Collecting Digital Evidence from Online Sources: Deficiencies in Current Polish Criminal Law

The 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.

Integration of innovative technologies into crime investigation activity is the significant direction of its effectiveness increasing

The article is devoted to the issues of the scientific and technical support of investigative activity. It is emphasized that nowadays fighting cybercrime determines the necessity to develop and implement the scientific and technical means, techniques and methods, as well as apply them to the activity of law enforcement agencies for prevention and investigation of crimes in the field of information and telecommunication technologies. The focus is placed on the fact that the retrieval, recording and investigation of electronic (digital) information in the pretrial investigation and its further use as evidence remain among the pressing and, at the same time, unexplored issues. It was stated that digital forensics is an integral and necessary tool in fighting cybercrime which is used for the identification, preservation, recovery, analysis, and presentation of digital evidence. The conclusion was made that with the spread of cybercrime in the modern world one of the priority directions of scientific and technical support of investigative activity is introduction of the latest means, methods and technologies of electronic intelligence into the work with electronic evidence and also protection of the sources of electronic (digital) information

“Shared Value”

Chapter 7, “Shared Value”: Promoting Climate Change for Data Worlds, begins with a provocation. In the growing movement to deploy big data for big solutions to mitigate global warming, are the data serving the climate cause? Or is the climate a convenient form of promotional capital for the benefit of big data adherents? This chapter reviews the shape of the Data for Climate Action (D4CA) campaign, showing how the campaign’s greatest impact is in the realm of publicity. Under the banner of shared value and social good, business, NGO and political leaders promote data solutions to climate problems, privileging technical and private sector expertise and digital “evidence” of global climate transformations. Despite its datafied package, the chapter reveals the continuity of mechanisms of public relations to generate facts that further reinforce the informational and technical character of environmentalism.

Technology as a Key Tool for the Prosecution of International Crimes: Lessons from Uganda

This article uses the context of Uganda to examine the role of technology in the prosecution of international crimes. It uses the International Criminal Court (icc)complementarity framework to analyse two cases — Dominic Ongwen and Thomas Kwoyelo, exploring a question — whether the use of technology enhances the icc’s positive complementarity approach? The article draws substantially from the review of empirical literature, qualitative interviews and the author’s work experiences at the two sites of justice - Uganda and The Hague. The article reveals a practical overlap between the two sites of justice in the use of digital evidence and witness protection. It is argued that use of technology enhances the criminal trial procedures, victims’ rights and the legitimacy of the courts. It is equally argued that the use of technology has the potential to enhance the icc’s complementarity approach. The article contributes to current debates about the role of technology in international criminal justice.

Image Forensic Tool (IFT)

Images now-a-days are often used as an authenticated proof for any cyber-crime. Images that do not remain genuine can mislead the court of law. The fast and dynamically growing technology doubts the trust in the integrity of images. Tampering mostly refers to adding or removing important features from an image without leaving any obvious trace. In earlier days, digital signatures were used to preserve the integrity, but now a days various tools are available to tamper digital signatures as well. Even in various state-of-the-art works in tamper detection, there are various restrictions in the type of inputs and the type of tampering detection. In this paper, the researchers propose a prototype model in the form of a tool that will retrieve all the image files from given digital evidence and detect tampering in the images. For various types of tampering, different tampering detection algorithms have been used. The proposed prototype will detect if tampering has been done or not and will classify the image files into groups based on the type of tampering.