Video surveillance evidence in court

Though laws vary by country and state, courts aim to verify that video surveillance is authentic (i.e. the video reflects reality and hasn’t been modified). Traditional security video recorders, however, often experience problems like clock drift, inaccurate timezones, disk failures, access problems, and unverified USB file transfers that complicate submitting video as evidence in court. If, instead, video evidence includes incontestable verification of its authenticity — complete with tamper-proof audit logs of timestamps associated with its original recording — then submitting surveillance video as evidence in court becomes much easier and more reliable.

Camio provides several features that assist in proving that recorded video has been produced as evidence without tampering or modification:

1. The SHA checksum of the video content itself is computed immediately upon storing each video file from the camera’s video stream. Since any modification of the video file would alter its SHA checksum hash, this hash provides proof that any digital copy of the video is exactly the same as the original recording.
2. Write-once metadata, stored with every video event, includes the SHA checksum hash of the the video file content with the associated timestamps that were recorded on tamper-proof cloud servers. The creation timestamps in the metadata are never altered, and cloud-generated timestamps, which are practically immune to clock drift and timezone problems, can be used to corroborate the timestamps of the video at the time of recording.
3. Reliable timestamps are created by system clocks that are continually verified by, and synchronized with, cloud servers. So regardless of the camera’s own clock, or the clock of an on-premise NVR/VMS, Camio ensures that the video’s recorded timestamps are accurate.
4. Link sharing that enables video to remain in-situ as it’s reviewed quickly, without complicating the chain of custody with the tracking of physical media being shared via USB thumb drives or email attachments.
5. Verified downloads include the original SHA checksum and metadata as proof that the video file submitted as evidence is an exact digital copy of the original.

Submitting video evidence is simple because it can be downloaded from any web browser with the supporting documentation of its authenticity.

Step 1: Select the events and choose Download from the overflow menu.

Step 2: Open the zip file downloaded in your browser. It contains copies of the original video files and a metadata.json file with the information required to prove that the video files exactly match the originals.

Step 3: Submit the video files themselves along with the contents of the metadata.json file as evidence. The date_created, duration_sec, hash, and name of each file is included in the metadata.json file as in this example:

{
    "files": [
        {
            "date_created": "2017-12-15T13:41:13.398-0000",
            "duration_sec": 10.811,
            "hash": "5ab887bbe4385e77ec4ff2c92e3f62f44420e011",
            "name": "0000-0001.2017-12-15-05-41-13.mp4"
        },
        {
            "date_created": "2017-12-15T13:41:01.786-0000",
            "duration_sec": 10.927,
            "hash": "8e6f8dbe3d9f0d594beb3982e82d05e6250a5613",
            "name": "0000-0000.2017-12-15-05-41-01.mp4"
        }
    ],
    "url": "https://camio.com/app/#search;q=east+west"
}

Forensic specialists of the court can independently verify that the video content is original by running the command shasum filename as in this example that verifies the first file above:

$ shasum 0000-0001.2017-12-15-05-41-13.mp4
5ab887bbe4385e77ec4ff2c92e3f62f44420e011 0000-0001.2017-12-15-05-41-13.mp4

Video is increasingly a critical element of evidence in both court and other legal proceedings. The fact that Camio enables video from any camera/DVR/NVR/VMS to include a checksum hash computed at the very instant that video is first recorded — and preserved in encrypted, replicated, tamper-proof cloud storage — radically simplifies verifying the authenticity of surveillance video as evidence. Combined with fast, auditable link sharing for forensic review without file exchanges, Camio makes it simple and natural to comply with best-practice policies for evidence collection. Learn more.