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The Freedom of the Press Foundation has called on professional camera makers to implement encryption in cameras to prevent governments from easily searching and seizing the contents:
An open letter written by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and signed by over 150 filmmakers and photojournalists calls on professional camera makers such as Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and Fuji to enable encryption to protect confidential videos from seizure by oppressive governments or criminals. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is a non-profit organization that has several noteworthy members, such as "Pentagon Papers" Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and EFF's co-founder John Perry Barlow, on its board of directors.
[...] Filmmakers and photojournalists that film documentaries or shoot photos of abuses committed by governments or terrorists in dangerous parts of the world are constantly under threat of having their videos and photos seized and destroyed. The danger is even bigger when these bad actors can see what's on the cameras--it's not just the documentation of abuses that is exposed, but also the confidential sources that may have wanted to keep their identities hidden. Encryption would ensure those who seize their cameras couldn't see the contents of the cameras, nor the journalists' sources.
This won't necessarily ensure that the information collected by journalists is disseminated, since border agents and law enforcement officers can just destroy encrypted equipment. For that, cloud storage or live streaming features are needed, as well as reliable access to the Internet even during times of political crisis and network shutdowns.
Also at The Register, CNET, and TechCrunch (they also found a small cameramaker that is planning to ship on-camera encryption).
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday December 16 2016, @07:28PM
I was wondering that myself.
I also thought that encryption might result in many more broken cameras, both from photographer frustration and from other parties smashing cards and phones/cameras because they don't want to take chances with what might be on them...
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Maybe the manufacturers could rig an unobtrusive switch between a public, visible folder on a camera, and a hidden, encrypted card?
That way a photographer could take some "innocent" public photos as cover, flip the switch and send the subsequent shots to the card. The first time accessing the card after switching would require a password (or a set sequence of actions with the camera controls functioning as the password) and then as long as the switch was "on," the card could be accessed as normal.
There might even be a control whereby the photographer could send dummy shots to the public folder whilst remaining in the encrypted mode.
If the switch was flipped "off," say, in handing the camera over to a cop or soldier, the camera would only show the public folder with the "innocent" photos, and would require flipping the switch and entering the password before even showing the existence of the hidden card...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 16 2016, @09:11PM
You may be better off with just a setup that uploads all pictures/video taken to a (sufficiently trusted) cloud account. Dropbox is set up to do that on my phone.
On the plus side, destroying the camera wouldn't help that situation at all. Not that the piggies might not decide to do it anyway just out of spite/ignorance.
On the downside, you need to have good connectivity and bandwidth and hope the pic/video gets uploaded quickly enough to make it to the server before camera smashage ensues.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"