Tbh, this is what scares me about tech illiterate juries. Many of these cases hang on key pieces of evidence that are literally the FBI's word against the defendants.
We need some sort of standardised trust metric....
Witness testimony is perfectly fine as long as it isn't implied to be anything greater than that.
The metadata is technical evidence, not witness testimony. But...
Who wrote the software that collected the metadata? Any bugs in it? Any possibility that I did not, in fact, make that call?
Where was the metadata stored? Who had access to it? Could anybody have altered it, perhaps even to cover their own tracks?
Who had custody of the data after the records got pulled from the database? Any chance that they could have altered it? Maybe they knew that the prosecution's case was weak, and they wanted to make it look better?
In this way, technical evidence does in fact depend on witness testimony.
In any case, I think a bigger problem isn't juries, but the huge amount of cases that never see a jury, via absurd overcharges leading to plea bargains. Only a judge is involved, and judges are much more "reliable" than a jury ...
Besides, when would an incident like this ever get in front of a jury? I can't think of a single case where the FBI was in the dock for COINTELPRO shenanigans like this.