Hard questions.Plain answers.

Yes. A system built to the Standard can compare faces and plates. The public name for that comparison is Similarity Check. Its result is a lead that a person must check. It never names anyone, and no stop, search or arrest can rest on it alone. A score says how rarely two different people score that high; it is never the chance that two images show one person.

The FusionTrace Evidence Standard is a public set of rules for how incident records a business chooses to share are preserved, sealed, requested, released and checked. It is Version 1.0 (draft): its public summary is the eight commitments and the rules on What the Standard forbids, and its full text is not yet published.

fusiontrace.io is published by BlueWave Technology, Inc., an Oklahoma corporation, as steward of the FusionTrace Evidence Standard until the FusionTrace Foundation takes it over. The Standard is stewarded by Stephen Pales and Jim Cords, co-founders of BlueWave Technology, Inc., which builds software to it. Any vendor may build to the Standard, and every implementation, the first included, is held to the same rules. Stewardship will pass to an independent board, with a majority independent of any vendor, and with nonprofit organizations, law enforcement, prosecution and civil liberties among the first seats filled. No board exists today, and no date is set.

U.S. Patent No. 11,830,346 B2 · 3 additional patents pending. BlueWave Technology, Inc. will license any patent claim essential to implementing the Standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

No. This site publishes the Standard and its public tools: Verify, the registry and the films. Software that seals to the Standard is sold by vendors under their own names. The first implementation is built by BlueWave Technology, Inc., and its conformance is addressed in The first implementation.

No. Under the Standard, every determination is made by a person, 100% of the time. A Similarity Check result tells a person where to look. It is never a finding about who someone is.

Nothing is sold. A business decides, one request at a time, what it releases to a law enforcement agency. The agency sees a record only after a named person at the business approves its request. The release opens the record to the agency for 90 days, and every look in the system that holds it is logged. A copy the agency downloads is kept as long as the case and the law require, and a certified agency commits to log every access to it.

Under the Standard, a record is released only to a law enforcement agency, and only when the business says yes.

Under the Standard, every record carries one chain: an incident number when the business preserves the incident, a case number the first time it shares it, a sealed Evidence Exchange Bundle carrying both, and a chain ledger where every step carries the fingerprint of the one before. The system assigns the numbers; no person picks or changes them. A system built to the Standard never collects a law enforcement agency's own case number. The agency keeps it in its own case management system and copies the business's case number into it. See The Record Chain.

The files, the record of what a person determined and when, an index of every file's SHA-256, a manifest, and a signature over the index and the manifest. One changed byte in any indexed file makes that file fail its check. A certificate page inside the package is not covered by the seal. The Standard governs the record, not the cameras.

Drop it on the Verify page. Your browser recomputes every file's SHA-256, checks each against the package's index, and checks the signatures on the index and the manifest. Nothing is sent anywhere. To know who holds the signing key, check the fingerprint the page shows with the issuer, using a contact you already know, never one the package prints. The signature check is still being tested against reference packages.

A record that reads Sealed to the FusionTrace Evidence Standard is one its issuer declares was sealed under the Standard on this site. Whoever holds a sealed package can check it. The seal shows that the indexed files are unchanged since sealing. The rest is the issuer's declaration, and the issuer is the system that sealed it, under its own name.

In the registry. Every law enforcement agency and organization that completes certification is listed there with its status in the open, and this site never lists one that has not. Certification is by invitation through the FusionTrace Academy™. The Steward scores every exam and issues every certificate.

Certification for law enforcement agencies and investigators, never for a product, and never requiring the purchase of one. An investigator becomes certified after the training, the exam and a signed attestation to the seven FusionTrace Canons. An agency becomes certified when its head signs the commitment, it names an administrator, and the administrator and at least one investigator have completed certification. See For agencies.

A person: 24 months, kept active by a 15-minute refresher each year, then the exam again. A trainer: the same, plus at least one course taught every 24 months. An agency: every 12 months, with a counts-only report and a signed audit statement. A new major version of the Standard: the update module within 90 days. A lapse: reminders at 60 and 30 days, Expired the next day, and 90 days to restore.

The designation for a nonprofit organization that works alongside law enforcement and trains agencies in the Standard. It is a designation in text, with no fee. An organization may charge an agency its reasonable, published course costs, never for the exam or a certificate. See For nonprofit organizations.

It sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Pages are served through Cloudflare, which processes your IP address to deliver them. Films load from Cloudflare Stream only when you press play. A form you send goes to the publisher's inquiry system with your IP address and browser type. Nothing you drop on the Verify page leaves your device. The privacy notice has the details.

No. Nothing on this site is legal advice or a statement about admissibility in any court.

Questions, comments and complaints about the Standard, a rule, or a system that uses its words: standard@fusiontrace.io. If you use a system that seals to the Standard, your provider is your first call.