Mark Saunokonoko's Madeleine McCann Podcasts

HiDeHo wrote:



[ltr]NOTE: Mark contacted OG a year ago.... They haven't yet returned his call.[/ltr]

A year ago? He's been sitting on this info for a year?

Mark contacted me yesterday and I suggested he get in touch with Paulo Reis so he can pass the info to the PJ.

No point in bothering with Grange, goodness knows what they're doing for their £12million - plus, they're not in charge of the real investigation anyway.

Well..well..welll...

MADDIE SEARCH END GAME 
Brit cops confirm end of forensic work in hunt for missing Madeleine McCann

Operation Grange has so far cost the taxpayer £12 million since its launch five years ago by David Cameron

by guy birchall
7th August 2016, 5:15 pm
Updated: 8th August 2016, 6:59 pm
BRIT cops searching for missing Madeleine McCann have decided to axe all forensic work from the investigation.
The final scientific testes on the case were completed three months ago.



A source told the Sunday Mirror: “The final forensics were carried out about three months ago but, sadly, they didn’t take us forward.

"There are no plans for any further forensic work to take place.”

There had been hopes tests could be performed on hairs recovered from the holiday flat Maddie vanished from.







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"Well...well...well" - what hideho?

From what you've said in your previous post, Mark sat on this 'explosive' new info for a year and has missed the boat. He could have sent the info to Portugal when Operation Grange didn't return his call instead of keeping it to himself for a podcast!

Maddy could have had justice by now had those free tests been carried out last year.

From that article in the Sun it would seem there shouldn't now be anymore funding for Operation Grange. What's the point?

£12M and absolutely no results. What a farce!

He could have applied the pressure last year!

IF there is no more funding for OG then presumably Mr & Mrs will use the money still in the fund to continue a private search.   If that does happen then I wonder if they would ask for help from this new DNA advancement?

Rocky has stated that a stamp on a letter would get the case re-opened.  I wonder if it would be possible for Mr & Mrs to write to the PJ and ask them to re-open the case and arrange for this to be put in place?

plebgate wrote:IF there is no more funding for OG then presumably Mr & Mrs will use the money still in the fund to continue a private search.   If that does happen then I wonder if they would ask for help from this new DNA advancement?

Rocky has stated that a stamp on a letter would get the case re-opened.  I wonder if it would be possible for Mr & Mrs to write to the PJ and ask them to re-open the case and arrange for this to be put in place?

 Now there's a thought plebgate! But I think we all know the answer to that one.

Technically, I believe the Portuguese case is still open. I think it was reopened a few years ago.

HKP wrote:

Verity wrote:He could have applied the pressure last year!

I'm not disagreeing, he could have shouted it from the rooftops then, however he was always unlikely to get a positive reaction from OG. Now that it's gone public, although it hasn't featured in any msm that I can see, more folks will be asking the question.

He could have scooped worldwide headlines a year ago with this information.

Anyone remember Steve 'Stevo' Marsden.  Anyone remember Duarte Levy?

This case has certainly attracted it's fair share of con-artists, how tragic people can so easily capitalize on the back of a three year old child, who evidence suggests, is no longer of this world.

I don't believe the Portuguese police to be a bunch of banana republicans or sardine munching addle-headed bumpkins, I believe them to be a competent force comparable to any force in the civilized world.  If there are advancements in forensic analysis that could move the case forward and it were in any way possible, the PJ would be on it. Besides, forensic analysis is not an exact science; it's open to interpretation and misinterpretation. manipulation etc, be that through a wo/man or computer. Every accomplished criminal knows there is always a way to circumnavigate the system.

According to Dr Amaral, forensic samples were sent to the Forensic Science Service in the UK, not only because they were said to be pioneers in LCN analysis but because the Portuguese (apply that as you will) didn't wish to be seen to be biased or up to no good in any way.

No meaningful results .... repeat .... repeat .... repeat ....

There's your answer.  If a case or incident needs to be covered-up, protected, rest assured - it will be secreted from public view for eternity.  No holes barred!

I understand the desire for something to happen to finally resolve this never ending case but to be sucked-in by every word uttered by opportunists twelve years down the line, I cannot understand.

aquila wrote:

HKP wrote:

Verity wrote:He could have applied the pressure last year!

I'm not disagreeing, he could have shouted it from the rooftops then, however he was always unlikely to get a positive reaction from OG. Now that it's gone public, although it hasn't featured in any msm that I can see, more folks will be asking the question.

He could have scooped worldwide headlines a year ago with this information.

 Hasn't he done exactly what forum members like PeterMac have already done;identified information which seems screamingly obvious in terms of evidence, which is then apparently ignored? Think of the letters sent by the moderators of this forum to relevant authorities. Peter had to turn his findings into an e-book and get the information out that way.   As it stands, it's now a double-whammy- firstly,DNA analysis methods mean there could be a CONCLUSIVE result -and secondly,why hasn't this information been acknowledged  by Grange?


I've just read Verdi's post, which appeared just as I was sending mine.

Really, Verdi. I haven't heard Mark Saunokonoko discredit the PJ in his podcasts. 

Tracey Kandohla (quite rightly, IMO) comes under forum criticism for styling herself as a journalist but in fact she does not appear to do any investigative journalism. 
Mark Saunokonoko IS a journalist. This IS a 'story'. 
Doesn't the fact that he is not starting from any particular stance lend weight to his findings-which so far accord to a lot of what has been arrived at on the forum? I for one am pleased that he is not going down the 'Netflix' route. 

Why so negative?

Really, Verdi. I haven't heard Mark Saunokonoko discredit the PJ in his podcasts.

I didn't say he had.

Verdi wrote:

Really, Verdi. I haven't heard Mark Saunokonoko discredit the PJ in his podcasts.

I didn't say he had.

My apologies. What was your reason for rekindling all the rude descriptions of the Portuguese police?

I think the difference is that Richard researched and released his findings asap.

HiDeHo said Mark had this important info a year ago. Why the wait? Surely he could have asked anyone a year ago how to get the information to the PJ. He'd already been in contact with PeterMac a couple of years ago so he could have approached him. He's also been in contact with Paulo Reis who also contributed to his podcast so could have approached him to get the information to the PJ - after all, it's ultimately their investigation.

But apparently he did none of those things and hung on to the information to put in podcast number 5 (not even taking advantage to produce it five weeks ago in podcast number 1) to highlight the fact that Grange didn't return his call.

And who better to decide on the merit of such testing than the PJ?

HKP wrote:

Jill Havern wrote:And who better to decide on the merit of such testing than the PJ?

Whilst I kind of agree, the PJ didn't exactly cover themselves in glory by allowing the DNA samples to be analysed by FSS and then not smelling a rat and insisting a more independent check. They were also informed that the samples would be destroyed (in accordance with FSS practices) unless FSS were told otherwise, which they weren't.

I'm not convinced if Mark had gone to them (PJ) with his story (he has a story, not evidence etc ), that they would have reacted any different from what he's had from OG (basically blanked him) I hope I'm proved wrong.

Hi HKP, in reference to possible DNA/LCI tests produced by Portugal PJ in assistance with UK Police,  Portugal had "nothing to Fear" about sending samples for examination to the UK, Birmingham FSS, naive maybe but truthful on thier part, No Bias?

Little did they know like the rest of the world has become to Know, anything to do with Madeleine McCann is an Enigma of scientific proportions,where there are known's and unknowns but you cannot decipher which are which?

Three UK Police Forces were involved from the beginning, Gold Group via Metropolitan Police and Leicestershire Police from 8 May 2007, fact, so each one of these forces(fiefdom) are accountable for their actions from that date they arrived in Portugal. 

Trouble is who were they there to assist, it certainly wasn't the Portugal PJ, which they found out to their cost, much like when DCI Redwood required DNA samples from the "Bungling Burglars" from Portugal,eh DCS Hamish Campbell, magic procurer of "Gunpowder residue", unsolved Murder of Jill Dando,aka Mr Barry George!

Now known as the "Magic Metropolitan Police Service", Mr J Totman Six years without a sighting, now springs forward as "Creche Dad", Daughter, walking wrong way from Ocean Club Night Creche facilities on 3 May 2007, Crime Watch 14 October 2013!

HKP wrote:Hi Willowthewisp,
I agree they should have had nothing to fear, they did however get results back which were questionable without really asking questions. Now that DNA analysis has moved on and better techniques have been developed I would have thought if there was any real investigation going on in Portugal they would already have picked up on the possibility of using TrueAllele or STRmix (they may already have done) as these software programs are not brand new (they may not have been given the digital numerical data from FSS but should surely be able to request it from UK). Although we here have asked why OG have not used or seem interested, the same could be said of the Portuguese. Perhaps it's in neither sides interest to solve this case (which actually seems extremely odd).

Hi HKP, The whole saga is about the "Libel case", being linked to the Portugal PJ case files and a Former Lead Detective Mr Goncalo Amaral.

Now that the Supreme Court in Portugal had delivered its Verdict, January 2017 where Mr Amaral has the "Right to Free Expression" about his Book and DVD, "The Truth of The Lie" be published for sale.

a certain " Family " had friends from upper echeclons in Society put pressure on a former Home Secretary, Theresa May,(Black Mail, Scum News Paper) via Prime Minister David Cameron to engage in Operation Grange to persist in a Remit of Abduction on Madeleine McCann's disappearance is where the case is today, zilch, No Evidence of an Abduction, Eight years later,but plenty of thesis?

That's just one of the reason's why this case is a "carry On", if a Police force could back up certain thesis without producing evidence into a disappearance, then in "theory", that person is still in existence,without confirmation of being alive, Twelve years later? 

It must be a "First", that a Civil suit claim be further advanced than a Criminal case expose Twelve years later based on "Probabilities!

OJ Simpson, Money talks, Bullshit Walks!

Sentenced by an Algorithm: Where Traditional DNA Testing Fails, New Technology Takes Over

   Pacific Standard Staff
   Nov 9, 2016

Powerful software is solving more crimes and raising new questions about due process.

By Lauren Kirchner

Late on a hot August night in 2014, Syracuse, New York, police tried to pull over a car driving without headlights. The driver and passenger fled into a darkened park. As the officers chased them on foot, they said they heard a gunshot. The cops never caught the suspects, but recovered a loaded handgun.

The police connected the abandoned car to its owner, and arrested him, but could not tie him to the handgun without a DNA match. The mixture of DNA on the handgun was too complicated for forensic scientists to analyze with conventional methods, a representative from the Onondaga County crime lab later testified. There were at least four people’s DNA present and possibly five or six.

So the District Attorney’s office outsourced the analysis to Cybergenetics, a private company that makes TrueAllele, a “probabilistic genotyping” software program. Where traditional DNA analysis involves manually and visually interpreting DNA markers, TrueAllele runs DNA data through complex statistical algorithms to calculate the likelihood that a particular person’s DNA is present in a mixture, compared to a random person’s DNA.
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Developers of tools like TrueAllele say that they remove human bias from the equation, delivering accurate, consistent results with the exactitude and cold remove of a calculator.

But critics worry that they undermine an important aspect of due process. The accused, defense attorneys, judges, and jurors typically don’t have access to the tools’ often proprietary inner workings and, thus, the ability to question their conclusions. As one attorney wrote in a brief arguing that TrueAllele’s developer should have to reveal and explain its source code, “The Petitioner cannot cross-examine a computer.”

In the Syracuse case, TrueAllele indicated that the DNA on the gun was a likely match to Frank Thomas, the 19-year-old who owned the car. Prosecutors had previously offered Thomas a deal if he pleaded guilty to a gun possession charge, but Thomas had maintained his innocence.

The TrueAllele analysis was the only physical evidence presented at trial connecting Thomas to the gun. Dr. Mark Perlin, TrueAllele’s developer, testified that a match between the DNA on the gun and Thomas’ DNA was “1.78 trillion times more probable than a coincidental match to an unrelated African American person” and “892 billion times more probable than a coincidental match to an unrelated Hispanic person.” The attorney for Thomas, who is black and Hispanic, pressed Perlin to share the tool’s source code so that his results could be independently verified. Perlin argued this was unnecessary and irrelevant.

In March, Thomas was found guilty of criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment, and menacing a police officer. He was sent to prison for 15 and a half years. He’s appealing his conviction.

For the past year, ProPublica has been investigating and reverse-engineering various algorithms as part of a series called “Machine Bias.” We’ve found that these complex pieces of software are helping to guide decisions in an ever-growing number of realms, including criminal justice, in ways that are often little understood and sometimes unfair.

DNA evidence is the gold standard of forensic science. Even as other techniques, from bite-mark analyses to fire patterns, have come under question, DNA has remained the most unassailable and most objective form of proof that someone did, or did not, commit a crime.

The emergence of algorithmic analysis programs, however, is creating a new frontier of DNA science. The tools are so new and expensive that only a handful of local crime labs use them regularly. But as law enforcement looks to DNA more and more frequently to solve even minor crimes, that seems almost certain to change.

Perlin says that, while he resists turning over code, he takes pains to demonstrate how TrueAllele works when it’s used in a criminal trial, giving attorneys and judges access to test the software themselves. “‘Here’s the car, here’s the keys — drive it,’” he said he tells them.

Perlin started building TrueAllele for casework in 1999, a few years after working on the Human Genome Project. He has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Ph.D.s in math and computer science, and a medical degree. In the early 2000s, his company helped clear the backlog of DNA samples waiting to be interpreted for the government databank in the United Kingdom, and later used TrueAllele to help identify victims’ remains at the World Trade Center site after September 11th. TrueAllele was used for the first time in a criminal case in 2009 and now encompasses some 170,000 lines of computer code.

Mark Perlin, CEO of Cybergenetics and the creator of True Allele, presents at a meeting of the Legal Aid Society in New York on October 28th, 2016. Photo: Lauren Kirchner/ProPublica)

Cybergenetics offers police, prosecutors, and defenders an appealing business model: It offers to take on their most difficult DNA cases and provides preliminary results for free. If the results indicate the likelihood of a statistical match, customers only pay at the point at which they want Cybergenetics to run a complete analysis and write a report about the results that can be used at trial. Cybergenetics also licenses its software for crime labs to use themselves. Labs in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Baltimore, Kern County in California, and Beaufort and Richland counties in South Carolina all license TrueAllele.

“Our laboratory does a lot of property crime, which involves a lot of weak samples and mixtures,” said John Barron, senior forensic scientist at the Richland County Sheriff’s Department. “It’s a more complete analysis of the mixture versus manually using [conventional DNA] thresholds, so it’s fairer to both the prosecution and the defense. We use it quite a bit.”

Since TrueAllele came on the scene, other companies have developed software to compete with it. The United States Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation use STRmix, developed by a New Zealand-Australia collaborative and sold in the U.S. by Nichevision, as do several public crime labs across the nation. New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner recently announced that it will switch to STRmix in 2017.

In recent years, these powerful tools have enabled prosecutors to make cases with evidence that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to interpret. TrueAllele solved a string of armed robberies from “touch” DNA swabbed from a store counter. STRmix solved another robbery by analyzing the sweat inside a sneaker.

The software isn’t only a tool for prosecutors: The Indiana Innocence Project used TrueAllele to help free a man who had been in prison since 1991 for a violent rape that DNA proved he did not commit.

Still, probabilistic genotyping remains on the outer edge of scientific acceptance. The White House released a report in September by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that called probabilistic genotyping an improvement over traditional methods of analyzing complex mixtures of DNA, but concluded the tools “still require scientific scrutiny.”

Studies have only established the validity of the available software in certain circumstances (such as a DNA mixture of three contributors), but not others, the report asserted. The authors cite a case in upstate New York in which TrueAllele and STRMix were used to analyze the same DNA data and came to different conclusions. (The judge in that case ultimately did not admit the DNA evidence into trial.)

The PCAST report also noted that independent research is especially needed. Most of the studies published on TrueAllele and STRmix in peer-reviewed journals have been done by the developers of the tools.

“Appropriate evaluation of the proposed methods should consist of studies by multiple groups, not associated with the software developers, that investigate the performance and define the limitations of programs by testing them on a wide range of mixtures with different properties,” the PCAST report says.

Perlin, TrueAllele’s creator, and John Buckleton, one of the creators of STRmix, both objected. “Your Report cannot unilaterally impose a novel notion of ‘independent authorship’ for peer-review,” wrote Perlin in an open letter, explaining that having a developer as part of a team of authors is the norm in scientific publishing. Buckleton wrote that the internal validation studies performed by jurisdictions using STRmix should be proof enough that it works.

Some makers of probabilistic genotyping software allow other programmers to use and modify their code. LRmix, software created by a pair of scientists in the Netherlands, EuroForMix, created by a Norwegian team, and Lab Retriever, a non-commercial program available under the Creative Commons license and uploaded to GitHub, are among the free, open-source tools available.

Beyond offering transparency, this approach can help expose problems. A significant bug was discovered and fixed in LikeLTD, an open-source Australian probabilistic genotyping program, because of outside scrutiny.

But TrueAllele and STRmix remain proprietary. A coding error in STRmix was only discovered in the midst of a criminal trial where prosecutors sought to include its faulty results as evidence. (Its makers say the error was minor and was quickly fixed.)

Defendants’ requests to get access to TrueAllele’s source code have consistently been denied, leading the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, to kick off a FOIA campaign to obtain whatever information is publicly available from the jurisdictions that use it.

Some who advocate for defendants see plenty of upside to probabilistic genotyping tools, even without the benefits of full transparency. Greg Hampikian, a professor of biology at Boise State University who leads the Idaho Innocence Project, said the project has begun using TrueAllele to help exonerate wrongly convicted people.

“Microsoft Excel doesn’t release its code either, but we can test it and see that it works, and that’s what we care about,” Hampikian said.

Judges have endorsed the business interests cited by makers of probabilistic genotyping software in ruling that they do not have to hand over their source code.

The defendant in the first case using a TrueAllele analysis appealed his conviction, based in part on his inability to understand enough about the software to challenge it. Pennsylvania Judge Jack Panella denied the appeal, saying the defendant had no right to the formula behind the software. “TrueAllele is proprietary software; it would not be possible to market TrueAllele if it were available for free,” Panella wrote.

Dr. Dan Krane, a professor of biology at Wright State University and frequent expert witness, said he figured defendants’ right to confront their accusers would outweigh companies’ right to make money.

“I suppose these are both Constitutional principles, but I thought one would trump the other,” Krane said. “And that’s not what’s happening here.”

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I smell a ginormous stinking commercial rat - to think they poo-pooed the Dannie Krugel patented all weather all terrain industrial sludge gulper.  Still, it talks a good job.  Time will tell.

M&A61 wrote:Apologies if already posted but just come across this. It's taken a few days but the MSM discussing this is a further development, in my opinion. Will the McCanns comment...?

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Yes thank you M&A61, it was posted here..

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Shoddy journalism to say the least but what else can you expect from the Sun. Perhaps if these journey journalist actually did some investigative journalism they might, just might, get something right instead of half-hardheartedly scouring the archives to cobble together a load of cobblers.