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

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

#151

Post by XorNot »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #143
XorNot wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this has been around for not so long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initiativ...

Sure but conceptually no one should've been able to crack any hashing scheme anyone half-way decent at their job could come up. SHA256 is the default and it's unbroken. Even SHA1 has scant few known collisions. So like...what the heck were they hashing and how that anyone was able to crack it?

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

#152

Post by simulator5g »

dofm wrote: post #132
hiddencost wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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)

It doesn't make much difference if you perform similar practices in a different country. UK police are just like American police.

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

#154

Post by victorbjorklund »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #113
thatguy0900 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My girlfriends been having me watch law and order svu with her and to be honest it doesn't really even seem trustworthy with how they want to present it. The psychologist guy especially will come up with some wildly detailed assertions about who the criminal is based on nothing

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

It affects the jury. If the jury watches tv shows that builds the expectation that there is always a bunch of ballistics evidence etc and that it is always fool proof then they will 1) distrust when there isn’t that type of evidence (but enough other evidence) and 2) they will overvalue the evidence when it exists

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

#155

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sveme wrote: post #142

Why police (and media) cameras aren‘t forced to use camera hardware signing, aka content credentials, is beyond me.

It's because they're a scam. Point the camera at a forged image with a higher resolution than the camera sensor and it will make a signed copy of the unsigned forgery.

That's before getting into the practical problems with securing the keys. Every camera by every manufacturer has keys in it and the attacker only needs one key from one camera, and they get to choose the model? Creating something premised on needing to trust something with such a high probability of being compromised is worse than nothing, because it allows the ensuing forgeries a mechanism to pass themselves off as "signed" "real" images.

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

#156

Post by jrflowers »

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.

> (presumably) some qualm

This sounds like you’re imagining how prosecutors as a group sort of feel about things, generally, and that this notion you’ve thought of outweighs the demonstrable real-world system where prosecutors are awarded for convictions, full stop.

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

#157

Post by BellsOnSunday »

simulator5g wrote: post #152
dofm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It doesn't make much difference if you perform similar practices in a different country. UK police are just like American police.

Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most part.

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

#158

Post by phreeza »

XorNot wrote: post #151
dzhiurgis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this has been around for not so long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initiativ...

Sure but conceptually no one should've been able to crack any hashing scheme anyone half-way decent at their job could come up. SHA256 is the default and it's unbroken. Even SHA1 has scant few known collisions. So like...what the heck were they hashing and how that anyone was able to crack it?

Maybe its more like the hash was a well known secure hash but someone managed to extract the salt/private key/signing certificate from the camera?

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

#159

Post by gorgoiler »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #155
sveme wrote: post #142

Why police (and media) cameras aren‘t forced to use camera hardware signing, aka content credentials, is beyond me.

It's because they're a scam. Point the camera at a forged image with a higher resolution than the camera sensor and it will make a signed copy of the unsigned forgery. That's before getting into the practical problems with securing the keys. Every camera by every manufacturer has keys in it and the attacker only needs one key from one camera, and they get to choose the model? Creating something premised on needing to…

But what about if:

…the signature included the depth measured by the autofocus system across the image?

…or a tiny stereo image was included to capture depth?

…or a mini video in the ten seconds before and after the photo was taken?

…and the key is in a tamper proof HSM?

…and the key is deleted the moment the camera detects the case being taken apart?

I know that it is a losing battle to try to build such hardware when offline attackers have essentially infinite time to dismantle even the most elaborate systems — no such thing as an un breakable safe, only how long it takes to break into it, etc — but I feel these are valid counter measures, are they not?

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

#160

Post by Arodex »

asdff wrote: post #58
Arodex wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of people. If you have running water, some tape, and trashbags, you too could have a darkroom. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhibi... The roll itself can be manipulated too. Most of the techniques used in modern photoshop are basically 1:1 carry overs of darkroom processes. Layers, dodge and burn, masking, etc. There was a time you could take this class in highschool.

You try to equate several days of work, specialized equipment (much more than water and trash bag: you need chemicals, baths, special paper, a projector, plates...) and knowledge with typing a text in a webpage.

Have fun keeping making bad faith arguments alone.

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