An Application of Blockchain Technology in the Supply Chain of Evidence
Tuesday, March 17, 2020 3:06
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Born and raised in Northern California, Jeff Neithercutt earned his Associates Degree in Administration of Justice from Chabot College in Hayward, CA. After, Jeff then completed his Bachelor of Science at CSO Hayward in Criminal Justice Administration and his master degree in cyber security and Information Assurance.
With over 25 years of information technology experience, Jeff is a well-respected individual within the industry. He has published multiple pieces on information technology and regularly is a speaker at conferences.
During his career, Jeff Neithercutt has spent 10 years working in the law enforcement industry as both a 911 dispatcher and a police officer as well as an additional six years as the Information Security Analyst for an international bank.
Currently, Jeff is the Senior Cybersecurity consultant with a firm specializing in information, security and technical consulting. Additionally, he is a college level educator and has taught over 30 different subjects for online certification groups.
The current Criminal Justice System in the United States consists of an adversarial process decided by either a Judge, Jury, or both. Recent cases of misconduct by Judges, Prosecutors, Police Officers, Evidence Technicians, and the age-old hue and cry of “I didn’t do it” by citizens demands the highest level of scrutiny of all items submitted by all sides as “evidence” in a trial.
Because these alleged cases of misconduct have greatly disenfranchised the citizenry of their likelihood of a fair investigation and trial, Blockchain of Evidence is proposed to greatly reduce or remove the human element of error and misdeed from the chain of evidence, and hopefully begin restoring the Public Trust in the Justice System. This has the potential to also greatly reduce the opportunity for accidentally or intentionally tainted evidence in all types of investigations.
Blockchain of Evidence (BoE) is a system of mathematical cryptographic fingerprints (hashes) and distributed permissioned ledgers designed to augment, not replace, existing Police Evidence management systems. The evidence management software or module is frequently contained in or modular to Computer Aided Dispatch Systems.
BoE is essentially just an overlay of the existing evidence management software that requires that every time a piece of evidence is entered into the software (generating an audit log entry) a mathematical hash is applied to that log entry, preventing it from ever being altered without detection. These “checks” occur at every stage of the evidence management process to verify that evidence is not altered, moved, manipulated, tampered with, or deleted without a true and complete audit trail that is stored off-site from the agency. This provides a second “factor” of verification to each and every function of the Chain of Custody from capture (by the Officer at the scene) to destruction (after trial and disposition.)
Because BoE stores the mathematical hash for each step in the Chain of Custody off-site in a private federated (permissioned) ledger that is copied to every other BoE installation at every other permissioned agency in the blockchain, accusations of evidence tampering can be resolved in seconds, instead of months. Any attempt to change anything about a piece of evidence will be immediately obvious, and will invalidate all pieces of evidence hashed after the tainted entry.
Frivolous civil cases filed against agencies can be eliminated or prevented by the surety of the unaltered ledger, as allegations of tampering or taint can be immediately proven or disproven upon receipt. If properly installed, independently verified and validated, and properly shared, BoE can prove definitively and immediately to the public that all viable evidence at a crime scene was identified, catalogued, and “booked” into secure Police Evidence storage. The family of the perpetrator no longer need worry that the evidence collected at the scene of a crime has been changed in any way at any stage of the Evidence Management process. They can be assured a fair trial when the case arrives in court for adjudication.
In fact, because the BoE hashes are not the actual evidence, but “proof” of the evidence’s integrity, they can be shared publicly with anyone, including press, defense attorneys, protest groups, even the suspects themselves, proving immediately and irrefutably that evidence has not been tainted and was properly collected and stored, and without releasing any confidential or private data.
This document provides details of the BoE design, implementation, Independent Verification and Validation process (IV&V), to assist agencies with the adoption of this new and crucial tool in the Law Enforcement evidence processing pipeline. Adopting this technology early will prevent the rush of installation “under fire” when citizens, District Attorneys, Defense Attorneys, and professional groups begin demanding its use.
Because BoE is hosted off-site, it can scale to meet the needs of any agency, of any size, no matter how many hashed pieces of evidence they process. The agency keeps the evidence the way they want to, and the rest of the world can see they are playing by the rules and properly handling proof of guilt or innocence.
Environment Overview Court
The system is designed so that every stage of a call for service is hashed and entered into the blockchain as it occurs, so that staff writing reports later can simply import their hash log and augment it with narrative descriptors where needed.
• Every auditable activity in the Computer Aided Dispatch system generates an unalterable, irreversible, immutable (undeniable) hash that is stored immediately upon generation in the blockchain offsite
• RFID sensors on equipment worn by personnel can eliminate confusion over whether a weapons system was deployed or not by generating a hash of the insertion or extraction of the system from its holder, particularly under stress or by accident
• Body camera video, 911 Dispatch audio, and audio recordings are immediately hashed when stopped, preventing the destruction, change, modification, or intentional or unintentional deletion of critical evidence
• Because all evidence is hashed, if a partial video or audio file is released by the press or the defense, agencies can immediately prove the video or audio file is not complete and was not exactly what was collected by the Officer
• Because all that is generated is strings of numbers and letters, based on log entries already generated by CAD systems, BoE causes no additional processing load to systems already installed (CAD/RMS)
• Because allegations of intentional acts can be disproven quickly, insurance payouts for “nuisance claims” can be eliminated
• Patterns of behavior that indicate training issues can be immediately identified and rectified at the training level, before they become a problem
• Accusations of Departmental Cover-up can be disproven by the comparison of the Blockchain to other participating Department copies, showing whether or not an improper change was made by the agency being accused
Based on the research BOE has conducted, we are hopeful that the Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) technologies, actions, policies, and behaviors will change to allow for what is essentially a second factor of verification of the processing of a piece of analog or digital evidence.
Our design can scale to incorporate all levels of the Criminal Justice System, from Federal to local/school/tribal. The United States Department of Justice will install Blockchain of Evidence on all systems that send and receive Law Enforcement information to state agencies and will issue the first and primary Permissioned Blockchain (Root or Genesis Block.)
Each individual State DOJ will follow US DOJ’s lead and install Blockchain of Evidence on all systems connected to the US DOJ and to County and State Agencies that receive information and services from them, and will “fork” (process of creating a new genesis block of their own from the original given by US DOJ) the primary Genesis Block from the US DOJ to create their own identifiable Permissioned Blockchain.
Each County within each State will install Blockchain of Evidence on all systems connected to the State and US DOJ’s as well as all agencies that connect to them locally and will fork the Permissioned Blockchain from the State to their own Permissioned Blockchain. Each City and County agency will have Blockchain of Evidence installed on their systems as well.
Therefore, The US DOJ will issue the Permissioned Blockchain to all State agencies, who will fork the Permissioned Blockchain to all County Agencies, who will fork the Permissioned Blockchain to all local and connected agencies and so on. Each local agency will then issue “signatures” to every employee consisting of a piece of the Departmental blockchain and a hash of the employee’s username, password, and two-factor authentication identity, making impersonation mathematically impossible.
The US DOJ will reissue a new Permissioned Blockchain every 24 hours. This way, all transactions from the local officer to the US DOJ will be on one blockchain and “committed” (process of finalizing the blockchain forever) every 24 hours.
The resulting completed Blockchain (of Evidence) will make it so that, for example, a piece of evidence collected and booked by Weed Police in Weed California will be immediately hashed and uploaded to the blockchain and therefore be visible and able to be authenticated by all agencies up to the top of the Blockchain at the US DOJ within 24 hours. This will remove the opportunity at any stage in the evidence process after that for unintentional or intentional tampering or taint to occur without immediate detection.
In order for any prior dated entry on the blockchain to be altered, a majority of the parties on the blockchain have to agree to the change and vote to allow the blockchain to be modified. Because of this requirement that a consensus of parties on the blockchain vote affirmatively to change any part of the blockchain, evidence could never be tampered with after hashing at the point of collection without a majority of LEA’s agreeing to it, rendering the system “secure by design.” It would therefore be theoretically impossible to ever alter any piece of evidence without detection once collected and hashed, then recorded in the blockchain ledger.
The Permissioned Blockchain model we intend to install at the LEA’s will ensure that only permissioned users with an identified and authenticated identity can upload to the blockchain. Because only a hash of the evidence is actually uploaded to the Blockchain, and the actual evidence remains safely “booked” into Law Enforcement protected Evidence Storage facilities, the publicly accessible front-end web site that accesses the Blockchain via the BoE website will allow for read-only access to suspects, victims, attorneys, and anyone else with the need to verify the evidence in a case was properly collected and reported by the Officer(s) investigating the case.
To be clear, they will not see or view the evidence itself, only the hash of the evidence, complete with meta data collected at the scene, which might include GPS location, date, time, Agency and Officer identifier, machine identification (camera, E-PAS, Bodycam) and any other information included in the configuration. This additional meta data collected with the evidence may prevent frivolous adversarial processes by the defense if they can see that evidence alleging their client’s guilt was properly handled and immutably recorded prior to trial. It may also allow the Prosecution to “dump” a case in the very early stages if evidence discrepancies become evident via BoE mismatches.
For example, a Defense Attorney considering taking the case of a DUI client could log into the Blockchain of Evidence website, enter a case number issued by the arresting agency, view all hashes for the evidence items, and immediately be able to see that a DUI client’s Preliminary Alcohol Screening (E-PAS) results were recorded and hashed at 0128 hours at GPS Coordinates where the Field Sobriety Tests were completed. They could see that the Field Sobriety Tests were also recorded by video (bodycam) which was hashed as well at the same time and location. This might prevent the filing of a frivolous attempt to prove the client “innocent” when the facts of the Officer’s report are clearly and undeniably supported by hashed evidence recorded at the scene and forever added to the blockchain.
Viewing the hashes from the same case prior to trial could also provide the Defense the opportunity to challenge the validity of the evidence if it appears the hash doesn’t match the Officer’s report, or the Blockchain, indicating the evidence was changed from point of collection to point of “booking” into the LEA’s secured evidence facility. The Defense would be able to see and confirm possible tainting if the first time the evidence appears on the blockchain ledger is two days after the arrest at GPS coordinates outside a private laboratory not contracted to do blood evaluations for DUI by the arresting agency. This could indicate possible mishandling of the evidence and trigger a focused and more successful investigation into possible mishandling of the evidence by the LEA.
The system will have a requirement for Multi-Factor Authentication that will prevent evidence being tampered with by a different employee impersonating the original employee. This means that every piece of evidence collected will be tracked through every trusted employee that handles it from point of origin to point of destruction after the case is completed and all retention periods have passed.
Due to the nature of blockchain technology, if an attempt is made to add a piece of evidence to the Blockchain by an unauthorized user, it will be denied. If it is forced into the blockchain anyway all subsequent hashes in the blockchain will be immediately invalidated, calling immediate attention to the attempt to counterfeit evidence at every LEA with the BoE Blockchain installed.
This removal of doubt from the validity of the evidence collection and booking process could free up hours of court time that a regular trial for this type of arrest usually takes, and could save the public the expense of a lengthy court trial.
Obviously, evidence problems in more complex cases will not be able to be solved as easily, but large chunks of the mundane everyday facts even in large cases could be properly stipulated early in the trial by the Defense and the Prosecution, dramatically shortening trials and releasing jurors from service that causes workforce disruption. In this fashion, only facts in question would need to be addressed, and any frivolous action asserted by the defense or the prosecution could be objected to as “already determined by the BoE evidence before the court”.
Additional information can be found at https://www.blockchainofevidence.org.
Copyright 2020 Jeff Neithercutt and Alister Inc.
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