Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of proof is the other way around.

The big claim is here: the state has grandiose claims that the overwhelming majority is fair, but there is no proof of it.

Therefore the state should prove that more than 90% of the cases are legitimate, fair, not coerced, and not motivated by the pressure to interrupt the proceedings.

97% of people choose plea deals or out-of-court settlement, it is a huge amount.

It means that in real practice, not imaginary internet, people who face court consider that justice is a big machine that can crush you no matter if you are innocent or not.

In the best case you are acquitted at the end, but you are guaranteed to bear the financial burden, fear and stress as a punishment.

Being held in jail before trial is a very convincing reason to plea deal too.

It's a system engineered to make pleading the only reasonable option, no matter if you did anything or not.

When DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So, 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double digits.

A few years ago, one of my coworkers was arrested for a domestic violence complaint. Looking into his case, I found an extremely specific lurid description of the allegations -- and then I found the same lurid description copy/pasted to every other person recently arrested for the same crime. I'm probably getting the specific terms wrong, but I did click through to see it on a government website, because my first suspicion was the aggregator, but no, the police just had a boilerplate story full of specifics which could not possibly apply to each and every person they carelessly slapped it onto. This absolutely blew my mind at the time, but it fits with smaller subsequent observations. In any case: a double digit percentage of institutional failure does not upset my priors about how carefully the police operate.

An important thing you should recognize: the judicial system is painfully nontransparent in such a way that even figuring this sort of thing takes an extensive amount of time and is often even impossible. I've personally gone down a similar route (did some journalism for a bit) by trying to understand how shotspotter is used in prosecution, many of which resulted in false arrests and many, many years of life lost across all the people arrested falsely from it.

If you would like to begin trying to answer these, I recommend starting with submitting some FOIAs. Considering your stance seems to be that you won't believe what others are telling you -- I promise you that you'll be surprised.

If you believe parallel construction should be illegal (it sure seems like it is unconstitutional to me), then 100% of prosecutions that rely on it are unjust. I don't think anyone truly knows how common it is, though, and that's by design. Double-digits wouldn't shock me at all.

I don’t know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was preserved).

Police in the United States is already in a state of "institutional failure"...

Do you have any exposure to the criminal "justice" system in the USA?

We have the highest proportion of imprisoned citizens in the world.

This is done because there's an exception in our constitution for slavery "as punishment for a crime" and well all know that capitalism loves slave labor.

An old phone book is enough.

What about a system that saves in some way the hash in a Blockchain, and if you, eg, XOR the hash of the video with the hash of the previous block you will "certainly" know that the video was created between the previous block and the block where the hash is saved in. That's a starting point.

"Crack the hash"? Does this mean you were employing some novel hashing algorithm and relying on its secrecy? If so your employer were never serious about security in the first place. Hardware attestation is more or less a solved problem, and that solution does not involve secret algorithms.

Now sell them version 2.

> But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that a digital image is not more recent than a particular time

Many (most?) blockchain mechanisms include a timestamp in each transaction on the chain, so while multiple records from the same owner prove little (the timestamps could be faked over a given period of time) the interaction with the wider network and the chain would give some confidence that the record happened between within a small amount of time.

The other possibility, that doesn't require a chain with many independent active participants, is to have things signed by an external trusted authority. Submit a hash of the content and appropriate metadata to them, and have them sign it with a signing timestamp. I've considered abusing ACME certificates for document signing like that: the hash of content (or some signature based upon it) becomes the subdomain to sign¹ and you get a certificate that even after expiry is evidence that the CA saw that value at the signing timestamp. Note of the signing will also be in the public certificate transparency log. This wouldn't, on its own, prove anything about the authenticity of the content, that could have been doctored before signing, but it does prove that the content+metadata existed at that time (so might be more useful in copyright claim type cases, or agreed contract situations where all parties have signed the content and the signatures are included in the metadata, than for proving authenticity).

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[1] based64²-ed with non-alphanumeric characters removed and truncated³ to fit or split, so acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.domain.tld or acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.w5jmmkpmyfgshx2jecsfordpnq.domain.tld

[2] names not being case-sensitive drops some of the entropy, if that is a concern use a 32-bits-per-character encoding instead and have names twice as long

Publish hash(image) on the blockchain at a verifiable time, then publish the image itself.

The image contains the previous block’s hash.

Wouldn’t this establish both a lower bound and an upper bound on the time the image could have been produced?

wouldn't that be a hash of the image signed by a trusted entity and stored on a chain? maybe i'm overlooking why this doesn't work

Interesting, There aren't any newspapers left in my country, neither printed nor not printed. The closest you can find is the weekly advertising booklet here and there. Which is irrelevant now because a computer can either stich new content to an old picture, or entirely producing a custom picture.

That would be a use case for a block chain. But I still don't understand how you are securing the integrity of the validity of the certificate stating the authenticity of the media. I only understand you are stamping media with a "at least as old as [timestamp]

Plenty of people. If you have running water, some tape, and trashbags, you too could have a darkroom.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhibi...

The roll itself can be manipulated too. Most of the techniques used in modern photoshop are basically 1:1 carry overs of darkroom processes. Layers, dodge and burn, masking, etc.

There was a time you could take this class in highschool.

Not really. End result is the same: manipulated image.

It is really not any different. People would throw a hubcap in the air and pitch it as a UFO photo and idiots would latch on to that. You could take a photo of the empire state building and use a double exposure to make it look like you were king kong. Kids were doing this sort of stuff. Stop motion home movies where you'd look like you were levitating or your head got cut off.

It always comes down to provenance.

Plenty could.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhibi...