Journalist recovers video of his arrest after police deleted it | Hacker News Reader

Journalist recovers video of his arrest after police deleted it

arstechnica.com

93 pointsevo_950 comments

> "Miller was charged with a single count of resisting arrest. ... 'we do not understand how, absent some other underlying charge for which there was probable cause, a charge of resisting arrest can stand on its own?'"

The most infuriating part of that article.

>> "Miller was charged with a single count of resisting arrest. ... 'we do not understand how, absent some other underlying charge for which there was probable cause, a charge of resisting arrest can stand on its own?'

That's settled law. The cop's mistake wrt whether an arrest is valid is not a defense against a resisting arrest charge.

Supposedly you get to make up for the unlawful arrest later.

I'm not claiming that this is good (or bad), just that it is fairly settled law.

Isn't "lack of probable cause" crucial here?

There's a difference between arresting someone when you have a probable cause and arresting someone just because you can.

The standard for probable cause might be low, much lower than a standard for proving a crime has been committed, but surely there is a standard.

If the cop cannot show that there was probable cause to arrest someone, he a) should be accountable in some way b) he shouldn't be able to arrest someone for resisting the arrest that he had no right to make in the first place as that's absurd.

Not to mention that based on the description of the events, the "resisting arrest" in this case is an excuse and not something that actually happened.

That's not how it works. You may be able to sue later for lack of probable cause (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_arrest ) but you still can not resist the arrest even if you are sure you are right.

Doesn't this conflict with that law that says citizens can intervene and stop cops from arresting someone? It was something to do with citizen arrest and arresting the cops themselves if they do something very bad.

What law is this? I've never heard of such a law. Normally if police are corrupt then the next level up law enforcement is called, i.e. city->state->federal

That's not true. It is specifically on the books that you can resist unlawful arrest up to and including killing the officer. People have done it and not received penalty for it.

Read the wiki article I linked. You can only resist unlawful arrest by a police office in very very limited circumstances. Simple mistake by the police is not included.

You are probably confusing resisting arrest by someone who is not actually a police officer.

No, I'm talking about a cop. This has been demonstrated in court [1].

[1] http://constitution.org/uslaw/defunlaw.htm

> Isn't "lack of probable cause" crucial here?

No. (Note that probable cause doesn't actually have the nice clean definition that you'd like.)

> There's a difference between arresting someone when you have a probable cause and arresting someone just because you can.

Yes there is, but your legal responses based on that difference do not include resisting arrest.

> If the cop cannot show that there was probable cause to arrest someone, he a) should be accountable in some way

Absolutely.

> b) he shouldn't be able to arrest someone for resisting the arrest that he had no right to make in the first place as that's absurd.

"The law" disagrees.

One argument in favor of "resisting is almost always illegal" is basically that if you resist, the force continuum starts. The end-point is with someone dead.

Suppose that you resist and end up dead. Is the officer guilty of murder? How about you resist and the officer ends up dead - are you guilty of murder?

Do you really want to argue that the answers to those questions depends on the definition of probable cause, which is actually defined by what a court says later?

> Not to mention that based on the description of the events, the "resisting arrest" in this case is an excuse and not something that actually happened.

Welcome to modern policing.

Whenever you ask govt to do something, you're asking police to get involved.

I think it's settled alright [1]. You're allowed to resist unlawful arrest, to the point of killing the officer.

[1] http://constitution.org/uslaw/defunlaw.htm

This is one of the reasons why Android's "Instant Upload"[1] feature is so awesome. Every Android device running 2.2+ is capable of instantly uploading photos and videos taken with your phone into a private folder on your Google+ account... not sure if the iPhone Google+ app will also do this, can anyone confirm?

There are other solutions proposed in this thread, but if you have an aversion to Google services (or perhaps an iPhone), you can also try out the new Dropbox beta that also has automatic uploading of photos and videos from your phone[2].

[1] http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

[2] http://lifehacker.com/5881692/get-up-to-45gb-of-extra-space-...

  P.S. This issue is another reason why it's so important
  that the tech community has a voice in the upcoming
  FCC spectrum auctions. Congress is currently trying to
  prevent the FCC from placing conditions on the auction,
  which will surely keep the spectrum in the hands of the
  biggest telco players and prevent more competition &
  innovation in the wireless market.

I surprised we're not seeing more instant offload/stream to server video apps for scenarios like this. With iPhones and 3G service, you could easily have videos auto-uploaded when you put the phone in a "panic" mode. It could even be set to be auto-emailed to some list of contacts in the event you don't checkin within 60 minutes.

Seems buildable, wish I had the time to do so.

Wouldn't iCloud already cover this?

I'm also thinking the "I"m getting arrested" app for android would operate similarly.

Yes, iCloud might. However, Apple is a large corporation that might be persuaded to take down videos. I'm not saying they would, but in a scenario like this, would you trust Apple (or Google for that matter) as the sole host of your video?

I think an option to upload to a public service (iCloud, YouTube, etc.) would be one viable option, but personally I'd still want the option to push it to some random server of my own choosing and control as well.

Photostream does photos automatically, but not video just yet. Could be implemented via an app, but you'd eat your iCloud and 3g data limits pretty fast.

I thought photostream was something that happened when on wifi only.

Imagine a GoPro-style camera which transmitted wirelessly to a nearby smartphone. From there, the receiving app would sync it to a server ASAP. If you knew you were entering into a situation where video you were capturing might be confiscated, you could tape the phone to your thigh with a lot of duct tape. By the time the police organized themselves sufficiently to cut the tape off of your body, the important video likely would already be uploaded. Could this scheme be expanded upon by some sort of steel lock box around one's waist/ankle/etc? That would give the phone a lot of time to do its work. Furthermore, the box could contain an additional microphone which would continue recording after initial camera seizure. In cases where groups of protesters feared arrest, could Bluetooth be used to create a Tor-esque upload-to-the-cloud network which would eventually reconstitute everyone's video? I'm imagining a bunch of phones talking to each other in a mesh and trading blobs which could be reassembled server-side.

Android supports USB devices, there's no reason you couldn't rig it up with a commodity webcam plugged directly into the phone. I'd had this idea, but as an art project (give the app away and maybe some hats with cams and use the footage for something. I'm not good with art). Anyhow, this setup could be used to stream live video from the frontlines of... anything with cell phone service. (edit, I suppose drivers could be an issue on second consideration)

At least until the police started deploying cell-phone jammers as a matter of 'best practice' during police action.

This sort of thing could set-off an arms race between police and those who want to record them. However, the police today seem to stifle recording in a grass roots, individual way. Would the police chief be embarrassed to explain in a room full of journalists that his department "jams" legal communications equipment as a matter of practice?

Simple, just use a livestreaming app.

The Bambuser app is my favorite one, it's available on Android and iPhones and allows people to view your stream on the web. You can also review and download any clips you've streamed in the past, so it would work perfectly for this. In a really serious case, I imagine the company could provide evidence to prove the video wasn't tampered with too.

Simple, just use a livestreaming app.

Your entire scenario rests on the fact that you are expecting a negative interaction with the police. It's one thing to go into a protest knowing confrontation is likely, it's quite another to have expect that same confrontation during a normal traffic stop.

If it's important enough to video, I'd say it's important enough to backup given how ubiquitous and cheap doing so is these days.

I get your point, but given the current environment with respect to video and journalists it does seem a bit naive to NOT have some expectation on any interaction with authority these days. It does make me sad to have to think this cynically.

This already exists. You could use ustream or a few different services for instant streaming + archiving. However, this is going to depend on a reliable data connection.

In case anyone else is curious; there are at least 4 that I know of for Android; ustream, bambuser, justin.tv, and qik.

That works until they start jamming cell service.

The operation of transmitters designed to jam or block wireless communications is a violation of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended ("Act"). See 47 U.S.C. Sections 301, 302a, 333.

Also LEO data terminals use commercial LTE these days.

Police did it in, I believe, the Bay Area last year, fearing organization of protests

They cut power to cell repeaters. They didn't jam anything, though they certainly got hell for it. The FCC is investigating.

Ahhh, and I didn't know there was an investigation, thanks for that!

"They" in this case was the BART Directors, not the police, and this was not the first time the Directors chose to disable cell service at various stations in the system.

See: http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/pulse-of-the-bay/bart-cut-ce...

What does it say about our world that we need the latest in high-tech equipment to protect ourselves from the police breaking the law to punish innocent people?

Things are getting better...? Abuse of authority is as old as time. The only thing new here is that now the common man has a way to fight back.

The latest dropbox app (currently in beta) can be told to automatically upload all new photos and videos on a device to dropbox. Then a remote server anywhere can watch your dropbox for changes and do something with the files - encrypt them, make remote backups, mail them out, whatever.

Can a lawyer comment about evidence tampering or something else? Do not know how the police could delete the videos and not be held accountable for something.

How can the police not be held accountable? Who investigates the police? Other police. Who investigates other police? Other police.

It's the police.

Your comment seems to imply police are never punished for misconduct and yet that is obviously not true. Internal Affairs is a very real thing.

Yes, they do get punished, but they get away with enough that they deserve their reputation.

Replace 'police' for 'people' and we find out that no one can ever be held accountable.

"The police" is not a single body, there are multiple police forces which are mostly independent. I don't know the US system very well, but at least where I live the cops that work on the street have a completely different chain of command than the detectives who investigate them if necessary.

When you substitute "people" for police, you're missing a crucial ingredient; other police officers have an institutional alignment with their fellow officers, and will continue to interact with other officers. Further, they are likely to need to be able to "get along" politically with other police departments in the future even if they don't interact with particular people in those departments day-to-day.

On the other side of the scale, the relationship with the mistreated citizen is totally expendable, and the relationship with the public consciousness is a diffuse one rather than a concentrated one (i.e. there's no one-on-one rapport with individual citizens, only a generalized "police force" and "citizens at large" relationship).

Game theory reliably predicts the outcome here: the diffuse and expendable relationships are likely to take a back seat to the concentrated and durable ones. Obviously this doesn't predict individual outcomes with certainty, but the imbalanced incentives with intra-institutional review are pretty significant.

"citizens at large"

I listen to the local police radio on the internet (it's oddly relaxing), and they have two terms for us: suspects, and reporting persons (RPs).

The whole point behind destroying evidence is to avoid accountability

He also hopes to determine the exact time the video was deleted, which could substantiate his charge that it was deleted while under police control.

Is this possible? As far as I know most cameras just delete the file from the storage medium, and there is nothing in the storage medium which could be used to determine this.

Depending on the underlying filesystem there could be evidence of the last time it was altered though it could be faked with enough knowledge.

I'm not sure---the last FS usually only posts a modified date if the file is modified and not deleted.

If its simply deleted, it'd those sectors as 'gone' in the file table but there's no notation in the file table to say when modifications to it were made.

Many current filesystems implement journaling - essentially, a circular buffer where operations are logged before being acted on. Therefore, it's perfectly possible that a log entry of the deletion is still on the device, if it used a journaling fs.

EDIT: Also, the EXT filesystems have a 'dtime' (deletion time) property for inodes.

Most photo-cameras use FAT for SD cards so I expect journaling is not that common. Don't know if the same applies to 'professional' video-cameras though.

Is it a photo or a video camera? I expect a professional video camera to use something other than FAT, which can only hold files smaller than 4GB.

My DVR uses FAT32 on a 1TB disk. Each recording has a meta entry that holds a list of files that make up that recording. As far as I can tell, as it records, it closes a file that is approaching 4GB, opens a new one to continue recording, and updates the meta entry by adding the new file name to the list.

The DVR is consumer grade, but this method is simple to implement. I guess my point is that it is a solved problem to use FAT with large files.

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