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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

The burden is on whichever side is attempting to introduce a piece of evidence.

From the federal rules of evidence:

> (a) In General. To satisfy the requirement of authenticating or identifying an item of evidence, the proponent must produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is.

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-ix/rule-901/

Specific to recordings

> An original writing, recording, or photograph is required in order to prove its content unless these rules or a federal statute provides otherwise.

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-x/rule-1002/

Unfortunately, the rules of evidence are pretty vague about what is actually required to prove that a video is admitable as evidence; but the burden to do so is absolutely on the party introducing it.

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I think you're reading a little too much into that. I think it's worth comparing it to other forms of evidence. It's incredibly common in civil disputes for one party to give untruthful evidence, sometimes out of malice, sometimes simply due to the human psyche (plenty of evidence of people believing falsehoods after all). Likewise, tampering with physical evidence is far from new - tampered photographs have been going around for over a hundred years, while altered financial records and planted drugs are seen in a court somewhere every day. Practically then, the status quo appears to be that if a prosecutor or litigant has done some due diligence and have a good faith evidence based conclusion that the evidence has not been tampered with (by e.g. having the cameraperson swear under oath that the video is an accurate representation of what they saw), then they will be allowed to present it, and that won't change with the proliferation of deepfake video and audio.

At that point the reliability of the evidence may of course be called into question, as with any evidence or witness. The question mark would be whether it was convincing.

Those are informative links. Sure. But that doesn't mean they have to prove it wasn't manufactured by martians 50 million years ago just because the other side brought up that possibility just to bring the piece of evidence in to the trial.

Exactly, the standard is "reasonable doubt", not "any harebrained possibility whatsoever".

The standard for admitting evidence is far below reasonable doubt, even in a criminal case. Generally speaking, all you need is someone to get on the stand and say (under oath), "yes, that video is an accurate copy of the video I took".

If you have that (absent other possible evidentuary concerns), it is up to the trier of fact (e.g. jury) to determine if how much they believe the evidence.

The problem here is the prosecution cannot meet even that low bar, and instead is relying on the various exceptions to the requirement.

Rule 902 lists evidence that is "self authenticating", and videos are not on it.

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-ix/rule-902/

I complement you for spelling "harebrained" correctly.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/complement-and...

whooosh!

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