This would also make us among the poorest judges in our own discipline for things such as the Turing Test because the Test is ultimately an empirical endeavour. Anyway, these are some initial thoughts I have composed over the past few days about computing's poor basis in empiricism. There's been a lot of discussion about the Audi problems and I remembered a similar incident. The Sept. 1984 issue of Consumer Reports included a review of the Mitsubishi Starion. The problem was eventually solved by replacing the engine microprocessor and the problem was reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Precedents are a good way of convincing people that there's a problem.
I know of a similar case that never made it to court. The computer security administrator at Roche, the drug company had been plagued by a hacker who auto-dialed the entire Roche phone system in sequence. It took a lot of phone calls from company management to convince the phone company that this was not just someone with fast fingers and a touch-tone phone. Once the suspect was found, it was even harder to get him arrested since he was in New York and Roche is in New Jersey, which somehow got the FBI involved. The perpetrator was brought into the police station and had the riot act and the fear of God scared into him.