Certification, registration and assessment of digital forensic experts: The UK experience
Highlights
► Certification of digital forensic experts is not a “good” in itself. ► Law enforcement agencies, defence lawyers are the main audience. ► Designers of certification systems must balance rigour with economic realities. ► The article explains these in the context of UK experience.
Section snippets
UK legal framework for expert evidence
Any scheme has to be specific to the precise circumstances within the jurisdiction it serves. A brief explanation is required of the situation in the UK. (There are in effect three jurisdictions in the United Kingdom: England and Wales taken together, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The basic principles are very similar but the actual law and nomenclature varies. This description is of English law).
Court procedure is adversarial as opposed to inquisitorial. Law enforcement officers investigate
The requirement for accreditation
It will be seen from the above description that are therefore several different classes of people who in various circumstances need to be able to assess expertise or expert competence. It might be helpful to list them out:
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Law enforcement agencies in recruiting permanent staff as technicians
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Law enforcement agencies in recruiting permanent staff capable of giving expert evidence
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Law enforcement agencies in forming contracts with forensic services companies
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Law enforcement agencies in seeking
How experts are actually sourced
There is no recent unambiguously reliable research to show how experts are actually sourced and recruited. The problem is at its most acute for lawyers; law enforcement agencies and prosecuting authorities have a routine requirement for a large number of expert forensic specialists whereas most solicitors may only seek a particular specialisation very occasionally. And although through the increase use of computers in the population as a whole is changing this, the occasionalism applies to
Moves towards regulation
Historically as well as today a great deal of forensic science and particularly those situations where opinion is required has been medical in nature. It includes examination after bodily attack, post mortems, the actions of poisons on the body, the calculation of the extent of physical disability and the assessment of a whole range of psychiatric phenomena. Regulation of the role of and provision of a code of ethics for medico-legal experts is by the same mechanism that allows a medical
Council for the registration of forensic practitioners
Eventually the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners failed when government funding was withdrawn in March 2009, but it is useful to examine how it operated and what lessons can be learnt. Work began in earnest in 2001–02. As one might expect there was a Code of Ethics and a governance framework of committees. The basic principles were that applicants needed to prove their existing qualifications, show ongoing training, provide some references but also to submit to a detailed
Forensic science regulator
The solution, the UK government hoped, was via a Forensic Science Regulator (FSR). The post was announced in July 2007, first existed in a “shadow” or preliminary format and in February 2008 a permanent appointment was made together with a Forensic Science Advisory Council. The position of digital forensics had been considered during the “shadow” period and a specialist group was formally constituted in July 2008. I had been involved in the preliminary discussions and have been a member of the
A future for assessing UK forensic expertise?
Certifications, accreditations, registration, qualifications are usually not an abstract good in themselves. They need to be seen as a means by which an audience, or a market, can assess some-one’s suitability for a role within a particular defined context. It is all too easy to produce long lists of criteria and set up elaborate structures for supervising schemes and lose sight of what value they might eventually deliver.
As we have seen from the case of CRFP and from the well-developed related