Law enforcement and prosecutors from Colorado to New York have turned to little-known artificial intelligence tools in recent years to help investigate, prosecute, and convict suspects accused of murder and other serious crimes. is paying attention to.
But as the software, called CyberCheck, becomes more popular, defense attorneys are questioning its accuracy and reliability. They say the methodology is opaque and has not been independently vetted.
The company that developed the software said the technology relies on machine learning to explore vast areas of the web and collect data. “Open source intelligence” – social media profiles, email addresses, and other publicly available information – is used to identify the physical location and other details of potential suspects in murder and human trafficking crimes, cold cases and investigations. Helpful.
Adam Mosher, the tool's creator, said CyberCheck is more than 90% accurate and automates an investigation that would take a human hundreds of hours to complete. By last year, the software had been used in about 8,000 cases across 40 states and about 300 government agencies, according to a court ruling citing prosecutors in a New York case that relied on the tool.
In a New York case, a judge last year blocked authorities from introducing CyberCheck evidence because prosecutors had not shown it was reliable or well-admissible. was made clear in the judgment. In another ruling last year, an Ohio judge blocked CyberCheck's analysis after Mosher refused to disclose the software's methodology.
“We are being asked to trust companies that provide evidence that could end up putting people behind bars,” said William Buddington, a senior technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group. To tell. “That violates due process rights.”
In a motion filed last month in a robbery-fatal case in Akron, Ohio, attorneys for two defendants charged with murder requested that Mosher provide the software's proprietary code and algorithms.
In the April 10 filing, the attorneys also made a series of alarming allegations. Mr. Mosher lied under oath about his expertise and made false claims about when and where his techniques were used.
Donald Malacik, one of the defense attorneys who filed the motion, said in an email that it is “shocking” that prosecutors continue to rely on Mosher as an expert.
Mr. Mosher did not respond to Mr. Malacik's comments or a detailed list of questions about the application. Executives at Canada's Global Intelligence, which makes CyberCheck, said they would not comment, citing ongoing court matters.
According to the appeal in an Ohio murder case decided last year, Mosher said CyberCheck's software is proprietary and will not be made available to defense professionals.
A spokesperson for the Akron Police Department, which investigated the fatal robbery, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Summit County Prosecutor's Office, which is handling the case, declined to comment because the case is pending.
At a hearing last year, prosecutors addressed some of the allegations in the filing. Mosher said he is “strong in software and open source intelligence and has ongoing legal work,” according to a transcript of a September hearing.
Prosecutor Brian Stano said his office has no intention of opening an investigation against Mosher, records show.
“I think this is more a matter of mistranslation than some sort of fraud,” he said.
“Circumstantial evidence”
When law enforcement requests Cybercheck's assistance, the software searches not only the surface web, but also parts of the web that are not indexed by search engines. Those findings will be compiled into a report and provided to law enforcement.
Officials from Washington state to Pennsylvania have considered or agreed to pay CyberCheck between $11,000 and $35,000 for Global Intelligence, according to several contracts and proposals reviewed by NBC News. It has been shown that The company has a $25,000 contract with Akron starting in April 2022, including 50 It says it includes the incident and 40 hours of “real-time information.”
A spokesperson for the Akron Police Department did not respond to a request for comment on the agreement.
Two men were arrested in July 2021 in connection with the alleged crime from nine months earlier in the deadly robbery, authorities said in a news release. Both suspects, Deshawn Coleman and Eric Farry Jr., were later charged with aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and other charges.
Ballistics analysis of the gun found in Coleman's home linked Coleman to the shell casing at the murder scene, Malacik said. Farley's registered car was seen on camera near the scene. Both men have maintained their innocence, and Malarsik said the evidence was “entirely circumstantial”.
In December 2022, Marasic said in an interview that Cybercheck had produced a report that identified both men at the scene. The report was created after 21 days of searching the web in an automated process in which software sifted through 1.1 petabytes, or more than 1 million gigabytes, of information and created “cyber profiles” of Coleman and Farley, according to the filing. That's what it means.
The profiles were collected from email addresses and social media accounts, according to the filing. CyberCheck uses network addresses (unique numbers that identify devices connected to the internet) from Wi-Fi-enabled security cameras to profile murder scenes within minutes of the murder, according to the filing. It is said that it was connected to.
According to the report, at least one device with the suspect's cyber profile, possibly a cell phone, attempted to communicate with the camera's Wi-Fi connection, Malacik said.
The report did not mention any video recording of the killing, and it was not clear where CyberCheck found the camera's network address or how it confirmed it was at the scene. According to the filing, the defense's forensic experts were unable to identify the social media accounts cited in the report, and it is unclear how the software verified the email addresses attributed to both defendants. It is said that
At a hearing last summer, Mosher testified that the software's conclusions in the case were: The accuracy was 98.2%, according to the filing, but no additional details were provided about how that accuracy was calculated.
Mosher said at the hearing that his software had never been peer-reviewed, and noted he made the same statement in a previous lawsuit in Akron, according to the filing.
However, according to this year's ruling, during a hearing in the third Akron murder case in October, Mosher said CyberCheck had been peer-reviewed by the University of Saskatchewan. The judge in the case ordered Mosher to provide the results of his research to prosecutors and Malasik, a copy of the ruling showed.
The 47-page document, which Malarcik said Mosher emailed in February, is from 2019. It appears to be a software manual, and there is no mention of who reviewed it or whether the results are included.
A spokesperson for the University of Saskatchewan said the school has a research contract with Global Intelligence related to an agreement with the National Research Council of Canada, a science and technology organization focused on research and development.
A spokesperson said the university was “not involved in the creation of the document, did not create the content of the document, and cannot definitively say what information the company used to create the document.” said in a statement.
The research conducted under the contract was not submitted anywhere and “therefore was not subject to peer review,” the spokesperson said.
Spokespeople for Global Intelligence and the Summit County Prosecutor's Office declined to comment on the document.
No data saved
According to the defendant, CyberCheck does not store the data used to create or search cyber profiles, according to an April 10 indictment in the Akron murder case.
Mosher did not respond to requests for comment about the apparent practice. In July transcripts of the case provided by Malasik, prosecutor Stano questioned Mosher about what data CyberCheck stores.
Mosher said the software is a data processor, not a data collector, so it does not index or collect data. He cited the large size of the files and “other governance and compliance considerations,” according to the transcript.
The April 10 filing asks a judge to order Mosher to share CyberCheck's software, and also includes other court decisions in which judges have ruled that defendants have a right to review the software. Pointed out. Mr. Mosher did not respond to a question about whether he planned to share his cybercheck methodology, and Mr. Malacik said he did not know whether Mr. Mosher had shared software in any of the cases for which he was ordered. .
In one such case, another Akron murder case in which defendant Javion Rankin was indicted in 2021 on charges including aggravated murder, Mosher was accused of using software because it was proprietary. The decision was made clear in the March 28 appeal filing. After that refusal, the judge barred prosecutors from introducing CyberCheck evidence in the case, the filings show.
Prosecutors appealed the ruling, arguing that their chances of an effective prosecution were “destroyed,” the notice of appeal said. Mr. Rankin was released on his own recognizance last year while his appeal was pending, said Mr. Malacik, who also represents Mr. Rankin.
Expert testimony under review
Lawyers for Mr. Farley and Mr. Coleman also pointed to Mr. Mosher's claims under oath in June's Rankin case about his experience as an expert witness.
Mosher has testified 13 times, but did not provide a list of incidents even though the judge requested them, according to the filing. At a hearing in an April 2023 Colorado child sexual abuse image crime case, Mosher told a judge that he had only testified twice, according to the filing. It is said that
According to the filing, the two cases Mosher cited at the Colorado hearing were related to child sexual abuse image crimes in Canada. Mosher provided the case name and number and said he would provide court records at the hearing, according to the filing.
But when contacted by Colorado State Bar investigators, Canadian prosecutors said Mosher had not testified, the filing said, citing an email from the agency.
In one case, Mosher provided authorities in Calgary, Alberta, with material he said he found on the dark web, the filing said.
“However, that was not a useful disclosure,” prosecutors in the case said, according to the filing. “Technologists in our Internet Child Exploitation Unit were unable to read it, analyze it, or find anything in the 'data dump.'”
Prosecutors added that the trial ended on the first day when the defendant pleaded guilty, according to the filing.
In the second case in New Brunswick, the person Mosher identified as the defendant was not even charged, the filing said, citing a corporal in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's child exploitation unit.
Canadian prosecutors learned of Mosher's “false testimony” and contacted authorities handling the case in Colorado, the filing said.
On August 4, prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges, according to court filings. The filing does not say why the Boulder County prosecutor asked for his dismissal. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office declined to comment, citing state law that prohibits the prosecutor's office from discussing cases that have been dismissed and sealed.
Mosher did not respond to requests for comment.
Malacik said he expects a ruling in the coming months on whether the judge in the case will order Mosher to hand over the software for the Akron robbery charge.