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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

it starts recording using the iPhone's front-facing camera. Once you've stopped recording, it can text or email the video to a different predetermined contact and save it to Dropbox.

Too bad it seems to record locally first -- it'd be nice if it could stream the recording online, in case the phone is seized or powered off before it can save the recording.

Maybe it could have a checkpoint feature where it sends the current recording to the cloud while continuing to record, maybe triggered by a keyword or a cough or something.

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There is an aclu app called mobile justice that does this. There appears to be a different one for each state. I was previously under the impression that it uploads the video if you shake your phone, but I found some articles that suggest it transmits while you’re recording.

>The app features a large red “Record” button in the middle of the screen. When it’s pressed, the video is recorded on the phone and a duplicate copy is transmitted simultaneously to the ACLU server.

I have an app from the ACLU of New Jersey app (I live in Texas)...I still have it but I get a warning that it may not work with this version of Android everytime I open it. I'm not sure if the video are getting sent anywhere?

This area looks disorganized...can we put a few smart developers together to donate their time to something like this?

Be the change you want to see in the world.

I think by "duplicate copy transmitted simultaneously" they mean at the same time your local copy is saved, when the recording stops. The Mobile Justice CA app says "As soon as you stop recording , the video will be automatically sent..."

Only available in the US. I am really surprised that such obvious use case is not covered by tens of apps already. I would certainly pay few bucks for such app if the servers were out of reach from corrupt poluce departments and governments.

Aside from the US, the kinds of places where you'd want and be able to use this aren't the kinds of places that have fast enough internet for it to be possible.

In a dense city environment, it would be neat if it could share the video with nearby peers via bluetooth or something similar.

You'd be surprised how much of the world has fast mobile internet.

ACLU = American Civil Liberties Union.

I'm not disagreeing, necessarily. But it's in the name.

> maybe triggered by a keyword or a cough or something.

Sounds complicated. Why not upload every 30sec chunk?

The shortcut app is a single thread. Send a message to an existing application (capable of receiving a message), wait for a response, send a message to the next application in the script and so on.

There's no logic, no timer.

The script is:

* Send message to {contact} with text (some templating done with location)

* Take video (Front)

* Save to photo album

The camera app has two messages you can send to it: take photo and take video. That's it.

I bet someone could make an app that streams video to a cloud-based recording endpoint and is exposed to shortcuts.

Does YouTube allow unlisted/private live streams? That would be an easy hack to achieve something like this.

It does, yes.

You’d have to rely on Google to not remove those videos.

An app should upload it to multiple services, including Twitter, Vimeo, Reddit, Dropbox etc.

You can download the original source video from YouTube later. I know it's not optimal but we're talking workarounds here.

> You can download the original source video from YouTube later

Unless you're in a jail cell, of course.

I figure we should be thinking of the worst-case here. If your salvation is locked up in a silo somewhere, that's a real downside.

> Unless you're in a jail cell, of course.

Or dead.

Sure, you'd still rather the video get out even if you've been wrongfully killed.

>Too bad it seems to record locally first -- it'd be nice if it could stream the recording online, in case the phone is seized or powered off before it can save the recording.

Facebook's live feature is worth a mention here, not only it's well tuned for the purpose; it also blasts notifications to your contacts.

It might just be me, but notifying all my friends & family that I’m being arrested and sending them a live, unedited video of the incident would be horrifying.

There was/is an app called bambuser that did precisely this

Hashes should be standard for this kind of situation. Sending a hash every few seconds ensures that the audio/video 1) was created and 2) can't be forged. If a device "disappears" or is damaged we won't know for certain if it was to destroy evidence or not, but an officer with too many issues can be investigated or fired. Hashes can also be made public without privacy issues, to increase trust that the police are not editing the video.

BT sync to vehicle memory could workaround

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