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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Mosher has said he wouldn’t provide Cybercheck’s software to defense experts because it is proprietary, according to an appeals filing in the Ohio homicide case that was ruled on last year. A spokesman for the Akron Police Department, which investigated the fatal robbery, didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, wouldn’t comment, citing pending litigation. At a hearing last year, the prosecutor addressed some of the allegations in the filing and said Mosher was “great at software, great at open source intelligence, a work in progress on the law,” according to a transcript of the September hearing. The prosecutor, Brian Stano, said his office had no intention of opening an investigation into Mosher, the transcript shows. “I believe this is more of a lost-in-translation issue as opposed to some sort of impropriety,” he said."
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SUB-HEADING: "Cyberchecks founder has said the software tops 90% accuracy."
GIST: Law enforcement agencies and prosecutors from Colorado to New York have turned to a little-known artificial intelligence tool in recent years to help investigate, charge and convict suspects accused of murder and other serious crimes.
But as the software, called Cybercheck, has spread, defense lawyers have questioned its accuracy and reliability. Its methodology is opaque, they’ve said, and it hasn’t been independently vetted.
The company behind the software has said the technology relies on machine learning to scour vast swaths of the web and gather “open source intelligence” — social media profiles, email addresses and other publicly available information — to help identify potential suspects’ physical locations and other details in homicides and human trafficking crimes, cold cases and manhunts.
The tool’s creator, Adam Mosher, has said that Cybercheck’s accuracy tops 90% and that it performs automated research that would take humans hundreds of hours to complete. By last year, the software had been used in nearly 8,000 cases spanning 40 states and nearly 300 agencies, according to a court decision that cited prosecutors in a New York case that relied on the tool.
In the New York case, a judge barred authorities from introducing Cybercheck evidence last year after having found that prosecutors hadn’t shown that it was reliable or well-accepted, the decision shows. In another ruling last year, an Ohio judge blocked a Cybercheck analysis when Mosher refused to disclose the software’s methodology.
“We’re being asked to trust a company to present evidence that could eventually put people in prison,” said William Budington, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. “That goes against the right to due process.”
In a motion filed last month in a fatal robbery in Akron, Ohio, defense lawyers representing two defendants charged with murder demanded that Mosher provide the software’s proprietary code and algorithm.
In the April 10 filing, the lawyers also made an alarming series of allegations: Mosher lied under oath about his expertise and made false claims about when and where the technology has been used.
Donald Malarcik, one of the defense lawyers who filed the motion, said in an email that it was “shocking” that prosecutors continued to rely on Mosher as an expert.
Mosher didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions about Malarcik’s comments or the filing. An executive for the Canadian company that makes Cybercheck, Global Intelligence Inc., cited ongoing court matters and said it wouldn’t comment.
Mosher has said he wouldn’t provide Cybercheck’s software to defense experts because it is proprietary, according to an appeals filing in the Ohio homicide case that was ruled on last year.
A spokesman for the Akron Police Department, which investigated the fatal robbery, didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, wouldn’t comment, citing pending litigation.
At a hearing last year, the prosecutor addressed some of the allegations in the filing and said Mosher was “great at software, great at open source intelligence, a work in progress on the law,” according to a transcript of the September hearing.
The prosecutor, Brian Stano, said his office had no intention of opening an investigation into Mosher, the transcript shows.
“I believe this is more of a lost-in-translation issue as opposed to some sort of impropriety,” he said.
‘Circumstantial’ evidence
When law enforcement agencies request assistance from Cybercheck, the software searches parts of the web that aren’t indexed by search engines, as well as the surface web. Those findings are compiled in a report and provided to law enforcement agencies.
Several contracts and proposals reviewed by NBC News show officials from Washington state to Pennsylvania considering or agreeing to pay Global Intelligence $11,000 to $35,000 for Cybercheck. The company secured a $25,000 agreement with Akron beginning in April 2022 that included 50 cases and 40 hours of “real time intelligence,” according to a copy of the contract Malarcik obtained through a public records request and shared with NBC News.
The Akron police spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about the agreement.
In the fatal robbery, two men were arrested in July 2021 in connection with the alleged crime nine months earlier, authorities said in a news release. The men, Deshawn Coleman and Eric Farrey Jr., were later indicted on charges of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and other crimes.
A ballistics analysis on a gun found at Coleman’s home linked him to shell casings at the scene of the homicide, Malarcik said. A car registered to Farrey was captured on camera near the scene, he said. Both men have pleaded not guilty, and Malarcik described that evidence as “entirely circumstantial.”
In December 2022, Malarcik said in an interview, Cybercheck produced a report placing both men at the scene. The report was created after the software searched the web for 21 days in an automated process that sifted through 1.1 petabytes of information — or more than 1 million gigabytes — and created “cyber profiles” for Coleman and Farrey, according to the filing.
Those profiles were assembled from email addresses and social media accounts, according to the filing. Cybercheck connected the profiles to the scene of the killing within minutes of the homicide using a network address — a unique number that identifies devices connected to the internet — from a Wi-Fi-enabled security camera, according to the filing.
At least one device — possibly a phone — with a suspect’s cyber profile had tried to communicate with the camera’s Wi-Fi connection, according to the report, Malarcik said.
The report didn’t cite any video recording of the killing, and it wasn’t clear where Cybercheck found the camera’s network address or how it verified that the device was at the scene. The defense’s forensic experts were unable to locate the social media accounts cited in the report, the filing says, and it wasn’t clear how the software verified an email address that it said belonged to both defendants.
At a hearing last summer, Mosher testified that the software’s conclusions in the case were 98.2% accurate, according to the filing, which doesn’t provide additional details about how that accuracy rate was calculated.
At the hearing, Mosher said his software has never been peer-reviewed, the filing says, noting that he provided the same testimony in an earlier case in Akron."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/ai-tool-used-thousands-criminal-cases-facing-legal-challenges-rcna149607
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
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SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
---------------------------------------------------------------
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
———————————————————————————
YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
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