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tonyPick writes:

The Atlantic has a lengthy, but informative, article on the problems with DNA testing, often seen as infallible by juries:

"Ironically, you have a technology that was meant to help eliminate subjectivity in forensics," Erin Murphy, a law professor at NYU, told me recently. "But when you start to drill down deeper into the way crime laboratories operate today, you see that the subjectivity is still there: Standards vary, training levels vary, quality varies."

Last year, Murphy published a book called Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA, which recounts dozens of cases of DNA typing gone terribly wrong. Some veer close to farce, such as the 15-year hunt for the Phantom of Heilbronn, whose DNA had been found at more than 40 crime scenes in Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s. The DNA in question turned out to belong not to a serial killer, but to an Austrian factory worker who made testing swabs used by police throughout the region.

The article also notes the increasing reliance on computer processing and the desire of the firms responsible to keep the details of the processing hidden, highlighting the example of DNA-testing firm Cybergenetics and their TrueAllele software:

William Thompson [attorney and a criminology professor at the University of California at Irvine] points out that Perlin [Cybergenetics CEO] has declined to make public the algorithm that drives the program. "You do have a black-box situation happening here," Thompson told me. "The data go in, and out comes the solution, and we're not fully informed of what happened in between."

Last year, at a murder trial in Pennsylvania where TrueAllele evidence had been introduced, defense attorneys demanded that Perlin turn over the source code for his software, noting that "without it, [the defendant] will be unable to determine if TrueAllele does what Dr. Perlin claims it does." The judge denied the request.
...
When I interviewed Perlin at Cybergenetics headquarters, I raised the matter of transparency. He was visibly annoyed. He noted that he'd published detailed papers on the theory behind TrueAllele, and filed patent applications, too: "We have disclosed not the trade secrets of the source code or the engineering details, but the basic math."

Originally seen at Bruce Schneier's Blog.

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