[Cryptography] Photojournalists & filmmakers want cameras, to be encrypted

[John Gilmore]

> I'm possibly being naive, but I don't see encryption (past hashing) as
> needed. tell me where I'm wrong?

Here's an example.  Some thugs with a rented box truck broke into a
cannabis dispensary storefront in a residential neighborhood near
mine, some years ago.  These thugs appeared to be hired or imported by
the DEA.  Their typical pattern had been to break all the glass, smash
open the door, take all the drugs, money and electronics they could
find, then disappear and never file charges.  Straight smash-and-grab
harassment, done under official U.S. government auspices.  A local
activist group had set up a call tree for similar future incidents;
they activated their call-tree, and dozens of people came to witness
the attack.  I was one of the witnesses.

I brought an ordinary pocket camera (pre-cellphone).

I recorded video of these thugs carrying things out of the store, from
the public sidewalk.  Several of them grabbed me physically, twisted
the camera out of my hand, and went into it to see what I had recorded.
They were unable to see anything useful and eventually let me go (with
fingers that hurt for several days from their unwarranted assault).  

They claimed that if their pictures were taken then they would be
unable to do their job.  My response is that they shouldn't be
breaking into a store on a public street if they don't want people to
take their pictures.  (I have since heard that the DEA can't get its
local agents to harass medical marijuana storefronts, because they get
so much informal criticism from their neighbors who all voted to make
those storefronts legal.  So DEA took to secretly flying in thugs from
all over the country to do these smash-and-grab raids, and then flying
them home again before they can be brought to justice.)

It turned out that my camera was poor enough that it couldn't take
good video while I was in motion (walking along the sidewalk), so
though I still have the audio track of my assault at their hands, I
did not get any decent photos of the perpetrators.  However, there was
a professional news camera person set up on the public sidewalk
halfway across the street at a mid-street transit stop (this was on
Judah St. in SF), who later told me that they had "made a deal" with
the thugs that the press would not film them in an identifiable way, as
long as they could get their shots of the smashed glass and broken
door of the storefront.

So in this case, the news media failed the public by explicitly refusing
to document the perpetrators of the incident; my camera failed me by
taking very blurred images.  But if it had taken crisp pictures, then
the thugs would've seen the pictures and deleted them.  I would have
wanted to put the camera into a mode where it would take pictures but
never show them (without some key that was not resident in the camera
or its media).

Since these thugs had no legal leg to stand on, I would've welcomed
intervention by local police, or by the thugs trying to seize my
camera or my media.  That would have provoked more publicity about
their actions which they were deliberately trying to cover up, which
would have included a lawsuit by me to recover the media if they had
seized it.

See, not all the people who don't want their pictures seized are
helpless in the face of official thugs.  When the thugs are violating
their own laws, which seems to be a very common occurrence, then the
people have redress against them.  The camera could have had valuable
evidence for that redress, as we have seen in many cases such as that
of Oscar Grant (shot dead in cold blood by BART police, who tried to
confiscate all cameras among the observers, but a train left the
station during the incident and the cameras of those passengers
escaped).

	John

PS:
> 2 and 3 are solved with remote storage, to a "safe" place, of the stills or
> video. Take it off the camera, fast.

You can't always do that.