Examination of Firearms Review: 2007 to 2010 - Interpol

Navigation devices are increasingly being examined in criminal cases to
identify data of evidential value. The evidential value of such devices are
obvious and becoming increasing available with the growth in the
availability of this technology particularly outside of traditional applications.
This technology is now a common feature within smart phones to provide
not only a traditional navigation function but to geographically record the
location at which a photograph was taken, or report the location of the
nearest teller machine. Obviously such evidence may provide a strong
indication between the user and a particular address. In any offence
where a person’s movements are of interest, the analysis of a GPS device
to retrieve the stored locations may be evidentiary value. Forensic
analysis may recover deleted location records and identify where the
device has been in addition to destinations which may have been entered
in the device (62).
4.5 Forensic tools
Limongelli states that there is a tendency among many proponents of
open-source software to assert that proprietary software applications
should be evaluated by courts by different, and higher, standards than
those applied to scientific or technical evidence generally (63). He states
that although there is case law regarding the proper standards for the
admission of technical or scientific evidence, none of that case law
supports a distinction between proprietary software and open-source tools.
He submits that if a particular proprietary software is unreliable, the
appropriate remedy is already embodied in existing case law and the rules
of evidence.
Lei pan submits that correctness testing methodology enables the tester to
achieve testing results of high quality from a manageable number of
observations and in a dynamic but controllable way (64). This is of
particular interest to forensic testers who do not have access to
sophisticated equipment and who can allocate only a small amount of time
to testing. Lei Pan stated that the focus of the testing should be on the
verification of the user’s desired features and prioritise frequently used
features. One concern however with tool validation is the assumption that
the tester and ultimate end user have operated the tool correctly according
to the user manual. A further concern for the reliance on tool validation is
that CFT are using the tool on a wide variety of hardware and software, not
necessarily the hardware and software employed for the validation
process. The question may arise “Was the tool validated for the Asus
Laptop model XYZ? If not, is the tool reliable? A further question also
relates to the release of new versions of a tool. For example what were
the changes between version 1.5 and 1.4 and does version 1.5 invalidate
1.4? The practitioner should expect these questions in cross examination.
4.6 Managing investigators and prosecutors expectations
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