Slashdot Mirror
Body Camera Giant Wants Police To Collect Your Videos Too (fastcompany.com)
tedlistens shares a report from Fast Company: Axon, the police supplier formerly known as Taser and now a leading maker of police body cameras, has also charged into police software with a service that allows police to manage and eventually analyze increasingly large caches of video, like a Dropbox for cops. Now it wants to add the public's video to the mix. An online tool called Citizen, set to launch later this year, will allow police to solicit the public for photos or video in the aftermath of suspected crimes and ingest them into Axon's online data platform. Todd Basche, Axon's executive vice president for worldwide products, said the tool was designed after the company conducted surveys of police customers and the public and found that potentially valuable evidence was not being collected. "They all pointed us to the need to collect evidence that's out there in the community."
[But] systems like Citizen still raise new privacy and policy questions, and could test the limits of already brittle police-community relations. Would Citizen, for instance, also be useful for gathering civilian evidence of incidents of police misconduct or brutality? [And how would ingesting citizen video into online police databases, like Axon's Evidence.com, allow police to mine it later for suspicious activity, in a sort of dragnet fashion?] "It all depends," says one observer, "on how agencies use the tool."
[But] systems like Citizen still raise new privacy and policy questions, and could test the limits of already brittle police-community relations. Would Citizen, for instance, also be useful for gathering civilian evidence of incidents of police misconduct or brutality? [And how would ingesting citizen video into online police databases, like Axon's Evidence.com, allow police to mine it later for suspicious activity, in a sort of dragnet fashion?] "It all depends," says one observer, "on how agencies use the tool."
It's not like there are not scores of public CCTV's already which they can pull from.
I see only a tiny risk to privacy, while at the same time large jump in the ability for investigators to figure out what really happened during a crime.
The video going in through a public portal is even better because that is another layer of tracked data you have to overcome to scrub it in the case of police wrongdoing they want to cover up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My first reaction to this story is what will prevent fraud? It has already been proven that editing video and audio is possible to significantly change the story of what has been captured. It might be trivial to add an object to a video such as gun or another bystander that didn't exist. Something to cause confusion or doubt in a court case. Computers can be used to rearrange voice and even learn a voice and be able to make up sounds that didn't exist.
I would hope that appropriate protections exist to prevent this kind of fraud on a body camera. However there is nothing to prevent that from a public video without further expert analysis to somehow prove that the public video is authentic. I think I like the idea, but it will need a lot of authenticity and security considerations.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Phones can be identified through the model number, IMEI and service phone number. Photos can be identified through the EXIF 'LocalizedCameraModel', 'BodySerialNumber' and 'CameraOwnerName' tags.
Combine photo tags with cell-phone tower logs to reveal which phone-camera snapped the revealing photo. This will quickly become about identifying the witness for purposes of further questioning.