I did what is taking government years and millions to do | Hacker News Reader

I did what is taking government years and millions to do

11 pointstimclemans14 comments

Right now you can not easily send photos or videos to the police. The government has been trying for years now to make 911 handle photos and videos without much luck. Today I coded the ability to send photos and videos to the police. One goes to https://sendevidence.org and uploads their evidence. If the police department is in the database then they get an email with the data and links to S3 to download the evidence. If not I'll try to find an email address and send them the evidence. By doing this officers won't have to go to people homes, can take hours in a major city, to pick up say surveillance videos of car prowlers. This also helps officers who don't want to give out their email addresses, see http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/2015/07/24/seattle-cop-who-bungled-westlake-groper-report-suspended-2-days/

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There is definitely an opportunity here. Several things you will need to consider:

1. Documented chain of custody for the evidence. For it to hold up in court everybody that touches any evidence must be logged.

2. There is a process that police departments utilize when handling computer data in terms of photos or videos. Most big cities and states have large computer forensics departments that handle this type of evidence specifically. To hold up in court, they need to be able to prove the data is not only real, but original and unaltered.

3. There should be a way to verify the photo/video belongs to the crime being investigated. For example, let's say several homes are broken into in my neighborhood. I have a home surveillance system, but really dislike my one neighbor. I decide to take a few stills from my home surveillance system of my neighbor walking by my yard, and submit them as potential evidence in the case.

4. I realize this is early on, but as the site stands now, I would never submit anything through it. How do I know I can trust the site, how do I know my evidence got to the detective investigating the case. As law enforcement (which I am not) how do I know the data is secure, how do I know it is real, etc...

Like I said, there is a good opportunity here. But there is also a ton of case law that makes implementing what would appear to be a simple solution much more difficult.

Do you think uploading straight to a department's S3 bucket would address any of the audit/security concerns? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingHTTPPOST... I'm looking into https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/

I think you may still run into some issues, but to be honest, if you are looking to make a business out of this, I would find and talk extensively to law enforcement and/or the state's attorney office in your area. I am neither. I did work for several years alongside law enforcement and have been to more crime scenes than I care to recount. I know from that experience that even what appears to be the simplest of tasks involved heavy documentation, logging, and chain of custody procedures. For data, such as photos and videos, they must eliminate or significantly reduce any chances of a file's metadata being altered. A good defense attorney simply has to put doubt in a jury's mind. They can do that by showing the video/photo could have come from a different date, a different location, etc...

I think it may be easier to refer to more as a crime tip submission site. However, with that approach you are competing with Crimestoppers which already accepts photos and videos from tipsters. Again, IANAL, but I believe those submissions fall into something similar to a polygraph. Where if you submit a photo/video to the site, the police can use it to build a case, but cannot use it in court.

Depending on where you are located, I do know a few crime scene investigators and computer forensic investigators that I may be able to put you in contact with and who could better answer your questions.

See: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communicat...

I'm not looking to make a business of out this which is why I went with .org instead of .com. I'm looking to solve a major problem with sending photos/videos to police departments. I'm looking into chain of evidence now. Thank you for your helpful feedback.

Yep. Look into digital evidence or "e-evidence". Both are big topics in crime scene investigations and many law enforcement agencies and courts have established procedures for handling. There is ample discussion.

May want to check this:

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/199408.pdf

I just added the MD5 checksum from AWS S3 to the email alerts for each linked "evidence".

You may want to look at https://guardtime.com/ for audit/data tampering concerns.

I'm copy pasting this from their site https://guardtime.com/ksi-technology

* A user interacts with the KSI system by submitting a hash-value of the data to be signed into the KSI infrastructure and is then returned a signature which provides cryptographic proof of the time of signature, integrity of the signed data, as well as attribution of origin i.e. which entity generated the signature.

There is a similar startup in the UK, has good traction https://www.facewatch.co.uk/

Thank you!

We're already doing this and have clients using our system.

What's your url?

Add fields to the evidence that could correspond to the fields in police information systems.

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