-through plastic clothes to prevent concealed weapons? Because many consider the cure worse than the disease. So you like high density life. Fine. Enjoy! I don't.
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
If a cop looks you in the eyes and sees they are a little bloodshot and you look a little tired, says "You are drunk!" and slaps you in handcuffs, that's improper procedure. If the cop goes thru the motions, gets you out of the car, makes you stand on one foot, makes you walk a straight line, touch your nose, and all that crap, and you fail the test, he's followed a method of testing your impairment that's well documented and defended in court and is well within the law to not let you drive anywhere. I compare the reviewing code in this case the same as reviewing the procedure the officer performed to determine if the driver was impaired.
He has the right to look at it and try to prove if it's returning false positives. The state should be 100% willing to allow them to look at the code, and the fact that it isn't means it's trying to save money by not going down that road. The state has to give up information about radar detectors and their maintenance as well as allow users to inspect the equipment, if you are accused of speeding.
I do not drive drunk, so I welcome this challenge, so that if I ever get pulled over and have to use this machine, I don't get a false positive. Don't trust a machine just because the government says so.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"No, you're guilty when a jury determines that you were impaired."
No, you're guilty if you did it. The jury only decides if the state has enough evidence to demonstrate such beyond a reasonable doubt.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
"that it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer".
t ion/
First expression in the practice of English Law dates to 1470, but it tends to go by the name "Blackstone's Formulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formula
Most likely all he's managed to do is annoy a judge who probably already hates him because he was pulled over drunk. The chances that this guy is going to find anything are next to nil. He probably lacks the equipment and background needed to thorough test things. The device is certified to be used, and has been calibrated to meet specifications set by the state. I'm sure those specifications and the use of the device have already been defended in many other cases.
What he's managed to do is take what should be a fairly simple DUI case for a judge and made it into a headache for no reason other than this guy who was caught driving drunk thinks he is smarter than the system. Breathalizers have been questioned and successfully defended so many times in the past that their use is pretty rock solid.
- I would like to see how it rounds. .01294568423764 does it show .013 or .012 .008327, not legally drunk here but does it round to .01
.01 and he is able to show .0099999999999
.01 you go to jail
-
If he is able to prove that the Court/Officer says his BAC was
that the device rounded and he was actually
or more importantly, the potential of that rounding.
x = round(.00979999998,3)
x =
x = round(.00979999998,4)
x = 0.0098 you don't go to jail
They call that a reasonable doubt.
The device did not report the "Actual" BAC
Now don't get me wrong, I HATE drunk drivers
But if the court can not prove its case 100% then he goes free
If he can raise the question in the juries mind that the device "May" report an inaccurate
number then they have to let him go plane and simple.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Yea, well, its a very capable as a micro-controller available in both 8 and 16 bit models and is rock solid. That really shouldn't be what they are basing their case on...but of course in court they will probably win on that due to sheer ignorance.
I have seen maybe 10 obviously fatal wrecks in my 10 year driving career. I know driving is dangerous, but to see 10 obviously fatal wrecks in one day would seriously worry me. Please let me know where this was so I could avoid that stretch of road.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
We decide together? Really? No, actually, we don't decide together. The lobbyists with the most money decide. See how MADD pushed through the absurd .08 BAC levels and the DUI check points. It is my responsibility as an American Citizen to ignore unjust laws, and DUI laws are unjust. The fact that you support current DUI laws (which allow for check points where a piggie can examine you with no probable cause) makes you an authorotarian coward with boundry issues.
Blar.
Whoa ! How strong is the beer where you live, or is it served in kegs instead of glasses ? 0.08 is two or three beers where I live.
In the state of CALIFORNIA, you sign a contract stating that you WILL submit to a field sobriety test or lose your license for 1 year, including fines. Also, if you think you are going to get out of a DUI charge simply by declining the test, well, think again. If you appear drunk, smell like booze, or say something incriminating they will forcibly take blood from you at the booking station. There is a nurse there and they will take your blood. You will be charged and you will lose your license. And because you refused the test the first time you will now be hit with the maximum sentence/penalty. Having fun yet? Well, you have the next 5 years of informal probation to think about it and the next 10 years before the charge is off your DMV record. Weee!
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
I'm certainly not advocating having a few beers then trying to go all Mario Andretti on your local freeway... but the point should be made that differening amounts of alcohol intake or BAC levels may have drastically different affects on different people. I've seen 200 lb people go to sleep after 2 beers, a 100 lb person hardly able to stand up after 1, and a 140 lb guy absolutely run a counterstrike server 6 beers into the evening.
The problem is, "impairment" is a highly qualitative assessment (no, I can't say my ABCs backwards stone sober)... and the state needs something quantitative to help make easy convictions. The BAC and legal limits is how they do this, conveniently ignoring that BACs will affect people differently.
Do I have a perfect system to suggest? Nope. When someone gets pulled over, maybe they should be able to challenge the officer to an on-the-spot Counterstrike match... and if I win I'm free to go. (substitute Gran Turismo if you think the impairment test should be more relevant)
Do I smell desperation? .....Nah. It's just booze.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
You might want to add function calls where it corrects that reading for ambient measurement factors (temperature, humidity, etc.) and inherent measurement errors (calibration coefficients for the sensors). Also, you probably want to seed that rand() with current time, or heart rate, or phase of the moon.