On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:38:55 -0500, willshak wrote:
On 12/23/2004 5:21 PM US(ET), Dave Hinz took fingers to keys, and typed
the following:

The photo is offered
up into evidence (or whatever the term is), the officer who took it
swears that it accurately portrays the incidents that are being testified
to, and that's that.

That's that for the time being. If it is proved that the photograph was
altered, then the person testifying as to its authenticity could be
charged with tampering with evidence.

Right, just as with any other technology or piece of evidence.
The topic came up because I was (a) surprised, and (b) toying with some
sort of "If we used an MD5 checksum, we could prove that the image hadn't
been tampered with". He explained how (b) wasn't needed because of the
whole "testify that the content...." thing. Film photos can be faked,
after all, it's just much more time consuming, so the legal folks have
already been over all this, to the level they understand it.

Dave Hinz