http://www.wired.com/2016/07/philando-castile-social-media-911/?mbid=psocial_techreview

I have had an idea to produce an app for people to use in all sorts of interactions with authority that will help to "keep the bastards honest". If there are any coders, legal practitioners or anybody else who can help with this, especially people with knowledge of crowdfunding, please get in touch and please spread the word. Graham Young has my details and I'm happy for him to pass them on to anybody interested.

This is only going to spread if something isn't done.

Honesty meaning your version of the truth? Judging from your past posts, now thankfully absent, you would have a very one-sided idea of what honesty means. All politicians are dishonest when they feel the need to be, and no website is ever going too change that.

Honesty meaning that when a police officer or other authority is dealing with someone they are aware that their actions might be scrutinised and that an independent recording can be accessed to do so. The purpose is to try to improve on the situation at present which is very much "he said, she said". Police and other authorities are human, they make mistakes and they sometimes act outside the law. Why should they not be surveilled?

The concept is to stream the recorded sound/vision to a secure storage that can be accessed by courts if required.

There are already apps of this nature, but they are quite crude. The ACLU has a series of apps that are available to assist in dealing with the law.

Not sure why you feel the need to be abusive ttbn, I guess that's just the way you are.

It should also be noted that this works both ways. A claim against police or other authorities can be readily dismissed if evidence is available. The purpose is not to create more tension, it's to improve the way people deal with each other. Think of it as a moderator.

To save GY the trouble, if anyone wishes to discuss this further, get in touch at [myname]atgmaildotcom.

Thanks.

There are already apps in twitter and facebook.

Yes there are apps, but they are clunky to use, requiring lots of click-throughs making them fairly useless under pressure. They stream to a public video that can be viewed by friends, meaning they are potentially invasive of privacy. What I'm proposing is to stream to secure storage that can only be accessed by a court order. That means there are no Privacy Act issues and that the recording is not the property of the user, making it an independent record.

The service has to be transparent and act independently of the user to some extent. Activation by key phrases, such as "hello Officer" or some such thing set by the user would be one useful way to go. There are other mechanisms as well, of course.

There are lots of applications in situations other than Police interactions. For example, anyone who has dealt with bureaucracies like Centrelink will have tales of being told one thing and having another thing happen, with the only record normally being the entry made by the Centrelink staff member. This can lead to significant consequences in time-critical situations, where there is a small window for completing an application or responding to a request for information.

It seems to me that in any situation where an independent record of events may be helpful, this could be applied. I focused on the US situation because it's so horrific.

Over time, the likely presence of such an app may be sufficient to improve the behaviour of people on both sides of such situations.

Thanks for the interest. Feel free to get in touch if you would like more information and please spread the word!

I"d be wary if not very wary about doing anything like this over the internet. With it's current security protocols and procedures for transmission of data packets, its scary enough even doing online banking these days let alone communications between members of the public and government staff.

Unfortunately the internet was not primarily designed for such rampant communications that nearly everybody these days takes for granted. Ever since its invention back in 1969 there has been a plethora of band-aid solutions and patch-ups for what is fundamentally a non secure communication system aka internet. Security was an afterthought when it was first setup.

There is no privacy issue.

The Queensland Police Service likes the idea.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-21/queensland-police-get-body-cameras-amid-major-rollout/7648028