Book Title: Computational Criminology: AI Applications in Forensic Science and Criminal Justice
Editors: Dr. Xavier Louis, Dr. Surbhi Girdhar, Ms. Aswathi Chandran Nair, Mr. Ravi Kumar, and Ms. Nandini Katare
Chapter: 10
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/704/10
Author: Purva Jain
Abstract
Digital forensics the scientific examination of digital devices and data for evidentiary purposes has, over the past two decades, become indispensable to the investigation of almost every category of serious crime.[1] Where the twentieth-century forensic laboratory was preoccupied with biological and chemical trace evidence, the twenty-first-century laboratory increasingly deals in bytes: storage media, mobile devices, cloud accounts, network traffic, surveillance footage, and the ambient digital exhaust of contemporary life.[2] Almost every case in a contemporary prosecutor’s docket whether the underlying offence is robbery, child exploitation, fraud, narcotics distribution, or homicide now turns at least partly on the proper extraction and interpretation of digital evidence.
The volume and complexity of digital evidence have grown faster than the human capacity to examine it. A single mobile phone today may contain hundreds of thousands of photographs, messages, application records, and location pings.[3] A single seized hard drive may hold terabytes of mixed personal and operational data. A single cloud account may span dozens of synchronised services across multiple jurisdictions. The result, in many forensic laboratories, is an evidence backlog measured in months or years a delay that prejudices both victims awaiting resolution and defendants awaiting exculpatory analysis.[4]
[1]Eoghan Casey, Digital Evidence and Computer Crime: Forensic Science, Computers, and the Internet (3rd edn, Academic Press, 2011) 7.
[2]Brian Carrier, “Defining Digital Forensic Examination and Analysis Tools Using Abstraction Layers” (2003) 1 International Journal of Digital Evidence 1, 4.
[3]Simson L Garfinkel, “Digital Forensics Research: The Next 10 Years” (2010) 7 Digital Investigation S64, S66.
[4]Erin E Kenneally, “Confluence of Digital Evidence and the Law: On the Forensic Soundness of Live-Remote Digital Evidence Collection” (2005) UCLA Journal of Law and Technology 1, 12.