Footage Security

_WHEN WORKING IN THE FIELD, creating backups of your footage is key to data protection. If you only have one copy of essential footage, that guarantees a single point of failure if it is lost or confiscated. Yet making copies of footage can raise other issues. The more backups you make to safeguard sensitive footage, the more avenues you open up for exploitation. This is the double-edged sword of data protection.

READ ON FOR YOUR FOOTAGE SECURITY STRATEGIES:

01: Secure data stored on external storage devices

02: Secure data stored on your computer

03: Secure data backups in the cloud

Ed Ou, on the tradeoffs of data protection strategies

“The key thing about being a filmmaker is that you want your footage to be in as many places as possible so just in case – knock on wood – something bad happens to one, you can make up for what you have somewhere else. It’s a constant juggle of losing all my footage because of bad luck or having more footage around for someone to intercept
or steal.”

Strategy 01
Secure data stored on external storage devices

_THERE IS CURRENTLY NO major brand of camera on the market that can encrypt while recording. As a result, raw footage sitting on your camera’s memory card is vulnerable to confiscation and destruction.

To minimize risk, you can move your raw footage off your primary memory card, and onto a secure storage device. This strategy is ideal when you need to secure and restrict unwanted access to your sensitive footage, especially while in the field.

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BEGINNER
Platforms:
MAC OS
INTERMEDIATE
Platforms:
MAC OS
WINDOWS
LINUX
Laura Poitras, on protecting footage while filming Citizenfour

“The highest threat model that I’ve ever been in was in Hong Kong shooting with Ed Snowden. I thought at any moment the CIA would try to break the door down, and so I was backing up everything, getting it outside the hotel, dropping it off with a lawyer, who was putting it in a safe, and physically destroying the SD cards that I was recording on.”

INTERMEDIATE
Platforms:
WINDOWS
Strategy 02
Secure data stored on your computer

_NEED A SAFE SPACE to store files on your computer? Encrypted file containers are the solution for you. Think of encrypted file containers as password-protected folders you use to store the most sensitive files on your computer, like photos, and interview transcripts.

This strategy is ideal if you want to protect data on a shared computer, or restrict access to sensitive data to a select group of teammates. They’re extremely portable; move file containers off your computer and on to an external drive or cloud provider for distribution or safekeeping.

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Strategy 03
Secure data backups to the cloud

_BEFORE YOU TRUST A CLOUD STORAGE PROVIDER with your data, it’s important to understand the security and privacy tradeoffs.

Traditional cloud providers (e.g., Google Dropbox) are convenient for accessing files and backups from virtually anywhere. The trade-off: If these service providers are presented with a legal order, they may be compelled to hand over data you’ve entrusted to them. Such legal orders might even be done under seal, so you would have no way of knowing your data is compromised.

By comparison, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage providers (e.g., Tresorit and Keybase) have similar features you’d expect from other cloud providers, but secure your data so you are the only one with the ability to access it.

Every film project will require a different balance between convenience and privacy. We cover several options for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage for when extreme privacy is essential.

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Ed Ou, on the tradeoffs of creating backup copies of sensitive footage

“You think to yourself, I should keep my backup drive on me, in case something happens, but if I have all my assets on me what if I get arrested? If I give my hard drive to a friend what if they get arrested? I would say no matter what you’re always getting someone into trouble. But at the same time, the worst thing you can do is to have such a fatalist viewpoint, like, we’re screwed anyway so we might as well not even try.”