[Brinworld] Car's data recorder convicts driver

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 05:11:57PM -0400, John Kelsey wrote:
 ...
> It seems intuitively like the EDR ought to be about as valuable to the 
> defense as the prosecution, right?  E.g., the prosecutor says "this guy was 
> driving 120 miles an hour down the road while being pursued by the police," 
> but the EDR says he'd never topped 70.  There are creepy privacy 
> implications in there somewhere, but the basic technology seems no more 
> inherently Orwellian than, say, DNA testing--which seems to be a pretty 
> good way of actually locking up the right guy now and then, rather than 
> someone who looks kind-of like the guy who did it, and was seen in the area 
> by an eyewitness and picked out of a police lineup.

The types of problems with DNA testing such as state's refusal to allow
testing of convicts when it might prove their innocence, and
testing lab "errors", would also apply to EDR boxes.
I.e. states will contrive to use EDR records only when it proves
their case, and data recovered will be subject to "interpretation".

You can bet that when EDRs become important as evidence, citizens won't
be allowed to posess the means to read their own EDRs let alone
write to them.

Eric