Cloverfield got me into thinking

[Ron_Tomkins]

Watching this movie remind me of an interrogant I had postulated myself a long ago. As years go by and our technology increase, we are getting closer to making videotaped evidence useless, simply because there will be no way to tell the difference between a faked video and an original one. The same thing could be said currently of pictures. Technically if someone showed you a picture of a spaceship landing on Yellowstone Park, you would have no way of knowing, by looking at it, if the picture was not manipulated by a real avid photoshop artist.

What will indeed happen when the technology not only is advanced enough, but available enough as to make real life looking fake events on video clips?

[boloboffin]

Provenance. People can point to where the videotape of Cloverfield came from and document its alterations. The same would be true of any evidence submitted to a court. Without provenance established, the evidence would be very weak in a trial.

[gtc]

It could become more like witness testimony, which can be compelling but is not compelling if it contradicts other evidence.

On the other hand, I wonder if the same computer technology will be better able to analyse video images for subtle evidence of alteration.

[Dark Jaguar]

Yeah that's sure possible, but then again technology provided that form of evidence to begin with and it's not like we've had that form of "inerrant" evidence for that long.

That providence thing there (nice word by the way) seems like the only real way to go about it. It'll still be more reliable than eye witness testimony at least, and with a trail of evidence showing where it came from it can still be as reliable as it is now.

[gumboot]

It depends on what use you're talking.

If you're talking general release, I would argue that the faking of video has been possible for a very long time, and has been able to fool people for a long time.

If you mean in terms of evidence in a court of law...

Evidence firstly requires a chain of custody - that means a confirmed link all the way from camera to the court room.

Secondly, even today the validity of video/photographs must be certified by experts who forensically examine the material. The world's best photoshop artists will tell you that any sort of manipulation of the original image leaves a digital fingerprint that can quite easily be detected.

I don't think, even today, that video evidence alone is considered compelling. It's just one more piece in the puzzle.

[shadron]

There are other possibilities. A confirmed "real" video can be scrambled and then only judged through a descrambling device; then the problem becomes, who has control of the descrambler (this can be done in various analog ways such that a computer is not involved, for the finiky).

[Seismosaurus]

This kind of thing has been the stuff of movie plots for many a year. Take a look at the movie "Rising Sun"; a faked video from a security camera was a central plot element.