Pervasive monitoring: Appreciating citizen's surveillance as digital evidence in legal proceedings

Images or video streams, extracted from data acquired through surveillance systems and intended to be used as evidence in court, should have all attributes of conventional digital evidence, meaning that they should be admissible, authentic, reliable, complete and believable. This paper discusses the first three attributes that surveillance systems should comply with to be submitted as evidence in legal proceedings and it identifies some of the obstacles in the way through harmonization. The focus is on data gathered from a range of ad hoc sources present at the scene of an incident, including smartphones and wireless sensor networks (used for safety, security or traffic management/environmental monitoring). New scenarios for crowd-sourced surveillance mediated by law enforcement supervision are further considered. Specific attention is brought to the compliance with privacy requirements that often condition the admissibility of the evidence.