[2017-11-03] Blockchain Could Help Verify Crime Evidence

[Beef Coin]

An official for the U.K. Ministry of Justice believes blockchain could help the government secure and verify digital evidence.

Alistair Davidson, a technical architecture lead at the Ministry, published a blog post Thursday which outlined a notable blockchain use case related to law enforcement: using the tech to create records for officer-worn camera footage.

While Davidson's blog post is largely hypothetical, it's a noteworthy exploration of how blockchain could find its way to being used by public-sector entities like the Justice Ministry. He noted that such utilization would be especially useful in court, particularly if the prosecution wanted to use the ledger record to prove the video’s authenticity, according to the post.

Davidson wrote:

"This property of distributing trust could be genuinely transformational in situations where public trust of government might not be taken for granted."

The ledger would not actually store the video, he stated. Rather, it would contain a hash of the video’s data and metadata, as well as a listing of its location within the government’s storage area.

If the videos are uploaded to a publicly available cloud storage, “the blockchain would be readable by anyone, anywhere - but only writable by the police,” Davidson writes.

In a technical overview published by the Ministry of Justice, the government explains that while a blockchain is immutable, it can only verify the assets stored after they are listed. Files may still be modified prior to being listed on the blockchain.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/u-k-ministry-of-justice-provides-use-case-for-blockchain/

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[darkangel11]

Very interesting. It would be a hack proof way of making the evidence widely available, like to lawyers, but at the same time not allow them to tamper with it.
I believe as time passes people will start making um more interesting ways of using the blockchain. A great example was the provably fair system used by casinos, blockchain voting and many more.

[Embeco]

That's great. I've thought of Bitcoin as an immutable storage for Hashes of large files for quite a while, police footage starts to get really useful if it can't be manipulated. Does not change the problem of staff "forgetting" to push the record button however...

[ettessuta]

i was think blockchain increase Crime Evidence because you not need ID to proof your self and start use it  

[Falgorn]

If the police will be given the opportunity to record video from an open book of the detainee, this will in many respects remove the charges against the crypto currency regarding its use for criminal purposes. However, for equal opportunities for proof in criminal proceedings, this possibility should be provided not only to the police, but also to lawyers, still such data are publicly available for viewing.

[Karakyli]

If such points of contact develop, then the crypto currency will stop blaming that it can be easily used for criminal purposes. This has always been a very strong argument by different governments to prohibit the use of crypto currency in the country. Without such an argument, the crypto currency will quickly be introduced by states as a means of payment.

[Qartersa]

While this may be interesting to help the justice system administered and imposed by the government, I do not think this is possible unless one has been proven effective. Bitcoins and block chains alike have been especially created to forestall possibilities of unleashing personas thereby creating a fiction of anonymity in the Bitcoin world. Nonetheless, should this be true that police officers can have access to criminal activities through block chain, I think they would have to go through a very tedious process to successfully determine the true culprit as some may have only been created by robots or trolls.