Digital Evidence in the 21st Century?

In many respects our legal infrastructure has changed little in the past centuries. While it has adopted email, electronic documents and digital evidence, it still generally struggles to move away from the good old traditional methods of lock and key, physical security and wet signatures. While digital forensics has come along as a new area, it is still seen as a bit like black magic, and where it often relies on a single expert witness to make sense of the 1’s and 0’s. But, increasingly, we need to digitize evidence, and then use electronic methods to share and analyse it, and so we must now build new platforms gather, process and share evidence, but still keep extremely high levels of trust.

Our governments often like to believe that they have transformed their economies to exist in the 21st Century, but only in places like Estonia and Finland do you see a true transformation in the way that the public sector uses digital methods. Having worked in health care research for many years, I know the resistance that you can face in properly digitizing things, especially when it involves integrating properly with citizens. I have lost count in the number of conferences I have attended that define information sharing across the public sector is the major barrier to improved services. At the core is a resistance to change, and a lack of any real vision as to what the data architecture…