This is the Kator Dilly Podcast for Friday, June 2, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What happens when evidence in court comes into conflict with the terms and conditions of the hardware and software that police

used to track their own officers.

Matthew Feeney, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, discusses the issue. The reason why we're discussing this is because recently a defense attorney wrote a blog post that got some traction where he

discussed his problems with a website called evidence.com and that is a website owned by Axon, formerly Taser, which makes a very popular brand of body camera.

And this was during discovery, which is when a defense attorney asks for evidence against his client,

and he was not happy about the agreement he would have to sign.

The fact that this case apparently involved a juvenile raises a whole host of privacy concerns.

This licensing agreement would, I suppose, technically allow Axon to use whatever

footage they have in promotional material or whatever and while some of these complaints

might be a little overblown the whole episode does nonetheless raise important

questions about if a private company should be handling body

camera footage.

All right, so what do we know about the, I guess, chain of custody of this evidence after it's been gathered by these body

cameras.

So with Evidence.com police can upload body camera footage but they can also do a number of different things to it.

They can delete the footage, they can alter the footage, they can flag it and this is where the

real concern comes in. This private company does not necessarily require that police

departments using this product adhere to certain privacy or transparency policies, not to mention accountability policies.

So while some of us might be concerned about this company and the sort of products that it's providing, it is actually incumbent

upon local officials, not the private corporation, to make sure that police departments

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