So how do police forces tackle the problem and how do they turn technology to their advantage?
Establishing Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s Hi-Tech Crime Unit, as Detective Sergeant Tim Beer explains, has been an evolving process, slow at times, but boosted enormously by the Home Office's recognition of the significant gaps in Hi-Tech investigative capability and its decision to set up a National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU).
The Internet may have made us more productive, but it has also made us more vulnerable to a variety of computer crime from software piracy to virus attacks and fraud through to on-line paedophilia.
Concerned with the fragile nature of computer based electronic evidence and the lack of procedures for dealing with it, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), issued guidelines outlining how, and in what conditions, evidence should be collected and interrogated to enable it to be admissible in court.
After consulting with Tim and his team, Compusys, the Constabulary's IT supplier proposed a scalable technical solution based on Compusys ProManaged Servers and Compusys IDE-RAID Disk Subsystems that would provide an initial 2 terabytes of centralised, instantly accessible storage for all case file images for the duration of the forensic investigation.
Sony AIT-3 Tape Libraries using WORM Media (Write Once Read Many) provided the Unit with the back up capability required to store legal records safely for many decades and Gigabit Ethernet provided the connectivity. A Compusys ProManaged high power workstation and a 24" LCD flat-screen monitor completed the solution. |