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DVRs for Cop Cars
AEton writes "News.com is reporting that IBM is developing digital video recorders for cop cars. The systems involve a digital video camera and reusable hard drives which police officers will take with them on their shifts; centralized servers with up to 3.5 TB of storage will hold recordings. The cameras continuously record and cache old video in a "Tivo-like" fashion; tapes will start from three to five minutes before the cop turned on the recorder. Unbiased, high-quality recording could have a compelling social effect; and at the very least, we're headed for HDTV Cops."
If you believe the paranoids, this will make it ever easier to generate evidence on the fly, without havingt o go to the extra step of encoding all that raw tape.
--- http://foo.ca
Or can cops turn it off when they wanna go Rodney King on someone's ass
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Free your mind.
It strikes me that a really good watermarking technology is needed before this type of technology will be truly trustworthy. Imagine a Rodney King scenario, but since the cops have it on digital video they could "edit in" some attack footage before the beating starts. Call me paranoid, but it would be possible.
A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
Um, it sounds like the *central* tape will start from 3-5 minutes before the cop "actually" turns recording on -- just so they make sure they get a bit more than just what the cop feels like needs to be seen.
I don't really think this is a keep-the-cop-honest feature, because there are much better ways to go about it than that. I think it's just to help establish the context in which the cop used the recorder.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
It means that video is continuously recorded, with the oldest video overwritten, and that when you press "record", you don't really start recording. Instead, you just mark a spot in the video stream, and the software takes the time three (or five) minutes previously as the "start" time. Those video bits wouldn't then get recycled.
Makes sense. You're only going to hit "record" after figuring out something interesting is going on, and you can't hit the button immediately.
Whlie i am also 100% for privacy, they only turn them on during a traffic stop.. Sooo at that point you have given up your rights of privacy in relation to that particular event.
If you are then set loose, they wont keep the recording as it serves no value. they already recorded the transaction of your name/time/location.
it helps keep the whole incident straight, for BOTH sides..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unbiased, high-quality recording could have a compelling social effect;
Unfortunatly, I somewhat doubt these will be available to the public w/o editing.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Unbiased, high-quality recording could have a compelling social effect
I think it bears saying that there is nothing about this which supports the notion that it will be unbiased. What you choose not to record can be every bit as important as what is actually recorded. If the Rodney King tape consisted only of a car chase, would it have been unbiased account of events?
Imagine several years from now, when most police departments have this system, and routinely record everything. Along comes a case like Rodney King, arrest is made, flashing lights, radio calls, etc ... and the recorder wasn't running. Pretty damning evidence, I'd say. Th epublic will say so too, the lawsuits will be settled for bih chunks of change, and the bad cops will at the very least have to be a lot more careful and pick their rage times more carefully. They will either leave the force, or hold themselves in check on duty and beat up people off duty, in which case they will probably go to prison.
This is going to do wonders to get rid of corrupt cops.
Infuriate left and right
You arrest some idiot at the beginning of your shift and then three hours later its deleted. Later the idiot cries "police brutality" and you only have a recording of your coffe break. See the problem?
I'm guessing that within ten years it will be impossible to prosecute anyone in court unless the entire arrest is recorded.
This is not my sandwich.
No need to mod down the original, it was actually kind of funny. :)
Why not keep more on the spool? Probably they will decide at some point to do so if five minutes or three minutes or whatever is deemed insufficient. But you don't really want to run your disk at always-maxed-out, I don't think. Especially since the amount of space available for spooling would grow smaller as you recorded. That's just a whole set of bugs waiting to find their way into code. Your code would have to account for the changing spool size during a shift. It would also make it harder to determine how much space is left on the device... and in fact, if you pressed record and it saved all three hours, how would you record the rest of the incident?
I do not have a signature
I will tell you a secret: people goof off sometimes when they work. One example: I bet at least a third of comments posted here during the day were written by people "on the clock." If you think there is something "wrong" with that, screw you. In western countries, we do enough work, goofing off and all.
It pisses me off that it's exactly the public servants who absolutely need to be competent who are eating the brunt of our "accountability on the job" insanity. Public school teachers and cops are perfect examples: We don't pay either very well, and both are losing more and more flexibility each year. It seems like in the USA, you are probably "down-and-out" with a liberal arts degree if you become a school teacher, and to become a cop, you are probably a complete asshole who trips on power because nobody liked you in high school. That's because no one in their right minds would work these jobs with "purer" motivations.
This is not how it should be! We should be making these public professions attractive to reasonable, intelligent people! Instead, it seems we just make them crappier every year with new restrictions and new Orwellian "accountability" measures.
If this doesn't bother you, ask yourself this: how would you feel about your job if every single thing you do were recorded on digital video, and then reviewed? We might be heading to a world like that in our constant obsession with economic growth. We will have paid video reviewers who are themselves videoed and reviewed by other reviewers.
some possibilities to be thought about:
1) broadcasting the video.
These are public officials. As long as you've got their activites on video, why not broadcast them in the same way their radio signals are?
The same reason cops are using encrypted channels: "Safety". Supposedly being able to monitor the activities of a public official puts their life at risk. The alternative, however, is an unaccountable public official. Which is worse?
If my tax dollars are paying for these cameras, then they're paying for their output, too. At the very least, I want equalized access to the archives - whether available only through a warrant (for both cops and defenders), or, ideally, completely unconditional access. There are lots of possibilities...
I don't think the primary purpose of this camera is to keep cops honest. I think it may occasionally have that effect, but the cops can always find some way to disable or destroy it. But that's OK, because really, the majority of cops are pretty clean. The cameras will be most useful as evidence against people the cops arrest.
I'm one of those pathetic losers who watches all the police chase shows, and in one a cop pulled over a car with two people in it. He smelled pot and took them out to search them. The driver came out without an argument, but the passenger bolted. While the cop chased him, the driver took a bag of pot out of his pocket and threw it into the woods where the cop couldn't see. Cop caught the passenger and hauled him back, searched both, found nothing. He brought them both in to the station (the driver had a suspended license or something) and, while reviewing the tape, caught the driver throwing the pot away. Went back to the scene and found the drugs no problem, since he knew exactly where to look.
Or the other case where a cop pulls somebody over and then just gets shot. The cop walks up to the driver's window and gets shot right in the head. It's happened before and it'll happen again, and while the cameras won't save the cop, they can at least pretty much guarantee the conviction of the guy who shot him. Higher-resolution cameras let you see more detail, like facial features and eye color, that can allow even more convincing positive IDs.
Anyway, I think this is the real reason they want the cameras. All the other benefits are great, of course, but they're just bonuses.
Bad assumptions abound here. Yes, this could make citizens safer from police. And since "Police Abuse of Power" is a popular meme it may seem like it's all daisies. First off the article doesn't go into nearly the depth needed to establish authentication. For instance: The recorder authenticates all the video to prevent changes, and it will have a checkout system to keep track of which officers have checked out which hard drives.
This could mean the officer get's handed a clipboard and "signs out" a drive, like he does a gun or any other piece of equipment. For evidence that can be so damaging (to both victim and jerk (whichever they may be)) the standard must come up to a whole new level. Anything less than outstandingly modern security will allow the tired mystery novel scenario to occur:
Officer A switches tivos with officer B; Officer A checks out drive 1 while signing for drive 2. Officer B checks out drive 2 while signing for drive 1. Officer A goes out to do something bad. Officer B drives a rush our traffic route so there are no tickets to hand out. That night they check in their drives, but Officer A has wiped his. Later Officer A is accused of a crime and has video to prove that he was somewhere else at the time. The fact that Officer B's drive crashed that day is not compelling evidence of anything.
The device that checks out the hard drive should be a black box digital time clock that puts it's own signature in the data of the drive. The vending company should make the public keys available to verify the signature, but keep the private keys out of the reach of law enforcement altogether. The officer that checks out a drive should type his pass-phrase into the checkout terminal so that it can generate a second signature that cannot be replicated without the pass-phrase. The Tivo-like computer should, in addition to other features, keep a running log of which hard drives (by signature) have been inserted into it and when, and these logs (up to the last say 100 insertions) should be included and signed on each new hard drive that goes into the Tivo. So any hard disk mucking about would be distributed over all the hard disks in the pool, and they would therefore have to destroy them all to successfully cover this stuff up. With the addition of signed GPS location/timestamps swapping/editing could be pretty tough especially if the tivo device derived it's signature from an unremovable factory issued SIM.
It's worth noting that I've never seen an episode of "Cops: A night of police screw ups."
Censoring the things they don't want seen is already the norm, and it will continue to be unless we legislate it otherwise.
is anyone else worried about how IBM, makers of some not-so-reliable drives of late, is making this? I sure don't want real evidence being destroyed because of a hard drive crash.
So they hit "record" at the end of five minutes. Later, when they are being charged, the tapes is reviewed and the recording starts with a guy in cuffs. The very fact that the process leading up to that was not recorded would make the entire recording suspect. In fact, not recording from the moment the suspect is pulled over or approached - i.e. as the cop gets out of the car - would be highly suspect.
Sure, a dirty cop could try scripting what goes on for those five minutes before he hits "record", but careful review of the recording is likely to show up inconsistencies. Besides, what suspect is going to spend five minutes re-enacting his arrest? Something like this: Cop takes cuffs off, walks back to the car, backs up several blocks and drives forward counting off five minutes before hitting "record" and getting out of the car. What suspect is going to stand around acting like the cop just drove up during this little five minute idiocy?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Now, hook a wireless transmitter up to that videocam and let the reality-police shows abound! Think of the possibilities. Stream the video from selected cruisers live on the 'net. You get a UI to select the cruiser you wish to view, and voila! you are right there in the action.
TV is not reality. What you see on cop shows is a pretty narrow view, showing cops as honest and clean. The reality is, unfortunaly, far from that.
If theyll stop holding me to their orwellian laws. If they dont like having a camera following them everywhere, well, too bad. Stop putting up your fucking spy cameras on every corner, stop with those redlight cameras that are there only to generate money.
I dont like being watched by camera all the time either.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.