I’ve entertained this concept before, but it presents issues. What if a piece of evidence needs to be edited? To protect someone’s identity (say an SA victim) or even just to cut an originally 1 hour stretch of security camera footage to the relevant 5 minutes.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for editing photos or videos, even when being used as evidence. And I’m sure there’s ways around this using trusted chain of custody methods.
But I’ve seen this “just hash it and store the hash in an immutable, publicly verifiable manner (the actual use case for blockchain)” brought up before for this and stuff like governments signing recordings of their officials, and every time I have to point out that it ignores relevant key use cases.
I’m sure there’s ways to make this concept work, it isn’t a bad idea, but it’s never going to be quite so simple.
Yeah, though that particular complication is chain-of-custody like anything else, like you said. At some point the court has to trust evidence processing.
If (say) the defense wants to verify, they can ask the judge to scrub through original footage. This feels like a thing that could be smoothed out over time.
…But what worries me most is the ease of ‘spamming the system’. Say someone wanted to commit a crime pre-emptively, in front of devices doing this automatically; they’d have incentive to pay to flood the blockchain with random data. And if you introduce a small cyptocoin cost to uploading, well, that’s a whole can of worms you’ve opened there.
I’ve entertained this concept before, but it presents issues. What if a piece of evidence needs to be edited? To protect someone’s identity (say an SA victim) or even just to cut an originally 1 hour stretch of security camera footage to the relevant 5 minutes.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for editing photos or videos, even when being used as evidence. And I’m sure there’s ways around this using trusted chain of custody methods.
But I’ve seen this “just hash it and store the hash in an immutable, publicly verifiable manner (the actual use case for blockchain)” brought up before for this and stuff like governments signing recordings of their officials, and every time I have to point out that it ignores relevant key use cases.
I’m sure there’s ways to make this concept work, it isn’t a bad idea, but it’s never going to be quite so simple.
Yeah, though that particular complication is chain-of-custody like anything else, like you said. At some point the court has to trust evidence processing.
If (say) the defense wants to verify, they can ask the judge to scrub through original footage. This feels like a thing that could be smoothed out over time.
…But what worries me most is the ease of ‘spamming the system’. Say someone wanted to commit a crime pre-emptively, in front of devices doing this automatically; they’d have incentive to pay to flood the blockchain with random data. And if you introduce a small cyptocoin cost to uploading, well, that’s a whole can of worms you’ve opened there.