Digital Evidence Regulation - an assessment of underlying issues in England and Wales

In the field of Digital Forensics, in England and Wales, the author has published a study of technical requirements found in Standard Operating Procedures and validation methods, evaluated potential mechanisms for producing evidence of verification as a means of reducing the validation and re-validation effort required, and examined the use of language in various documents produced, and referenced, by the Forensic Science Regulator. From this work, he argues that the current situation re validation may be giving a false sense of assurance that technical requirements are being satisfied, that it should be possible for evidence of verification to be made available to solve this problem, without requiring full disclosure of commercially sensitive or secret methods, and that the situation may have arisen through poor use of language in the Regulator’s guides. He also suggests that the FSR’s guides may have allowed, or caused, Digital Forensic Laboratories to ignore or misunderstand the importance of technical requirements in Standard Operating Procedure design and validation. Finally, having observed the lack of interest in the FSR’s work and in method validation in court proceedings, he considers, from a lay perspective, the legal position relating to admissibility of computer-derived and computer-generated evidence. From this, he argues that the legal precedents are not entirely valid in the context of modern systems, and proposes a new classification of digital forensic systems which takes account of the increasingly automated analysis present in these tools.