Digital Photos Challenged In Court
from the whatcha-been-manipulating? dept
While some police departments have been thinking of moving to digital photography for recording crime scene evidence, some court cases challenging the validity of digital photographs are making them think twice. Even though film camera photos can be manipulated as well, defense attorneys are ready and willing to challenge any digital photo with a simple demonstration of how easy it is to change and manipulate a photo in Photoshop. Some police departments are trying to figure out a way to have cameras take photos that are then "locked" so that there's always the original photo to compare against any "adjusted" photos.
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chain of evidence
And for that matter, film photographs have always been just as malleable. They can be cropped or manipulated in lots of ways, and even if they're not, who's to say that the photo wasn't staged?
All evidence is ultimately based on trust in the personnel gathering and evaluating it. Fibers, DNA samples and test tubes can all be planted, switched or manipulated by incompetent or overzealous investigators. In fact, I remember recently reading about a fairly high-profile crime lab technician that was found to be doing these sorts of things at the prompting of the police dept.
And don't even get me started on the scientific validity of fingerprint matching or the polygraph. (Hint: they're not.)
In the end, in must be understood that, for all types of evidence, the trust isn't placed in a medium or technique, but in a person. It's the credibility of the people that makes a strong chain of evidence.
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Re: chain of evidence
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digital signatures
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No Subject Given
However, one more wrinkle: people have successfully hacked the $900 Canon 300D camera firmware to include most of the features found in its $1500 Canon 10D body. The Canon cameras essentially run a firmware version of 16bit MS-DOS, and the firmware is just a plain x86 executable file that interacts with proprietary data processing hardware.
Of course, that would be much more difficult if the Canon firmware had to be PKI signed properly...
We need more "cradle-to-grave" data security mechanisms in plain
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Another red herring
We've always used verbal testimony to bridge the gap between the picture and other physical evidence (as the prior poster notes). Showing that things could be faked doesn't do anything to besmirch the witness' actual testimony, except in the eyes of conspiracy nuts and people looking to let someone popular off the hook.
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VeriPic
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