Murderers, fraudsters and paedophiles are being brought to justice with the help of digital forensic evidence. Andrew Mernin meets a man who has brought CSI into the 21st Century to find out more.
And from his case work in the seedy underbelly of corruption that exists in the corporate world he has seen a very common mistake made by law-abiding directors looking to flush out bad apples in the company.
He urges North East business leaders to learn from the mistakes of others to avoid being caught out by fraudsters within your ranks.
“I had a recent business case of one director against the other. It was one of those classic situations in a business enquiry where the guy bringing the prosecution had mishandled the computer so none of the evidence on it was sufficient.
“A huge number of people tend to expect their own IT staff to know how to handle computer evidence.
“If there’s one message from this, find a copy of the ACPO good guide it’s available to anyone who wants to read it. If you try to prosecute someone or discipline them you will have a problem if you don’t follow that guide.”
Looking forward, as technology advances and encroaches more and more on our lives, people like Marshall are likely to play an increasingly-important role in criminal cases.
And he believes the new capabilities of smart-phones and PDAs – which many of us now use to organise our lives – could make his job easier in the future.
“The latest big thing is all about location detection so that the devices know where they are and can search for things nearby (restaurants, cinemas and so forth) and share the location data.
“It means that we are all, effectively, going to be carrying a spy in our pockets, but a really useful one, which will contains huge amounts of data about us.
“From an investigative point of view, that is incredibly useful. Something very personal which contains an almost complete record of someone’s movements and activities is just about a perfect witness.
Marshall also thinks there is an argument that technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple may have a responsibility to monitor the behaviour of their customer in light of cases such as that of Coutts.
However, he warns that it is nigh on impossible to distinguish between monitoring people behaving illegally and simply monitoring everyone.
“We could use the arguments around CCTV monitoring as an example – it doesn’t just target the criminals, but actually watches everyone just in case.
“But there is a one vital difference, the CCTV operators are not profiling the behaviours of the people they watch. My concern would be that anyone authorised to monitor computer usage, in the way you suggest, would be tempted to use the data gathered for other purposes, such as direct marketing based on behavioural profiles.
“Internet monitoring may be a necessity to protect society, but it needs to be handled in the same way as any other form of monitoring – properly licensed and controlled, and performed by independent third parties who should not be tempted to abuse their positions of trust.”