Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases

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aaustinallegro about 4 hours ago 64 commentsRead Article on news.sky.com

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radicaldreamer•about 3 hours ago

I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…

gcr•about 2 hours ago

Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…

cadamsdotcom•about 1 hour ago

> large double-digit percentage

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.

rvnx•41 minutes ago

Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of proof is the other way around.

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.

smallmancontrov•34 minutes ago

A few years ago, one of my coworkers was arrested for a domestic violence complaint. Looking into his case, I found an extremely specific lurid description of the allegations -- and then I found the same lurid description copy/pasted to every other person recently arrested for the same crime. I'm probably getting the specific terms wrong, but I did click through to see it on a government website, because my first suspicion was the aggregator, but no, the police just had a boilerplate story full of specifics which could not possibly apply to each and every person they carelessly slapped it onto. This absolutely blew my mind at the time, but it fits with smaller subsequent observations. In any case: a double digit percentage of institutional failure does not upset my priors about how carefully the police operate.

jyounker•about 1 hour ago

When DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So, 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double digits.

chaps•7 minutes ago

An important thing you should recognize: the judicial system is painfully nontransparent in such a way that even figuring this sort of thing takes an extensive amount of time and is often even impossible. I've personally gone down a similar route (did some journalism for a bit) by trying to understand how shotspotter is used in prosecution, many of which resulted in false arrests and many, many years of life lost across all the people arrested falsely from it.

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.

dpkirchner•about 1 hour ago

If you believe parallel construction should be illegal (it sure seems like it is unconstitutional to me), then 100% of prosecutions that rely on it are unjust. I don't think anyone truly knows how common it is, though, and that's by design. Double-digits wouldn't shock me at all.

Arodex•about 1 hour ago

Police in the United States is already in a state of "institutional failure"...

lokar•about 1 hour ago

I don’t know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was preserved).

Terr_•about 2 hours ago

Especially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0], lying to the court about the process taken.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

tyingq•about 2 hours ago

Consider all of that can be used for forced confessions and forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence" doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any way.

reactordev•about 1 hour ago

Let alone all it takes is a photo and a voice clip of 10sec to create an imitation of that person confessing to whatever your heart desires.

rvnx•40 minutes ago

An old phone book is enough.

gdulli•about 2 hours ago

Sadly, there's more evil and more laziness/incompetence in the world that's being accelerated by AI than there is good.

madaxe_again•about 2 hours ago

Over all time? Probably tens of millions.

bobthepanda•about 3 hours ago

i do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.

pjc50•about 3 hours ago

There's a big gap between "theoretically unreliable" and courts actually recognizing that, unfortunately. Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.

yardstick•about 2 hours ago

There used to be - probably still are - cameras that would digitally sign all their images. Used in crime scenes? Maybe we will end up seeing wider adoption of this, despite the privacy implications. Hackers attention then will focus (once again) on the certificate supply chain and crypto hardware.

ChrisMarshallNY•about 2 hours ago

I worked for a company that made these. We sold expensive software to the FBI.

Took about six months for someone to crack the hash.

deepserket•about 2 hours ago

What about a system that saves in some way the hash in a Blockchain, and if you, eg, XOR the hash of the video with the hash of the previous block you will "certainly" know that the video was created between the previous block and the block where the hash is saved in. That's a starting point.

EPWN3D•about 1 hour ago

"Crack the hash"? Does this mean you were employing some novel hashing algorithm and relying on its secrecy? If so your employer were never serious about security in the first place. Hardware attestation is more or less a solved problem, and that solution does not involve secret algorithms.

lostlogin•about 2 hours ago

Now sell them version 2.

aorloff•about 2 hours ago

I imagine in this age of blockchains you could embed into a media file a signature that proved it was no older than the timestamp of when it occurred, the digital equivalent of a hostage-proof-of-life photo with a recent newspaper

But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that a digital image is not more recent than a particular time

dspillett•about 1 hour ago

> 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).

----------------

[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

gcr•about 2 hours ago

Publish hash(image) on the blockchain at a verifiable time, then publish the image itself.

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?

__del__•about 2 hours ago

wouldn't that be a hash of the image signed by a trusted entity and stored on a chain? maybe i'm overlooking why this doesn't work

catlikesshrimp•about 2 hours ago

Interesting, There aren't any newspapers left in my country, neither printed nor not printed. The closest you can find is the weekly advertising booklet here and there. Which is irrelevant now because a computer can either stich new content to an old picture, or entirely producing a custom picture.

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]

asdff•about 2 hours ago

You should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever since there was imagery to manipulate.

Arodex•about 1 hour ago

This is why:

- 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.

asdff•35 minutes ago

Plenty of people. If you have running water, some tape, and trashbags, you too could have a darkroom.

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.

olyjohn•about 2 hours ago

Big difference between that and writing an AI prompt.

asdff•34 minutes ago

Not really. End result is the same: manipulated image.

mukbangpervert•about 1 hour ago

We've gone from highly skilled people being able to forge some specific photos and documents using substantial time/energy/resources, to any asshole being able to generate realistic full-motion video in minutes.

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.

asdff•38 minutes ago

It is really not any different. People would throw a hubcap in the air and pitch it as a UFO photo and idiots would latch on to that. You could take a photo of the empire state building and use a double exposure to make it look like you were king kong. Kids were doing this sort of stuff. Stop motion home movies where you'd look like you were levitating or your head got cut off.

It always comes down to provenance.

croes•about 1 hour ago

How many people could do that?

How long did it take?

Now it’s a lot easier and faster

asdff•37 minutes ago

Plenty could.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhibi...

thewebguyd•about 3 hours ago

I suspect so. Tbh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already with the amount of processing that cell phones do on photos, with generative fill/expand/perspective change, etc.

We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.

Lammy•about 1 hour ago

The end-game is that people will willingly surveil themselves 24/7 on behalf of The System because that will be the only way to prove what they didn't do.

LtWorf•about 1 hour ago

Ah yes training the AI with more data to represent me even more accurately.

testing22321•about 2 hours ago

I’m still shocked we have not seen an extremely convincing AI video of a famous person or world leader announcing something huge like UBI or WW3 or aliens.

Surely it’s just a matter of time.

WarOnPrivacy•about 3 hours ago

per ft.com: https://archive.fo/BIOej

    [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.

wahern•about 2 hours ago

I don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the common law and still in the US this why all substantive evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why.

The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.

tim-tday•about 1 hour ago

Maybe use the word “falsify”?

tamimio•23 minutes ago

Can we know the motivation? Will it get them a bonus at the end of the year? Was it something common in the cases, maybe similar victims or something else?

delichon•8 minutes ago

I'd wager that it was just a shortcut to getting his work done. That banal motive is why we've seen an explosion of these cases and why they won't stop.