I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…
Consider all of that can be used for forced confessions and forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence" doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any way.
Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…
Especially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0], lying to the court about the process taken.
i do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.
You should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever since there was imagery to manipulate.
[delayed]
There used to be - probably still are - cameras that would digitally sign all their images. Used in crime scenes? Maybe we will end up seeing wider adoption of this, despite the privacy implications. Hackers attention then will focus (once again) on the certificate supply chain and crypto hardware.
I worked for a company that made these. We sold expensive software to the FBI.
Took about six months for someone to crack the hash.
What about a system that saves in some way the hash in a Blockchain, and if you, eg, XOR the hash of the video with the hash of the previous block you will "certainly" know that the video was created between the previous block and the block where the hash is saved in. That's a starting point.
This sort of chain doesn't need PoW I take it, just a very secure police server to sign blocks.
Might have a point. This was before blockchain.
I suspect that the cops wouldn’t like the chain public, though.
[deleted]
Now sell them version 2.
I imagine in this age of blockchains you could embed into a media file a signature that proved it was no older than the timestamp of when it occurred, the digital equivalent of a hostage-proof-of-life photo with a recent newspaper
But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that a digital image is not more recent than a particular time
Publish hash(image) on the blockchain at a verifiable time, then publish the image itself.
The image contains the previous block’s hash.
Wouldn’t this establish both a lower bound and an upper bound on the time the image could have been produced?
[deleted]
wouldn't that be a hash of the image signed by a trusted entity and stored on a chain? maybe i'm overlooking why this doesn't work
Interesting, There aren't any newspapers left in my country, neither printed nor not printed. The closest you can find is the weekly advertising booklet here and there. Which is irrelevant now because a computer can either stich new content to an old picture, or entirely producing a custom picture.
That would be a use case for a block chain. But I still don't understand how you are securing the integrity of the validity of the certificate stating the authenticity of the media. I only understand you are stamping media with a "at least as old as [timestamp]
There's a big gap between "theoretically unreliable" and courts actually recognizing that, unfortunately. Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.
I suspect so. Tbh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already with the amount of processing that cell phones do on photos, with generative fill/expand/perspective change, etc.
We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.
[The Derbyshire Police] declined to give more detail
about what the evidential material consisted of.
The term can be used to describe witness statements.
I don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the common law and still in the US this why all substantive evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why.
The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.
I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…
Consider all of that can be used for forced confessions and forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence" doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any way.
Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…
Especially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0], lying to the court about the process taken.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Over all time? Probably tens of millions.
i do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.
You should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever since there was imagery to manipulate.
[delayed]
There used to be - probably still are - cameras that would digitally sign all their images. Used in crime scenes? Maybe we will end up seeing wider adoption of this, despite the privacy implications. Hackers attention then will focus (once again) on the certificate supply chain and crypto hardware.
I worked for a company that made these. We sold expensive software to the FBI.
Took about six months for someone to crack the hash.
What about a system that saves in some way the hash in a Blockchain, and if you, eg, XOR the hash of the video with the hash of the previous block you will "certainly" know that the video was created between the previous block and the block where the hash is saved in. That's a starting point.
This sort of chain doesn't need PoW I take it, just a very secure police server to sign blocks.
Might have a point. This was before blockchain.
I suspect that the cops wouldn’t like the chain public, though.
Now sell them version 2.
I imagine in this age of blockchains you could embed into a media file a signature that proved it was no older than the timestamp of when it occurred, the digital equivalent of a hostage-proof-of-life photo with a recent newspaper
But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that a digital image is not more recent than a particular time
Publish hash(image) on the blockchain at a verifiable time, then publish the image itself.
The image contains the previous block’s hash.
Wouldn’t this establish both a lower bound and an upper bound on the time the image could have been produced?
wouldn't that be a hash of the image signed by a trusted entity and stored on a chain? maybe i'm overlooking why this doesn't work
Interesting, There aren't any newspapers left in my country, neither printed nor not printed. The closest you can find is the weekly advertising booklet here and there. Which is irrelevant now because a computer can either stich new content to an old picture, or entirely producing a custom picture.
That would be a use case for a block chain. But I still don't understand how you are securing the integrity of the validity of the certificate stating the authenticity of the media. I only understand you are stamping media with a "at least as old as [timestamp]
There's a big gap between "theoretically unreliable" and courts actually recognizing that, unfortunately. Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.
I suspect so. Tbh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already with the amount of processing that cell phones do on photos, with generative fill/expand/perspective change, etc.
We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.
per ft.com: https://archive.fo/BIOej
I don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the common law and still in the US this why all substantive evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why.
The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.
[flagged]