Digital Evidence Gathering in Cartel Investigations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Volpin ◽  
Takuya Ohno
Author(s):  
Darryl K. Brown

Criminal disclosure rules in all common law jurisdictions are organized around the same sets of conflicting aims. Pre-trial evidence disclosure is essential to fair and accurate adjudication. Yet certain types of information, such as identities of undercover operatives and ongoing law enforcement surveillance, must be kept confidential. Beyond these tensions, disclosure practices face new challenges arising primarily from evolving technology and investigative tactics. This chapter describes divergent approaches across common law jurisdictions—especially among U.S. states—to these challenges and offers explanations for their differences. It also sketches the technology-based challenges that discovery schemes face and offers options, or tentative predictions about their resolution. Differences often turn on who decides whether to withhold information from the defense—judges or prosecutors—and when certain information must be disclosed. Broader disclosure regimes tend to put greater trust in judicial capacity to dictate or at least review hard questions about the costs, benefits, and timing of disclosure; narrower systems leave more power in prosecutors’ hands. Technology has multiplied challenges for disclosure policy by vastly increasing evidence-gathering tactics and thus the nature and volume of information. Disclosure rules adapted fairly easily to the rise much forensic lab analysis. But fast-growing forms of digital evidence is more problematic. Defendants may lack the time to examine volumes of video and technical resources to analyze other data; sometimes prosecutors do as well. The chapter identifies some possible solutions emerging through technology and law reform, as well as trend toward greater judicial management of pre-trial disclosure.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1865
Author(s):  
Andrés Marín-López ◽  
Sergio Chica-Manjarrez ◽  
David Arroyo ◽  
Florina Almenares-Mendoza ◽  
Daniel Díaz-Sánchez

With the transformation in smart grids, power grid companies are becoming increasingly dependent on data networks. Data networks are used to transport information and commands for optimizing power grid operations: Planning, generation, transportation, and distribution. Performing periodic security audits is one of the required tasks for securing networks, and we proposed in a previous work autoauditor, a system to achieve automatic auditing. It was designed according to the specific requirements of power grid companies, such as scaling with the huge number of heterogeneous equipment in power grid companies. Though pentesting and security audits are required for continuous monitoring, collaboration is of utmost importance to fight cyber threats. In this paper we work on the accountability of audit results and explore how the list of audit result records can be included in a blockchain, since blockchains are by design resistant to data modification. Moreover, blockchains endowed with smart contracts functionality boost the automation of both digital evidence gathering, audit, and controlled information exchange. To our knowledge, no such system exists. We perform throughput evaluation to assess the feasibility of the system and show that the system is viable for adaptation to the inventory systems of electrical companies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Els De Busser

Any crime could generate digital evidence. That is a reality law enforcement authorities across the world need to face. The volatile and “unterritorial” nature of the evidence means that international cooperation in criminal matters is confronted with new questions. One of these questions is whether the traditional cooperation mechanism, mutual legal assistance, is a viable way of working. Due to its time-consuming and cumbersome functioning combined with the lack of a faster alternative, countries have developed unilateral and extraterritorial methods of evidence gathering. This paper zooms in on this development and the risks it entails.


Author(s):  
Piotr Lewulis

AbstractThe importance of digital evidence, especially online content, is continuously increasing due to the proliferation of digital technologies in socio-economic life. However, the legal means of criminal evidence gathering in Polish legislation remain unchanged and do not take into account some contemporary challenges. In various countries, traditional rules of evidence gathering were created in the context of a physical world. These rules may be insufficient to safeguard the forensic soundness of evidence gathering methods. Inadequacies of current procedures may be especially visible in the context of transborder digital evidence gathering from online open sources. This article describes the practical shortcomings of Polish criminal evidence law in the context of digital evidence with particular attention to online open-source materials. Empirical data indicate that existing legal limitations are bypassed in practice to enable evidence collection. This unfortunately often happens at the expense of the forensic soundness of digital evidence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-83
Author(s):  
Hussein Abed Ghannam

WhatsApp is a giant mobile instant message IM application with over 1billion users. The huge usage of IM like WhatsApp through giant smart phone “Android” makes the digital forensic researchers to study deeply. The artefacts left behind in the smartphone play very important role in any electronic crime, or any terror attack. “WhatsApp” as a biggest IM in the globe is considered to be very important resource for information gathering about any digital crime. Recently, end-to-end encryption and many other important features were added and no device forensic analysis or network forensic analysis studies have been performed to the time of writing this paper. This paper explains how can we able to extract the Crypt Key of “WhatsApp” to decrypt the databases and extract precious artefacts resides in the android system without rooting the device. Artefacts that extracted from the last version of WhatsApp have been analysed and correlate to give new valuable evidentiary traces that help in investigating. Many hardware and software tools for mobile and forensics are used to collect as much digital evidence as possible from persistent storage on android device. Some of these tools are commercial like UFED Cellebrite and Andriller, and other are open source tools such as autopsy, adb, WhatCrypt. All of these tools that forensically sound accompanied this research to discover a lot of artefacts resides in android internal storage in WhatsApp application.


Author(s):  
Matthew N.O. Sadiku ◽  
Adebowale E. Shadare ◽  
Sarhan M. Musa

Digital chain of custody is the record of preservation of digital evidence from collection to presentation in the court of law. This is an essential part of digital investigation process.  Its key objective is to ensure that the digital evidence presented to the court remains as originally collected, without tampering. The chain of custody is important for admissible evidence in court. Without a chain of custody, the opposing attorney can challenge or dismiss the evidence presented. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the concept of digital chain custody.


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