[a] “The allegations in the complaint lay bare the Faustian bargain that the PRC government demands of U.S. technology companies doing business within the PRC’s borders, and the insider threat that those companies face from their own employees in the PRC,” said Acting United States Attorney Seth D. DuCharme. “As alleged, Jin worked closely with the PRC government and members of PRC intelligence services to help the PRC government silence the political and religious speech of users of the platform of a U.S. technology company. Jin willingly committed crimes, and sought to mislead others at the company, to help PRC authorities censor and punish U.S. users’ core political speech merely for exercising their rights to free expression."
[b] "As this complaint alleges, that freedom was directly infringed upon by the pernicious activities of Communist China’s Intelligence Services, in support of a regime that neither reflects nor upholds our democratic values,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Americans should understand that the Chinese Government will not hesitate to exploit companies operating in China to further their international agenda, including repression of free speech.”
I don't mean to pick on you. As someone who works in legal---albeit not in criminal law---citing a complaint as fact, when it's essentially one side's declaration of what they intend to prove, does bother me.
CEO is Chinese, staff are mostly Chinese.
[0] https://blog.zoom.us/navigating-a-new-chapter-for-zoom/
2020-Tricking its users during installation pretending the OS is requiring password[2]
In general, playing fast and loose with its users' data-sending a conference en(de)cryption key between two users in Canada/US to an ip address in Beijing.[3]
[1]https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-... [2]https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193 [3]https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...
Besides, Zoom works really well, and if I propose a change, then I have to own that change and any future problems become my problem.
Unless you are the boss, it’s easier to maintain the status quo.
I feel dismissing a case that the DOJ is briefing for and that the FBI has added the perpetrator to Most Wanted for as “an allegation” is true in a strict legal sense, but the burden of proof for a commercial decision has been unequivocally reached here
Do you think the US should not have an administration that is highly motivated to root out CCP operatives?
Basically most of our politicians (on both sides) have sold out to China and a very few haven't.
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/03/congress-wants...
They were routing all calls such that the CCP could listen to them. [2]
They lied about calls being End-To-End encrypted. [3]
Zoom was founded by a Chinese national and all of their development is done in China. [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...
[3] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-zoom-plans-to-bette...
[4] https://technode.com/2020/04/13/is-zoom-crazy-to-count-on-ch...
The CCP requires that all eventually companies have CCP members embedded in the company as an instrument of control.
Irrespective of the Zoom executives disposition/views - they're going to be under immense pressure for a host of related things.
"The party’s efforts to place itself inside private companies have been, according to its own figures, very successful. One recent survey by the Central Organisation Department, the party’s personnel body, found that 68% of China’s private companies had party bodies by 2016, and 70% of foreign enterprises. Although these figures sound high, they don’t match the targets the party has set for itself. In Xi’s old stamping ground of Zhejiang, for example, officials set a target in August 2018 to have cells inside 95% of private businesses. There was a need, the survey said, to retain the revolutionary spirit inside the companies as their ownership was handed on to the next generation." [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...
A short summary of CCP "elite capture" is:
- Mitch McConnell's wife is high-level CCP royalty
- the CCP spy Fang Fang "dated" several US politicians
- Hunter Biden is thoroughly compromised by the CCP
- it appears the CCP owns Dominion, the voting machine used in 29 states.
- the Thousand Talents program has signed up over 7,000 foreign professors and researchers. They agree to license patents to China, and not to criticize the CCP.
Also, although it's beside the point from the perspective of whether what I said is true, I read the complaint. It's not clear if this guy was an executive executive, or an account "executive" (i.e. a low-level administrator). I'm inclined to believe the latter based on the actions he is alleged to have taken.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...
> Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.
I have no doubt people are stupid enough to continue using 'Video Conferencing by the CCP'(tm pending). That just means they're dumb.
Does Tesla mostly employ South Africans?
Is your point is that something can't be clear if ignorant people are ignorant of it? That's inane. 'Clear' does not mean 'common knowledge.'
Ah. So it's not quite disrupting meetings, it's framing people as pedophiles an terrorists.
Bringing charges is not evidence.
The court of public opinion is far more important than real courts. You only have to look at enlightened HN comments on Ross Ulbright to see it in action, nearly all are convinced he's guilty of a charge that never went to trial and was dismissed with prejudice, which is rare.
Complaint-bombing has become a popular technique to silence opinions on public platforms.
I'd say almost every "claim" is worth investigating, even a little bit.
These people are awful - Zoom should be avoided (along probably with any company operating primarily out of China, under influence of the CCP).
Recent examples： >Mike Pompeo’s China adviser has name chiselled off school monument >removed his name from the genealogical chart of the “Yu Clan.”
Again, I was almost totally against Tik Tok's de facto nationalisation ordered by the Trump administration, but seeing executives like this one acting on the orders of the CCP as part of a huge IT company lead by a Chinese citizen (and I now presume also a CCP asset himself) has reversed that belief for me.
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/counterintelligence/xinjiang-jin/...
Intercepted Zoom meeting ;)
The statement also says that Zoom itself is under separate US federal investigations for its dealings with Chinese and other foreign governments, as well as its security and privacy practices more generally.
> During the time this individual was employed by Zoom, he took actions resulting in the termination of several meetings in remembrance of Tiananmen Square and meetings involving religious and/or political activities, some of which were hosted by non-China-based users. We terminated the host accounts associated with certain of these meetings.
And about sharing information on dissidents with the government,
> While the complaint alleges that the former employee obtained Zoom account and user IDs associated with the Xinjiang region of China, our investigation shows that this data was anonymized, and at this time we do not have reason to believe that it was shared with the Chinese government.
This is hard to believe given how difficult it is to operate any company in China without very close ties with the CCP.
How has no one mentioned that zoom also seems to think there may be other employees involved?
We need features including: OAuth, Meeting scheduling, meeting link generation (without requiring user accounts), managing recordings, meeting status webhooks, etc.
Teams has its own bizarre self-inflicted limitations. For example a limit of only 9 people on screen at once whose positions constantly and randomly change. Having used all of them if you have decent sized screens e.g. 28" or better and are presenting to a group or 20-30 people and want to be able to gauge feedback from faces as you would do in a real meeting or classroom, Zoom just offers a much, much better experience for the presenter, who is probably also the meeting organiser. And it's not just aesthetic, if you are on all day Zoom is actually much less fatiguing than Teams.
Where Teams wins is if you are using it for corporate chat anyway (because you have O365 anyway) and just want to make the occasional 1:1 call.
It is built on eilixir & will be open-sourced soon. (The next step I’m looking to make it E2E.)
There are also existing ZOOM-alternatives like https://gather.town
>leave no information on how to get an invite
you can follow lo.fish's twitter page if you're interested! The free-trial give-away starts in jan
I’m looking for publishers at the moment. Will appreciate any tips on that. I can be reached at a at castella.art. Thanks!
― Martin Luther King Jr.
This seems more hauntingly true than ever, and with the internet and people's social lives and communication tied to products from 'everywhere', seemingly injustice anywhere seems to be inching closer and closer to home.
It's not 'well some other place' anymore...
A better argument is that this guy allegedly committed crimes that took place on US soil.
If I plotting things, that’s how I’d do it at least. But alas reality isn’t a Bond film.
And in some cases you don't even need to corner the market - just abuse your adversaries' psychology. For example, Canada, was sending tons of PPE to China in February. [1]
This turned out to be an awful decision and Canada was caught in a terrible shortage weeks later. China gladly sold PPE to Canada though.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2020/02/canada-...
I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before. It's a federal crime? What does it mean?
Google Meet? - others on gsuite domains blocked from joining, rules around having accounts etc? We need background replacement or blur. I tried before and couldn't really make it a success (and so confusing with hangouts, chat, talk, duo, allo etc). Background replacement not as good as zoom.
Uberconference - audio latency is worse - we've dialed down our use for conference calls.
Jitasa - I don't see background replace on this?
Why?
Our intern (who I'm sure is in a shared / crappy space) has a zoom background from their college they drop in - looks clean / professional and they can participate.
I snapped a shut from my zoom camera at the office, and use it as the background if I'm at home (with bed behind me not always made up, boxes from our move still stacked up). It's practically indistinguishable - I got rid of my green screen because the auto replace is that good on zoom.
I bill at $100/hr+. Maybe low by silicon valley standards, but people have expectations in my non tech field.
So if I am readings this right, PRC authorities are using Zoom employees to monitor the activity of Zoom users both inside and outside the PRC.
>Jin’s co-conspirators created fake email accounts and Company-1 accounts in the names of others, including PRC political dissidents, to fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography.
Imagine if it had been you. Imagine if you logged into a Tiananmen Square Massacre commemoration from your couch in Sunnyvale, and days or weeks later, American police knocked down your door and arrested you in front of your family for distribution of child pornography. Imagine going to trial against a prosecutor armed with “authentic” Zoom logs of your criminal activity.
The potential for this type of attack does not only exist within Zoom.
Imagine if you thought CCP were reading your emails? Would your company/school/government use that service? I don't think so.
Having supply chain problems for ASICS is one thing.
But 'video conferencing' ... my gosh we should be embarrassed as an industry that this wasn't nailed down a decade ago.
There is a school of thought that provides a lot of analysis and evidence that the acceleration of the Holocaust was a bottom-up phenomenon (not a master plan made by Hitler years before). Hitler might have laid out details to exile the Jews, but there was no evidence he gave a direct order to begin full scale extermination via extermination camps (different from forced labor camps).
The evidence suggests the underlying Nazi ideologies gave ample flexibility to middle management Nazis to begin competing and escalating into a full blown Holocaust.
With that said, I wonder if the top CCP leaders gave the order ‘get a Zoom executive to troll the Tiananmen Square meetings’, or ‘Specifically do X and X to the Uighurs’. It could very well be possible that there is no directive, just a general ideology that is now being executed in creative ways, completely independent of leadership (but ultimately co-signed by leadership as it fits the ideology).
Once the Nazi sub leadership began their mass shootings of the Jews, they couldn’t stop. They found out it was too much to do at scale, so they escalated to gas chambers.
CCP sub leadership may not be able to stop what they have started.
https://meet.google.com/ Google Meet(recording is with the enterprise version) integrates with google calendar
Amazon Chime: https://chime.aws
Kosmi: https://kosmi.io
Jami: https://jami.net
Screen: https://screen.so
Signal: https://signal.org
Whereby: https://whereby.com
Airtime: https://airtime.com
Microsoft Teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...
Rally: https://rally.video
https://kopano.com/products/meet/
A subscription or self-hosted, e2e encrypted video call tool
You can email us any time at developers@prosody.im and community venues are listed here: https://prosody.im/discuss
I pay for Zoom and if anyone can point me to a native app alternative that actually works reasonably well (Teams does not) I will happily switch.
Everything that runs in the browser is pretty awful.
Even local schools and colleges that agree to setting up Confucius Institutes on school grounds. Indoctrinating students into fight anything it deems to be "anti-China".
And any org that employs 3+ party members shall set up a party chamber, host party sessions and even appoint a sectary.
This executive very likely is a party member, but that doesn't necessarily make this act party related, more and more Chinese have come to defend the 1989 event(if they know it ofc), as China is now on a peak, what the party did back then is gaining legitimacy and praises.
I won't be surprised if he had done this out of his own volition, and probably most of the people in his position would have done the same.
The HK protests were overwhelmingly disapproved and regared as "abject-lowlife riots", in some way, it reflects the public sentiment toward that 1989 event.
Beyond zoom, this is another incident/escalation in an emerging field. Chinese norms for doing business are coming into conflict. Especially for things like comms, media and such... doing business the chinese way is becoming a standoff position vis a vis western norms.
Some wealthy Chinese like to send their children to the US or Europe for University; if he does, he certainly cannot visit them, without the risk of getting arrested.
The US has been doing such things in the past, for example against "cyber" criminals in Russian and other "bullet proof" jurisdictions. Once in a while, they catch somebody who is on vacation in a country that does extradite to the US. It's a long game.
The initial installer would do some funky stuff in the ground I believe to bypass a lot of the usual install friction. Once it was discovered, Zoom's installation process became a little bit slower.
Next, calls were being "broken into" because there was no security so they changed the default behaviour to generate a password randomly. As a user, this meant having to go through the normal install process and then enter all this stuff in so it seemingly went from near-instant (10 seconds top from no install to in a call) through to perhaps like 5 minutes once you fiddle with macOS's permission model (that was bypassed I presume) and all that.
Personally, I hate it nowadays and it's banned on our company devices anyway but I think for plenty of users, they bought into it when it was frictionless and have no reason to change.
I think there was an element of shadow IT going on like marketing people for example using it for calls without necessarily getting sign off or oversight from IT teams, given it was "free". That's purely anecdotal mind you.
Why couldn't they keep it even after it was discovered?
I've seen product updates from LINE touting their improvements and I assume the Skype team got yelled at for blowing it so bad at the beginning but there's just no inertia for anyone to bother with something else until after the pandemics over. I've stopped looking. The company seems shady but I'll take a product that works to be able to actually talk to friends and family in the short term.
(1) Zoom works even in pretty bad network environment, and provides phone call fallback out of box; (2) Zoom provides a variety of clients optimized for many platform and devices.
If there are 10 people in a meeting, even 1 people facing technical issues can affect other 9 people, which is very different from typical software that can just ignore 10% customers without losing 90% customers.
What other software allows a large number of people to meet, has good audio and image quality even when many people are connected, has easy switching between fullscreen, windowed mode and screen sharing, allows you to re-arrange the participant videos on screen, allows you to share documents by drag & drop, allows you to raise a hand in the participant list, is easy to install and works on all platforms, allows connecting via an ID/link and an optional password, allows the presenter to see all participants while sharing the screen, allows the host to mute participants, has good auto-feedback suppression, and allows the host to transfer host authority to any other user and to optionally control who is entering?
All of these features are essential for us. Is there something else that has all these features?
In case you'd like to know how to research your question when you see a government announcement on a criminal case:
1. Scroll the bottom of the page. If it's the website of the government agency that brought the case, they'll almost always link to a "complaint", which is almost always a PDF.
2. In a criminal complaint, each crime charged is usually called a "count". Search the PDF to find the "count" that matches up with the crime you're interested in. In this case, the means-of-identification charge is count two.
3. Look for a "citation", a reference to a section or other numbered subdivision of a law within that count, in the part that spells out which law they're being charged under. Here: "Title 18, United States Code, Section 1028(a)(7) and 1028(f)".
4. Go to the official website of the government that law comes from. In this case, it's the US federal government. Their info portal is https://www.govinfo.gov/.
5. Search for the citation and find the law and its text. The portal will usually provide some notes after the text of the law about which bills introduced or changed that particular subdivision, and when. Sometimes they'll even provide commentary or citations to cases decided under it. I'll leave that part to you if you're interested.
6. For extra background, try searching for the name of the bill that introduced the law on Wikipedia, or even on Google. You can often get a sense of what was going on at the time, who proposed the bill and how the vote for it panned out, and so on.
18 U.S. Code § 1028 - Fraud and related activity in connection with identification documents, authentication features, and information
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028 See subsections 7 and 8.
(18 USC 1028(a)(7))
"the term “means of identification” means any name or number that may be used, alone or in conjunction with any other information, to identify a specific individual, including any— (A)name, social security number, date of birth, official State or government issued driver’s license or identification number, alien registration number, government passport number, employer or taxpayer identification number; (B)unique biometric data, such as fingerprint, voice print, retina or iris image, or other unique physical representation; (C)unique electronic identification number, address, or routing code; or (D)telecommunication identifying information or access device (as defined in section 1029(e));"
(18 USC 1028(d)(7))
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028
Criminal complaint with details: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1347146/downl...
Second, F, A, A, G, and M do provide rock solid video conferencing. Apple being the most rock solid of all of them, but limited to Apple devices.
The smartest software engineers are in FAAGM, or so I've been told?
> Second, F, A, A, G, and M do provide rock solid video conferencing.
If they have solid products, then how did a no name company beat them?
FWIW I'll have to disagree with you on 'solid products'. My wife runs a learning center that went virtual. I evaluated very product that came up on Google search. It was a tight choice between Zoom and Skype, but chose Skype because I felt a big name would have better service. Microsoft kept locking our accounts and doing other shenanigans. Bit the bullet, paid for Zoom and no problems.
Why would teachers etc. be turning to Zoom if Hangouts etc. was at their fingertips and worked well.
We moved to Zoom before the pandemic because Skype (Microsoft) was unreliable to the point of useless whereas Zoom was solid.
People use Zoom because it's better, and there's really no excuse for Hangouts, Skype etc. to be of inferior quality. Those companies have the best Engineers and all the money in the world. It's a lack of product focus.
By only giving a high level ideology/direction, the top leaders give themselves room to manuver when things go sideways and can shift blame onto the lower level leaders' execution.
The system also seem to over penalize under-execution rather than over-execution.
Many examples can be found clearly demonstrated in Hong Kong as the integration with mainland China get sped up by the National Security Law. The recent freezing of exiled HK lawmaker Ted Hui's bank accounts along with his parents and family members accounts which was making global headlines and causing attention.[1]
It seems like the move was part of the high level "exterminate HK pro-democracy figures" but after the headlines, Ted Hui's bank accounts were unfrozen for a while which subsequently allowed him to move some of his funds. Shortly afterwards they were re-frozen [2]. Some believed that the execution went too far as to undermine the global trust in HK which would cost more to the regime so it had to retract to mitigate the damage.
This type of farce seems to happen more often as HK transition into a police state masquerading as a rule of law society.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/hongkong-security/former-hon...
[2]https://hongkongfp.com/2020/12/07/hsbc-re-freezes-accounts-b...
Check out the numbers in 1942 (this is just from one death camp, in 1941 they were doing the mass shootings pre-gas chambers):
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/1/eaau729...
By the time they were done, I guess they said ‘Yeah, this is the plan’.
Goebbels also has a history of instigating and letting things ‘play out’, Kristallnacht being the prime example. Even so, this wouldn’t be the guy up top that would deliver a clear plan on extermination. Similarly, they found no proof that even Hitler delivered clear plans on extermination (his end goal was exile initially). You pretty much have to find the shitbags in the sub leadership in Poland that took it to a new level (Himmler). So, yeah, I wouldn’t call it a Freudian slip if it happened in 1943, it was just shitbags latching on to a plan that was well into motion by then (not absolving anyone here on any level, Hitler/Goebbels set fertile ground for things to escalate organically). If anything, the death camps were planned to be closed (and were closed by 1944 by Nazis themselves) and erased from history to cover up.
Anyway, back to the point. I think China said ‘we need to do something about Muslim extremist, and anti nationalists’, and how that gets carried out is up to a lot of imagination, whether it be re-education camps, Hong Kong crackdown, or Zoom bombing. This is a country that will also work very hard to cover up all this bullshit when it’s all said and done.
I’m aware that this sounds like over-fitting, but I can’t help it, the pattern just fits in my eyes.
A what point does the effort necessary to compute these odds become an exercise in apology and where does the need to exonerate CCP leaders come from? We do not hesitate to attribute the fall of every sparrow to Trump's incitement of his racist supporters, yet somehow we mustn't permit the attribution of the crimes of CCP's many minions rise to any meaningful height in the party.
It’s a win-win-win situation.
But yeah, the fact that the entire world is dependent on China for cheap manufacturing is probably a bad thing.
Thanks for the tip, I'll check for a new version, but I am running the Microsoft Autoupdater and as of earlier this week, it was still doing the 9-people-only thing and randomly shuffling around.
I dunno, I'm sure background blur is a cute trick, but given how easy the low-tech alternatives are I'm surprised it would rise to the level of "must-have" feature.
Imagine talking to your own slides for 2 hours without any visual feedback from the audience...
Oh, and that "Brady Bunch" view that Google quickly copied, after refusing to update Google Meet for years before that.
What I should expound on is that in the Jitsi server configuration that out of the box they don’t have good documentation for getting room size, participants, total number of rooms etc. I did find the Jitsi community forums where the Jitsi devs tell community members how to enable some prosody plugins. There was an issue for my vanilla configuration where I needed to update Lua and download 5 other lua rocks. Then the mod-muc-size plug-in needs to be modified and the nginx configuration needs to be updated as well. This is my rough memory from a month ago.
So it would be nice if Jitsi had a more out of the box solution for this integration, and I understand prosody is just a piece in the whole production.
Why do you use (presumably the consumer version of) Skype when the Microsoft product that superseded Skype for Business is Teams?
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3535789/weakness-in-zoom-f...
> Zoom uses the API to execute a bash script called runwithroot which is unpacked by the installer in a user-writable temporary directory. This means that any local application, including malware, could monitor the Zoom installation process, rewrite this script on the fly and add malicious code to it. This would allow it to take full control of the system.
They have no intention of playing by our rules. Sucks, but we need to accept it for what it is and act accordingly.
Moving the cloud hosted data to Oracle doesn't solve the underlying risk.
The real risk is CCP manipulating what's surfaced via the algorithm to sway public perception or to censor things they dislike. They've already done this explicitly with the protests in HK and Tiananmen Square, they'll do it in other ways that suit them.
The worst part is with TikTok the manipulation is more subtle, harder to see - are you seeing something because it's popular? or because the CCP is interested in you seeing it?
Are you not seeing something because it's not popular? or because the CCP has told Bytedance to kill it?
Moving the data to Oracle misses the point. The data is not important in this case, but the ability to control what the public sees is. Letting the CCP have control over that lever when they abuse it elsewhere: that's the risk.
This can be an issue anywhere, but the CCP has a terrible track record and no interest in a free press or free speech. What they're doing to the Uyghurs and what they've done to HK and how they treat people talking about Tiananmen Square. They don't take responsibility for any of it and they do what they can to suppress all of it.
It's a very machiavellian view and their soft influence on the US and western companies tied economically to China to self-censor or otherwise defer to the CCP's interests is alarming.
That recent article about Tim Cook killing an Apple TV show written by a couple ex-gawker editors doesn't bother me at all. Gawker was awful and we're better without it, shows glorifying it, or supporting the editors that worked there. This is Tim Cook deciding for himself he doesn't want to support those people, it's a principled position.
The other bit in that article about an Apple rep saying the two things Apple TV would never do are 'nudity and China' was a lot worse. The South Park 'band in china' episode was right. This is Tim Cook knowing what's expected of him to be able to operate in China - it's not a principled position, his hand is forced.
Also, the Microsoft competitor isn’t Skype, it’s Teams.
How so?
And Zoom had a few headlines about incidents where they probably should have locked some accounts but didn't.
Security is a tradeoff with usability. Zoom slid the slider all the way to the right at first.
> Jin and his co-conspirators fabricated evidence of TOS violations to provide justification for terminating the meetings, as well as certain participants’ accounts. Jin then tasked a high-ranking employee of Company-1 in the United States to effect the termination of meetings and the suspension and cancellation of user accounts.
Which does sound like corporate policy working through regular channels, but those channels were compromised.
In any case, it appears that the fabricated evidence was intended to suggest to the employee in charge of terminating accounts that the targeted users were violating US law in addition to Chinese law.
Sigh - you can't trust cops even with physical possession and cameras rolling [1].
On July 24, 1973, Dallas Police Officer Darrell L. Cain fatally shot Santos Rodriguez, a 12-year-old Mexican-American child, while interrogating him and his brother about a burglary. Cain shot Rodriguez while conducting Russian roulette on the brothers in an attempt to force a confession from them.
In fairness, that was the 70s. But the 70s were also "one generation ago," so it's not exactly ancient history.
(I could imagine myself being skeptical about your comment before having wised up a little, so I thought I'd chime in to say yes, this really does happen.)
In UK we've been putting innocent people in jail for 20 years, because of bugs in accounting software. It was going unnoticed and noone would believe them untill recently. We are talking hundreds of people.
If it happened to a single person, noone would ever find oit the truth.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/0138cd7d-967...
Note that in Britain, following a Tory amendment to the law, you can only get legal aid if you have assets less then £37.5k -- so if you own a home, and are charged (incorrectly!) with criminal proceedings, which you then win, expect to sell it to pay the legal bills. Once you win, you'll get...nothing. No fees. Just a "release the defendant from the dock" and you're good to go. If you get imprisoned, and THEN are found innocent later on, maybe, say, 30 years later (as has happened!) expect to get....nothing. I really recommend "The Secret Barrister" both as a book and a blog. Nobody stands up for funding criminal justice properly -- because what politician wants to support the rights of the accused? -- but it's badly breaking. https://thesecretbarrister.com/2016/02/02/mr-gove-must-now-h...
We should always presume innocence when law enforcement makes an accusation.
Additionally, grand juries are well known to simply be tools of the prosecution with >90% of grand jury presentations voting to indict, in part because the prosecutor can present whatever narrative they want, in secret, without any checks other than their conscience without a counter narrative.
Grand juries aren’t “known to be tools of the prosecution.” That’s just something defense lawyers and public interest people say. A grand jury is just a group of ordinary people tasked with deciding whether there is enough evidence to even bring a case. The secrecy is there to protect the defendant as much as it’s there for the government. If the prosecutor’s case is weak, then the allegations don’t even become public. Grand juries do vote to indict at a very high rate. That’s because prosecutors only bring cases they know they can win (and indeed they have an ethical obligation not to bring cases they don’t think they can win).
There is a lot of misinformation about how the justice system works. I have seen it from the inside, working for a judge. These cases are buttoned up top to bottom. They’ll arrest a guy for robbing a store. They have him on security camera. They have tracking information from his cell phone. They have his text messages with the guy who he fenced the goods to. They searched his car and found stolen items.
Wrongful convictions are rare. The legal clinics that help wrongfully convicted people actually spend tremendous amounts of time screening cases to find ones that are meritorious. And a lot of those are from the era before DNA testing came into routine use. See: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...
> Based on a careful review of the available empirical literature, it is possible to assemble the component parts of a wrongful conviction rate calculation by looking at error rates at trial, the ratio of wrongful convictions obtained through trials versus plea bargains, and the percentage of cases resolved through pleas. Combining empirically based estimates for each of these three factors, a reasonable (and possibly overstated) calculation of the wrongful conviction rate appears, tentatively, to be somewhere in the range of 0.016%–0.062%
