Citizen Video Journalism Meets Policing

There was an article in The Australian about a fortnight ago called "Police take a tip from YouTube", discussing the plans of the NSW police (New South Wales is Australia's oldest and most populous state) to roll out a website where private citizens can anonymously upload photos and videos taken with their mobile phones which may be of assistance in solving crimes. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of what I wrote about last December in my Cryptographic Cameras article (see the "Emergency Response" section), an article heavily inspired by an essay by Bruce Schneier and others, and one which I really should get around to finishing sometime soon.

This is a really interesting idea and one I'll tentatively call "good". There are a few things which cause concern - there is obviously no system in place to guarantee the authenticity of uploaded photos and videos, as would be done using digital signatures in a true "cryptographic camera" system. This means that we can't immediately discount the possibility of people uploading doctored media in an attempt to deceive police (perhaps framing an innocent, perhaps in an attempt to lead police away from actual leads) - I'm not sure whether the generally poor quality of mobile phone media would make Photoshopping harder or easier. Also, because the presence of GPS facilities in mobile phones is still pretty rare, there is no way to confirm that photos or video footage are actually of the location an uploader claims them to be, as there, again, would be in a true "cryptographic camera" system. Obviously, this is less of a problem the more distinctive the proclaimed location is.

The first thing that struck me as curious was the level of indirection introduced by having people upload their media through a website rather than sending it direct, and possibly even live, via the phone itself using MMS messages or video calls. When it's possible to make one, a live video call has substantially more value than a recorded video uploaded after the fact precisely because it removes the possibility of doctoring a video. The reason this isn't currently being considered, apparently, is a desire to preserve the anonymity of the people doing the uploading. I realise this might seem unusual to some international readers, for whom mobile phones can be entirely anonymous - while honeymooning in Europe earlier this year my wife and I were able to buy pre-paid SIM cards in Poland and the Czech Republic without leaving any sort of record of who we were. In Australia, you can't get a mobile phone of any kind (to my knowledge, anyway) without showing a driver's license or some other accepted form of ID, which means that your mobile number can always be linked directly back to you. On the one hand, I'm impressed and pleased that the police actually realise and really seem to care that anonymity is a valid concern here, but on the other, I'm not sure this solution is entirely effective. It's a sure thing this website will record the IP addresses of uploaders, and in 9 cases out of 10 the police can track this to an individual or at least a household.

But whatever shortcomings this plan has for the time being, they're sure to improve with time. GPS will eventually be standard in mobile phones, and it would be astonishingly stupid of handset manufacturers not to give users the option to "geotag" their photos and videos by embedding GPS data. If evidence arises that doctored material is being submitted, digital signatures could certainly be implemented if the police wanted to put enough money behind it. Ultimately, regardless of whether this experiment succeeds or fails, the very fact that the police are even considering using technology to provide private citizens the ability to conveniently and anonymously contribute to crime fighting is a fantastic and exciting thing.

At the same time, I would throw just as much if not more support behind a parallel site run by private citizens which is all about letting people provide photos and footage of police officers in action, letting us watch the watchers while we're not helping them.