I'm still skeptical that this would end up working well in practice, but I do want to say:
> You could also handle cropping and omissions by having the original device sign the picture as a grid of individual tiles.
is a pretty good idea, I like that quite a lot. Not saying it means I'm on board with signatures overall (I mean, we're still in agreement that this would require locking down devices to at least some degree) but I do think that's an elegant solution for the cropping/censoring part of it.