imagine an app that is sort of like a panic button. You get pulled over, you open the app and hit the button which then (depending on your preferences), starts recording/streaming video and audio, locks the phone, and maybe starts recording accelerometer/gps data, etc.
It would need to be thoroughly developed/tested before actually it could be ethically recommended.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? unfeasible? Already existing?
I feel like there was an app from the ACLU or EFF that did exactly that. Locked the device and started recording on panic button combo, and if I am remembering correctly had the ability to auto-upload to a cloud in case of device seizure.
EDIT: Ah, ok I was confused. It was the ACLU Mobile Justice app which was cloud based, but it was shutdown just last month. They point to external entities having access to their database as the reason.
Dang, this was the first I heard about mobile justice shutting down.
It had been on my phone and thankfully unused for a long time.
They have shut it down exactly when you needed it.
That is so dystopian, holy shit… I mean, if you see it as something people would want/need, then yeah, that sounds good. I don’t know if such a thing exists, though. This link shares some things, features, and apps that maybe do some of what you’re talking about.
That is so dystopian, holy shit…
Hey you, you’re finally awake.
IDK man, over here I don’t think police interactions are as violent as they are in the US…
CopWatch used to be pretty active and has apps for iOS and Android, but I see they haven’t been updated in a couple of years.
This exists but doesn’t do the streaming part: https://cryptocam.gitlab.io/
The idea is that you (or a friend ideally) have a private key on your computer at home, and your recorded video is encrypted with the public key so that if you lose your phone or it gets into the hands of an adversary, they can’t decrypt the files. You won’t have them either though, unlike the ACLU app.
I think the use case is more situations where you want video of something cool, but where the raw footage would put people in danger if it got into the wrong hands. Like blurring or cutting stuff out before you release it
Ah, cool. That sounds useful for like if you’re recording at a protest/action
Dash cams do this continuously I thought. Good? Bad? IDK.
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built an entirely open-source dash-cam that excels in this scenario. Instead of recording to an SD card inside the camera, the camera is connected to a capture device installed somewhere else in the car.
It’s not perfect, but it’s very time consuming for a potential adversary to locate the video storage. It was designed like this primarily for car break-ins, but it would work well here as well.
It all runs on a generic Linux SBC, so there’s technically nothing stopping you from encrypting the SD card too.
That’s pretty cool! Any hardware info? I had thought a diy dashcam project would be most about hardware (rpi zero and 3d printed enclosure maybe) with the software being relatively simple. Using an old phone might be another approach.
I will say it’s quite a bit more expensive than a typical off-the-shelf consumer dash-cam, since you’re essentially just installing a full-blowm computer. I use a Raspberry Pi 5 for the pre-made kits, which is able to record 30fps@720p across two channels (front/rear). It’ll work with just about any USB webcam. The tricky part for new users is that you typically have to create a 12V to 5V USB harness to power it from the car.
Cig lighter phone charger won’t supply the 5v? I’d have thought the camera mount and enclosure would take the most effort. Raspberry pi zero with their camera accessory would be the main camera.
It might, but the Pi 5 has pretty strict power requirements. The official specs reccomend 5V5A, while most 12V adapaters supply 5V2.4A (or 5V1A for the cheap ones). It’ll generally work, but customers often experience strange behavior with questionable power supplies.
Mounting the camera isn’t terribly difficult. A significant portion of USB cameras have 1/4th inch tripod mounts, which gives you a lot of options. I personally use a little adhesive GoPro mount, with a small 1/4th inch tripod adapter. That lets you securely mount it just about anywhere with a flat surface. The camera’s cable is several meters long, which means you can mount the Pi just about anywhere. In my install you have to disassemble a significant portion of the car to get to the SD card (video is typically offloaded over LAN, which is password protected).
I will say that the Pi Zero is almost certainly insufficient for video recording. In my tests, the Pi 5 tops out at about 2 channels of 720p@30fps, while the Pi 4 struggles to encode one 480p@30fps stream. I’ve been researching SBCs better suited to video encoding, like the Nvidia Jetson, but I’m not quite ready to invest in dev kits for a non-profit project when other components of the software are much more commercially successful.
You need something that streams to a secure server, so the police can’t just delete the video.
Do the police take your dash cam if they pull you over? Does that show on their own badge cam?
Streaming live video takes a lot of bandwidth and connectivity from a car can be intermittent, but maybe it’s enough to send a timestamped hash every few seconds, so there is tamper evidence in case of a deletion.
Anyway, deleting video through a dashcam user interface is like deleting a file on a computer: basically a little bit of metadata is overwritten but the underlying data can usually be mostly recovered with filesystem repair or forensic tools. To really delete it for sure you have to either destroy the media or use special tools to overwrite the data blocks. Or just running the camera for a long time (to make sure the freed blocks get re-used) might do it.
You could also stream to another phone or computer tucked away elsewhere in the car, unless you expect the whole car to be seized.
Dash cams are a bad option, cops have and will delete footage that doesn’t fit their narrative in court.
I never could find an elegant solution for video, but I do use Easy Voice Recorder on Android. Records audio only on a locked phone and streams it to your Google Drive. I’ve used it in a pinch a couple of times and it’s performed perfectly. I keep looking for the video version of the same thing but alas…haven’t found it. Anyway, it really is a fantastic, free app.
You could use any trustworthy sync service with automatic camera uploads, but they will all wait until the video has finished recording before uploading it. Ideally there would be an app that streams live to a remote server that’s recording. There used to be. A sync service might be second best though.
I will second the suggestion for a dash camera, they can record audio automatically without need for user intervention.
Another option is to just use a voice assistant, I usually quickly ask my watch to start a voice recording beforehand to ensure there is a record of the interaction.
Do any dash cams stream to the cloud or a self-hosted server? If the police spot the dashcam they may just delete the footage.
Here in America, they might also shoot the camera, you know, in self defense.
You could build such an app to serve the same purpose for robberies, road rage, etc and have it host the incident data to a personal cloud.
Is it illegal to film police where you are? If it’s not illegal then just use your camera app. You can probably configure it so that you can open the camera app from the lockscreen without a password, but then of course make sure you can’t e.g. access anything from your gallery from the camera app. I have always just used my camera app to film police. There also used to be “secret recording” apps for Android at least, but I believe modern Android security doesn’t allow for that kind of app behaviour anymore.
I know there’s an app built by a French antipolice group. It’s sends the video to their server for safekeeping. Can’t remember what it’s called.
