Satoshi Trial (COPA v Wright): COPA forgery experts dismantled on the stand

Through three weeks of COPA v Wright, one factor has hovered over the proceedings like a phantom: hundreds of documents submitted into evidence which the Crypto Open Patent Alliance says were forged by Dr. Craig Wright to support his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Jonathan Hough KC, barrister for COPA, spent almost the entire six days of Dr. Wright’s time on the stand accusing Dr. Wright of having made the forgeries, one by one. Armed with expert reporters from supposed forensic experts Patrick Madden, Arthur Rosendahl and others, Hough KC would put things to Dr. Wright like, “This document’s metadata lists an ‘last edit time’ of years and our expert says this means it’s manipulated, isn’t that right Dr. Wright?” or “This OpenOffice document’s timestamp is from a time before the version used to create it was released. It’s a forgery, isn’t that right?”

Dr. Wright had an answer to practically everything. He’d say that he works with a complex computer environment which is slightly difficult to reproduce (but far from impossible), involving the use of virtual machines and shared environments such as Citrix which are known to produce the kind of document anomalies that have been seized upon by COPA. He’s also particular about which release and version he uses for his software, so what COPA’s experts called anomalies are a consequence of, for example, opening a document that was created in an old version of a program via a new one. Other anomalies, Dr. Wright would sometimes say, aren’t anomalies at all and any expert worth their paycheck would know that.

Yet backed with multiple expert reports, Hough KC and his clients must have felt confident that Dr. Wright’s explanations were passing through Justice Mellor without having any impact. After all, experts are valued in court cases precisely because they are independent from it—and Dr. Wright most certainly is not.

If that was COPA’s hope, it fell apart almost as soon as their first expert took the stand on Monday.

First up was Patrick Madden. Madden is COPA’s primary document authenticity expert, having submitted no less than five expert reports in advance of the case. Within minutes, Craig Orr KC (barrister for Dr. Wright) had elicited an admission that shook many of the assumptions underpinning COPA’s forgery allegations.

Keeping in mind that many of Madden’s conclusions on document manipulation were reached because of anomalous timestamping, Orr KC asked Madden:

“MS Word documents contain an ‘edit time’ metadata counter, yes? It’s true that if a user is accessing MS Word through Citrix, the edit time counter will start to run when MS Word is opened on the remote server,” posed Orr KC, and Madden agreed.

“And it will continue to run until MS Word closed on the remote server.”

Madden, as he often did during his testimony, quickly interjected, seemingly anticipating Dr. Wright’s defences as Orr KC formulated his questions: “Or if a separate MS Word launches on the same remote session.”

“But subject to that, the counter will continue to run until MS Word is closed. And that’s because a user operating MS Word through Citrix is interacting with an instance of MS Word running on the remote server?”

“Yes,” admitted Madden.

So, Orr KC surmised, all that would have to happen to have an ‘edit time’ spanning a period of years or even decades is for a user to simply open a Citrix session on their local computer, open MS Word on the remote server, open a document in MS Word, disconnect their local computer without closing MS Word on the remote server and then at a later point in time reconnect to the remote server using their local computer. Madden said yes.

Assuming this is news to Justice Mellor (something we shouldn’t do, given his technical background) he must have been left wondering why so much time was spent goading Dr. Wright over timestamp anomalies caused by Citrix when Madden’s response affirmed what Dr. Wright had told the court days earlier.

When it came time for Orr KC to challenge Madden’s actual conclusions, things really started to fall apart.

One of those conclusions was reached by Madden in respect of an OpenOffice document submitted by Dr. Wright as part of his case. Madden found that the timestamps, which dated it to March 2008, could only be explained by Dr. Wright backdating the computer clock on which the document was created, because the OpenOffice version used was not released until well after 2008.

“Are you aware that Dr. Wright explained in his evidence that he created this document using LaTeX, and deliberately set the metadata to use OpenOffice 2.4 to obscure the version number by making it appear as though he wrote the document using OpenOffice?”

At the mention of LaTeX, an expert in Madden’s position should have immediately tapped out. He isn’t a LaTeX expert and as he would go on to admit, isn’t at all familiar with LaTeX. Therefore, the only good faith move open to him as an expert before the court was to acknowledge he cannot offer an opinion on Dr. Wright’s explanation. Yet, for some reason (the reason would become clear by the end of Orr KC’s cross-examination) Madden wouldn’t cede the point.

“I’m not a LaTeX expert, but from being familiar with other not dissimilar programs and the concept of document conversion, looking through this has the structure and feel of a document created using OpenOffice.”

Just how the court is supposed to assimilate Madden’s opinion on the ‘feel’ of the document, he did not say. He went on:

“So you can’t answer as to whether or not what Dr. Wright says is technically possible,” said Orr KC.

“No, however, he would then have had to have been instructing the software to put in the level of detail about the build to name in the document which hadn’t been released yet.”

“That’s a question of fact on which you are unable to express any opinion.”

Madden, not getting the point: “It’s a question of how he would have known” and then “the fact is this information is recorded in the document.”

“I do suggest that clock manipulation is not the only possible explanation for the metadata you have observed in this document.”

Madden, still not getting the point: “I don’t believe LaTeX was used for this because it is an OpenOffice file. This document is an ODT file in my opinion, created with OpenOffice.”

“You are not a LaTeX expert. And again, as in other places, you are jumping to conclusions here in a desire to reach a conclusion you want to reach—that these documents are not authentic.”

Orr KC’s genial façade had steadily been giving way to a firmer tone throughout this line of questioning, and by that last comment his tone had made clear he’d heard all he needed to from Madden on that point.

In Madden’s defence, on cross examination we are seeing only the parts of his expert analysis that Dr. Wright’s barristers see fit to highlight. For some of these items, Madden may have phrased his analysis less forcefully than Hough KC makes its sound when putting it to Dr. Wright on the stand. But that is precisely why declaring Dr. Wright’s case a write-off after his testimony would have been foolish—it would be like judging an NFL player solely off his career highlight (or lowlight) reel. Without the context of the 99% of the story not captured in those highlights, it’s impossible to draw a conclusion one way or the other.

That caveat aside, however, the strategy of Orr KC was clear: get Madden to confirm the blanket statements made by Dr. Wright to excuse the supposed manipulations (such as his Citrix environment) and drill down on enough of Madden’s specific conclusions to demonstrate to the court that he is speaking beyond his expertise and clinging to the conclusion that Dr. Wright is a serial forger.

This culminated in a killing blow right as Madden was about to be home-free. Orr KC brought Madden to the wording of his first expert report, which contains an acknowledgement that “the volume of work has been too much to do alone and I have been assisted by Bird & Bird.” Orr asked why Madden wouldn’t recruit an assistant rather than rely on the law firm for whom he is supposed to be serving as an independent expert. Madden answered that he didn’t want to rely on the work an assistant did, preferring to keep his expert analysis wholly his own—so he relied on Bird and Bird.

“The majority of which was just finessing the language,” Madden said without a hint of self-awareness.

“So when we see language in your reports such as ‘Dr Wright’s position is speculative and unfounded,’ that’s your language?” asked Orr KC, whose dramatic pauses were becoming longer and his expression of disbelief sterner.

“No, that’s my language,” Madden laughed nervously.

Orr KC must have known what he had in his hands at that point. He asked Madden if he kept an office at Bird and Bird (no, just met with them three or four times in their office, said Madden) and how it’s possible for Madden to be both dictating his analysis to Bird and Bird and reviewing it at the same time (that would be sections where I’m demonstrating the findings and as I’m talking through it one of the people at Bird and Bird would have been writing up what I’m saying, he answered).

“They were drafting the report for you, weren’t they?” said Orr KC.

“No, they were helping with the assembly of it, but the actual content is mine,” came Madden’s answer.

“Have you adopted a similar approach in any other case?”

“I produce my draft, I’ll be asked to explain bits in more detail, and have had that happen here.”

“I asked you: have you adopted a similar approach to that you’ve adopted with Bird and Bird in any other case?”

“Not quite the same, no,” came the begrudging admission.

“You must be aware of the overriding importance of retaining your independence as an expert. The approach you have adopted has undermined that independence, hasn’t it?”

Madden of course said no, but the damage had surely already been done.

Madden’s testimony contrasted with that of another of COPA’s expert witnesses: Arthur Rosendahl, who is put forward as an expert on LaTeX. Unlike Madden, Rosendahl readily accepted—and even pre-empted—that certain areas he could have commented on were beyond his area of expertise. There were also no questions from Orr KC on the process Rosendahl had used to prepare his report or his independence more generally, underscoring the complaints made about Madden.

Beyond that, however, Orr KC found that Rosendahl’s opinion contained much of the same problems as those put to Madden.

Like Madden, Rosendahl had also failed to replicate Dr. Wright’s computer environment. Dr. Wright made clear in his witness statements that he used a combination of Windows and Linux when using LaTeX, and that he had used the MiKTeX distribution for Windows and a TeXLive distribution for Linux. Despite this, Rosendahl worked only performed his analysis using TeXLive.

Rosendahl’s answer to this was to say that it was not clear from Dr. Wright’s explanation whether he was using one specific OS or not, or whether he was flitting between the two as he worked.

“It seemed to me like he was using either one or the other, and I used the environment I was most familiar with.”

It’s hard to imagine the court being satisfied with this answer. It was open to Rosendahl to come back with a request for more information from Dr. Wright so he could perform accurate tests, but he evidently chose to operate on an erroneous assumption instead. Such nuances in testing environment are likely to be significant in this case, because COPA’s case is that the LaTeX code provided by Dr. Wright does not compile into a pixel-perfect representation of the Bitcoin White Paper like Dr. Wright says it should. As COPA tells it, the slightest difference in appearance between the compiled output of Dr. Wright’s code and the original Bitcoin White Paper is evidence of forgery, so a failure to take into account the full extent of Dr. Wright’s environment is inexcusable. This failing is especially dramatic given that Rosendahl knew his report would be deployed against an individual facing serious allegations of forgery.

Rosendahl was also, like Madden, forced to admit that Dr. Wright’s explanations as to certain anomalies within his evidence were technically possible (albeit unlikely). In his report, Rosendahl highlighted features such as a lack of hyphenation over line breaks. Rosendahl wrote that LaTeX is set by default to allow words to break across lines, whereas the PDF format does not. Lack of hyphenation in the white paper PDF, according to Rosendahl, means that it cannot have been created in LaTeX.

Except within minutes of having Rosendahl on the stand, Orr KC got him to admit, just as he had done with Madden, that it is possible for a person to change the default LaTeX behaviour so that it does not use hyphenation. Orr KC elicited the same admission regarding Rosendahl’s conclusion that because the White Paper uses different fonts for headers and body text, it can’t have been created in LaTeX: it would be uncommon, conceded Rosendahl, but possible.

So, after two days of hearing from the experts whose reports COPA so scandalously used to attack Dr. Wright while on the stand, where is COPA’s case left? No where. In relation to both experts COPA had put up for cross-examination, Dr. Wright’s barrister Craig Orr KC was able to show that neither had replicated Dr. Wright’s working environment in order to produce their reports despite knowing it was non-standard, and many of the expert conclusions Hough KC lobbed at Dr. Wright were shown to be either beyond the expertise of the expert or are simply non-sequiturs.

If that sounds unusual, wait until you hear the real absurdity underpinning the forgery allegations against Dr. Wright: as he’s said repeatedly over the course of the trial, the library’s worth of documents submitted into evidence in this case is largely his life’s work spanning decades. Many of these documents are said by COPA to be poor forgeries, and yet those same documents form the foundation for a vast empire of patents that have already been granted to Dr. Wright and nChain. This means they have already undergone (and survived) rigorous trials at the hands of patent attorneys and patent offices around the world.

Paid-for experts produced by COPA may muddy the waters for some (and full credit to Craig Orr KC for the limited purification he was able to do while on the stand), but the proof of Dr. Wright’s work is already in the patent pudding.

Check out all of the CoinGeek’s special reports on the Satoshi Trial (COPA v Wright).