WITNESS is a theoretical system that logs number plates in an encrypted database that can later give you a WITNESS statement if it saw a target car or bike at a given time. I could make it for real but I am mostly exploring the idea for fiction.

I had an idea looking for a story: WITNESS.

WITNESS records when and where it has seen a number plate on a car. The result is a huge database that can be queried to answer the question, “did anyone see this car in that area at this given time?” By “anyone” we mean, a WITNESS (number plate recording) box.

Due to the way it is set up, you must specify a day and an area. For each search, the customer is charged thus discouraging fishing expeditions.

If the answer is yes, you get a WITNESS statement – a certificate that affirms the car in question was in the area.

I imagine that private investigators might use it as they close in on their person. Cops might use it to place a car near the scene of a crime, and the accused might use it to place their car far from said crime.

I’ve worked out exactly how this would work. I’ll get to the technical part at the moment. WITNESS sounds like it could be dystopian or a lifesaver for the wrongly accused. I would very much like to hear your opinion on it. If this were real would you feel it was dystopia or a good idea for law and justice?

For the TL;DR: crowd – it is very hard to tamper with the database and harder (and more expensive) to go fishing for information as the search has to be done once for every hour in every box for every day. That’s 24 searches for just one box and one car.

The technical stuff

There are two main technical actors in this model. The central database and the witness boxes.

The WITNESS box

The box itself would be a sealed unit connected to a power supply with a camera sensor capable of identifying number plates.

Inside the WITNESS box, is a simple computer with a restricted storage capacity. This is so it cannot buffer too many number plate images. The exact capacity is relative to how busy the road is that the box watches.

The box also maintains a record of its location. It uses GPS, nearby WiFi hotspots, and nearby cellular towers to confirm that it is where it is supposed to be. A further check is carried out by examining the network route to the central database (traceroute). Some of these techniques are used by Pokemon Go to detect cheating.

The WITNESS process

Once WITNESS snaps a number plate (triggered by a detection) it caches the relevant part of the image to storage. A secondary process steadily works through the images converting them into text.

If WITNESS cannot read the image with confidence it adds the image to a compressed file along with other data needed to add this image back to the central database. This is then encrypted with the central office encryption public key. This way only the central office can decrypt the image. There humans will identify the number plate. After that, the central office server converts the text into a database record in a single packet signed with the identification team’s secret key (more on that in a bit).

At random intervals, WITNESS will send identified images to the central office so its work can be verified. The people who do the work do not know if this is a verify or identify.

If a WITNESS box runs low on space in its image buffer, it can send a signed and encrypted compressed file to a nearby WITNESS box or central office for processing.

Now that WITNESS has a text numberplate, it deletes the image. The text is combined with the WITNESS box’s Unique ID and that day’s secret salt and turned into a one-way hash. Say, SHA3-512. The number plate is now a string of characters that cannot be reversed and can only be created again with all three pieces of information. This is added to the local store along with the date and time the number plate was taken.

Every hour, the records in the local store are put into a data packet which is signed by the WITNESS box’s private key. This is then sent to the central database which can use the WITNESS box’s public key to verify the data packet was not tampered with. This is done using an encrypted connection like the one your bank might use for your Internet banking app.

Key pair cryptography is a real thing. Here’s the overview. And here is the technical/mathematical stuff.

The Central Database

The central database stores the WITNESS data packets by location group and day.

Each incoming packet is verified using the WITNESS box’s public key. If the packet fails the test, the database sends a repeated request to the WITNESS box and notes a possible attack. This attack potential is then monitored by the security team. If enough fails are detected, the packets are placed in the isolation database along with all future packets until the WITNESS box integrity is secured.

The search

To search the database and create a WITNESS statement, the location, day, and number plate must all be entered. For each day, for each number plate, for each WITNESS box, the one-way hash must be created. Then all 24 hourly records must be searched for the hash. This must be repeated for every WITNESS box in the area.

As a result, confirming a car in a location is relatively inexpensive in terms of computing resources but searching broadly becomes quickly prohibitive. That deliberate time-complexity cost is how WITNESS defends against unreasonable surveillance and fishing attempts. Asking, “Was my car near Wilson Road on Thursday” generates a quick yes or no. Asking “Which cars were in Wilson Road on Thursday” means checking every possible number plate. In other words, confirming location is easy but search is nearly impossible.

This is why WITNESS charges per search. The authorities can get all the court orders they want, a broad search is technologically impossible.

BOLO mode

If a Be On the Look Out (BOLO) is issued for a given car (number plate), WITNESS boxes in the area can be given a limited number of numberplates to look out for. The box can check for the given number plates before one-way encryption. They add a flag for the BOLO target to that hour’s packet which can then be verified with a single search of that packet. Once verified, the location can be sent to the police. The report would be an hour or two after the sighting.

Another way to do BOLO would be to have the database perform a search for the number plate each hour after the update. Expensive for the police (each one is a paid search) but I am sure some sort of discount can be worked out.

What could WITNESS stand for?

Let’s take a few shots at this:

• Wide Interconnected Test of Number (plate) Existence Secondary to Sighting
• Wired Internet Tagging of Number (plates) Every Second Street
• Will Itomise Tracking Numbers Entered Securely and Systematically

What do you think?

I am confident that with a significant loan, a grant and/or the right legislation I could make WITNESS right now. None of this is technology that does not exist. There’s nothing stopping its creation. You could save time and money by adding traffic cameras and other car surveillance that already exist. I have my doubts about its viability as a business but as a private/public partnership deal, this is almost too easy to make.

What do you think of WITNESS? Would you like a government to implement it or is it capitalist dystopia?

This is a snippet of dialouge from my upcoming Visual Novel (The Spell Collector) between the titular Wizard (W) and their assistant Brian (B). It appears after chapter zero.

W: Tell me something Brian.

B: What do you want to know teacher?

W: I truly appreciate the assistance you have given but there is one thing I don’t quite understand.

B: There’s something that you don’t understand?

W: The end of this trip will mark the start of the fifth year with you as my assistant. Most novices serve for a year or two before leaving to pursue their own studies.

B: That’s true.

W: You’ve been with me for over three years already. Four by the end of this journey.

W: Do you plan to leave when we arrive somewhere more exciting?

B: No, teacher. Not at all.

W: Strange. Most young mages would do just that. It is not as if you owe me anything.

B: I’m not ready to go it alone. I feel like I have so much more to learn from you.

W: That’s kind of you to say. I doubt there is any more for me to show you. At least not anything new that you cannot work out for yourself with a little practice.

B: I’m confident this journey will teach us both all sorts of new things.

W: That is why I am taking this sabbatical after all.

B: I’m looking forward to it.

W: Me too. It’s been far too long since I left that stuffy old castle.

This is in reply to: Writers, tell us about your WIP

Yesterday I started writing a story. I called it “Cube”. It is about a person who one day discovered they have the ability to summon a large extra-dimensional space.

My plan is to write each episode, take it to one or two writer’s groups for feedback, and then share it on this blog. Episode one should be up in the coming week. Before then, I need to replace some tell with more show as I kinda wrote the whole thing far too fast.

In the update, I hinted that the first step was to resolve the guests and plus-ones. In this post, I am going to walk you through some of the clues and try to figure out who the guests and plus-ones were.

Massive spoilers to follow.

This is the grid that I suggested you might want to use to track clues. I made it in a spreadsheet. I will post screenshots of my spreadsheet as we go through the clues to make deductions, inductions, and educated guesses. We will try to work around the terrible job that your officers have done getting information to you. By the end, we will have a working theory for the pairings of the guests.

We are going to focus on filling out the first box.

As per the introduction post, we know that the following people were there:  Albert Smythe, Wesley Harper, Jason Samuels, Amara Samuels, Owen Johnson, Rohan Wooster, Sue Smith, John Greene, Bret Jones, Jack Dent, Daniel Jenkins (obviously), and Evelyn McMillan. We know that John Greene came alone and was a victim. We can exclude John Greene and Daniel Jenkins as he was the host and the other victim.

That gives us 5 pairs of people which we can later seek to match up with five cars, five feuds, and five gifts. A safe early assumption would be to pair Jason Samuels and Amara Samuels. Anyone who wants to make a fuss about this assumption would have to wait for a much later clue that confirms it. I’ll place Jason as the driver because who drove and who did not shouldn’t make any difference.

The first clue gives us quite a bit more to work with. Jack, the BMW, and some carnations all go together. That means we can list Jack as a driver and pair him with the BMW. Additionally, with a little real-world knowledge, we can see that carnations are cheap flowers. Thus, we can tentatively place the gift of cheap flowers with Jack and the BMW while eliminating such pairings from the Samuels couple.

If you are feeling especially inductive, you might pencil Jack in for the debt inductive, you might pencil Jack in for the debt feud. After all, he gave a cheap gift and has a battered old car. That’s far from hard evidence so I’m going to leave that one unmarked for now.

Our knowledge grid may look something like this now:

As the murder method was poison, we should prioritise the givers of the wine and the port. For now, we can remove Jack from our prime suspects list.

The next clue gives us a lot to work with. We get Wesley Harper as a driver and Rohan Wooster as his plus-one. We also learn that Wesley was involved in a feud about gossiping.

This removes Rohan from being Jack’s guest and Jack is decoupled from the gossip feud. Our connection graph now might look something like this:

We only have two more drivers to identify.

Albert Smythe, Wesley Harper, Jason Samuels, Amara Samuels, Owen Johnson, Rohan Wooster, Sue Smith, John Greene, Bret Jones, Jack Dent, Daniel Jenkins, and Evelyn McMillan.

We can also deduce a few negatives from this data.

Clues three and four do not help us pair drivers and guests. We will come back to them later.

Our earlier intuition about Jack is supported by clue five where we learn that Jack, Albert, and Jason all had financial connections to the victim.

Clue six gives us a lot more to build on.

Evelyn claimed that she did not know who Sue Smith was but that Smith probably came with Jack or Owen.

This gives us one more driver and a guest. It also decouples Evelyn from both of them as she did not remember exactly who they travelled with.

Clue seven puts Evelyn in the love triangle feud. Once we have her in the guest and plus-one square we can add that to our knowledge graph.

Clue eight is not a direct help yet. Knowing the port was fake may be useful once we know who gave the gifts. Doubly so as clue nine implies that the poison was ingested. Clue ten pretty much nails that one down. This clue confirms what we already know.

The clue from IT is mostly plot.

This clue is not of use to us yet. This clue confirms that a feud was the motive.

This clue decouples Jones from the Tesla.

We then learn that Rohan Wooster and Jack Dent had a famous falling out and the two no longer speak to each other. If Rohan came as a plus-one, he was clearly not Jack’s plus-one. We already worked that out.

This clue confirms our assumption to put the couple with the same last name together. We can strongly pencil them in for the betrayal feud.

Our knowledge graph plus strong hunches now looks like this:

This clue would allow us to inductively associate Sue with a gift and then with a driver.

Meanwhile, this clue confirms our hunch about Jack, connecting him to the debt feud. This clue confirms it.

This clue tells us stuff we already know but adds that Jack does not even own his car.

Finally, we learn something new. “The Bentley is registered to Mr Smithe. No relevant evidence was found in the car.” However, we soon realise that our officers can’t spell. We will have to make an assumption that Mr Smithe is actually Mr Smythe.

That assumption allows us to fill out the rest of the names like this:

We can now go back over our clues and gather more information from them. For example, we learned that Evelyn did not travel with Jack or Owen which places her with Albert Smythe by process of elimination.

This clue hides a whole range of questions. “Bret Jones denies any feud between the victims and Mr Johnson.” This gives us a connection between Jones and Johnson and casts doubt on Jones’s claim as we have five guests and five feuds. An earlier clue said, “Bret Jones has priors for attempting to bribe a police officer. You would like to interview him but none of the officers thought to take contact information.”

Whatever else is going on we can pencil Jones in as the plus one for Johnson. This finishes our grid (with some tentative guesses). It is here that we recall the clue that said Sue worked in a supermarket. Somewhere that often sells carnations and other cheap flowers. You could be forgiven for concluding that our educated guesses are correct.

While we may need to remain open to correction, we now have a fairly decent foundation upon which to pair gifts, cars, and feuds. You don’t even need them all. We only need to learn who gave the wine and the port and then we will have our prime suspects.

At the end of this walk-through, we have a reasonable picture of who the guests and their plus-ones were. We can now make some logical deductions and fill out more of the knowledge graph. Then we need only go back through the clues and start to work out who our prime suspects are.

Did you conclude the same pairings? Have you found any flaws with the conclusions that might break open your case? Do you already have a prime suspect?

I will post another update soonish where we will try to work out who drove each of the cars. This will allow us to test our assumptions and suspicions.

For the 7th of December #TimeTravelAuthors question set by Julie Bihn, will be (unless any of you go back and change it) the question of the Earth moving. I shall make the case that this is not a problem at all. Or, rather, I will make several independent cases.

“But the Earth moves, so if you travelled in time, you’d end up in space.” Thoughts?

Julie Bihn‘s question for day 7 in December in the original timeline

Here are NNNN reasons why I think this might not be a problem for your Sci-Fi story.

Reason 1: Screw it. Write it the fun way anyway.

There is a lot to be said for fun stories without overthinking everything. So what if the hard sci-fi fans moan? We’re not predicting the future, we’re telling stories to entertain and amuse our readers.

Reason one is – this is not a problem if you decide it’s not a problem.

Reason 2: Gravity

In General Relativity, space-time is bent by gravity. Time passes every so slightly differently for satellites than on Earth. The difference is tiny but it does exist.

If spacetime is shaped by gravity, why should a non-standard journey through it not also be shaped by gravity? The reason you don’t end up in space is because you travel in time relative to the Earth’s centre of mass.

Reason 3: Magnets

The Earth has a strong magnetic field which contains the passage between times within itself. The reason you don’t end up in space is because of the powerful influence of a planet-sized magnet. This has the added benefit of being plausible enough to get the story onto the interesting bits.

This is pretty close to what I used in my as-yet-unnamed novel. (It’s written but I’ve got a fair bit of tightening up to do).

In this particular story, the method of time travel is through spheres which link two points in time and space. They are spheres because a hole in a three-dimensional space would be three-dimensional too. These spheres (called portals, tunnels, or wormholes depending on who you ask) are strongly influenced by magnets or even just sizable lengths of steel or iron.

Reason 4: Yeah, that’s weird we thought it would be a problem too

The reason time travellers don’t end up in space is unknown. It turns out it just isn’t a problem. Some very smart people worried about that no end but it just turned out to be perfectly fine.

There is nothing wrong with lampshading the expectation and getting on with the fun stuff of the actual story.

For those who might not know, lampshading is a trope where you recognise that the mic is in the shot and you hang a lampshade on it so we can all pretend that it is a lamp. In other words, you acknowledge the issue and then dismiss it as something the author has clearly understood and fixed. This allows us to suspend our disbelief and just enjoy the story.

Here is a TV Tropes link if you have a spare couple of hours.

Reason 5: We thought of that already.

The movement of the Earth has already been factored into the calculations. The reason that ending up in space is not a problem is that some very smart people already did the maths.

This works because the smart people are very smart and have no intention of explaining it right now because there’s not enough time.

Reason 6: The unobtainium compensator takes care of that

There is some complex or eldritch device that protects against that sort of nonsense. A bit like fuel injection systems, we don’t really know how they function but we are glad they work.

This has the advantage of possible trouble for the heroes went he device is broken, stolen, or is otherwise offline. Thus they are forced to solve the problem without time travel this time.

Reason 7: What are you talking about – there’s no such thing as absolute motion

This reason argues that the frame of reference is all wrong for that ending up in space nonsense and our time travel just does not work like that.

This is similar to reason one where we just say “shut up” and get back to the adventure. It was such an important point that I felt it deserved mentioning twice.

Conclusion

Your story does not have to please everyone. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t have to please anyone. We’re dealing with time travel fiction here. Hard Sci-Fi gatekeepers need not apply. Besides, those guys are probably explaining Primer to each other with interesting diagrams – we’re safe to just have a fun story.

When you write the story, you get to decide what is and is not a problem your characters must overcome. If space and planetary motion are not important to your story then don’t worry about them. It is your story, write it how you want to.

Anyway, my little rant aside, what explanations does your time travel story have? How do you solve the ending up in space “problem”? Drop a comment (or a mention) and let me know your thoughts.