Did the defense use some sort of tool to debunk? Was it just an obvious deepfake etc? Or was it the officer’s ineptitude that got him caught?
Took about six months for someone to crack the hash.
if it is mandated that every photo or video taken for the possible use in evidence is notarized at the time of acquisition, any fabrication would necessitate total premeditation. that is, the fabricators would need to know ahead of time what they were pursuing and what evidence they would need. this seems like a very costly barrier.
for example, altering security footage would require some fantastical elements: a real-time system of ingesting real footage and altering it in real-time to slip it into the notarization pipeline within the error margins.
requiring that any equipment that produces acceptable evidence stream commitment hashes in real-time to public append-only repositories would be an enormous step forward.
I suspect that the cops wouldn’t like the chain public, though.
An attacker altering the ledger would still require compromising an unreasonably large number of independent groups at once, and even then the rest would be able to clearly see that some unusual and suspicious event occurred.
By limiting membership a bunch of problems simply vanish, like long-clearing times, wasting hardware on mining, vulnerability to foreign botnets, etc.
[0] A blockchain is distinguished by its core requirement, from which a cascade complexity flows: Uncontrolled node membership. Don't be fooled by people pitching "private blockchain", its a contradiction in terms designed to rehabilitate hype, like "multi-sample Theranos test" or a bicycle as "Segway passively stabilized inline wheel model."
I think it was a fairly well-known technique.
But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that a digital image is not more recent than a particular time
Many (most?) blockchain mechanisms include a timestamp in each transaction on the chain, so while multiple records from the same owner prove little (the timestamps could be faked over a given period of time) the interaction with the wider network and the chain would give some confidence that the record happened between within a small amount of time.
The other possibility, that doesn't require a chain with many independent active participants, is to have things signed by an external trusted authority. Submit a hash of the content and appropriate metadata to them, and have them sign it with a signing timestamp. I've considered abusing ACME certificates for document signing like that: the hash of content (or some signature based upon it) becomes the subdomain to sign¹ and you get a certificate that even after expiry is evidence that the CA saw that value at the signing timestamp. Note of the signing will also be in the public certificate transparency log. This wouldn't, on its own, prove anything about the authenticity of the content, that could have been doctored before signing, but it does prove that the content+metadata existed at that time (so might be more useful in copyright claim type cases, or agreed contract situations where all parties have signed the content and the signatures are included in the metadata, than for proving authenticity).
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[1] based64²-ed with non-alphanumeric characters removed and truncated³ to fit or split, so acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.domain.tld or acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.w5jmmkpmyfgshx2jecsfordpnq.domain.tld
[2] names not being case-sensitive drops some of the entropy, if that is a concern use a 32-bits-per-character encoding instead and have names twice as long
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?
Back when I was on Twitter and following a lot of infosec accounts, it was quite common to see tweets that were just a hash. Sometimes they'd have an explanation "Zero click RCE in Android 10 - {hash}"
In the past I've used gmail for this internally - email a hash of something critical (logs, configurations, decision docs, etc) to a dedicated gmail account - relying on the in feasibility of "faking" the date/time once it's onb Google's servers.
The important thing here would be to make sure those hashes are published somewhere where its technically infeasible for the police to change it after the fact, so not on a platform the police run or p-aid for (or that is run or paid for by an organization that the police can request or coerce the operators to make changes).
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]
[0] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...
We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.
- the whole roll of negatives was prime evidence;
- police forces were one of the biggest users of Polaroid instant film.
And moreover, who had a darkroom and the skills to edit substantially a picture?
Whereas here we have nobodies being able to generate pixel-perfect fake "evidence" from the computers they already have.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhibi...
The roll itself can be manipulated too. Most of the techniques used in modern photoshop are basically 1:1 carry overs of darkroom processes. Layers, dodge and burn, masking, etc.
There was a time you could take this class in highschool.
I get that there is a certain type of moron who thinks that the collapse in cost of misinformation has no harm... but all you've done is announce to the world that you are a moron.
It always comes down to provenance.
Surely it’s just a matter of time.
Regardless of what they did, tampering with evidence is completely unacceptable and should result in their dismissal and conviction but I don’t think the story will transpire to be as attention grabbing. A well meaning idiot could convince themselves that enhancing evidence is somehow justifiable whereas it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to justify creating evidence out of thin air.
Creating evidence out of thin air would be ridiculous because evidence is available to the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an image or video had been created (as the defendant would be able to recognize what they do or did not do) whereas “enhancing” an image could be easily spotted by other officers. “How come this photo is clearer than the last time I saw it?” “Oh I ran it through ChatGPT to clean it up! Neat, eh? Just like on CSI!”
The word of a police officer, in UK law, is that of any other witness. There is a kind of presumption of regularity in the courts, but they don't have any sense of qualified immunity; they are generally but not universally considered not personally liable for negligence but that is not guaranteed them.
And unlike police departments in the USA they don't really have much latitude to experiment with technology. IMO they should be banned from using AI tools that aren't centrally provided.
Other than that, yes — I agree with your general view that this is an alarming state of affairs for people in a position of trust.
Here's a couple fun examples:
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-06-05/boston-law-enforc...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
I think there have been less than two dozen police involved killings in the whole of the UK in the last six years, and that's in a population of seventy million people.
It's about 2% of the equivalent US figure (which averages 800 per year in 340 million people)
Doesn't iphones do this by default? The camera isn't actually that sharp, instead it fills in the details so it looks sharp, and sometimes it adds things that were never there. Can easily see it adding a gun in a blurry photo of someone.
So almost everyone uses AI to forge evidence then.
This is AI. Its not generative AI if that is what you mean, but it is AI altering the image and adding things that wasn't there, usually its fine sometimes it fails horribly and make the picture totally different.
Thank god that never happens anymore. I'm sure the bodycam era has ended all of that misbehavior and one could not possibly go to YouTube and find videos of cops in possession of that unique blend of corruption and stupidity that would lead them to plant drugs while being recorded. Ahem.
My mind went straight to using the AI to write a statement and the AI made stuff up, which would be a nearly guaranteed outcome from using existing LLMs for that task, and it's exactly the sort of thing that I'm sure many officers are doing ... and it could go a fair time before it was discovered.
[The Derbyshire Police] declined to give more detail
about what the evidential material consisted of.
The term [evidential material] can be used to
describe witness statements.The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.
There you go.
Them being all super-keen to use AI really fits. Some pillock of an officer going too far really fits.
Derbyshire is really safe but they act like it is not.
This is a very very intense claim, and if true, would represent a monumental institutional failure across hundreds or even thousands of disparate organizations.
Do you have any data to support your hunch?
Strong claims require strong evidence.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/first-death-row-exoneration-inv...
How did we do that? I never heard this: certainly 10% of people on death row weren't exonerated by DNA? This is some kind of shaky extrapolation I assume?
I disagree wrt reasonableness. It’s just too big a leap. There are a lot of crimes, and not many land you on death row.
The big claim is here: the state has grandiose claims that the overwhelming majority is fair, but there is no proof of it.
Therefore the state should prove that more than 90% of the cases are legitimate, fair, not coerced, and not motivated by the pressure to interrupt the proceedings.
97% of people choose plea deals or out-of-court settlement, it is a huge amount.
It means that in real practice, not imaginary internet, people who face court consider that justice is a big machine that can crush you no matter if you are innocent or not.
In the best case you are acquitted at the end, but you are guaranteed to bear the financial burden, fear and stress as a punishment.
Being held in jail before trial is a very convincing reason to plea deal too.
It's a system engineered to make pleading the only reasonable option, no matter if you did anything or not.
That's the rule for criminal court in the US, but each of us is free to pick his own standard for his own purposes.
It is disingenuous to weasel out of proving one claim by making another, or saying “look over here”
Also, outrageous claims in opposite directions can both be bullshit.
Even single digit percent is hard to believe, but its possible, but double digits you are talking China or Russia levels of state corruption and even there I doubt its that high.
Edit; upon closer examination. I did imply in my last paragraph that your claim was outrageous. Bit of a gaffe considering I’m the agitator here. My apologies.
If you would like to begin trying to answer these, I recommend starting with submitting some FOIAs. Considering your stance seems to be that you won't believe what others are telling you -- I promise you that you'll be surprised.
It’s easy to say things that sound true on the surface, but even if true, it’s still irresponsible to say them on the back of a hunch.
This is done because there's an exception in our constitution for slavery "as punishment for a crime" and well all know that capitalism loves slave labor.