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

news.sky.com

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

#131

Post by dofm »

danielvaughn wrote: post #128
dofm wrote: post #127

I saw this headline, saw that it was Sky news, thought "oh a British policeman? Bet it was Derbyshire police". There you go.

As an American, I'm totally out of the loop on this one but it sounds interesting. I assume Derbyshire has a reputation?

They are just rather over-eager and a bit of a law unto themselves in a rather silly way; it is Derbyshire police that hassled people walking in the open air during COVID, including rather excitably harrassing Peak District walkers with drones, and enforced rules that were only guidance as if they were law (famously asserting that two women walking in the fresh air with a coffee was "a picnic").

Them being all super-keen to use AI really fits. Some pillock of an officer going too far really fits.

Derbyshire is really safe but they act like it is not.

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

#132

Post by dofm »

hiddencost wrote: post #126
Quarrelsome wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're quite right, every single one of them is actively trying to kill each and every one of us. To consider any other possibility would be hysterical.

... Police in the united states have more than a century of flagrant misconduct under their belts. They protect their own, they almost never face consequences for killing people, they are frequently corrupt, they are frequently biased. Here's a couple fun examples: https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-06-05/boston-law-enforc... https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...

To be fair, this is Derbyshire in England. They are often a bit overkeen but they are not exactly Homan Square.

I think there have been less than two dozen police involved killings in the whole of the UK in the last six years, and that's in a population of seventy million people.

It's about 2% of the equivalent US figure (which averages 800 per year in 340 million people)

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

#133

Post by XorNot »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #43
EPWN3D wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Eh. It was some kind of hash of the image. I was not involved in that project, so can't tell you exactly how it worked, but the images were "signed," and someone figured out how to "re-sign" an altered image. I think it was a fairly well-known technique.

Which still sounds like your employer was simply incompetent because why was any type of perceptual hashing scheme even involved?

Signing digital data with hardware secure tokens is a commodity capability in the iPhone many of HNs users are reading this site with.

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

#134

Post by XorNot »

bigiain wrote: post #118
gcr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't need a blockchain for that. You just need some reliable-enough way to publish hash(image) with a timestamp - some way that it's infeasible enough as to be considered impossible for thepublisher to change the hash or the date. Back when I was on Twitter and following a lot of infosec accounts, it was quite common to see tweets that were just a hash. Sometimes they'd have an explanation "Zero click RCE in And…

You literally just need several oracles which sign hashes at the time they receive them and record that fact.

As a community service you need them to have enough scale that no individual hash or source can be tampered with without being likely to become known as unreliable to everyone else as well ala certificate transparency records.

(You could probably just bootstrap let's encrypt for this - issuing a certificate you use to sign a bunch of data would stamp several minimums on the order anything could have happened).

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

#135

Post by kalleboo »

CDRdude wrote: post #123
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really going to go to a fictional TV show now?

If a fictional-but-popular TV show treats some kinds of evidence as more reliable than they really are, juries may be primed to believe in the kind of thing the TV show presents as legitimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

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

#136

Post by themafia »

Arodex wrote: post #45
asdff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You can burn negatives. You can fake polaroids, really, just think about how a camera itself must operate and you'll see why instantly. Darkrooms used to be far more common before digital photography my Junior and High school both had them.

What makes evidence "pixel perfect?" What digital photographs don't have to involve a chain of custody? Literally the first question the defense will ask is "how did you get this picture." If you say you pulled from a security system they can just go ask for the originals. This happens all the time.

Where people are getting confused is it's almost never _one_ piece of evidence that's used to convict you; although, it may be a single piece of evidence which convinces your attourney to railroad you into a plea deal.

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

#137

Post by themafia »

constableclaude wrote: post #76

The headline evokes ideas of creating a video of a suspect perpetrating the crime but what I think is much more likely is the police officer used AI to enhance an image in a way that they considered innocuous, e.g: a photo was blurry so they “enhanced” it. Since “enhancing” is letting AI fill in the gaps it would be using AI to “create evidence”. Regardless of what they did, tampering with evidence is completely unac…

> it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to justify creating evidence out of thin air.

Yet we have many examples of this precise thing happening. This is because the police carry immense credibility when testifying. This is also why the "Brady List" exists.

> the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an image or video had been created

How? Just pure skill? Again, we can see from appeals court proceedings, they miss details all the time. The system of "public defense" in the United States is severely lacking.

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

#138

Post by themafia »

jyounker wrote: post #42
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

When they choose the "DNA loci" to do SRT "matching" in the first place they convinced themselves it was a unique fingerprint and there never would be any duplicates in the database.

It only took a few years.

They've since changed and expanded the standard "DNA loci" to compensate.

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

#139

Post by themafia »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #35
gcr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

It's actually an institutional success since prison labor is so often utilized in the United States. The truth is they're just lying to you.

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

#140

Post by inigyou »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #99
inigyou wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get rewarded based on winning cases?

Yeah, again, there are some incentives to fabricate evidence like career advancement. Now why should those, on a mass scale, outweigh disincentives like getting caught in an adversarial process and (presumably) some qualm about regularly convicting innocents and regularly letting guilty parties run free in communities. Easy to argue in particular cases but I haven't heard the basis for a trend.

What adversarial process? If the prosecutor loses the case, the defendant doesn't go to jail but still receives a very big punishment and the prosecutor loses nothing. And prosecutors never prosecute themselves for false prosecution.
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