This would require regulation of these devices, and they would have to have adequate hardware protection of the keys used to secure these Merkle hash trees.
Not really: if you copied them to a pair of USB keys, those could be handled like other physical evidence.
The point of the Merkle tree in this case is just to make tampering much more difficult/ easier to suspect; independent entities could hash he result and compare for evidence of tampering.
This isn’t a case of absolute perfection, this is bringing things up to the current standard (aka “state of he art”) WRT courts and police procedure.
Sure, one could design all sorts of additional mechanisms (error correcting codes in the trees etc) but realistically, it’s tamper detection that matters, and it only needs to be as good as paper, candlesticks, fingerprints (sigh) or whatever else is already customary in the evidence room.
