Customer Service in Digital Forensics

January 23, 2016

Customer Service in Digital Forensics

My first jobs as a teenager were in customer service.  The brief first foray into the world of customer service was at an amusement park, which ironically, was anything but amusing.  After 3 months there, I transitioned to a retail environment where I worked for several years and into college.  You might be surprised to learn that the transition from retail customer service to public service in law enforcement was not all that much of a leap.  The biggest overall difference is the personal danger aspect.

After leaving law enforcement to start my own digital forensic consulting company, I find that many of the lessons, skills and techniques I learned working in a retail environment serve me quite well in dealing with attorneys, clients and the general public.  This is an intangible that I propose often gets lost among both governmental and private sector digital forensic practitioners.  We all have customers -- from the crimes against person detective to the special agent accountant to the corporation who feels they’ve been the victim of intellectual property theft.  The natural tendency is for us to treat our customers like they need us.  They need our skills, our knowledge and our expertise to help analyze, interpret and explain what may have been going on in their cases.  But the truth is, we need them at least as much!

Customer Service in the Public Sector

For my friends & colleagues in the government sector, this can sometimes be a far leap.  You see, the reality is that many in public service don’t really have a sense of service at all.  Yes, that comment will undoubtedly bristle some of my public sector friends, but deep down, they all know it’s true.  There are folks working for the government that are there to pick up a steady paycheck, get decent benefits, not really caring to be pushed or challenged and doing (almost) as little as possible.  This article is not for them.

My purpose in this article is to refresh the sense of service of those in the government who enjoy their job and enjoy the rewards that come with doing a good job, even if it’s not always (or ever) recognized.  The homicide detective who brings you a cell phone or computer of a suspect is your first-line customer.  Without him, your job doesn’t exist and trust me, if no one is bringing you work, your superiors will eventually recognize that and start to re-evaluate your job.  Sometimes, even the most dedicated public servant sighs and gnashes his teeth when the detective (who sometimes fits the category in the previous paragraph) brings you evidence and wants you to solve his case for him.  But think about why you got interested in this field in the first place.  Think about what drives you and challenges you.  No two cases are the same.  Maybe this case will be the one in which you’ll be able to write a case-study or learn a new technique.  Maybe you’ll discover evidence that will lead to the rescue of a child or the arrest of a sexual assault suspect.  And while it’s true that the investigators are the first-line customers of the public-sector digital forensic examiner, the real customer is the innocent public and victims of crime.  They’re the ones you are there to help.  Never forget that.

Customer Service in the Private Sector

Being in private practice, you’d think having good customer service would be a “no-brainer”.  Well, in the past 18+ months since we launched Pro Digital full-time, I’ve been schooled in the fact that not every private practitioner really practices good customer service (or even knows what it is).  I’ve been pleasantly shocked to receive no less than a half-dozen referrals because of other practitioner’s lack of responsiveness and service.  I’m happy to serve their clients.  It gives Pro Digital a better reputation, expands our client-base and assures our place in the digital forensic market. 

Our customers (clients) range from spouses embroiled in divorce matters to plaintiffs or defendants in civil actions.  They all require different levels of communication, attention, education and technical expertise to help them through their cases.  Going a bit further, we help out indigent clients and accept court-appointed cases at reduced rates because our history of public service was not abandoned when we launched a private practice.  We know our clients need us to perform services they may have neither the skills nor the equipment to perform, but just because that fact is present and undeniable doesn’t mean we take our clients for granted.

Perhaps the best notion on which to hang the proverbial hat of customer service upon in private practice of digital forensics is trust.  Our clients trust us with their data, which is oftentimes very sensitive.  They trust us to be able to help them in their cases.  And they trust that we won’t over-bill or exploit their naiveté about digital forensics and investigation.  That measure of trust is one we do not take lightly, nor do we ever intend to forget.

One More Thought

I’d like to close by touching briefly on the public-private sector “rivalry”, or whatever term is appropriate to define the alleged philosophical difference in approaches between public and private sector practitioners.  Both as a digital forensic consultant and as a trainer, I’ve run into a segment of workers and “leaders” in public service with the overall mindset that what they do is of a higher calling and, because they don’t get paid as much as private sector practitioners, they are sacrificing some of themselves for the public good.  I’ve even experienced this as a contract trainer who teaches to law enforcement. 

To be honest, it makes no sense to me.  It may make some sense if I had never worked in law enforcement, but being that I also dedicated 15 years of my career to public service, I really don’t accept the notion that my counterparts in public service are sacrificing themselves for the public good.  The bottom line is, we all get paid to do a job.  (And please trust me when I say that many of you get paid much more than me!)  Government workers are paid by tax-payers to do a job, just like private practitioners are paid by clients to do a similar job.  We all have “customers” and we’re all answerable to them.  We’re all part of the system and the system needs us all to try to maintain fair and impartiality in investigations and court proceedings. 

We all have a role to fill.  Let’s make a common pledge to work together to serve everyone to the best of our ability by putting ego aside and working for the benefit of the digital forensic field, never forgetting the value of the customers we serve.  We’ll all gain from that mindset!

Author:

Patrick J. Siewert, SCERS, BCERT, LCE

Principal Consultant

Professional Digital Forensic Consulting, LLC

Virginia DCJS #11-14869

Based in Richmond, Virginia

Available Globally

We Find the Truth for a Living!

About the Author:

Patrick Siewert is the Principal Consultant of Pro Digital Forensic Consulting, based in Richmond, Virginia.  In 15 years of law enforcement, he investigated hundreds of high-tech crimes, incorporating digital forensics into the investigations, and was responsible for investigating some of the highest jury and plea bargain child exploitation cases in Virginia court history.  A graduate of both SCERS, BCERT, the Reid School of Interview & Interrogation and various online investigation schools (among others), Siewert continues to hone his digital forensic expertise in the private sector while growing his consulting & investigation business marketed toward litigators, professional investigators and corporations.

Email:  ProDigitalConsulting@gmail.com

Web: www.ProDigital4n6.com

Twitter: @ProDigital4n6

Digital Forensic & Information Security Considerations in Police Body Cams

January 4, 2015

Digital Forensic & InfoSec Implications in Police Body Cams

As has been detailed ad infinitum in previous articles, Pro Digital Consulting Owner and the primary Author of this blog is a former law enforcement veteran of 15 years.  The experience gained in this amount of time spans the realms of campus policing, community policing, school safety, patrol, supervision, narcotics, high tech and major criminal investigations (not to mention digital forensics).  With all the recent conversations in current events calling for police officers everywhere to wear body cameras in the spirit of “accountability”, it seems prudent to detail a few important implications of these proposals that directly relate to digital forensics.  Some of the implications will be mentioned, but not in detail.  Others will be more thoroughly examined as they have a direct relation to modern technology and digital forensics.

Some of the obvious issues with regard to equipping the police with body cams are cost and policy.  Any major program within an agency requires these considerations 1) is the cost worth the benefit to the customer or, in this case, the citizens (who are also paying for it) and 2) what policies and procedures should be implemented for their use?  These considerations are more applicable to an article targeted toward police administrators and won’t be detailed much further here, only to say we realize these two major hurdles with regard to program implementation.

But after the program is implemented and the body cams are issued to individual officers, how to we maintain tight controls on that data?  How much access do individual officers have to their own videos and what, if any, best practices for preservation and evidence-handling are in place to ensure authenticity of the video footage and associated data?  Many of these are secondary concerns, but very important nonetheless.

Background

It bears mentioning that videotaping of the police is not a new phenomenon.  For years, we’ve watched police car dashboard camera footage of traffic stops, DUI field sobriety tests and critical incidents involving the police.  When they were first implemented, the technology was little more than a camera mounted in the front of the vehicle with a VHS VCR in the trunk.  Many agencies held policies that maintained tight control over the videos and only supervisors and/or investigators could access the tapes.  They were activated when an officer turned on his emergency lights and the video stopped when the lights were turned off.  There were/are manual controls for the officer to activate the cameras as well.

As time and technology progressed, the videotaping methods included DVD recording and finally with the emergence of various current technologies, they are now phasing in hard disk or solid-state digital video recording in police vehicles, which would undoubtedly be the same form of recording utilized on wearable police cameras. 

In case you’re wondering where all of the police dash camera videos came from, many times media outlets file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain the videos and, depending on the jurisdiction, their resources and the circumstances of the particular video, the media would obtain the videos with little or no trouble.

Body Cam Utilization as Evidence

It could be argued that virtually everything a police officer does on-duty (and sometimes off-duty) is of some sort of evidentiary value.  From the simplest traffic stop all the way up to responding to a homicide or active shooter.  That being said, it makes the potential use of police body cams an intriguing legal issue.  No doubt, the camera footage can be used as evidence in a formal investigation, but at what point does the call for accountability turn into “big brother” keeping an eye on our public servants?

If much of what the police do at work is of some sort of evidentiary value, it therefore follows that the video footage should be treated the same way as any other evidence.  However, it’s been long-held as a matter of best practices in evidence handling that a police officer should not carry around evidence with him while on-duty for any longer than is absolutely necessary.  Indeed, many agencies prohibit an officer from proceeding to the next assignment before properly securing any evidence they may have from their current assignment.  This unique circumstance of digital video evidence potentially being collected possibly thousands of times a day brings up some very interesting questions…

Evidence Data Storage & Retention

One of the biggest problems we’ve encountered in the past with regard to setting up and operating a digital forensic lab is data storage.  While stand-alone hard drives are getting cheaper by the day, mass storage in the form of servers are still very expensive.  Video files are not small and not very compressible, so where will all this digital video evidence be stored?  Who will have access to it?  And how long will the data be retained?   In theory, a citizen could make a complaint upon an officer from an encounter months or even years prior, so what is the “standard” by which we will dictate how long to retain this evidence?  Evidence also normally requires a court order for destruction.  Will a court order be issued every time a digital video file is destroyed, wiped or over-written?  These are all very important considerations that don’t get much play in politics or media.

Evidence Data Security

Whether or not you’re aware, local and state governments are probably one of the biggest warehouses of personal data, beyond medical care facilities and banks.  Every time an officer has an encounter with a citizen and checks their driver’s license information or uses their name, date of birth or social security number in a police report, that data is stored in databases at the local level and many times is uploaded to other databases for access by other agencies in subsequent investigations.  With the ever-present data security issues permeating virtually all of our daily lives, it begs the question exactly how secure some of these local and state databases of personal information may be.  The implementation of a police body cam program adds another layer to that security concern because now, not only is a citizen’s personal information recorded in text format within the local and/or state system, but that information is also now part of a video file which necessitates additional information security measures.  Granted, each file may only have a handful of personal data, but most hackers steal data in bulk, and not only would that potentially compromise personal information, but potentially privileged information about criminal investigations, including those involving juveniles.  The bottom line is, the police deal with very sensitive matters on a daily basis and the spoliation of that data would not be measured by simply issuing the concerned parties a new debit card, as we have seen when retail outlets get hacked.  The potential damage of this type of data being leaked could be much more costly, both to the citizens involved and to the governments in the form of subsequent civil or criminal legal action.

Data Validation & Authenticity

One final point about the use of police body cameras is one that is a tried and true practice in digital forensics when analyzing data of evidentiary value – validation and authentication of the evidentiary data.  With every digital forensic case that may be involved in some sort of legal action, one of the early steps a trained examiner takes is to validate and authenticate the data as original.  It’s one of the steps that helps us avoid questions later on in legal proceedings.  It begs the question: how do we validate the data stored on a police body camera?  How do we know the data wasn’t altered or the tape wasn’t cut-off or trimmed in some fashion?  Who has had access to it before any type of digital forensic exam or validation attempt?  The best way to ensure data authenticity in this practice is to have a trained digital forensic expert not only oversee the acquisition of the data when it is to be turned over, but immediately create an evidentiary, read-only data file of the video, analogous to a photo negative. The file should be verified by hash value (a.k.a: digital fingerprint) that can then be documented and used for later validation, should the video be needed in a later formal proceeding.  As stated earlier, incorporating this best practice of digital forensics would go a long way to avoiding questions later on down the road. 

Conclusions

Considerations such as these should most definitely be explored and settled before implementation of a body camera program, not when an issue arises requiring any of the above-mentioned.  So while the use of police body cameras may sound good in theory, the implications go far beyond simple cost and acceptable use policy.  And while these considerations may only be a few of many, they already have added implications insofar as cost, procedure and manpower that many agencies may not be equipped to bear.  It helps to think critically and thoroughly about these programs prior to implementation.  Only then can we take a huge step toward not only doing the right thing, but doing the right thing correctly.

Author:

Patrick J. Siewert

Owner, Lead Forensic Examiner

Professional Digital Forensic Consulting, LLC

Based in Richmond, Virginia

Available Globally

Email:  ProDigitalConsulting@gmail.com

Web: www.ProDigital4n6.com