A Proposal for Software Accountability of Law Enforcing Information Systems

Everyone in our society must obey law. Similarly, in esociety, information systems which play the role of enforcing law must obey law. A law usually defines its purpose, conditions, and activities/procedures. In this paper, we propose a concept of Software Accountability of Law Enforcing Information Systems (LEISs) and show its realization method. Software accountability is that a LEIS itself can explain the reason why it makes decisions or calculated results to the user of the system. The explanation is generated by using the laws relating the decisions or results and the empirical data, namely execution history of the LEIS. We expect that the concept of software accountability can be applied to global software development.