
Journalist recovers video of his arrest after police deleted it - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/journalist-recovers-video-of-his-arrest-after-police-deleted-it.ars
======
daenz
> "Miller was charged with a single count of resisting arrest. ... 'we do not
> understand how, absent some other underlying charge for which there was
> probable cause, a charge of resisting arrest can stand on its own?'"

The most infuriating part of that article.

~~~
anamax
>> "Miller was charged with a single count of resisting arrest. ... 'we do not
understand how, absent some other underlying charge for which there was
probable cause, a charge of resisting arrest can stand on its own?'

That's settled law. The cop's mistake wrt whether an arrest is valid is not a
defense against a resisting arrest charge.

Supposedly you get to make up for the unlawful arrest later.

I'm not claiming that this is good (or bad), just that it is fairly settled
law.

~~~
kkowalczyk
Isn't "lack of probable cause" crucial here?

There's a difference between arresting someone when you have a probable cause
and arresting someone just because you can.

The standard for probable cause might be low, much lower than a standard for
proving a crime has been committed, but surely there is a standard.

If the cop cannot show that there was probable cause to arrest someone, he a)
should be accountable in some way b) he shouldn't be able to arrest someone
for resisting the arrest that he had no right to make in the first place as
that's absurd.

Not to mention that based on the description of the events, the "resisting
arrest" in this case is an excuse and not something that actually happened.

~~~
ars
That's not how it works. You may be able to sue later for lack of probable
cause (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_arrest> ) but you still can
not resist the arrest even if you are sure you are right.

~~~
nextparadigms
Doesn't this conflict with that law that says citizens can intervene and stop
cops from arresting someone? It was something to do with citizen arrest and
arresting the cops themselves if they do something very bad.

~~~
ars
What law is this? I've never heard of such a law. Normally if police are
corrupt then the next level up law enforcement is called, i.e.
city->state->federal

------
joelhaus
This is one of the reasons why Android's "Instant Upload"[1] feature is so
awesome. Every Android device running 2.2+ is capable of instantly uploading
photos and videos taken with your phone into a private folder on your Google+
account... not sure if the iPhone Google+ app will also do this, can anyone
confirm?

There are other solutions proposed in this thread, but if you have an aversion
to Google services (or perhaps an iPhone), you can also try out the new
Dropbox beta that also has automatic uploading of photos and videos from your
phone[2].

[1]
[http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...](http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1304818)

[2] [http://lifehacker.com/5881692/get-up-to-45gb-of-extra-
space-...](http://lifehacker.com/5881692/get-up-to-45gb-of-extra-space-on-
dropbox-for-uploading-photos-and-videos)

    
    
      P.S. This issue is another reason why it's so important
      that the tech community has a voice in the upcoming
      FCC spectrum auctions. Congress is currently trying to
      prevent the FCC from placing conditions on the auction,
      which will surely keep the spectrum in the hands of the
      biggest telco players and prevent more competition &
      innovation in the wireless market.

------
brk
I surprised we're not seeing more instant offload/stream to server video apps
for scenarios like this. With iPhones and 3G service, you could easily have
videos auto-uploaded when you put the phone in a "panic" mode. It could even
be set to be auto-emailed to some list of contacts in the event you don't
checkin within 60 minutes.

Seems buildable, wish I had the time to do so.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Imagine a GoPro-style camera which transmitted wirelessly to a nearby
smartphone. From there, the receiving app would sync it to a server ASAP. If
you knew you were entering into a situation where video you were capturing
might be confiscated, you could tape the phone to your thigh with a lot of
duct tape. By the time the police organized themselves sufficiently to cut the
tape off of your body, the important video likely would already be uploaded.
Could this scheme be expanded upon by some sort of steel lock box around one's
waist/ankle/etc? That would give the phone a lot of time to do its work.
Furthermore, the box could contain an additional microphone which would
continue recording after initial camera seizure. In cases where groups of
protesters feared arrest, could Bluetooth be used to create a Tor-esque
upload-to-the-cloud network which would eventually reconstitute everyone's
video? I'm imagining a bunch of phones talking to each other in a mesh and
trading blobs which could be reassembled server-side.

~~~
ADevilsAdvocate
At least until the police started deploying cell-phone jammers as a matter of
'best practice' during police action.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
This sort of thing could set-off an arms race between police and those who
want to record them. However, the police today seem to stifle recording in a
grass roots, individual way. Would the police chief be embarrassed to explain
in a room full of journalists that his department "jams" legal communications
equipment as a matter of practice?

------
fingerprinter
Can a lawyer comment about evidence tampering or something else? Do not know
how the police could delete the videos and not be held accountable for
something.

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
How can the police not be held accountable? Who investigates the police? Other
police. Who investigates other police? Other police.

It's the police.

~~~
icebraining
Replace 'police' for 'people' and we find out that no one can ever be held
accountable.

"The police" is not a single body, there are multiple police forces which are
mostly independent. I don't know the US system very well, but at least where I
live the cops that work on the street have a completely different chain of
command than the detectives who investigate them if necessary.

~~~
_dps
When you substitute "people" for police, you're missing a crucial ingredient;
other police officers have an institutional alignment with their fellow
officers, and will continue to interact with other officers. Further, they are
likely to need to be able to "get along" politically with other police
departments in the future even if they don't interact with particular people
in those departments day-to-day.

On the other side of the scale, the relationship with the mistreated citizen
is totally expendable, and the relationship with the public consciousness is a
diffuse one rather than a concentrated one (i.e. there's no one-on-one rapport
with individual citizens, only a generalized "police force" and "citizens at
large" relationship).

Game theory reliably predicts the outcome here: the diffuse and expendable
relationships are likely to take a back seat to the concentrated and durable
ones. Obviously this doesn't predict individual outcomes with certainty, but
the imbalanced incentives with intra-institutional review are pretty
significant.

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
"citizens at large"

I listen to the local police radio on the internet (it's oddly relaxing), and
they have two terms for us: suspects, and reporting persons (RPs).

------
NathanKP
_He also hopes to determine the exact time the video was deleted, which could
substantiate his charge that it was deleted while under police control._

Is this possible? As far as I know most cameras just delete the file from the
storage medium, and there is nothing in the storage medium which could be used
to determine this.

~~~
hartror
Depending on the underlying filesystem there could be evidence of the last
time it was altered though it could be faked with enough knowledge.

~~~
true_religion
I'm not sure---the last FS usually only posts a modified date if the file is
modified and not deleted.

If its simply deleted, it'd those sectors as 'gone' in the file table but
there's no notation in the file table to say when modifications to _it_ were
made.

~~~
icebraining
Many current filesystems implement journaling - essentially, a circular buffer
where operations are logged before being acted on. Therefore, it's perfectly
possible that a log entry of the deletion is still on the device, if it used a
journaling fs.

EDIT: Also, the EXT filesystems have a 'dtime' (deletion time) property for
inodes.

~~~
slug
Most photo-cameras use FAT for SD cards so I expect journaling is not that
common. Don't know if the same applies to 'professional' video-cameras though.

~~~
icebraining
Is it a photo or a video camera? I expect a professional video camera to use
something other than FAT, which can only hold files smaller than 4GB.

~~~
Nick_C
My DVR uses FAT32 on a 1TB disk. Each recording has a meta entry that holds a
list of files that make up that recording. As far as I can tell, as it
records, it closes a file that is approaching 4GB, opens a new one to continue
recording, and updates the meta entry by adding the new file name to the list.

The DVR is consumer grade, but this method is simple to implement. I guess my
point is that it is a solved problem to use FAT with large files.

