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P E E R T O P E E R M A G A Z I N E · S P R I N G 2 0 2 6 89 threatening, "I will light you up." That additional angle reshaped public debate about the encounter. For legal teams, this raises a foundational question: who had this video, and why was it not seen sooner? LEGAL TECH TAKEAWAYS The Jan. 6 prosecutions and the Sandra Bland case highlight the reality for legal teams: truth depends not just on what a video shows, but on what video exists and how it surfaces. Vantage point is everything. As the Bland coverage demonstrates, one extra angle can change perceptions of force, compliance, and escalation. Governance drives defensibility. As Daniel Capra and Andrew Toft explain in their writings on evidence rules and electronic authentication, how video surfaces, or why it is missing, can become both a legal and reputational problem. Organizations need defensible retention and clear, consistent disclosure rules. WHEN PUBLIC-SOURCE VIDEO CHANGES THE NARRATIVE: THE CASE OF ALEX PRETTI A more recent illustration of how public-source footage can rapidly counter or confirm official accounts emerged in the Alex Pretti shooting. According to ABC News' "A Minute-by-Minute Timeline of the Fatal Shooting of Alex Pretti" and CNBC's reporting on the incident, the January 2026 shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis shows how bystander video can reshape an official narrative in near real time. Initial accounts described Pretti as an imminent threat, but synchronized clips recorded by bystanders from multiple angles showed otherwise. Footage taken from sidewalks, windows, and passing cars contradicted key elements almost immediately. As a result, public-source footage sped up scrutiny that might otherwise have taken months. What this case shows is that some of the most decisive footage does not originate inside enterprise systems, which raises the challenge of handling public-source video. THE TECH LESSON Some of the most important video evidence will not live inside your systems; it lives on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, in someone from the crowd's camera roll, or on an encrypted device. Jason Loring and Graham Ryan note in "Synthetic Media Creates New Authenticity Concerns for Legal Evidence" that this shift demands new authenticity and collection strategies for the synthetic-media era litigation. This reality requires public-source workflows: a repeatable, defensible way to collect, hash, preserve, and sync third-party material. WHY VISUAL TIMELINES DEBUNK "DEEPFAKE" CLAIMS Once all sources are collected, the next hurdle is making sense of them. This is where timeline-driven reviews shine in disproving deepfake allegations. Timeline-driven review is one of the most powerful tools against deepfake allegations because it creates a coherent, cross-validated record: • Cross-angle footage: Consistent identifiers across multiple independent cameras are extraordinarily difficult to fabricate, especially when they come from unrelated sources. • Temporal and spatial continuity: Clean, continuous movement across time and location leaves no space for a fictional insertion. • Defensible integrity checks: As explained in the Federal Judicial Center's guidance on Rule 902(13)– (14), audit logs and cryptographic hashes can demonstrate that files remained intact from the moment of ingestion, proving nothing was altered along the way.

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