Forged evidence is a problem that has existed in court before. The whole concept of a clean chain of custody of media or an object, the trustworthiness of the thing that generated it, people being able to argue that something is fake and then prove it, has been around for centuries.

There was a brief period during which we could make exact digital replicas of what happened, but not fake them very well, and it sounds like that’s drawing to a close. But that just means video is on the same footing as every other type of evidence.

I think that things like mapping hot/cold pixels, noise modeling etc will come into play to prove source

AI is a new technology but video, images, and documents have always been able to be forged.

In the US at least, there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid in order for this kind of evidence to actually be admissable. You can’t just show any video or photo and say it’s real. You need to establish where it came from, how it came into your possession, and how it’s relevant.

Doesn’t mean forgeries never make it I to court, but just because you can make a fake video easier than before doesn’t mean you can just get it into court easily. Especially since if someone does think it’s suspicious, that will be discussed and ruled on long before the trial itself begins. And even if they can’t outright prove it’s fake, it may not be admissible just due to how suspicious it is.

Law enforcement fabricating evidence is probably a much bigger issue. No matter how well you verify the accurarcy of your own evidence, if the system is corrupt, then it doesnt matter. Digital media is only one small part of that problem. Server logs, message logs, existence of files on your confiscated devices, call logs, etc. can all be fabricated by police. Fabricating images is just a cherry on top.

Cops can just raid your house, confiscate your drives, carefully plant CP on them and claim that you were in posession of CP. Im pretty sure this has happened before.

Manipulating photos, documents and witnesses lying has been invented since long ago.

All of the above is still admissible in court. Just a question of strong evidence it constitutes.

It wouldn’t ever be inadmissible, but it be less and less trusted until it eventually would no longer become a “smoking gun”.

It would be essentially regarded as another form a “eyewitness testimony”, it would require an actual person to attest to its authenticity. If you recorded a street fight, you then would attest to what you can remember, who started the fight, then attest that you didn’t know any of them, and that you did not edit the footage and no one has touched it until you submitted the evidence.

CCTV wouldn’t be “absolute undeniable proof”, it would be linked to the storeowner’s credibility and security practices. For big systems, like government owned buildings, some IT expert would have to testify how the system works, then the security guard on duty will have to testify that no one has tampered with it, probably a neutral third-party IT expert to verify that the government employees isn’t spewing BS technobabble. We would probably need some sort of “citizen’s oversight commission” and people from said commission to tag along and monitor what cops are doing, make sure cops don’t start using AI to edit the footage, ensure the chain of custody is working, kinda like elections and poll watchers type of thing.

Problem I could see is, if you challenge the validity of a contract, and want to get a handwriting expert, you currently have to pay out of pocket. I fear the same for video/audio evidence, if you wanna chalenge it, you have to hire your own expert, and that is gonna get a lot of poorer, innocent people jailed over fake evidence.

So… for authoritarian/totalitarian countries with even less transparency, there’s gonna be a stronger wave of doubt and conspiracy theories about “the government framed him/her”, heck, even in democratic countries, these conspirscy theories are already a thing, people are gomma cry “deepfake” regardless of if the evidence is legit.

A long time.

Digital evidence, like any other evidence, is something that is shared between the plaintiffs and the defense prior to being admitted in court for the judge or the jury to review.

If there is suspicion over whether it is authentic, there are experts that can be brought in to confirm the validity of the digital evidence.

That is not to say that there is no likelihood that false digital evidence can be successfully brought to court, but the likelihood is very small, assuming that each side is doing their part to the letter and spirit of the law.

For a long time, cctv recording isn’t always a 100% effective evidence, it merely proof something happened, and you will need multiple account to actually make a solid argument. Cctv can be forged, evidence can be manipulated, and people can be framed.

Though AI definitely make stuff messier because how thing can be so easily generated.

Court cases are all about constructing narratives—AI is just the legal system distilled to its essence.

This is actually one of the very few reasonable use cases for block chain technology.

You have a security camera on site. It takes recordings and sends them to a data centre which then appends the footage and uses various algorithms to make a much smaller block chain compatible summary, a small hash for each snippit of video. The hash is then mixed with the previous sum of all hashes and appended to the video. This means that after the fact modifying the video is effectively impossible. You would have to do it between the camera and the data centre, so yes, still possible, but doing it at a later date would be very hard. You could also make sure this data was stored in an append only form, say magnetic tape, which has physical measures to prevent access after the date of storage.

Forgeries are nothing new. Society has always worked on trust and best guesses. Nothing has changed.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2650/

When i was in the police I’d often collect CCTV from store owners etc.

I’d usually supervise the download to make sure I only got what I needed. In my statement I’d reference that I’d supervised the download and that the footage hadn’t been tampered with.

It wasnt a big deal.

Adding on that as a compulsory requirement, or making it so CCTV systems add hidden info into the meta data wouldn’t be difficult.