In this 21st century, the world has become highly digitized. No one can even think of a life without a digital network. When the utility increases, the misuse also increases subsequently.
The mischief of the miscreants has been causing enormous damage to the innocents. The menace could be controlled only with highly empowered experts who excel in the digi-world. The incidence of intrusions, attacks, and release of malicious code (viruses, worms, Trojans, etc.) has become a night mare to the users and one has to pay a heavy cost in dealing with such unwarranted yet unavoidable problems that have been common nowadays. Prosecution of computer criminals happens to be a routine affair in spite of the difficulties involved in locating them and proving the guilt.
This is so because in majority of the cases the person who is involved in the crime will in no way have any link with the victims. The perpetrators will do all such fraudulent activities from an unknown destination at a remote corner.
To monitor and to identify the culprits we need experts as they alone can enlighten others with effective analysis which could influence the computer related criminal cases.
The role of expert witnesses, in the specific context of computer-related crimes will often be to educate the court about the relevant technology, to examine the computer evidence and to form an opinion, and then present the same before the jury under cross-examination. Shouldered with this tremendous responsibility, the expert witnesses could play the pivotal role in deciding the fate of the alleged persons, so as to say that they may be convicted or acquitted, based on the quality of those presentations and the validity of the opinions. Needless to say, it is crucial that experts giving forensic evidence, IT professionals involved in this work require an in-depth understanding of information security and network security measures, as well as of intrusion prevention and detection and forensic analysis for compromised systems. An expert has to bear in mind that he has to maintain the confidentiality of the facts during the assessment.
While so, the expert witness has the liberty to refuse to conduct the expert assessment if the materials provided to him are not sufficient or if the expert assignments set out in the ruling on the expert assessment are outside his specific IT technology expertise.
Let us analyse some of the computer-related crime cases which used expert witnesses. A Norwich, Conn. substitute teacher was booked in a cyber crime allegation. The charge against her was that she secured pornographic pop-ups on her schoolroom and thereby endangered her pupils. The prosecutors maintained that the teacher visited pornographic Web sites while at work and accused her that she didn\'t just turn off the computer. The witness of a forensics expert was helpful in proving that an innocent hairstyling Web site that the teacher had visited installed spyware on her computer. As a result, the pop-up pornographic ads, got saved into her system. Reporting the above case, the Norwich Bulletin, brought out that the police investigators apparently did little forensics investigation on the computer. Further, the school did not maintain the security software on the systems that could have prevented the installation of the spyware. Thus the role of the expert witness assumed significance in this case.
In yet another interesting case, an Internet Service provider was raided by the police on the ground that it utilized Usenet posts. While none of the employees of the company was aware of the application of Usenet posts, the police raided the premises without verifying the factual position through an expert. Annoyed over the unexpected raid, the Internet Service Provider approached the court and a federal judge permitted the Internet service provider to sue police. Also, in a dawn raid, Arizona police stormed into the house of a 16-year-old boy named Matthew Bandy and accused him of downloading child pornography--which carried a maximum penalty of 90 years in prison -- only to find out later, with the assistance of an expert witness that his computer was thoroughly infected by malware and that he was innocent.
Their witnesses could be largely influencing and instrumental in bringing a computer criminal to justice or recovering damages for the affected organization. Their testimony as an expert witness could be the deciding factor in a criminal or civil trial.
Moral of the story - in the interest of justice, especially when life or liberty is at stake, insist that proper forensic investigations take place on the computer in question.