In today’s police work, digital evidence has a more prominent role than ever before. Everything from emails and text messages, to surveillance footage and social media posts, plays a crucial role in law enforcement, legal proceedings, and even corporate investigations or personal matters. But the amount of digital evidence that can be part of a case is vastly overwhelming and requires a system that helps managing it: a DEMS.

What is digital evidence?

The term “digital evidence” refers to any information or data that can be used in legal proceedings, investigations, or audits. For the most part, we interact with it in our daily lives, but it can take various forms beyond those usual data types, including:

  • Text data: Emails, text messages, chat logs, and documents of different types.
  • Multimedia: Photos, videos, audio recordings, and animations.
  • Online Activities: Social media posts, website history, and online communications.
  • Device and System Data: This is more specific and usually is not used in everyday life, but is really relevant for Law Enforcement. The category includes information from computers, smartphones, IoT devices, and surveillance cameras.

The importance of digital evidence has grown exponentially as technology has advanced, and it now serves as a critical resource for solving crimes, resolving disputes, and ensuring compliance. But this brings a couple of challenges with it.

The current challenges

Managing digital evidence can be a complex and daunting task, mostly because of the sheer volume and variety of data sources that we come in contact with, especially in today’s connected world, where everyone has (at least) one smartphone. So any modern investigation has to face different issues when dealing with digital evidence:

  • Data Volume: Any police or intelligence investigation can easily gather hundreds or thousands of files of different types. The rapid growth of digital data requires efficient storage and retrieval mechanisms.
  • Data Integrity: Particularly in police work ensuring the authenticity and integrity of digital evidence is crucial to its admissibility in court.
  • Security & Privacy: Protecting sensitive digital evidence from tampering and unauthorized access is paramount. As is having a system in place that allows a very granular access to the information, based on certain rules, that can be defined for every particular investigation. Also storage security is a very important issue for this point. Encrypted and secure storage is simply a must.
  • Compatibility: Different devices, file formats, and software can complicate evidence collection and analysis. Hence a DEMS (Digital Evidence Management System) needs to allow the ingestion of almost any file type, so it can be used and analyzed in the context of the investigation.
  • Admissibility: Digital evidence can be ruled inadmissible by courts because it was obtained without authorization. So, in most jurisdictions, a warrant is required to seize and investigate digital devices. Either live data (from working devices) or forensic data (recovered from destroyed or partially damaged / deleted devices.
  • Legal Compliance: For any DEMS it is imperative to comply with digital evidence management standards and best practices, in order to meet legal and regulatory requirements.
  • Chain of Custody: Maintaining a clear record of who had access to the evidence at each stage is essential for the legal admissibility. Any DEMS must provide a clear and extensive logging of any and all actions related to all the files that represent evidence in a case.

Why is a DEMS (Digital Evidence Management System) necessary?

To cope with all the previous challenges, a DEMS needs to be able collect, store, preserve, analyze, and present digital evidence while maintaining its integrity and authenticity. The last two are especially important, because the prove the data has not been altered in any way, and it comes from a known and reliable source. This preservation not only covers the actual data, but also the metadata extracted from it during the analysis phase.

Due to the amount of files that usually have to be analyzed, artificial intelligence analyzers are used normally to comb through all the data in order to find the evidence we need in the available amount of time. No human could ever check 600 hours of video by hand looking for evidence. But a machine can do it in a couple of minutes or, at the most, hours. For example, our own Intelion DEMS.

All of this defines a series of features that every DEMS should have to integrate seamlessly in the workflow of police investigations. The first step is always the gathering and storage of information from different relevant sources. In this step it is very important to use sound methods to prevent contamination or alteration of the digital evidence. After this, all the information has to be stored securely, with a really strict access, for only those people directly involved with the case at hand.

The step that all investigators usually appreciate most, is the analysis step. In this phase all the evidence is analyzed either by hand or, more frequently, with AI analyzers, that can work in an unattended manner, on multiple files at a time. This step is one of the most important ones, as it serves to extract meaningful insights or establish connections between pieces of information. Digital forensics tools and techniques can also be employed in this phase, when necessary.

The last step is the presentation phase, where all the findings are compiled into a summary, in order to present the evidence in a clear and understandable manner. This may involve creating reports, charts, or presentations for judges, juries or other Law Enforcement agencies or branches.

During all this process, maintaining the Chain of Custody (CoC) is very important, in order to keep the validity of the found evidence. This entails maintaining a secure and documented record to demonstrate that the evidence has not been tampered with or mishandled during its lifecycle. All accesses to the information must be registered, any change or modification logged and the files have to be digitally signed after their upload, to disallow any later modification. Only this way the evidence will hold in court.

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Conclusion

In an era where digital information is omnipresent, digital evidence management is paramount to maintaining accountability, resolving disputes, and upholding the integrity of legal and investigative processes. Organizations and individuals must invest in the right tools, technologies, and practices to effectively manage digital evidence, ensuring its admissibility and reliability in court and other contexts. As technology continues to evolve, so too must our methods for managing the digital evidence that plays an increasingly central role in our lives.