Re: [PLUG] Morphing & Graphics

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 7:51 AM, LeRoy Cressy <rev.cressy@protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> Prosecutors have a reputation of lying and presenting false evidence.  It
> seems that the MSN is not too concerned with the government using these
> tools, but they are concerned when average citizens can use the same tool.
>

Whether they like it or not seems irrelevant, as banning software is
virtually impossible.  The sorts of people who would use these tools
to do something nefarious like falsifying evidence aren't going to
disclose their use of these tools, and using these tools for those
purposes is already illegal, so using the tool creates no additional
risk even if it were illegal.

That said, it creates issues for ordinary people who use things like
dashcams and surveillance cameras and such.  If we're talking about a
big company they can have their raw video feeds stored in some vault
where it takes two people to access it, and establish all kinds of
procedural chains of custody so that their video will stand up in
court.  If somebody breaks into your house you don't have the same way
to prove that you didn't tamper with the video you gave to the police.

One solution to this is to trust manufacturers to digitally sign their
video feeds, but that now means that you have to buy a proprietary
camera from a trusted manufacturer to have your video accepted in
court.  It also could allow manufacturers to charge for this service -
maybe the cameras all sign everything for free, but using an encrypted
instead of a clear signature.  Then if you want to use your video in
court you upload your video to the manufacturer and pay them a $10k
certification fee, and they then issue a notarized document that
attests to the validity of the video, maybe giving you a clear signed
video as well.  This lets them keep down their camera prices and
saturate the market, and rely on the fact that the people who actually
have to use the video in court are going to put a lot more value on
that video than the person just buying the camera just in case.

I'm not really sure there are practical FOSS solutions for individuals
here.  In a setting like a home or small business the owner+operator
of the camera will tend to have the ability to manipulate the
equipment, and a possible incentive to do so.  It seems like the same
problem if you wanted to have a sole proprietor bank: it would be hard
to run it in a way that others could trust you to safeguard their
deposits.


-- 
Rich
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