Digital images as evidence : evidence / Select Committee on Science and Technology.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
Date:
1998
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Digital images as evidence : evidence / Select Committee on Science and Technology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    168/184 (page 160)
    Sub-Committee), digital images MUST be treated differently when used as evidence. Not by some artificial and irrelevant “admissibility” approach, but by firm action being taken NOW to ensure that in future any legal examination (eg a criminal court trial) which involves reliance on computer-generated evidence must first order a report BY AN EXPERT into the likely reliability of that evidence. I know this will be an unpalatable thought, because your Sub-Committee will quickly spot the large cost implications—but the cost of NOT getting expert testimony will eventually be infinitely higher and be measured in far more dangerous citizen distrust and social breakdown (BETTER STILL, AN INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING A NEW LEGALLY-RELIABLE DIGITAL MACHINE ARCHITECTURE WILL BE THE CHEAPEST APPROACH IN THE LONG RUN). 3. “Watermarking” and any other so-called “authentication” technique inherently relies on the same digital architectures as the systems or digital images they are intended to “authenticate”. There is no reliable practical measure. Every supposed “uncrackable” system is crackable, eventually. Given the opportunity, an expert can cast doubt on almost any digital evidence however supposedly “authenticated”. “If it’s digital, it is inherently modifiable without audit trail” and that is the basic and overwhelming truth of the matter, with current commercial digital architectures. 4. Always call for an independent expert’s report, first. 5. Compression or error correction does not raise special problems, just amplifies the basic one “no (human readable) audit trail” (as well as that of “communicating in code”... ). 6. Of course civil liberties are threatened (it is already possible for papparazzi to dream up any photo they want, digitally, and print it in a newspaper; equally the police are already able to “prove” someone was at the scene of a crime by undetectably modifying a digital surveillance camera image). On the other hand, if no- one really knows where you are or who you are—“you are only the digital image you permit others to see or know”—the concept of “civil liberties” (for the privileged, but growing, few) perhaps becomes redundant anyway— ‘digital image technology liberties” replaces it. 7. Whether there are statutory controls or not will make no difference—the technology of micro-miniature digital surveillance cameras, transmitting their images to wherever you want on the face of the globe by low- power wireless communications over public mobile telephone networks, satphones, the Internet, etc is dramatically advancing. We are about to enter a world not of “Big Brother is watching you”, but “Millions of Private Little Brothers are watching you (and you them)”. Such controls would never be enforceable, even if one could sensibly define them and draw them up in the first place. 8. Yes, of course advice and training should be provided to law enforcement officers. (I am not sure the word “further” makes sense, however—is there much/any such training provided already?) Above all, they should be taught to recognise when an expert investigation and opinion is required (that is, “usually always”), and not, eg try and oppose it. 9. See my answers to 6 and 7. You can try, but it is not going to work. You might “control” existing newspapers (but the Princess Diana “sensible and restrained” aftermath is probably only going to be a short- term effect) and television, but these are rapidly becoming far less powerful in terms of being “the media”. The new media is the Internet, or whatever broadband “private and personal” superhighway follows it, plus recordable Digital Video Disks, 3-D computer “games” using real-time collected images of real locations and real people etc, etc—in the free world, the horse is already well out of the stable. NB The problem of trying to control these things by statutue will not improve whilst there are no technically competent people drafting the statutes. For example, the definition in the Criminal Justice Act intended to modify the Child Protection Act specifically to make mere possession of an “obscene image” of a child an offence, whatever form that image is in (having in mind eg “zipped” files, protected by a PIN, downloaded from paedophile Usenet Group sites on the Internet), defines “pseudo photograph” as “any computer data capable of being transformed into a photograph”. Unfortunately, that definition makes ALL computer data (eg this email!) a “pseudo photograph” of an “obscene image” of a child, since, by use of appropriately written software any “Data” is transformable into any “image” you want!! Dr Stephen Castell 6 November 1997 Memorandum submitted by Lord Brain, Member of the Council of the Royal Photographic Society and Chairman of The British Photographers Liaisons Committee AN EXPLANATION OF THE DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES IN CHEMICAL AND DIGITAL IMAGING I use the words Chemical and Digital Imaging because a photograph is defined in the 1988 Copyright Act as: “photograph” means a recording of light or other radiation on any medium on which an image is produced or from which an image may by any means be produced, and which is not a film.