BU Cyber Alliance hosts 4/30 Seminar, Featuring Ahmed Ghappour

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM on Monday, April 30, 2018
Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

*This talk was postponed from its originally scheduled date of Thursday, January 11, 2018. 

Machine Generated Culpability: Inscrutable Machine Evidence in the Criminal Legal Process
Ahmed Ghappour
Associate Professor, BU School of Law

Abstract: Machines used in the criminal legal process increasingly have opaque programming architectures and perform cognitively impenetrable functions. Their inscrutability threatens to undermine the procedures relied on by the criminal legal process to safeguard substantive guarantees such as due process and freedom from arbitrary government action.

This talk will consider the question of whether and to what extent fact-finders in the criminal legal process should defer to factual outcomes generated by “opaque” algorithms whose form or functionality cannot readily be digested by human-scale observation and reasoning. First, Prof. Ghappour will provide a taxonomy of evidence-producing machines and highlight potential infirmities that may result in improper inferences from machine evidence. Then, he will show how courts struggle to deal with information asymmetries that arise from a lack of access, expertise, and cognitive capacity, producing results that are inconsistent, unpredictable, and at times incoherent. Finally, he will argue that regulation of machine evidence in the criminal legal process should account for the unique characteristics of modern machines, and will make suggestions tailored to these concerns.

Bio: Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in criminal law and computer security, joined the full-time faculty of Boston University School of Law in 2017. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at U.C. Hastings College of the Law where he taught Criminal Procedure and a seminar on Electronic Surveillance.

Ghappour’s research bridges computer science and the law to address contemporary challenges wrought by new technologies in the administration of criminal justice and national security. His recently published Stanford Law Review article, “Searching Places Unknown: Law Enforcement Jurisdiction on the Dark Web,” examines the foreign relations and national security implications of government hacking operations that use malware to pursue criminal suspects that use sophisticated cryptographic tools to anonymize their communications on the “dark web.”