Surveillance Footage Has a Chain of Custody Problem
No major surveillance camera vendor publicly documents hash at capture, Merkle-chained audit logs, or external immutable anchoring. That is an FRE 901 authentication problem courts are beginning to recognize.
This essay covers the technical architecture required to make footage independently verifiable — hash at capture, Merkle chaining, Arweave immutable anchoring — and introduces Challenge the Footage: free legal document generation for public defenders challenging ALPR, body camera, and civilian recording evidence.
Source and model legislation live in the surveillance-evidence-integrity repository.
Full essay on PragmaticVectors.
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