UPI: House Dems urge social media platforms to keep evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. “High-ranking House Democrats have called on the four major social media companies of Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok to preserve and archive content shared on their platforms that could be used as evidence of Russian war crimes committed against Ukraine.”
CBS News: Bellingcat: The online investigators tracking alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. “Since 2014, Bellingcat investigations have exposed Russia’s undercover hit squads and tied Russian troops to atrocities. Suffice to say the Russian government denies everything you are about to see in this story. But that’s exactly where Bellingcat comes in. Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, has created a method of mining online data and social media to put the lie to disinformation and unmask Vladimir Putin.”
NIST: NIST Publishes Review of Digital Forensic Methods. “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published Digital Investigation Techniques: A NIST Scientific Foundation Review. This draft report, which will be open for public comment for 60 days, reviews the methods that digital forensic experts use to analyze evidence from computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.”
AFP: Tech battles to show worth in Ukraine war crimes probes. “Russia’s war in Ukraine is still being counted in days, but images of atrocities already number in the hundreds of thousands. The conflict is the first to throw up such rich evidence in real time, but the sheer volume of material poses a huge challenge for those trying to use it as evidence of war crimes.”
Business Insider: Ukrainian prosecutor investigating potential Bucha war crimes says that Russians left behind a computer server that could help identify perpetrators. “The chief regional prosecutor in Bucha, Ukraine, told the New York Times that Russian soldiers left behind a computer server with potentially damning information as investigators are zeroing in on killings and mass graves in the city.”
University of Alabama in Huntsville: UAH helping create AI cell phone forensics tool to help police solve mass crimes. “There can be lots of forensic evidence on many people’s cell phones when a mass incident like a shooting or bombing is happens, but winnowing out the relevant material and putting it in context can be a time-consuming and tedious affair for law enforcement. That’s why The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), Florida State University (FSU) and Purdue University have teamed to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help law enforcement target, extract and collate cell phone evidence related to an incident.”
Wired: Scientists Settled a Century-Old Family Drama Using DNA From Postcards . “MyHeritage, the DNA testing company, announced in 2018 that it would be jumping into the business of commercial artifact testing. An Australian company, Totheletter DNA, was founded in 2018 to offer DNA testing of artifacts ‘from your passed loved-ones to enhance your genealogical research’ for a cost of over $2,000. But what was once envisioned as an explosion in artifact testing has petered into more of a slow burn.”
Government Technology: N.Y. Bill Targets Privacy Issues Around Criminal DNA Profiles. “Municipal DNA identification indexes in New York have raised privacy concerns after a report showed they’re widely unregulated. One state lawmaker proposes to shut down these databases and create a single state-run index.”
Global Network on Extremism and Technology: “Take Nothing But Pictures, Leave Nothing But (Digital) Footprints”: Social Media Evidence From the US Capitol Siege Perpetrators . “The Program on Extremism at the George Washington University, which continues to track these ongoing arrests, has identified 143 individuals currently charged at the federal level for their role in the siege at the Capitol as of 24 January 2021. We conducted a preliminary analysis of this database of court records to focus on how prosecutors used evidence from social media to charge those involved in the storming of the Capitol.”
BBC: How to investigate a firm with 60 million documents. “Ms [Yousr] Khalil and a 70-strong team faced an ocean of files, transaction data and emails spanning worldwide activities, most of them entirely innocuous. So how did they plot a course through? Artificial intelligence (AI) and a bespoke computer unlike any PC you have ever worked on played a big part in this epic data trawl. A daunting collection of 500 million documents and transactions had to be whittled down.”
TNW: How to build a search engine for criminal data. “Data analysis platforms are becoming increasingly crucial in the fight against crime. We spoke with two forensic software experts from Hansken about how they support law enforcement agencies, like the Dutch National Police and the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service.”
Gizmodo: Forensics Experts Used Social Media to Reconstruct Exact Cause of the Tragic Beirut Explosion. “One of the most awful elements of the devastating August 4 explosion in Beirut, which killed over 200 people and injured more than 6,500, was that it could have easily been prevented. Using videos of the event that were shared on social media, forensics researchers have been able to reconstruct exactly what happened, including the shocking negligence that led to the tragedy.”
Philadelphia Inquirer: The FBI used a Philly protester’s Etsy profile, LinkedIn, and other internet history to charge her with setting police cars ablaze. “More than two weeks after that climactic May 30 moment, federal authorities say they’ve identified the arsonist as 33-year-old Philadelphia massage therapist Lore Elisabeth Blumenthal by following the intricate trail of bread crumbs she left through her social media history and online shopping patterns over the years. The path took agents from Instagram, where amateur photographers also captured shots of the masked arsonist, to an Etsy shop that sold the distinctive T-shirt the woman was wearing in the video. It led investigators to her LinkedIn page, to her profile on the fashion website Poshmark, and eventually to her doorstep in Germantown.”
Motherboard: We Built a Database of Over 500 iPhones Cops Have Tried to Unlock. “One of the top level findings of Motherboard’s dataset is that many law enforcement agencies and officials can not reliably access data stored on iPhones. Whether that’s due to a device having too strong a passcode, the phone being damaged, an unlocking capability not being available at that specific point in time, or a particular agency not having access to advanced forensic technology itself, Motherboard found many cases where investigators were not able to extract data from iPhones, at least according to the search warrants.”
EurekAlert: New research uses physiological cues to distinguish computer-generated faces from human ones. “‘Digital human face detection in video sequences via a physiological signal analysis,’ a paper published today in the Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI), presents a viable, innovative way to discern between natural humans (NAT) and CG faces within the context of multimedia forensics, using individuals’ heart rate as the discriminating feature.”
