This and That in Court Technology – August 2018

In this edition, we share news about eCourts 2018 conference, law enforcement body cameras, the 25th anniversary of PDF, and microfilm to digital conversion technology to write up while the software is installing on my new laptop. 




eCourts 2018 News

eCourts is right around the corner:

How different will the courts operate in 2030? What radical changes in technology will be necessary to support those changes? What will happen if the courts stay the same?

A panel of experts will try to answer these and other questions at the opening address of eCourts 2018, NCSC’s premium education conference. The conference, which goes from Dec. 10-12 in Las Vegas, promises a fascinating slate of addresses, sessions, and exhibits.

The featured speaker is University of Tennessee Law Professor Benjamin H. Barton, who co-wrote Rebooting Justice. In his book, Barton argues that our laws are too complex and legal advice is too expensive, causing the poor and even the middle class to get no or inadequate legal help. He concludes that the courts must use technology and procedural innovation to simplify and change the system in order to protect the rights of all litigants.

The entire schedule is posted online. Some highlights are below:

• AI: The Good, The Bad, and The Risk Mitigation. This session will explore the potential – and the risks – of ways artificial intelligence can be used in the courts. The speakers will argue that it can improve the courts, but court leaders must understand its challenges and risks.
  
• Correct, Complete and Informative. Courts collect a lot of data, but it doesn’t always help court leaders make better decisions. The speakers will identify the data that courts should collect, the approaches to improve it and the best ways to use it to improve judicial administration.
  
• "Right Sizing" Penalties through Technology. Poor people continue to be incarcerated because they can’t pay court fines and fees. The speakers will highlight two projects – one in Michigan and the other in Kentucky – that have developed alternatives to incarceration that uses technology to help judges determine defendants’ ability to pay.

Register here.


It was Only a Matter of Time

I ran across this article the other day on Arstechnica.com website.  It shows “staged body camera footage” by a law enforcement department.  We here at the NCSC has been expecting such a thing for a while. And so has the author of a Wired Magazine article “Police Bodycams Can be Hacked to Doctor Footage”.

The author writes:

“More specifically problematic: The bodycams don't have a cryptographic mechanism to confirm the validity of the video files they record either. As a result, when the devices sync with a cloud server or station PC, there's no way to guarantee that the footage coming off the camera is intact. "I haven’t seen a single video file that’s digitally signed," Mitchell says."

And last, a little more than a year ago we wrote about the possibility of using “Block Chain for Criminal Charge Tracking”  This article from the SpotCrime blog notes the possibility of using blockchain as well.

Whether Block Chain or traditional PKI file signatures are applied to the body camera recordings, in our opinion, something needs to be done by the legal system to address this problem.


25th Anniversary of PDF

There is no doubt that the PDF document format has had a great effect upon the use of digital documents for E-filing in the courts.  A very interesting post on the Adobe Blog “Evolution of the Digital Document: Celebrating Adobe Acrobat’s 25th Anniversary” celebrates a milestone and shares some history.  The article shares that in “the summer of 1990, Adobe co-founder Dr. John Warnock wrote a six-page white paper called “The Camelot Project.” In this paper he outlined a pervasive business problem: the ability (or rather, inability) to reliably exchange high fidelity documents between different computer applications and systems.”

“These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers,” he wrote. “If this problem can be solved then the fundamental way people work will change.”

Congratulations!


17 Reasons to Scan Convert Old Microfilm to Digital Form

I saw this article the other day from a vendor who sells microfilm conversion scanners.  I thought that just last month we learned of a court who had their microfilm archive flooded, it would be good to share the technology to convert this data format into something more useful.

According to the article, the scanner can read the microfilm at a rate of one page per second and that there is the option to be able to add notes and titles.  I would also say that it would be possible to OCR the images once they are converted into digital files to improve access.

Last, once converted there could be a lot of copies of the files made and saved not only in the courthouse but say on hard drives stored in a cave/state archive somewhere.