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by timclemans 3947 days ago
Do you think uploading straight to a department's S3 bucket would address any of the audit/security concerns? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingHTTPPOST... I'm looking into https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/
2 comments

I think you may still run into some issues, but to be honest, if you are looking to make a business out of this, I would find and talk extensively to law enforcement and/or the state's attorney office in your area. I am neither. I did work for several years alongside law enforcement and have been to more crime scenes than I care to recount. I know from that experience that even what appears to be the simplest of tasks involved heavy documentation, logging, and chain of custody procedures. For data, such as photos and videos, they must eliminate or significantly reduce any chances of a file's metadata being altered. A good defense attorney simply has to put doubt in a jury's mind. They can do that by showing the video/photo could have come from a different date, a different location, etc...

I think it may be easier to refer to more as a crime tip submission site. However, with that approach you are competing with Crimestoppers which already accepts photos and videos from tipsters. Again, IANAL, but I believe those submissions fall into something similar to a polygraph. Where if you submit a photo/video to the site, the police can use it to build a case, but cannot use it in court.

Depending on where you are located, I do know a few crime scene investigators and computer forensic investigators that I may be able to put you in contact with and who could better answer your questions.

See: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communicat...

I'm not looking to make a business of out this which is why I went with .org instead of .com. I'm looking to solve a major problem with sending photos/videos to police departments. I'm looking into chain of evidence now. Thank you for your helpful feedback.
Yep. Look into digital evidence or "e-evidence". Both are big topics in crime scene investigations and many law enforcement agencies and courts have established procedures for handling. There is ample discussion.
I just added the MD5 checksum from AWS S3 to the email alerts for each linked "evidence".
You may want to look at https://guardtime.com/ for audit/data tampering concerns.

I'm copy pasting this from their site https://guardtime.com/ksi-technology

* A user interacts with the KSI system by submitting a hash-value of the data to be signed into the KSI infrastructure and is then returned a signature which provides cryptographic proof of the time of signature, integrity of the signed data, as well as attribution of origin i.e. which entity generated the signature.