I can see technology advancing to the point that traditional forms of evidence - photographs, voice recordings, videotapes, even fingerprints will be so easy to forge digitally that they will have no real value as evidence. How will this affect the use of evidence in the future?
Hopefully we’ll still have traditionally honest investigators. 
Actually I’m sure technology will advance along with it where they will be able to detect advanced forgery.
Forensics has totally ruined the detective fiction genre. No more pistols-wiped-clean-of-prints so the sleuth has to go on character analysis and brilliant intuition. Now it’s all tiny incriminating microscopic bits of fibre, laboratories, and analysis.
Well such forgery is either the result of a criminal framing someone or police/investigator corruption, both of which have been around a long, long time. Sniffing out corruption in it’s self will remain pretty much the same.
Forgery will be easier to do now, although hopefully people will get better at spotting the fakes too.
Many people right here can point out tiney little details that let you know a photo has been digitally altered when you show it to them… an investigator from 1950 wouldn’t even know what a pixel or digital blurring was. Look at all the security features they put in money nowadays too. I could have done some very easy forgery if I had even my crappy scanner and printer with me 30 years ago. Today I’m still out of luck in printing myself a few million due to the advances in fake-spotting.
Guess you could say we know how easily evidence can be faked now, so we’ll scrutinize it that much more before we accept it at face value… though once proved genuine, probably used the same way it always was. Also simply having well forged “evidence” may not be as powerful as it sounds… if you perfectly faked a picture of me supposedly assasinating the king of Siam in SE Asisa at the same time I was really having a business meeting at work in New York with 20 witnesses, you wouldn’t get very far.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by curwin *
**I can see technology advancing to the point that traditional forms of evidence - photographs, voice recordings, videotapes, even fingerprints will be so easy to forge digitally that they will have no real value as evidence. How will this affect the use of evidence in the future? **[/QUOTE
It really tickles me that you refer to videotapes as “traditional forms of evidence.”
But for what it’s worth, I expect we will still use video and audio recordings - as it becomes easier to tamper with such evidence, people will get better at detecting tampering. So I basically agree with mmmiiikkkeee.
The traditional, and still the primary, form of evidence is personal testimony by witnesses as to what they themselves have seen or experienced. “Technological” evidence may supplement this, and the way in which it does so will vary as technology advances. Over time some technologies will become less useful and others more useful, but this is nothing new.
The future is already here.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/135/metro/At_MIT_they_can_put_words_in_our_mouths+.shtml
Turns out this question took a while to be relevant!
I happen to do video forensics work and have been accepted as an expert witness in various courts. Most of my work is in civil cases involving vehicle incidents.
You might be surprised by the types of video material we work with and the questions we get asked. A lot of my work is in establishing the foundation for the reliability or authenticity of video material for one specific purpose (e.g., what is the time between these two frames?) And I frequently have to provide an opinion on whether a video has been edited or altered in some way.
But it HAS become more common for me to get videos where one party claims that “the orange safety cone wasn’t there when I slipped and fell.” The cone is plainly visible in the store’s security video, but the individual just assumes that it’s very easy for the store owner to have the cone inserted into the video after the fact. Hint: It’s not that easy.
That’s an important point. It’s an arms race.
This too. ZonexandScout mentioned being an expert witness, and vetting/authenticating evidence is an often overlooked part of the legal process. A decade or so ago I got called into a deposition where some photographs I took were used as evidence. There wasn’t any dispute that the event happened, where it happened, who it happened to, when, etc., but they still gathered as much relevant evidence as they could. I didn’t even know about the case until I was called in, and they still asked questions like “you say these photos were taken between 5:30 and 5:32 PM, why does it look kind of dark out?” (clouds) “why are these car’s headlights on?” (I wouldn’t care to speculate). That particular attorney knew he was just spitting into the wind for no good reason and let it drop, but I still had to state under oath that I took the photos, that the metadata was correct as best as I know, and that they accurately conveyed the timeline, and that it matched with my recollection of the events. This is all standard operating procedure, but it’s part of the discovery process which doesn’t make for good TV. So there’s already procedures in place to verify authenticity of evidence, and such vigilance will be just as necessary moving forward, but I don’t think we’re exactly in uncharted waters either.
And the OP can now be authenticated under the Ancient Documents Rule.
Ultimately, all court cases depend on trusting that people are telling the truth. There are two ways that people can fail to tell the truth: They can make mistakes, and they can lie. For a very brief time in history, we had technology that could (sometimes) catch people lying, but that was an anomaly: For most of past history, we didn’t have that, nor will we going forward. But what we do still have now, and will continue to have, is technology that stops mistakes. Which, since mistakes are so common, is much more useful anyway.
I’m guessing there will be chain of custody issues with evidence just like there are chain of custody requirements for ballots when voting.
You’ll need a chain of custody so that you know the evidence hasn’t been tampered with. I guess that means more cameras everywhere under both the public and private sector.
Moderating
Since this thread’s revival (after a 23 year rest) we’ve been veering a bit out of FQ bounds. I think this thread will do better in IMHO.
Moved from FQ to IMHO.
That is correct. I also used to do digital forensics work many years ago (a few years after the OP to be exact). A big part of it was being able to demonstrate a chain of custody back to the original source of the data (someone’s computer, phone, camera, etc).
IOW, doctored TikToks and Facebook posts may be accepted in the court of public opinion, but not a court of law.
One possibility is to install multiple cameras in every location that might require surveillance; it may be relatively easy to fake the images from one camera, but it would be much more than twice as difficult to fake the images from two or more different locations and make them consistent with one another. Even better if several independent witnesses have camera footage from different angles
Parallax is a very useful tool when trying to detemine the exact location of a nearby object, and similar comparisons can determine in that object was really in the location the witness says it was. Make no mistake, in the relatively near future many individuals with routinely use personal surveillance systems (or sousveillance as David Brin suggests we call it; surveillance from below). Comparing several different visual sources should allow the elimination of everything but the most comprehensive fakery.